A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Read online

  A Knight of Cold Graves

  Copyright © 2020 by Clara Coulson

  Cover Design by Christian Bentulan at https://coversbychristian.com/

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

  For more information:

  http://www.claracoulson.com/

  To contact the author, email: [email protected]

  To my cats. You may not be famous on the internet, but you’re still too damn cute.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Two Weeks Later

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Two

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Three

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part Four

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  To Be Continued

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  Books By Clara Coulson

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The little cottage on the outskirts of Sandwick in the Shetland Isles didn’t make for much of a home, but Kim Ballard had long made peace with living in only a house.

  To begin with, the cottage was situated on a patch of scenic countryside that boasted rolling green hills in the summer and a vast expanse of pristine snow in the winter. So no matter the time of year, Kim always had a lovely view.

  On top of that, everything in the cottage worked as it should all year round. The water from her well always flowed. The fireplace always crackled and warmed. And the stove always cooked a mean breakfast of thick bacon and runny eggs, just the way Kim liked it.

  There was also the fact that the little cottage was better armed than the US military, and would immediately set fire to any evil creature or dark magic sorcerer who came within thirty feet of its front door. This made Kim feel a tad bit safer, even when she was out and about in the village, running errands or meeting with friends from whom she kept an appropriate emotional distance.

  All those defensive wards she’d painstakingly laid over the course of the past eight years to protect the precious thing hidden under the floor of her cottage’s living room acted like a security blanket. They made her just comfortable enough to pretend to live a relatively normal life.

  But on the day where that security blanket was caught up in a mighty gale and blown right out to sea, Kim had spent the morning feeling dreadfully unwell. Her grandmother had been a precognitive, able to catch glimpses of the future, and while Kim hadn’t inherited that particular ability, she always felt sick to her stomach whenever something bad was about to happen.

  Unfortunately, Kim thought the bad thing on this particular Friday was a nasty storm that was blowing in, threatening to knock out the power and drown Shetland in eight inches of rain. As a result of this mistake, she decided to go into the village to buy some extra food and supplies.

  At exactly half past two, as Kim was loading grocery bags into the boot of her tiny blue hatchback, a shrieking alarm that no one but her could hear blasted across the countryside. It was the perimeter ward alarm that went off whenever a magically inclined trespasser crossed the boundary of her property line.

  While the property line was invisible to the mundane passerby, anyone with the Third Sight could see it faintly glowing pink. So any person or entity who didn’t want to brawl with the witch who owned the little cottage would veer around the property line and leave the alarm ward undisturbed.

  Someone had crossed it deliberately and hadn’t even attempted to disarm it. Which meant the trespasser believed one of two things: That there was no way Kim could make it back to the cottage from Sandwick in time to stop them from breaking in and stealing the object under her floor. Or, that even if Kim showed up and challenged them to a fight, there would be nothing she could do to prevent them from obtaining what they wanted.

  In short, they were either underestimating her ability to drive like a maniac, or they were overestimating their strength and skill as a practitioner of the magic arts.

  Either way, Kim thought, I’ll have to set them straight.

  Tossing the rest of her groceries into the back of her baby-blue car, she slammed the boot lid shut, jogged around to the driver’s side, and hopped in. A minute later, she was barreling down the winding country road, loose stones kicked up by her tires hurtling through the air. If she’d lived in a more heavily populated area, she’d have been worried about collateral damage, either from her crazy driving or from the impending battle with some type of evil sorcerer or monstrous creature.

  As it was, she was more likely to inadvertently harm a sheep than a human.

  Which was the whole reason she’d moved to such a remote location in the first place. There were always casualties when people fought over the treasure buried under her floor. And people always fought over that treasure. They’d been fighting over it for more centuries than you could count on one hand, and they’d probably still be fighting over it the day the sun went supernova and consumed the Earth in a colossal ball of fire.

  People could never resist its lure for very long. The eight years of peace during which Kim had acted as its guardian had been the most uneventful since the 1830s, when the object was temporarily lost in the Atlantic Ocean as a result of a rather unfortunate shipping accident involving pirates and a category four hurricane.

  Now the peace had ended. Kim would either restore it or die trying. As every guardian before her had done, much to their personal detriment.

  Far from the first time, Kim wished this mantle hadn’t landed on her shoulders. But she’d been born for this role, the same as each guardian before her had been, and the same as each after her would be. Fate had no feelings and didn’t care whether you liked the roles it dished out. All you could do about your individual role was drown in a puddle of self-pity or accept your lot and make the best of it.

  Kim had come to terms with this fact shortly before she moved into the little cottage and left her entire life behind. Boyfriend. Job. Education. She’d resolved to toss all of that into a bin the morning she woke up in a hospital bed after a run-in with a Vespa and realized she now had the memories of fifteen past lives in her head.

  Memories tha
t let her in on highly secret information that, in the wrong hands, could result in a disturbing deal of death and destruction. Memories that had led her to the place where the previous incarnation of herself had hidden the precious object all her past lives had valiantly protected.

  Back then, she’d been mere minutes ahead of the people who’d come to steal it.

  Today, she was minutes behind, and she prayed that wouldn’t make all the difference.

  On the crumbling road that led to her house, Kim passed only one other car. The passenger, a vague acquaintance, waved to her, and Kim waved back. The villagers would only be alerted to the disturbance at her cottage if she and the intruder started slinging spells that had physical impacts on the environment.

  Most persons of the magic variety avoided that sort of thing unless it was absolutely necessary. Drawing the eye of the mundane world was a wonderful way to get a target painted on your back by everything from witches to elves to the monsters that lived under beds.

  The preternatural community reveled in privacy almost more than it reveled in power.

  Around a low hill her hatchback flew, tires nearly spinning out on a damp patch of asphalt left over from a late-night rain. Kim ignored the close call and cast her gaze across the flat expanse of lush autumn grass to the teeny nook of land that lay in a notch of pasture fencing where a thoughtful developer had stuck a cozy cottage. They’d probably intended for a shepherd to live there so he could more easily tend to the sheep, but a recluse like Kim fit the cottage just as well.

  What did not fit the cottage was a man dressed in a long black coat, with a sword at his side and a knife in his hand that he’d used to cut his palm. Though Kim was still two hundred feet out from her house, she could taste the blood-born magic, a powerful spell that whispered dark tidings beneath the dull roar of the wind.

  The man, who stood just outside the boundary of the targeted inferno ward, held out his hand toward the cottage’s door, and a dark-blue light emanated from his palm. He was searching for weaknesses among the array of defensive wards so carefully woven into the windows, the walls, and the very foundation of the cottage.

  He wouldn’t find any, Kim knew. And when he didn’t, the sorcerer would switch to the brute-force approach. He’d try to rip her wards apart, layer by layer, unwind all the work she had meticulously sewn into the fabric of her house.

  The mere thought made Kim furious. What audacity this man possessed, to think he could so easily rip to shreds the work of a witch like her. She clicked her tongue against her teeth and began to weave the tidings of her own spell.

  Words that were hot like fire danced between her teeth, and carried with them the taste of cinnamon spice and a touch of mint. The spell was an old favorite, one her past selves had used to great effect in the many centuries they’d protected their precious charge. So Kim thought it was fitting to use it once again to smack this man and his nasty blood magic, riddled with the putrid smell of decay—

  Kim slammed on the brakes. The hatchback skidded twenty feet farther down the road, producing a screech that half the island could hear. But Kim was less concerned about being heard and more concerned about living through the next five seconds.

  She hurriedly unclipped her seatbelt, struggling to untangle it from the folds of her fluffy coat. Then she opened the door and dove from the car, landing in a hard roll on the opposite lane of the road.

  The instant her knees hit the ground, something that weighed nearly forty stone landed on her hatchback and completely crushed the roof. It was what Kim had smelled, its undead scent mixed with the copper tang of the sorcerer’s blood magic. It was a manticore, with the body of a lion, the tail of a scorpion, and the head of a human being. It was a necromantic chimera, the product of the most forbidden and reviled of the magic arts.

  Unconstrained necromancy. The darkest path a sorcerer could take.

  The past incarnations of Kim had not faced a necromancer skilled enough to construct a manticore in over two hundred years. Necromancy as an art had waned in recent times, due in part to the overall decline of magic driven by the Industrial Revolution, and due in part to the slow but consistent organization of magic practitioners on a global scale, a development that allowed the preternatural community to better police its many rogues.

  Out of all the enemies that Kim had expected to fight when the perimeter alarm had first gone off, a highly skilled necromancer was near the bottom of the list.

  Kim rose shakily to her feet, knees bleeding through the shredded fabric of her trousers. The manticore had been momentarily distracted by the shattering glass of the windscreen and the collapse of the hatchback’s roof, which required it to gingerly extricate itself from the dented metal to avoid injury.

  But now it stood on the hood, its deformed face staring at her with milky eyes that had been gifted pure magic Sight in place of human vision. It didn’t see Kim as a physical being. It saw her as an energy source, glowing the same pink as the wards on her house.

  Since her soul left traces of its energy everywhere she went, there was nowhere she could run that the manticore could not follow. She had to defeat it, or at least delay it, before she could return her attention to the assault on her cottage by the creature’s creator. Luckily, the spell she’d already been conjuring was still tingling on the tip of her tongue.

  So as the manticore whipped up its scorpion tail to strike her down, Kim parted her lips and let the spell fly in the form of a soft-spoken song: two lines that rhymed and carried a rhythm conceived centuries before.

  The spell hit the manticore’s forehead with a sound like the crack of a whip, and an invisible force hefted the creature’s body from the hood of the hatchback. It struggled in the grasp of the telekinetic noose but could not free itself, its lion paws swiping to and fro at something that was not there.

  Enraged, it let out a scream that sounded like a cross between a human shriek and a lion’s roar, and made to strike Kim with its tail again despite its awkward hanging position.

  Kim didn’t give it the chance.

  She sang a third line, and with a strong push of will, she instructed the spell to send the beast sailing across the sky. And sail it did. It shot off toward the far horizon, toward the seaside, toward the open water dotted with jutting, jagged rocks that could pierce the hulls of boats and skewer unfortunate souls who washed too close.

  She had the urge to see if the manticore landed on the beach or in the water, so that she could glean some satisfaction from the fact that her skills had not grown shabby. But she didn’t have the time.

  A fluttering sensation under her skin indicated that the sorcerer had dug his way through the cottage’s first layer of wards without burning himself to a crisp. He was now using a chain of complex spells to unravel the second layer, and at the rate he was going, he’d be halfway through before Kim even reached her front drive.

  The hatchback more a pancake than a car, Kim found herself running full speed down the road. When it curved into a sharp bend, she left the asphalt and sprinted through knee-high grass that tickled her blood-streaked skin. A high jump took her over a wooden fence, and she grunted with pain as her shredded knees took the strain of the landing. But she brushed off the discomfort and kept on going.

  She could cast a healing spell when the fight was over and the treasure safe. Until then, the pain could be a reminder of what was at stake if she failed. Namely, a great deal more pain for a great many people.

  Fifty feet out from her cottage, she shoved her hand beneath the collar of her coat and yanked out her necklace of pretty charms. The five charms were made of clear quartz, and all of them, save one, glowed pink to her Third Sight. The dark charm had contained the concentrated life energy she’d used to cast the telekinesis spell on the manticore, and it would take her weeks of meditation to replenish the store in that charm.

  Every human being had a limited amount of life energy they could use to cast magic spells—even those without the Sight could cast if
they knew what they were doing—but some people naturally possessed more energy than others.

  In this particular life, much to her chagrin, Kim’s body held quite a bit less than it had in any of her previous incarnations. So she’d decided to prep a storage device that would allow her to throw strong spells on the spot without risking the integrity of her soul and its attachment to her body.

  Four glowing charms meant four strong spells. Four chances to defeat the necromancer before she ran out of hard hits and was reduced to using clever tricks to try and eke out a victory.

  She hoped that those four would be enough, that the necromancer wasn’t exceptionally strong but rather a careful planner who’d spent the preceding weeks slowly siphoning energy into the myriad spells that had brought the manticore into its mimicry of life.

  Because if he was both smart and strong, Kim would actually be in trouble.

  In a war of attrition, Kim Ballard would lose, and the whole world would lose with her.

  The necromancer heard her rushing up behind him, and he looked over his shoulder with a sneer etched deeply into his face. He wasn’t much older than Kim, maybe a couple years south of thirty, but his look was far more rugged and rather wild.

  His dark hair was shaggy, like he’d gone too long without a haircut. He had thick stubble that was at least half a week old. Dark circles hung heavily beneath his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept well in months.