Tanks, armored cars, and other military machines the British Army had employed against the demons and found lacking lay abandoned, burned-out, and overturned in the streets like a child’s broken toys. Conventional warfare hadn’t even dented the demons’ armament.
Thomas ran. Not for his life, but that of another. Six Stalkers harried a female Templar. Her blue-tinted armor blazed azure sparks as the teeth and fangs of her attackers made contact. She wielded her sword with skill, causing ruby sparks to fly as she attacked. In the end, though, there were too many of them. Her attackers depended on numbers.
The Stalkers were small and wiry. Their lean, wolf-like bodies were covered in a mixture of fur and scales. Jagged, razor-edged claws stuck out from their forearms and backs. They had long, predatory snouts that opened up to rows of serrated teeth.
Thomas struck from behind, never thinking of giving quarter. Stalkers were jackals, preferring to mass on a victim and strike when their prey wasn’t looking or was already overwhelmed. Bringing his sword down in an overhand swing, Thomas cut and smashed through the Stalker’s spine.
Instantly, the demon howled in pain, but then attacked Thomas. It dragged its paralyzed hindquarters behind, slowing it. Still, though, it went for his groin, looking for vulnerable areas. Thomas slammed the hilt of his blade against the creature’s head, breaking teeth and crushing the skull. Twitching, fighting death every inch of the way, the Stalker collapsed to the ground.
The other Stalkers hadn’t given up their attack on the female Templar, though. Although many in number, they worked with single-minded purpose. One of them leaped to the back of another, then vaulted onto the Templar’s back.
Unable to stand against the assault, the Templar went down. Fangs and claws ripped at her armor, finally tearing it away.
“No!” Frantic, Thomas redoubled his efforts. He lopped the head from another Stalker just as the woman Templar put her blade through the throat of a third. No longer able to work with the sword as the Stalkers covered their fallen prey, Thomas abandoned his sword and drew the Spike Bolter.
Knotting his mailed hand in the scruff of razor-sharp tines across a Stalker’s shoulders, Thomas pulled the demon free of the pack. It turned on him, lunging for his face. Thomas shoved the Spike Bolter into the demon’s mouth and squeezed the trigger. Spikes erupted through the back of the Stalker’s head as it continued to try to bite Thomas’s hand off.
Thomas threw the carcass away. He put the pistol at the back of another Stalker’s head and pulled the trigger again. Spine severed, the demon went down in a mewling heap.
The surviving two Stalkers reluctantly sprang away, hissing and snarling challenges. They took up positions behind trees only a few feet away and called to others of their kind.
Thomas knew there wasn’t much time. The Stalkers would re-mass at any moment. He picked up his sword and knelt to the woman.
Blood covered her armor, and it was the good, rich blood of a human, not the foul pus of a demon. Judging from the amount of it, Thomas doubted he’d arrived in time.
“Who…who are you?” The woman’s weak voice echoed inside Thomas’s helmet.
“Thomas.” As long as he was in contact with the woman, a hand on her armor, he knew she’d hear him. “Thomas Cross.”
“The Seraphim…of the House of…Rorke.”
“Yes.”
“I know you.”
Thomas felt bad that he didn’t know her.
“I’m…Kathleen. A knight. Of the House…of Stratham.”
“We need to get you some help, Kathleen.” Thomas kept his voice calm, as if they were only discussing crossing a busy street.
“Too…too late.”
Somehow he knew she’d be smiling beneath her featureless mask. His hand against her armor told him her life signs were dropping. And there was nothing he could do.
“Die well,” she whispered.
“I will.”
She reached for his hand and he took it. Then the strength and the life fled from her.
Gently, Thomas placed her hand beside her. He thought about Simon again, about how this war—this unholy war—was going to be left to his son. So few of them. Levering himself to his feet, he surveyed the battlefield around St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The demons were winning. Just as Grand Master Sumerisle had believed they would. The Templar were there to struggle and die, to shed so much blood that the demons thought them all dead.
Here and there, though, the Cabalists—the strange group that had allied themselves with the Templar to fight the demons—were in evidence. They fought not to die, but to better understand the enemy and to scrape up whatever weapons or even body parts the demons left behind. Thomas feared they had their own agenda, though, and it wouldn’t be discovered until it was too late.
Remembering the woman he’d met, Keira Skyler, her strange clothing and the horns that jutted through her skin along her jaw, the writhing tentacles of hair, Thomas knew that those people could be a threat as well. If they had met under other terms, without the arrival of the demons through the Hellgates and the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Thomas knew they would not have been allies.
A raging, deep roar behind Thomas nearly froze the marrow in his bones. Locating the new threat on the HUD, he turned to face the demon, lifted his sword, and took aim with the Spike Bolter.
The demon towered fifteen feet tall, made even more huge and fearsome by the clustered spikes atop his reptilian head. Corded muscle stood out along his sinewy neck. Pointed fangs filled his huge, gaping maw. The broad expanse of his thick shoulders made his head look small by comparison. Broad-chested, clad in a gray-green chitinous growth as tough as Templar plate mail, the demon stood on legs thick as tree trunks. The scales picked up the light from the fires dancing atop the cathedral.
But the most fearsome thing about the demon
