“It’s rumored to be a memoir,” Derek went on. “Supposed to be written by a mad monk that escaped demonic captivity.”
“Never heard of the like,” Waverly said.
“Neither had I,” Derek admitted.
“Brother Cargill,” Simon said before he realized he was going to speak.
The Templar’s helmets turned toward him.
“That’s right,” Derek said. “I was given an image of the book.”
The image of a large leather-bound book popped onto Simon’s viewscreen.
“What do you know of it, Simon?” Derek asked. “I wasn’t given any real information. Just that they wanted the book.”
“Brother Cargill was the man who discovered the Ravager corpse in a display case in the Rorke Museum.” Simon couldn’t believe no one else knew the story.
“I remember Brother Cargill,” Amanda Peyer said.
Simon vaguely remembered the young woman from school days. She’d been more successful with the sword than with the pen.
“My father told me the story,” Simon said. “Brother Cargill was supposed to have traveled with King Richard I in 1189 during the Third Crusade. Cargill maintained that Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperor, called Barbarossa for his red beard, was murdered by a demon rather than dying by accidental drowning as everyone believed.”
“We don’t exactly need a history lesson here,” someone growled.
“Frederick’s untimely death put an end, more or less, to the Third Crusade,” Derek said. “Philip II of France decided to leave. After he did, Richard couldn’t do anything more. He had to make a truce with Saladin.”
“Cargill returned to England with Richard,” Simon said. “But he was supposed to have a fabled book that told of Frederick’s murder at the hands of the demon.”
“If the demons could come through a thousand years ago, why didn’t they come through then?”
No one had an answer.
“Cargill said he’d been taken prisoner by the demon,” Simon went on. “The way he told it, the demon took him to their world for a time.” When his father had mentioned that, he’d had nightmares that night imagining what that must have been like.
“Why did they take him?”
“Cargill didn’t know. He made his escape shortly after that when the demon brought him back to our world.”
“Can’t believe the fiends didn’t kill Cargill outright,” someone said.
“The Templar reported that Cargill was crazed by his capture,” Simon said. “They didn’t believe anything Cargill said about being taken to the demon world. They didn’t doubt the Ravager corpse because they had it, but the things Cargill had claimed to have seen, a burned and scarred land, was beyond anything anyone wanted to believe.”
“Like Hell itself,” Bruce said.
“Like what they’re doing to London,” someone else said.
“On the way back to England,” Simon continued, “the Templar joined up with Richard I. They were shipwrecked during a storm and beached in Austria. Duke Leopold, Richard’s longtime enemy, captured him and ransomed him to Emperor Henry VI, who had taken over Germany. Cargill finished his memoirs in Austria while they were waiting to be ransomed. But the book went missing there, too.”
For a moment no one said anything.
Simon stared out at the long, dark street.
“Well,” Derek said, “that book’s supposed to have turned up in Chelsea now. At that house on King’s Road. And it’s up to us to get it. Ferrell, you’ve got point.”
Ferrell moved out at once. The other Templar followed a slight distance behind.
Twenty-Nine
F eeling suffocated and trapped inside the MRI machine, Warren willed himself to remain calm while the medical people inspected the changes taking place within his body. The itching was almost unbearable, making it even harder to lie still while they moved him around with the aid of the conveyor belt that ran through the machine.
He thought he could actually feel the scales growing and multiplying across his body, sliding under his old skin and locking into place. He knew—he hoped!—that wasn’t true and that it was only his imagination.
At first he’d thought the scales might be some kind of scab, something that could be removed. In fact, with the aid of a knife that Tulane had lent him, Warren had tried to remove one of the scales. That was when he’d found out the scales were as much a part of him as his skin was.
Had been, he reminded himself.
He’d succeeded in removing the scale, but it had proven incredibly painful. It had bled only for a moment, though, then had sealed off. By the time Tulane had convinced him to come to the medical lab, a white blister had formed over the area where the scale had been. Warren felt certain a new scale was already growing there to replace the one that he’d torn away.
The machinery hummed and buzzed around Warren. He forced himself to concentrate on his breathing and not act on the panic that filled him.
Then, mercifully, the conveyor belt rolled him back out of the MRI machine.
The physician pointed at the image of Warren lying naked in the air on the tri-dee projector as he spoke. Warren guessed that the man was around forty, old enough to have a lot of experience with medical ailments, but young enough that he was still up on breaking information.
Not only that, but if Warren could even find another trained physician to examine him, that physician wouldn’t have been trained in the ways of monsters as Tulane’s man was. In the end, there was nowhere else to go for answers. Or help.
Feeling somewhat nauseous, Warren stared at his image. The tri-dee rendered a ghostly image of his body—although on a two-foot scale—that floated naked in midair. He felt embarrassed over that, but the horror and worry about his physical condition outweighed that.
“As you can see,” the physician said, “the third-degree burns have obviously replenished lost tissue as well as coating those areas with the scales.”
“How do you know tissue has been replenished?” Tulane asked. He stood at the head of the table and looked on with keen interest.
“From the nature of third-degree
