Jack Templar and the Lord of the Demons (The Jack Templar Chronicles Book 5) Read Free Page B

sure to find some kind of remains. Even if ogres had done the job, there would be bones left. Gnawed on from their feasting on the bodies, but bones nonetheless.
    “Anything?” I shouted.
    Will, T-Rex, and Eva looked up from their prospective ruins and shook their heads. I noticed how each of them gravitated to part of the property that had meant the most to us. I was in the main house where most of the young hunters had been staying. Will kicked through the blackened remains of the barn where the armory and the training grounds had been. T-Rex was near me, digging through what had been the kitchen, lifting pots filled with ash and soot, some of them lopsided and partially melted from the heat of the fire. Eva was farther away, out at the barn where Master Aquinas had kept her caged, rehabilitating her back to health and teaching her control over her vampire form.
    All of us were looking for some answer as to what had happened here, but none of us wanted to be the one to find the first body.
    “Over here,” Xavier shouted.
    We all turned toward him. He was supposed to stay by Daniel, laid out on the stretcher we’d carried him on for the last five days, but instead he was at the far edge of the field waving his hands frantically. We hurried over to him.
    “What is it?” I called.
    Xavier held up a black arrow with barbs down the entire shaft. I’d seen a weapon like that before, back at the Academy when the goblin army attacked. In fact, one just like it had struck Master Aquinas when she used her body to protect me during the onslaught.
    Eva held out her hand, and Xavier handed the arrow over. She lifted it to her nose and sniffed its length.
    “Master Aquinas,” she said. “I can smell her blood on it.”
    “New or from before?” Will asked.
    “It’s old. If it were recent, I could have smelled it from thirty yards away,” she said.
    I tried not to show my repulsion at the idea of her smelling blood in the air, let alone being able to identify whose it was. I wasn’t successful though. Eva frowned at me and then stabbed the arrow into the ground.
    “You asked,” she mumbled.
    I grabbed the arrow and handed it back to Xavier. “Show me where it was. Exactly.”
    Xavier took the arrow, careful not to hold it where any of the barbs stuck out. He walked a few steps to an enormous oak tree, bent down, and positioned the arrow on the ground, backside first so the sharp point stuck out.
    “So it obviously wasn’t shot here,” Will said. “Could be a trap.”
    “What made you look over here, Xavier?” T-Rex asked.
    “This was where Master Aquinas conducted many of her lessons. She loved this tree. Said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge back at the Academy.”
    I looked the tree over, thinking it a poor substitute for the massive tree at the Academy that used to house four living levels connected by ladders and pulley systems. Still, I saw the resemblance and could imagine why Master Aquinas had been attracted to it.
    “She knew you’d come here,” Eva said.
    “I guess,” Xavier shrugged.
    “Then maybe it is a sign from Aquinas,” Will said.
    For the first time since cresting the hill and seeing the old Spanish farmhouse burned to the ground, I felt a glimmer of hope. I crouched down next to the arrow and studied the angle where it pointed.
    “Are you certain this is exactly where you found it?” I asked.
    Xavier turned his head to one side, then closed his eyes. He had a photographic memory, and I knew he was recalling the exact moment he’d found the arrow. He opened his eyes and looked at its position. “No, it was more like this.”
    He moved the point to the right a few degrees and down a couple of inches. “There, that’s it,” he said with confidence.
    “Maybe it’s the direction of their escape?” suggested Eva.
    “Or the direction she wants us to go to get the next Jerusalem Stone,” Will said.
    I wasn’t so sure about that. Master Aquinas was many things, but vague about