Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) by Joseph Nassise

Adversary’s hideout on the Isle of Sorrows in the Sea of Lamentations, the week they’d spent in the Beyond had actually been four months back home. The Order had declared them both dead and buried them in absentia; something that Cade knew still freaked Riley out. The longer Cade stayed here in the Beyond, the more time might pass in the real world and the closer the Order might get to tracking down the Adversary, and, by extension, Gabrielle.
    He couldn’t afford to let that happen.
    Over there, every mirror was a potential pathway to the Beyond, but from this side, the pathways back were far more rare. It was almost as if the two worlds were spinning at different rates and he had to wait for one of the rifts on this side to line up with one of the mirrors on the other. When that happened, a portal appeared and he could cross back over to the other side. Normally, at this point he would have to start wandering about, looking for one of those very portals. But the vision-like dream he’d experienced while being transported to the commandery gave him a different idea.
    He descended the steps and crossed the cul-de-sac, giving the choked-off fountain a wide berth in the process. At the edge of the lawn he stopped. He lifted the eyepatch covering his right eye and then put his hands at his side and bowed his head slightly. He kept his good eye open, afraid something would sneak up on him if he didn’t, but mentally called up an image of his home in the forefront of his mind and did his best to focus on that. He pictured the large mirror in the spare bedroom, the one that had belonged to his wife’s mother and which they’d inherited upon her death. It was one of the few mirrors, along with the two smaller ones bolted to the wall in either bathroom, that he hadn’t stripped out of the house during his grief-stricken search of the Beyond months earlier. His wife had loved that old mirror and at the time he just hadn’t been able to find the force of will to make use of it in so cavalier a fashion. Now, however, he needed a target for what he was about to attempt and that mirror was the best option going for him.
    He’d just have to remember to explain it all to Gabrielle when she woke up.
    With the image of that mirror fixed firmly in his thoughts, Cade crossed his fingers and then triggered his Sight.

    # # #

    Riley was in the officer’s mess, wasting time with a cup of coffee, when the alarms began blaring through the commandery. As those around him scrambled to their feet, he hid his smile behind another sip of his coffee before getting to his feet to join them.
    Men were hustling through the corridors to their duty stations as Riley made his way back to the block of interrogation rooms on the lower level. There he found the men he’d left in charge of Cade frantically searching the nearby rooms. Upon seeing him, they snapped to attention.
    “What the devil’s going on here?” he asked.
    “Sir! The prisoner has escaped!”
    “What?” Riley shouted, glaring furiously at them as he played his part to the hilt. ”You were supposed to keep an eye on him!”
    “We did, sir! Honestly!”
    “Then how on earth did he escape from a locked interrogation room?”
    Riley didn’t wait for an answer but pushed past the guards and headed over to the room where he’d left Cade not twenty minutes before. He knew what he would see - the empty room, the discarded restraints, the cracked mirror - but he pretended to survey it as if for the first time. He looked back at the guard he’d left in charge of Cade and felt the temptation to go easy on the guy; he was an unwitting accomplice to Riley’s own plan to help Cade escape, after all. But Riley knew he couldn’t if he wanted his own involvement to be overlooked.
    “What happened?” Riley demanded.
    “I marked the prisoner’s arrival in the log as required, sir. Upon returning I glanced into the interrogation room through the observation window and noted the