Jack Templar and the Lord of the Werewolves (Book #4 of the Templar Chronicles) (13 page)

Thick ropes wrapped around me, binding my hands to my sides and my legs together in a bizarre cocoon. As if that wasn’t enough, I lay in an iron cage being pulled along in a horse-drawn wagon. Trees streamed past me like a river. I had the uncomfortable sense that the world had lost its gravity, and things had simply spun out in every direction. The disorientation worsened when a face entered my field of vision from behind me, upside down and to one side. It was Skyal.

“Well now, you’re not supposed to be awake, are you?” she said. Then she bared her teeth in a snarl. “Go back to sleep until we get there.”

Another burst of white, hot pain to the side of my head.

Then everything went black again.

Chapter 19

This time I dreamed.

I was flying over the forest, far above the height of even the tallest trees. I had the strongest sense of déjà vu and searched my memory for all the times I’d flown before.

There was a plane ride with my Aunt Sophie the year we went down to Disney World. The memory brought a smile to my face. Not just because any thought of my Aunt Sophie was a fond one, but because I knew now that as I’d ridden on the rides, watched parades, and soaked up all that Disney magic, I’d been right next to a devil-werewolf the entire time.

There was my airborne fight with the harpies when a group of them attacked us in the forests near my house in Sunnyvale. The view above those trees looked similar to what I saw beneath me, but I’d been holding on for dear life and then fighting and clawing my way loose after that. It was nothing like the smooth, floating feeling I had now.

The next time I flew was on the back of an outraged dragon flying over the Monster Hunter Academy and the surrounding mountains. That had been a wild, looping ride as the beast tried every trick in the book to shake me off its back and hurl me to my death. That experience had some of the power of the sense of flight I was experiencing, but still wasn’t what I was looking for in my memory.

Then it came to me.

It was months before the ride on the dragon. I’d forgotten because it wasn’t real. At least not in the physical sense.

The last time I felt like this was the night I’d drowned in the river escaping Ren Lucre.

The night I’d died.

The second I realized, I tumbled from the sky. I cried out, flapping my arms and kicking with my legs. The forest canopy rushed up at me, and I crashed through it.

Branches tore at my clothes, but they also slowed my fall. By the time I reached the lowest branches, I was half-falling, half-lowering myself to the ground. A few seconds later, I was standing on the forest floor on a soft bed of moss covered with dried pine nettles.

I took stock of my surroundings and reached for my sword only to find it gone. I was still wearing the clothes I’d been captured in.

Captured.

By Eva.

The memory of the tavern flooded over me along with feelings of betrayal and pain. Until that moment, the memory had the decency to stay on the sidelines, lingering right on the edge of my consciousness as if it knew it was too painful for me to handle.

How could Eva have done that?

But she hadn’t done it, I told myself. The vampire blood in her had made her do it.

The words she’d used argued otherwise.
I told you I didn’t forgive you.
Those were the words of someone enjoying revenge over an enemy. She’d said them with such bitter triumph that there was no way to explain it away.

Eva was with the Creach now.

A rustle of air through feathers whooshed right behind me. On reflex, I ducked rolled to my right, coming up in a crouched, fighting position. A white owl flew past me, easily navigating through the pine trees. It perched on a branch some distance from me and rotated its head until it stared at me with its oversized, black eyes.

“Hoo?” said the owl, making it sound like a question.

“Mom? Is that you?” I asked. I felt foolish asking, but the last time this had happened to me my mother had appeared. Still, she hadn’t taken the form of an animal. She had just been herself.

The owl opened its wings and flew deeper into the forest. I ran after it, nearly losing it once or twice as it darted between the trees. The bright white stood out so starkly amid the greens and browns of the forest that sometimes all I saw was a flash of its color between the trees for only a split second. At first, I assumed the owl was leading me somewhere. But as it flew farther ahead of me, I considered that it was just trying to get away from me.

Just when I thought about stopping the chase, the forest opened into a perfectly circular meadow of tall grass. A slight breeze blew, and the grass swayed in a soothing, hypnotic rhythm. In the center of the meadow stood the five pillars from the ruins at Delphi, the Temple of the Oracle.

The owl circled once around the meadow, then flew over the pillars and flapped its wings in a controlled, slow descent into the center. I lost sight of the bird because the grass was too high, so I crept closer to the pillars. Slowly, the little girl I’d met at the ruins came into view, the form in which Pythia, the Oracle, had originally appeared to me. She smiled and walked to the edge of the circle formed by the ruined pillars but was careful not to cross over.

“You,” I said stupidly.

The Oracle smiled. “You have a way with words, Jack. So eloquent.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked but then realized I knew a better question. “What am I doing here? Did I… did I die?”

The Oracle laughed. It was an adult sound, disturbing coming from the little girl’s body. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Die and then come back like last time? Have that count as a fulfillment of the prophecy I gave you.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” I said even though it really hadn’t. I didn’t want to let on that my mind was still whirling and having trouble catching up to this weird situation. The Oracle had proven to be dangerous. I needed to be sharp, so I didn’t find myself in a battle with another one of her creatures because I said the wrong thing.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re not dead,” the Oracle said.

“But the last time, it looked just like this. Felt like this,” I replied, reminding myself that there was no reason for me to trust anything the Oracle told me. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

The little girl frowned. “Do you find insults an effective way to get people to help you?”

“Is that what you’re doing?” I asked. “Helping me?”

The Oracle shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe this is just a dream from that knock on the head your girlfriend gave you.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said, feeling slightly ridiculous saying it.

“Whatever you say.”

“I think this is real,” I said. “I mean, not really real, but I don’t think I’m making you up.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because you’re staying inside the pillars. I don’t think I would imagine you locked up like that. Somehow it’s tied to you being able to communicate with me,” I said.

“Aren’t you a clever boy?” the Oracle said.

“So, you’re here, but why?” I asked, more to myself than to her. “Do you want me to succeed?”

The Oracle shrugged. “I’m neutral on the subject. I can’t stand the race of Man. Rude, obnoxious, greedy, a terrible waste of organic material.”

“But you don’t like Ren Lucre either,” I guessed.

The Oracle scowled. “He wants to destroy mankind, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, but he also wants to rule over us all. I can’t decide which is more distasteful.”

“Then we’re back where we started,” I said. “Why are you here?”

“I explained a little how prophecy works when I saw you last. Do you remember?”

“I mostly remember your statue trying to eat me.”

The Oracle waved the comment away like a fly buzzing around her head. “Prophecy is not seeing
the
future, it’s seeing
all
futures simultaneously and then trying to understand which outcome out of an infinite universe of outcomes is most likely.”

“Like in a sword fight,” I offered. “You have a hundred different moves to make and your opponent has a hundred different possible reactions, but you have to think them all through in a blink of an eye.”

“I suppose so,” the Oracle said. “Now suppose there are a thousand versions of you fighting a thousand opponents, and you get closer to what I see.”

“Doesn’t it overwhelm you?” I asked.

“That’s why I remain inside these pillars. Even if they are erected only in my own mind, they protect me from being buried under it all.”

I was starting to grow impatient. In the real world outside of this dream state, I was in trouble. Bound and captured by the Creach, being taken who knew where. Betrayed by Eva. Lost to my friends. As interesting as this little lesson on prophecy was, I didn’t see how it was going to help me.

“Is there a point here?” I asked.

The Oracle hissed at my rude tone. I felt a little bad, but she did try to kill me once, so I didn’t feel
that
bad.

“Once you left, I explored some of the most obscure potential paths your miserable little life could take. Buried there among the outcomes with the least chances for success was the possibility that you could fulfill the ancient prophecy of the last Templar. That you could bring balance back between man and monster.”

“And why would you want that?” I asked.

“Because once that prophecy is fulfilled, prophecy itself will not be needed. My gift is my curse, and I want no more of it.”

“How can it be a curse?” I asked.

“Think of it. Every person I have ever met, every person I have ever loved, I can see not only their deaths, but every conceivable way in which they might die. I’ve seen versions of your own future, Templar, where you are skewered by a goblin’s arrow, crushed underfoot by a tree giant, ripped apart by a pack of screechers, boiled alive in a witch’s pot, burned at –”

“Okay, I get the idea,” I said, not really enjoying hearing all the ways I might die.

“You see? I’m forced to see these and a thousand other deaths waiting for you whenever I open myself up to the flow of possible futures. I’m tired of it.”

I heard the anguish in her voice and wondered how long she’d lived with the visions filling her head, with the pain of seeing every form of death for each person she met. I felt a wave of sympathy for her.

“I want nothing more than to succeed. For my friends. For my father. For everyone,” I said.

Pythia looked as me hard. “And I want you to succeed for me. I will do something I have never done before and explain to you the riddle I gave you as your prophecy.”

Then she told me something that would not only eventually save my life but also put me in the greatest danger I’d ever faced.

Chapter 20

I sat up with a start, shocked awake by the sounds of men yelling. I was still in the cage and still wrapped in thick cords of rope. We had stopped in the deep forest on what looked like an old dirt logging trail. Sunlight filtered through the canopy above, and I guessed it was midday, over twelve hours since Eva had betrayed me in the tavern.

I closed my eyes and tried to repeat what the Oracle had told me. I wasn’t sure if it had been a dream or some kind of wacky hallucination from being hit too hard on the head… twice. But just in case, I wanted to make sure I remembered it.

Something small hit my cheek, and the Oracle’s words disappeared. Poof. Gone. I opened my eyes just as another little pebble soared through the air and bounced off my forehead.

“Oops, sorry,” came a voice from a nearby bush.

I couldn’t believe my ears. It sounded just like T-Rex. But that was impossible. They were back in the town. No way could they be out here in the forest.

“T-Rex,” I whispered. “Is that you?”

There was a long pause, and my heart sank as I figured I must have been hearing things. And dreaming things. But a guard came running from behind the cart my cage was on, passing by without giving me a second look, hurrying toward the shouting I’d heard farther ahead. This was no man, but a goblin with bulging eyes, hooked nose, and warty skin.

Once it passed, T-Rex’s face poked through the bushes. He looked left and right for more guards, then scrambled out from his hiding spot. He didn’t move with a lot of grace, but to me he looked like a Greek god sprinting to the finish line.

“Boy, am I happy to see you,” I said. And I was happy – even though he’d knocked the Oracle’s words right out of my head. If she was ever really there.

“Are you okay? You’ve been out for hours,” T-Rex said, digging into a bag he carried at his side.

“I’m fine,” I whispered. “Where are the others? Get me out of here.”

He pulled a small knife from the bag and a plastic Easter egg. Sticking both through the bars of my cage, he put them into my hands, tied behind my back.

“Not yet. Hold tight. You’ll know when to move,” T-Rex said fast. He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and ran for his bush as if a pack of cursed demons was on his tail.

“Wait,” I hissed. “Don’t leave me in here. You can’t –”

“Oy, you. Who you talkin’ to?” a snarling voice said from behind me. I turned to see a goblin guard approaching, dressed in full battle armor including a spiky helmet. Over his shoulder, I saw Eva walking just behind him.

I slunk to the rear of the cage, cradling the knife and the weird little Easter egg between my hands and the small of my back. The goblin beat his spear against the metal bars of my cage.

“Oy, I’m talkin’ to you,” the goblin snarled.

Eva walked up and peered into the cage. Her eyes narrowed, and she turned and looked at the exact spot where T-Rex had hidden. She pulled her sword and crept toward the bush. With a lunge, she parted the branches.

Nothing.

T-Rex had been smart enough to get out of there.

“How could you do this to us?” I called out to her.

Eva returned to the cage and shoved the goblin aside.

“Don’t you dare judge me,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“This isn’t you, Eva,” I pleaded. “This is the vampire blood. It’s got you all messed up inside. You can fight it.”