Crusader Read online

  Crusader

  Saint Tommy, NYPD Book Five

  Declan Finn

  Contents

  Newsletter

  Prologue: Last Tour Bus to Munich

  1. Unto Us a Child is Born

  2. Witness for the Prosecution

  3. Sturm und Drang

  4. Night Moves

  5. Succed off

  6. Dance with the Devil

  7. Officer Needs Assistance

  8. Flipping Tables

  9. Tourist Trouble

  10. Then the Winged Hussars Arrived

  11. Murder Mountain

  12. What Could Go Wrong?

  13. A Potsdam to Piss In

  14. Phone Home

  15. Ghost of a Chance

  16. Blood of the Martyrs

  17. Unlimited Sin

  18. Procedure

  19. Cover Up

  20. Fire and Steel

  21. Attack of the Oven-Baked Golem

  22. Holy League

  23. Hussar

  24. Crusader

  25. Come Home to Rome

  Review Request

  Acknowledgments

  About Declan Finn

  Want to keep up to date on news, new releases, and convention appearances? Join the Silver Empire Newsletter!

  Dedicated to Poland.

  An island of light on a continent falling into darkness.

  Prologue: Last Tour Bus to Munich

  Adara was hiding from the monsters.

  She had been in the bathroom when the bus stopped. She had been afraid to come out when the growling started. The roars. The screams.

  She would have stayed in the bathroom, but that seemed too simple. There was nowhere to hide if someone thought about it. She was small, but she wasn’t small enough to hide behind the toilet.

  When all of the others had been taken off the bus, she slid out of the bathroom on her belly and crawled on her elbows all the way to the back row. She grabbed the back chair and pulled herself under it. She was still small for her age, and so she could fit where the carry-on luggage used to go.

  It was just her and her wine-dark shirt and her long black skirt. The only thing she heard for the longest time was the sound of her own breathing. She forced herself to quiet even that as she curled her legs up against her and held tight.

  Clomp.

  Someone had stepped back onto the bus.

  Adara stopped breathing entirely and closed her eyes tight.

  Click. Thump. Click Thump.

  The footsteps came slow and careful, coming steadily closer.

  Adara forced herself to breathe out slowly, so she didn’t gasp.

  Click thump … pause.

  Adara froze mid-breath. She had barely inhaled when the footsteps stopped.

  Click-thump. Click-thump.

  She felt the footsteps through the bus floor.

  Click-thump. Click-thump.

  It was so close now. It was right behind her.

  Click-thump. Stop.

  She could feel it above her, through the seats. She heard it breathing.

  Then the other breathing stopped.

  Adara slowly, carefully, let out her own breath.

  A hand grabbed her ankles and dragged her away as she screamed.

  1 Unto Us a Child is Born

  Chattanooga, Tennessee

  I woke up to my wife screaming.

  “Tommy! Wake up!”

  I sat up in bed like Count Orlac from the silent film Nosferatu. I didn’t quite shoot straight up and out of a coffin, but it was close. I grabbed the gun from my nightstand and snapped around to face her, gun at the ready.

  Nothing ominous or threatening was in the room. I grabbed her hand. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  Mariel looked at me with a loving gaze that also said Stop being stupid. “My water broke.”

  Despite the natural inclinations of many civilians I had seen in similar situations, this news caused me to relax. It wasn’t a demon. It wasn’t zombies. It wasn’t a SWAT team kicking in the door. This made for a nice change.

  I checked the time. It was three in the morning. “Okay. Time to make the doughnuts.”

  I turned on the light and started getting dressed.

  Our son Jeremy darted into the room, launching himself from the bedroom door to the bed. “Is she coming?”

  Mariel smiled a little. “Yes, dear. We’re going to have to go.”

  Jeremy nodded and shot off again to get dressed. Mariel watched me intently for a long moment but made no move to get off the bed—which was fine with me. I was going to help her out of bed once I was ready.

  It took me a moment to realize that Mariel wasn’t watching me as much as she was examining my scars.

  Ever since my battle with the shadows in London, the scars had been solidifying, and I had to stretch them out. Anyone who looked closely at my body would easily confuse the new scars for stigmata. They were the size of quarters in the palms and the back of my hands, the soles and tops of my feet, and what looked like a through-and-through with a spear in my side.

  Frankly, “stigmata” would be easier to explain to people than “This is how I died once when I was bi-locating during riots in London and got eaten alive by shadows.”

  “You realize that this isn’t the worst thing that happened to me,” I said, showing her my palm.

  Mariel was about to speak, then had to stop and take several slow, deep breaths. “I wasn’t exactly happy with your Saint Sebastian scars either.”

  I winced at the memory of those scars. A demon had ripped out a series of prison bars and proceeded to pin me to a concrete wall like a butterfly. I had died that time too.

  Saint Paul said it was up to man only once to die … boy, he didn’t count on me. Then again, he also said, “I die daily,” so he was still up on me by a few. I’m not that bad yet.

  “Hey,” I said aloud. “I’m still kicking.”

  The three of us ended up in the car that WitSec had provided. Chattanooga was a nice little town by our standards. It felt very much like our back end of Queens. Even “downtown” felt very much like our home. If we never went back to New York City, I wouldn’t have been put off. Thankfully, anything not covered by the Witness Protection Program and the Marshal Service was covered by my NYPD salary—which I still collected while I was abroad. I was still on the active payroll since the NYPD is the only city police force I knew of that had foreign operatives. Money went a lot farther in Chattanooga than in Queens.

  I wasn’t terribly worried about my home in Queens. Given that my home was within three blocks of the precinct, it had become a makeshift crash pad for guys pulling double shifts. My partner, Alex Packard, had moved in permanently to maintain the place. He didn’t have to worry about his apartment, as he sublet it to some college students.

  Since there were still small platoons of assassins who still thought there was a bounty on my head, Packard had padded his arrest record with the idiots who thought I still lived there. Nice when you do not have to chase them because they come to you.

  As I drove, I kept my speed level and easy. Breaking speed limits would only make it worse. But thankfully, I wasn’t in a part of the world that really paid much attention to the posted speed limits. We made it to the hospital within twenty minutes. Mariel was in a bed five minutes after that.

  Jeremy and I stayed with Mariel for the first hour. He and I alternated coaching her through her breathing. Since Mariel had been homeschooling Jeremy during the entire WitSec ordeal, Jeremy had been to as many Lamaze classes as I had. He was eager to help. Every time he took over, I alternated with praying the rosary.

  Halfway through the second hour, doctors had taken notice of my hands – too many for Mariel’s comfort. She gripped my hand and said, “Tommy, take Jeremy for a walk, would you?”

  I just smiled, returned the quick squeeze, and went out into the hallway.

  Jeremy looked around before saying at a whisper, “Dad, what happened to your hand that Mom’s worried about it?”

  I smiled at him. Jeremy had always thought of my charisms as superpowers … which was the easiest way to understand them, really. He wanted to keep my powers a secret identity. To him, I was the next best thing to having Captain America for a father.

  “I did a six-way split in London. One of me didn’t end well.”

  He nodded solemnly. I didn’t tell Jeremy that I had died five times in London during the riot. Calling my bisection “creating doubles” was misleading. I was in several places at once. It was one consciousness directing six bodies. I felt everything that had happened to each body. Thankfully, I had only kept a specific set of scars from one of the five deaths. It would have been difficult to explain dinosaur-like teeth marks traveling up my body.

  “With great power comes great responsibility,” he intoned. “Also, a lot of bruising. But why is Mom worried?”

  “She’s concerned that doctors are going to ask too many questions.”

  Jeremy frowned. He was probably trying to fit it to a classic superhero plot.

  I had no doubt that he would find it, but I wanted a chair and a place for the two of us to sit back and relax.

  We sat. Within five minutes, Jeremy was asleep, curled up against my side. I had one arm around Jeremy, the other hand fingering my rosary.

  I fell asleep a little bit later. Chattanooga was one of the few places I felt comfortable enough to do that. It helped that every other citizen was armed. It wasn’t Switzerland but close enough for me.

  Around 8, a nurse prodded
us awake.

  After five hours of labor, Grace Gabrielle Nolan was born, weighing in at 8 pounds, 2 ounces. And she was adorable. I held her in one arm and held my wife’s hand in the other. Mariel was still exhausted from the labor … or was it because the labor started when she only had three hours of sleep? Either way, she was out like a light a few minutes after delivery. This left Jeremy and me to fill out the paperwork.

  Jeremy and I planned for a day full of religious education since he had fallen into the faith as a way of researching my “superpowers.” Though I was content to listen. I had been too busy getting shot at to investigate what “powers” I might possibly receive at some point, including Saints who raised the dead.

  I had been listening to Jeremy so intently that I was only distracted when the loud thump of the cane was already upon us.

  2 Witness for the Prosecution

  I turned around to see a big man, over six feet tall, with a puffy, snowy white beard. The width of his gut exceeded his shoulder span, but not by much. For his age, he looked good. He was dressed in full, three-piece pinstripe suit. His tie was green and gold, something regimental, and vaguely Irish. His walking stick was a little taller. He was leaning heavily on it. Though it looked like an iron club. It was very sturdy but obviously an open-carry weapon.

  “Jeremy, do you remember Assistant District Attorney William Carlton?” I asked my son.

  He nodded enthusiastically, as though his favorite uncle had arrived. “Sure! Hey!”

  Carlton thumped his way down the hall a little more and nodded in our direction. “Hello, Jeremy. Detective.”

  I forcibly kept my smile on my face. On one hand, I was certain that he was here to ask for a favor, and that favor had to be back in New York. I didn’t begrudge him the favor he was certain to ask. I technically owed him. He was instrumental in the current deal that had me overseas for several months. While my friend Father Freeman and the Mysterious Fed had proposed it to the acting mayor, ADA Carlton had gone to bat for me.

  However, we were friendly but not friends. He couldn’t have heard about Grace’s birth. I hadn’t even told my partner back in New York yet, and he was close enough to qualify as family. Thus, Carlton needed a favor. No one would go that far to ask after one’s health. He wouldn’t need me for my detective skills. After all, he had legions back home.

  What he needed from me was my special relationship with God—though I couldn’t imagine what.

  Though I wasn’t eager to go. I had spent the last month almost nonstop with my family as I awaited the Vatican’s next recall order. It was Heaven. Morning Mass, followed by breakfast with the family, followed by Jeremy’s education—at the current rate of speed, he’d be done with high school before he was fifteen.

  And Carlton probably wanted me to go back into the lion’s den that had my face on the “Wanted: Dead” posters.

  “ADA Carlton. What brings you here?” I asked cautiously.

  “I have a dead witness,” Carlton answered. “Part of my case against the Women’s Health Corps.”

  That made my blood run cold. The WHC might have only been a tool of the warlock who ran New York City, but the cult itself had raised my first demon. So anything regarding them was in my wheelhouse. It also might involve needing to smite someone.

  What I said was, “Good. I didn’t think they had left any witnesses.”

  Carlton’s head tilted back and forth, balancing his words. “Funny you should put it that way…”

  I sighed. “They got to your witness?”

  Carlton nodded as he lowered himself next to me in the chair. “They did. I think. For about a year, he’d been slowly getting sick. Every specialist in the city couldn’t find anything wrong with him. We had people tear his house apart in case it was something environmental …”

  “Was it?” I prompted

  “You could say that. Father Freeman and some Haitian experts from Flatbush identified it as Voodoo.”

  “He was cursed,” I concluded. “To death? Interesting. But what do you want me to do about it? Bring him back from the dead?”

  Jeremy grabbed my arm and bounced in his seat like he was on a sugar high. “Of course, Daddy!”

  I looked from Jeremy to Carlton. “You can’t be serious.”

  Carlton shrugged. “Why not?”

  “One, I don’t know if I could even help. Two, my daughter is only a few hours old. You think I’m going to leave my wife and children right now?”

  “Of course you are,” my wife told me that afternoon as she held our eight-hour-old daughter.

  “Say again?”

  Mariel looked at me with a calm, patient smile. “Jeremy?”

  Jeremy shot to his feet and stood perfectly straight, as though giving a lecture. “God does not let people die from demonic infestation or curses. The only physical harm can be what God wills. If this is a curse, and this man died from it, it’s because God allowed it.” He paused, frowned, and added, “Or he was involved in occult stuff. It left him open to it.”

  Mariel nodded. “Right.” She smiled at me. “We focused on the occult for a bit while you were away.” She shrugged. “There are only three books on Catholic exorcisms, anyway. But if this works? It means God wanted to draw your attention to the witness. I can’t imagine it doesn’t lead you to something else. It’s either going to be a two-week assignment or two days. Go. Be Secret Agent Saint. Come back to us. Got it?”

  I sighed. “Yes, boss.” I looked at Jeremy. “Watch after your mother while I’m gone.”

  Jeremy nodded. “Duh. Of course.”

  Say what you like, but ADA William Carlton had a logical mind. Sherlock Holmes’ mantra “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” took on a whole new light when the supernatural was no longer considered “impossible.”

  Before the witness, Julian Thompson, died in Carlton’s office, Carlton had figured out ahead of time that Thompson had been cursed. Father Freeman had helped with the research, as well as discussing probable remedies. This included, well, me.

  Carlton had gotten Julian Thompson on ice in short order. When Thompson died not four feet away from the ADA, Carlton called Sinead Holland—the only ME who knew my secret and knew that there was always an alternate hypothesis. She would work with Carlton, who didn’t want Thompson in the system… It would look funny if he were registered “deceased” if, by some miracle, I had raised him from the dead. Holland could hold off being put into a system for a while. She was backed up a bit, so if he was discovered, it could have been passed off as an innocent clerical error. This showed a lot of foresight on Carlton and Holland’s part. This meant that there was no evidence of his death in the first place.

  So no one batted an eye when Julian Thompson walked into the courtroom three days later after I had raised him from the dead. All I had to do was pray for an hour and say, “Please.”

  Okay, to be honest, two people had more than batted an eye. Those people who murdered him the first time were somewhat taken aback. Carlton would later elaborate in a 5,000-word letter that two of the defendants died of a heart attack in the courtroom. Holland would remark on the coincidence that Thompson had also died of a heart attack.

  Julian Thompson had personally witnessed an element of the Women’s Health Corps cult that I hadn’t been made aware of. After all, I just caught them; I wasn’t that involved in the prosecution (which was a good thing, since I would have been hard-pressed to explain that I had thrown the Deputy Mayor into the fire pit at the crime scene, only to have later witnessed my partner burning him down to the ground with thermite and other chemicals … only to have met him again in London a few months later. And that was only one of the problems I would have had to explain under oath).