CHAPTER TEN

Once out of the woods and back on more regularly travelled roads, Cade drove north, through Hartford and across the state line into Massachusetts. He grabbed some fast food at a rest stop outside of Springfield, then drove into the outskirts of the city where he found a motel and took a room around the back, out of view of the street.

He’d had time to think about his next move on the drive north. He’d pretty much exhausted his local targets before running afoul of the Order; the succubus he’d interrogated the other night had been the last one on his list. With nowhere else to turn, he thought it was time to try something a bit more extreme.

It was time to look in the Archives.

Officially established in 1475, though they had existed for quite some time before that, the Archivum Secretum Vaticaun, or Secret Vatican Archives, was an extension of the Vatican library that preserved and enhanced the deeds and documents related to the government of the Catholic Church, including the papers of the individual Popes. Its five miles of shelving housed some one million volumes written between the 8th and the 21st centuries. It was the Church’s official stance that the word “secret” did not mean unknown or hidden away, but rather referred to the fact that the collection was the Pope’s personal property.

Conspiracy theorists believed that there was far more to the secret archives than the Church was letting on. In their view the Church was hiding information that would shake the very foundations of society if it was ever released to the public. What that information might actually be changed depending on who you were talking to; theories ranged from proof that Christ had been merely human to a secret tome that would bring about the events chronicled in the Book of Revelation if it was ever read aloud, among others. Most also believed that the archives held a wide variety of mystical relics, from the Holy Grail to the Ark of the Covenant.

Why else would the Church restrict access to all but four people, the conspiracists would often ask, if they contained only simple documents related to the day-to-day management of the Church?

As head of the Templar’s special combat teams, Cade knew the truth. The archives did contain information that would throw the world into turmoil, but it had nothing to do with Christianity. No, the archives contained the truth about the reality of the supernatural world; the truth about how humankind was surrounded by creatures that saw humans as something to be toyed with, or, even worse, fed upon. If that wasn’t bad enough, the information contained therein made it clear that not only were such creatures stronger and faster than the average human being, but that they were often far harder to kill as well.

The Church believed that such information would frighten Joe Public out of their minds and had worked dutifully for many years to keep that information out of the hands of the average man on the street. Even the very name was designed to be misleading; the Vatican Secret Archives weren’t in the Vatican at all, but miles away on the other side of the English Channel at the Templar’s headquarters in Rosslyn, Scotland. More than a little subterfuge was carried out to safeguard the true archives; a portion of the library in Rome was kept locked and under twenty-four hour guard, access to its contents was severely restricted, and certain rumors were carefully leaked at appropriate times. All of this theater was nothing more than that, theater; a large-scale feat of misdirection that kept the public occupied with trying to break the secret of the archives. A secret that didn’t really exist except in their own heads.

It was a marvelous piece of social engineering and Cade had to give them credit for not only coming up with it in the first place, but being able to maintain it in this age of smart phones, Instagram, and the Internet. The Order had an entire division dedicated to just monitoring the various forms of social media, making sure to discredit any actual photographs or video that got uploaded by either flooding the net with similar, though obviously faked, footage or disparaging the reputation of those who did the uploading in the first place.

Cade had long suspected that the Archives held information about the Adversary that hadn’t been made available to the Order’s regular rank and file. He’d gone so far as to request access to that information several times over the years, but his requests had always been denied. No such files existed, was the standard answer. Nor had he ever been able to search for them himself, as the few times he’d been within the archives he had always been in the company of the custodian. With his own personal resources exhausted and without being any closer to finding the Adversary than when he’d started, he thought it was about time to take a look for himself.

He knew he could make the drive to either Hartford or Boston and from there catch a flight overseas, but that would take more time than he wanted to give up at the moment. Thankfully he now had another option. He could get to the Archives, and back again, without having to fly anywhere.

Cade walked into the bathroom where he found a fair-sized mirror held to the wall with four small, plastic mounts. He used the tip of his knife to unscrew the mounts and then took the mirror, frame and all, back into the main room and put it on the floor in front of the bed.

He knew he was pushing things by travelling through the Beyond again so soon after his last trip. Passing through the Veil was both mentally and spiritually taxing and the time spent on the other side, chronologically out of whack with the real world, took a physical toll on one’s body as well. He’d been in a hurry to get his gear and get out of the house after his unorthodox arrival and so he hadn’t felt the effects of his most recent journey into the Beyond until he’d been on the road a bit. Now, a couple of hours later, he felt tired and out-of-sorts and he knew it was only going to get worst after this trip.

Still, what other choice did he have? He needed to get to the Archives quickly and he needed to do it in a way that kept him off the Order’s radar, at least until he had what he needed. Besides, entering the Archives by way of the Beyond helped him avoid not only the guards outside but the locks on the entrance doors as well. It really was the best option available.

Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, that nagging little voice in the back of his mind said to him, but Cade brushed it off.

The time for debate was over; now it was time for action.

He slipped his arms through the straps of his go-bag and hefted it onto his back and then picked up his sword. The weight of the bag would slow him down a little, but he’d have to make due. He had no idea if he was coming back the same way and he didn’t want to lose what little equipment he had at his disposal by leaving it behind. The Jeep would probably be towed if his trip took too long, but at least it would be safe at the local lock-up, not sitting around the lot waiting to be broken into.

Cade took one last look around the room to make sure that he hadn’t left anything behind and then, satisfied that he had not, he stepped up beside the mirror he’d placed on the floor beside the bed.

He wanted to spend as little time finding the proper path as possible once he was across the barrier, so he began preparing himself for that process now. He stood there a moment, head bowed, clearing his mind of extraneous thoughts. When he was ready he began picturing the oversized dressing mirror he’d seen in the Archives the last time he’d been inside. It was the kind of thing he’d expect to find in the bedroom of a guy like the Edgar Allen Poe or the Marque de Sade, with its thick pewter frame covered with finely sculpted figures of witches and demons and devils, all caught up in acts that would make a back alley prostitute blush. Cade didn’t know where the mirror had come from or what it was doing in the Archives, but he was fairly confident that it was still there. Once an object ended up in the clutches of the custodians, it would take something like the apocalypse to get it out again.

That mirror was going to be his backdoor into one of the most protected vault’s known to man.

When he had the image firmly fixed in his mind, when he could practically see every detail well enough to just reach out and touch it, he took a step forward and disappeared through the surface of the mirror.