C. Palov - Templar's Code

Reaching the back staircase that led upstairs to Rubin’s boudoir, he grabbed the newel post and lunged upward, only to gracelessly stumble. Stopped in his tracks by a small barricade of cardboard boxes. He stepped on top of one of the boxes, his shoe promptly plunging through the crack in the cardboard top.

“Damn!” Holding on to the banister, he yanked his foot out of the box. He scrambled awkwardly over the obstacle, taking the steps two at a time.

“Rubin!” he shouted as he neared the top step. Although he didn’t expect an answer, the eerie silence filled him with dread.

A moment later, he charged through the foyer with its massive court cabinet and hideous cuckoo clock and on into the flamboyantly paneled room. He came to a shuddering halt.

He was too late.

Rubin Woolf lifelessly hung from the ornate four-poster bed. Snow-white hair. Pale spindly limbs and rotund belly. Bulging tongue. A blue-tinged icicle suspended a foot above the floor. A gallows bird dangling from an oak perch.

He fought the instinctive urge to recoil from the macabre sight. Instead, he closed his eyes, giving his mind a much-needed respite to take it all in. To process the horror of it all.

This was not the Rubin he knew. This was not the animated man who, less than twelve hours ago, had merrily quaffed a martini while banging out “London Calling” on the piano.

Opening his eyes, he glanced around the room. There was no blood. Not a single drop. Only a puddle of piss on the floor. He swallowed a mouthful of bile, nauseated. Unable to recall the last time he’d felt so powerless.

Horrified, he turned his head. Then he saw it: an eight-pointed star neatly incised into the oak panel directly opposite. The same octogram star that had adorned the dagger hilt used to kill Jason Lovett.

Think, man! The bastard was obviously sending a message.

His shoulders slumped, grief, horror, and bewilderment assaulting him in equal measure. Why kill Rubin Woolf? Since the Mylar-encased Bacon frontispiece was on the bed, in plain sight, he must assume that the killer knew about the Knights of the Helmet. And, quite possibly, the Emerald Tablet. The bastard was probably in the dark about Benjamin Franklin, meaning they were one step ahead. Still in the game.

He rubbed a hand over his cheek. Good God, did I really just think that? With Rubin’s lifeless body dangling from the—

Caedmon tensed.

He felt rather than heard the vibration of a repeated footfall. Someone was coming up the stairs. The bastard had returned to claim another victim.

He turned his head from side to side, searching for a weapon. His gaze alighted on the upturned stool. The same stool that Rubin had stood upon in the moments before his death. Determined to smash the bastard’s skull, Caedmon grabbed the stool by one of its spindle legs.

A split second later, seeing a pink blur and a mass of curly dark hair, he immediately flung the stool aside, catching Edie in his arms as she burst into the room and trying as best as he could to shield her from the ghoulish scene.

“Don’t look, love.”

The admonition came too late.

“No!” Edie gasped, violently shuddering in his arms.

Uncertain what to say, he said nothing. There was no flowery platitude that could erase so violent an image.

Long moments later, Edie pulled away from him, a shell-shocked expression on her face. “There was no reason to kill—” She swung her head toward the foyer. “Do you hear that?”

He listened. Then he heard it. A faint, but unmistakable crackling sound. Accompanied by an unmistakable smell. Smoke.

He dashed to the foyer and out to the stairwell just beyond.

“I can see flames!” Edie screeched.

Indeed, a sprightly fire crackled and danced at the bottom of the steps, flames darting upward. A fire-breathing dragon come to life!

“We’re trapped, aren’t we?” Edie wildly gestured to the stairwell, pointing out the obvious—that the flames were quickly advancing up the wooden steps, which supplied the perfect kindling.

“Get back in the room!” he ordered, grabbing Edie by the arm and forcibly pulling her away from the stairwell.

“We’ll never get out of here alive! This is a bookshop. It’s a tinderbox ready to blow!”

Well aware that a raging inferno would soon engulf them unless they could put out the fire, he scanned the wood-paneled room. He needed something with which to smother the flames. Charging toward the window, he reached up and yanked the heavy velvet drapes off the wall. Rod and all.

Ignoring Edie’s wild-eyed stare, he dashed back to the stairwell. In the short time since he’d been gone, the flames had traveled nearly to the top of the stairs. Quickly he pulled the metal rod through the fabric. He then unfurled the fabric and laid the heavy swath on top of the roaring flames.

Like humans, fire required oxygen to breathe. Cut the oxygen flow, kill the fire.

“Damn it,” he swore as the flames consumed the velvet drapery in a fiery burst. The soft crackle they’d heard a few moments ago now a deadly roar.

His lungs filling with smoke, he noisily hacked. Reflexively crooking his elbow, he placed his bent arm over his mouth and nose as he backed away from the stairwell. There were more flames in the stairwell than London during the Blitz. The funeral pyre had been carefully planned to the last detail. The jumble of boxes at the foot of the steps had been set on fire. Probably soon after Edie ran up the stairs. For all he knew, the bastard had been in the bookshop the entire time. Waiting. Watching.

“Caedmon!”

“Window!” he hollered back at her. “Quickly!”

Knowing it was their last line of retreat, he rushed toward the window, relieved to see a narrow ledge on the other side of the glass.

“We’re a full story aboveground. We’ll break our necks if we try to jump.”

“And we’ll meet a fiery end if we don’t,” he told Edie as he hurriedly unlatched the window. Legs straddled wide, he put a hand on either side of the wood rail and shoved upward.

“Bloody hell! It’s painted shut!”

Edie began to cough. “Fire . . . in the . . . foyer!” she gasped.

“Right.” Knowing they only had a few seconds before the menacing flames devoured the wood-paneled room—an incinerator in the making—he hurriedly shrugged out of his anorak. He then wrapped it around his right forearm and hand. “Stand back!”

Order issued, he smashed through the glass with his heavily padded arm. It took a few seconds of determined bashing before he’d cleared all the jagged pieces out of the frame. As he unraveled the coat from his arm, he glanced over his shoulder. The fire was now lapping at Rubin’s bare legs.

Grabbing Edie by the hand, he pulled her toward the opening. “Out you go!”

A stricken expression on her face, Edie ducked her head through the window. Carefully holding on to the frame, she bent at the waist and swung a jean-clad leg through the opening. Seconds later, she was on the ledge.

In the near distance, Caedmon heard the blare of sirens.

“Probably best if you don’t look down,” he warned as he made his way through the window, hoping she didn’t suffer from acrophobia. A few seconds later, hugging the painted brick exterior wall, he carefully sidled next to Edie. “You all right, love?”

Brown eyes fearfully opened wide, she nodded. “All things considered.” She attempted a brave smile. One that fell woefully shy of the mark.

A few feet from where they stood, tangerine flames darted through the open window.

Taking Edie gently by the wrist, he wordlessly coaxed her to sidestep as far away from the window as possible. They got no more than four feet before they were stopped by a chunky bit of architectural ornamentation: a coved bulwark that protruded from the exterior façade. There was no way to straddle the bloody thing without falling off the ledge.