Infernal Games (Templar Chronicles Urban Fantasy Series) Read Free

see something monstrous emerge
from the fog on the right side of the bus. As his mind was still trying to
make sense of what it was seeing, the creature slammed into the side of the bus
with all the force of a runaway train. Tires popped as the bus slid sideways
for several yards, stopping just inches away from the edge of the embankment.
    Men
were screaming, guns were firing, but the duty captain didn’t notice. His gaze
was locked on that of the prisoner in the back of the bus, the prisoner who
couldn’t speak around the gag placed in his mouth but whose laughter was
somehow ringing loudly in the duty captain’s ears as the thing outside slammed
into the bus for a second time, sending it careening over the edge of the
embankment and tumbling, down, down, toward the ravine floor below...

CHAPTER TWO
    ––––––––
    K night Captain Matthew Riley, acting commander of the Echo Team,
stood at the edge of the embankment and stared down at the wreckage in the
ravine several hundred feet below.
    It
looked as if the driver had lost control of the bus on the icy road and, unable
to stop the oversized vehicle, had careened off the embankment and into the
ravine. The dents in the sides and roof of the bus showed it had rolled
several times on its way down the embankment before coming to rest with its
nose rammed into a large, outcropping of rock, the impact hard enough to push
the engine block halfway into the cab.
    Riley
knew looks could be deceiving, however.
    It
had been two months since Knight Commander Cade Williams had come stumbling out
of the Beyond with Riley’s near-dead body in his arms, the two of them crashing
through the mirror in the surgical prep room of the Templar commandery in
Arlington, Virginia. Thankfully the medical staff sprang into action immediately
and as a result managed to save Riley’s life. Not only had he lived to see
another day, but the faith healers who had treated him shortly thereafter had
been able to cut his healing time down from several months to just a couple of
weeks.
    A
good thing, too, because the powers-that-be had put him to work the minute he’d
gotten up out of that hospital bed.
    The battle with the Chiang Shih had been
costly and many of the Order’s strike teams, including Echo, Bravo, and Delta, had
been all but decimated. Riley was the only man still on active duty out of
Echo’s four-man command unit. Sergeants Nick Olsen and Sean Duncan had both
perished during that last op; Olsen at the hands of the Chiang Shih and Duncan
while fighting the fallen angel Asharael, known to the Templars as the
Adversary. Riley’s friend and long-time commander, Cade Williams, was still
alive but had been “forcibly retired” as a result of the actions he’d taken in
the wake of the Chiang Shih assault.
    As a highly decorated member of the Echo
Team, as well as one of the Order’s most senior surviving non-coms, Riley had
been tapped by the Preceptor to rebuild the strike teams to operational
capacity. Over his protests, he’d been put in charge of Echo itself and
elevated in rank all the way to captain.
    When word of the escape had come down from
Bennington, the Preceptor had immediately ordered Riley to the crash site. Riley
had been told that he was the logical choice; not only had he been part of the
squad that had captured the Necromancer, but he was one of the few surviving
Templars who had faced the Necromancer in personal combat. When Riley had
calmly pointed out that he’d lost that encounter, his objections had been
overruled and he quickly found himself aboard one of the strike team’s
Blackhawks headed for the crash site.
    Staring down at the wreckage now, he was
overcome with a sense of dread so strong that for a moment all he wanted to do
was turn around and climb back aboard the helicopter, leaving this mess to
someone else.
    He shook off the feeling, slung his HK MP5 on
its sling around his back, and grabbed hold of the rope that was being offered
to him by