Read Wild Cards: Death Draws Five for Free Online Page B

waited.
    For a few moments it was tricky. Nighthawk didn’t like blind firefights where anything could happen. But he felt no sign of a coming revelation, and again, he was right.
    Usher retrieved the chest. Nighthawk and Magda laid down suppressive gunfire, and no one came out of the chapel after them. After that it was only a matter of keeping quiet. Of keeping to the darkness and avoiding the growing search. Their car was ready. They made it past the roadblocks before they could be set up.
    They reached Rome at dawn and Nighthawk took the reliquary into the Vatican before the rest of the tiny city-state was even waking up. Only then could Nighthawk relax. He’d gotten the Mandylion, the actual burial cloth, the Shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, into the hands of the Allumbrados. That was the hard part. The rest, getting it to New York and the Brothers who waited there, would be easy.
    The mission was practically over. It had cost the life of one of his team members and an uncounted number of Savoias, but it had been worth it. Returning Jesus Christ to the world would be worth it all.
    ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
    New York City: Waldorf-Astoria parking garage
    “Save my soul from evil, Lord,” the Midnight Angel murmured, “and heal this warrior’s heart.”
    She stood up, leaning over the driver’s side door of the vehicle next to her. It was an SUV, big, shiny, and new looking. She wondered at the idiocy of a city dweller buying a vehicle like this. Was it excessive pride? Envy? Of course, maybe she was guilty of immoderate judgement herself. This was a hotel parking lot, after all. Maybe the SUV’s owner lived in the country somewhere and actually needed it.
    She had, she suddenly recalled, little time for moralizing.
    She punched through the window effortlessly, her arm protected by a leather gauntlet and full body, form-fitting leather jumpsuit. A burglar alarm clanged raucously as she quickly leaned in through the shattered window and slipped the transmission into neutral. She shoved the SUV, sending it skittering toward the Allumbrado, who had halted his approach when the alarm started to scream.
    The Angel peered out from behind the car in the next parking slot—it was a late model Ford of some sort, and she approved much more of its lack of ostentation and relative utility than she did of the conspicuous and consumptive SUV—and watched as the Allumbrado, suddenly frowning, make a complicated set of hand gestures as the SUV bore down on him.
    He finished with his left hand clenched into a fist, held chest high. His right hand was next to it, palm open. He pushed that hand out, extending his right arm fast, like he was throwing some kind of open-handed punch at the SUV, which was now almost upon him.
    A wall of force met the SUV head-on. Its front end crumpled as if it had hit an invisible fence and it rebounded backwards right at the Angel as a sudden wind buffeted her, stirring her long, thick hair in its passing.
    Her heart pounded with desire. She wanted nothing more than to stay and fight this man, but she knew that there was a chance, however slim, that he and his companions might overpower her and prevent her from getting her message to The Hand. She scuttled back among the parked cars as her opponent threw another force wave in her general direction, setting off numerous car alarms as the vehicles in the wave’s pathway rocked as if in an earthquake.
    The message was foremost in her mind as she slipped away in the darkness.
    The Cardinal has come. And he has brought aces with him.
    But also, not so far buried, was an image of the man who accompanied the Cardinal. The handsome, strong-looking one.
    There, she thought, was a proper foe.
    Or perhaps, something else entirely.
    ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
    Hokkaido, Japan
    It was two in the morning, about an hour and a half before the unsui would strike the sounding board with his wooden mallet, waking everyone for the start of the long monastery day, but Fortunato was already