Flesh and Bone (Templar Chronicles Missions)

SOME NIGHTS DEFINE YOU. SOME NIGHTS DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU WERE AND FORGE YOU INTO SOMETHING NEW.

August, 1999. Lafayette, Louisiana.

Matthew Riley has survived Desert Storm, transitioned to civilian life, and found work on an oil rig in the Gulf to support his family. After six weeks offshore, he's finally coming home to his wife Cleo and teenage son James. Two weeks of normalcy. Two weeks to be husband and father again instead of roughneck and provider.

But the front door is standing open.

And there's blood in the living room.

WHEN THE MONSTERS HAVE ALREADY WON
What Riley finds inside destroys him: his wife dying in a stranger's arms, her throat torn open. The intruder's face covered in her blood. Canine teeth too long to be human sliding from pale gums as the creature hisses and lunges.

Riley fights with the fury of a man who has nothing left to lose. A baseball bat becomes a weapon. The living room becomes a killing ground. And when it's over, two intruders lie dead—one with his skull crushed, the other impaled on the backyard fence.

But his family is gone. And the nightmare is just beginning.

THE DEAD DON'T STAY DEAD
The Lafayette police respond. They take statements. They run the bodies. And that's when Riley learns the impossible: the man he beat to death in his living room—the one whose face he'll never forget—has been dead for three weeks. Autopsy confirmed. Buried and gone.

Except he wasn't gone.

The detective thinks Riley is mistaken, traumatized, confusing faces in his grief. The case goes cold. The investigation stalls. And Riley is left alone in a blood-stained house with questions no one can answer and a growing certainty that something is terribly, fundamentally wrong with the world.

Then a stranger appears at his door. A man in a dark suit with a soldier's bearing and an offer that sounds insane: *Your wife was killed by something that shouldn't exist. And it's coming back for you.*

Riley throws him out. Vampires? Government conspiracy? Black-ops agencies hunting monsters? It's too much. Too impossible. His grief is overwhelming enough without adding delusion to the mix.

But that night, Riley wakes to find his dead wife standing beside his bed, dirt-stained dress torn from clawing her way out of the ground, her healed throat a mockery of the wound that killed her, and her eyes filled with an inhuman hunger that has nothing to do with the woman he loved.

THE CHOICE THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING
Flesh and Bone is the origin story readers have been asking for—the night that broke Matthew Riley and remade him into the Knight Captain who would stand beside Cade Williams through hell itself.

PERFECT FOR FANS OF:
Military horror and supernatural thrillers • Origin stories with emotional weight • Urban fantasy with real consequences • Home invasion horror • Vampire fiction without romance • Character-driven action • Grief and transformation narratives • Military veterans vs. supernatural threats

SERIES CONNECTION:
For longtime Templar Chronicles readers, this is the story Riley doesn't talk about. It's the pain that drives him, the loss that made him, and the night that explains why he's willing to die beside Cade Williams without hesitation. You've seen Riley as XO, second-in-command, and loyal friend—now see the man he was before the Order found him.

New readers can start here. While this story takes place decades before the main series (shortly after the events of *A Tear in the Sky* in series chronology), it stands completely alone. You don't need to know the Templars, the Echo Team, or Cade Williams to understand Riley's horror and transformation.