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

  “That’s a possibility,” Jack said, “but teens can get themselves tangled into serious messes if they try hard enough. Right, Saul?”

  “Yes.” Saul cast his gaze at the ground. “They can indeed.”

  “Was she killed here, Momo, or brought here from another location?” Jack asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  Momo pointed at a small section of asphalt about ten feet in front of the dumpster, which was distorted in a way that indicated it may have been recently exposed to high temperatures. The crime scene techs had marked the spot with a yellow evidence marker for photo reference.

  “I believe she was killed right there,” Momo replied, “then carried to the dumpster by a single person. The CSU guys should be able to give you a few more details, after they finish running their forensic analyses.”

  Saul trudged over to the indicated spot. Atop the warped asphalt was a thin layer of soot, where the girl’s body had lain after she’d been set alight. Someone, presumably the man who’d disposed of her remains, had stepped in the soot as he picked up the body and tracked it over to the dumpster, leaving clearly defined footprints behind.

  “Judging by the enormous shoe size,” Saul said, “I’m guessing Muntz gave Don the lovely job of tossing the girl’s corpse like a piece of garbage.”

  “Which puts Drew at the wheel of the getaway vehicle, since Muntz prefers to be chauffeured around,” Adeline said. “The three stooges, back in action.”

  “So we have an abduction site to locate”—Jack scratched at his graying stubble—“along with the vehicle they used to transport the victim.”

  Saul shifted his weight from foot to foot. “If we figure out who she is, that might give us an idea of where Muntz picked her up. Don’t suppose she had any ID on her?”

  “She did, actually. But it was destroyed by the fire. All I got off her was this.” Momo tugged a plastic evidence bag from her pocket. Inside was the remaining fifth of a white ID card whose printed information had been entirely destroyed by the fire. Nothing remained but a sliver of the girl’s picture and a couple of colored streaks that appeared to be part of some larger design. The streaks looked vaguely familiar to Saul, but he couldn’t quite extrapolate the full design.

  Adeline leaned closer to get a good look at the partial card. “That can’t be a Connecticut driver’s license. The design is wrong.”

  “Maybe she was from out of state?” Jill said. “A tourist or someone visiting relatives?”

  “Or a student.” Momo stuffed the bag back into her coat pocket. “She’s young enough.”

  Saul snapped his fingers. “That’s it! It’s a college ID. For Weatherford College. Those gray and orange streaks are part of the school’s logo. They’re the feathers of that bird. The, uh, the state bird, whatever it is.”

  “The American Robin?” Jill said.

  “Yeah, that.”

  Adeline pushed away from the wall. “How long ago was the girl killed, Momo?”

  “I’d put time of death at around four hours ago.”

  “And she was abducted sometime before that,” Jack said, “which means someone has likely noticed her absence.”

  Adeline patted the phone in her jacket pocket. “Want me to ring the school, boss?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.” Jack took out the little notepad he always used to keep track of important case details and jotted something down with his nub of a pencil. “Impress upon them that their student may have been abducted from campus, and if we can’t determine her identity quickly, then we’ll make a public entreaty at a press conference. That should light a fire under their asses.”

  “Nothing colleges hate more than bad press about campus safety.” Adeline yanked out her phone and unlocked the screen, then opened the browser to look up the numbers for the various people large and in charge at Weatherford College. “They’ll do anything we ask, as long as we keep the details of the murder on the down low.”

  “We have to keep the details on the down low though,” Jill said. “It’s preternatural.”

  “But we aren’t going to tell them that,” Saul retorted.

  “All right,” Jack said, reviewing what he’d written on the pad. “So we’ve got viable suspects and a reasonable way to ascertain the girl’s identity. Only other thing we need is a lead on Muntz’s vehicle.”

  “I assume it was some kind of van.” Saul zipped his jacket as the wind suddenly picked up and the shadow of a storm cloud fell across the area. “Maybe an unmarked work van with no back windows, so as to conceal the cargo.”

  “The kidnapper’s favorite.” Jack signaled for one of the cops to come over, and a young uniformed officer broke away from the line of yellow police tape erected near the end of the lot. “I’ll get the cops looking for it.”

  “Is that wise?” Jill asked. “What if they encounter Muntz?”

  “I’ll give them strict orders not to approach any occupants,” Jack replied, “but I seriously doubt there will be any when they finally track it down. It’s almost certainly a throwaway vehicle. Muntz will ditch it or torch it by the end of the day.”

  The young officer came to a halt before Jack, and he asked her to gather a few of her colleagues and canvass the area for witnesses who saw a work van parked behind Wong’s around the time the girl was killed. If they were able to get a specific description of the van’s make, model, and color, Jack impressed, then they should put out a citywide APB for the vehicle.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to include the state police in that APB, sir?” the officer asked.

  “No point in that,” Jack said. “Our prime suspect has no intention of leaving the city.”

  “Understood.” She gave him a respectful nod. “I’ll get right on it.”

  After she jogged off, Jack turned back to Momo. “Looks like there’s a bad storm rolling in, so we’ll leave you to your business.” He motioned to the rest of the team. “Why don’t we find a place to duck out of the rain, sit down, and discuss our next steps?” He eyed Saul. “And maybe get some food while we’re at it. You’re looking a little muddled there.”

  Saul smacked his cheeks. “Sorry. Threw up my lunch.”

  “Aw, you sick, Saul? Heard the flu’s going around.” Momo nodded to her assistants.

  The assistants, a male-female pair of fraternal twins, hauled a gurney out of the back of the ME van, which was parked halfway on the sidewalk. A black body bag lay folded on top of the gurney, and it bobbed up and down as the pair wheeled the gurney across the uneven asphalt.

  “Nah, I’m not sick,” Saul answered, wiping from his cheek a stray drop of rain buffeted ahead of the storm by the rising wind. “But something weird did happen earlier.”

  While the assistants transferred the body to the bag underneath Momo’s discerning gaze, Saul reiterated the story about his strange episode. When he wrapped it up, Momo hummed a curious note and said, “Could it have been related to your brain damage?”

  Saul was taken aback. “That hasn’t affected me in years.”

  She gave him a sympathetic look. “It’s affecting you all the time. It’s why your revenant memories are so badly fragmented. Or at least, that’s the prevailing theory.”

  A sour taste spread across the back of Saul’s tongue. “Did you have to remind me?”

  Each time someone mentioned the car accident that had triggered Saul’s revenance—and also put him in a coma for three weeks—it felt like they vigorously rubbed a mental scar with a fresh piece of sandpaper. It reminded Saul of his first few weeks at the PTAD academy, where he’d been evaluated by various revenance “experts” who had determined that Saul’s revenant memories were woefully incomplete.

  They’d literally written “defective” in their notes, notes that had been passed up to the PTAD brass. Who had been severely disappointed that the precious gem they’d plucked out of a jail cell, the latest reincarnation of the Merlin, the greatest wizard who’d ever lived, had been reduced to a mediocre combat wizard as a result of chi
ldhood brain damage.

  The more powerful a revenant soul, the less frequently it reincarnated, so Merlin had only come around a handful of times since his original life. The last incarnation had died well before the FBI existed, much less the PTAD, which meant the organization hadn’t yet had the chance to benefit from the wizard’s vast knowledge and expertise.

  Because Saul’s brain had been so badly rattled by the drunk driver who T-boned his mother’s car that fateful morning after his eleventh birthday, he would never be able to provide all the knowledge the PTAD so desperately sought. Some of it had apparently gone out the window with the fragments of his shattered skull.

  Saul would go down in the PTAD’s top-secret history books as a serviceable field agent, and nothing more.

  Far too many people loved to rub that in.

  “Sorry, hon,” said Momo. “I was just making a point. The effects of traumatic brain injuries often last a lifetime, and you can develop new symptoms from old damage as you age. Seizures, for example.”

  “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a seizure. At least not a physical one.”

  “You think someone attacked your soul?” Momo adjusted her glasses and took a harder look at him. “I don’t see any signs of destructive or parasitizing foreign energy in your aura.”

  “Look, we can worry about me later.” Saul gestured to the body bag on the gurney now being rolled across the lot by the assistants. “For the time being, let’s focus on catching Muntz before he brutally murders another college student.” He grunted. “We should’ve locked that bastard up and thrown away the key when we had the chance.”

  “We would have,” said Jill, “if we hadn’t had to stop in the middle of a high-speed pursuit to save you from drowning after Muntz rammed your car off a bridge.”

  “What is it with people pointing out my shortcomings today?” Saul snapped.

  Jill pursed her lips. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset—”

  Jill’s face suddenly went slack, her arms dropped to her sides, and her pupils widened as if she’d stepped into a pitch-black room.

  Saul rushed to her side and grabbed hold of one of her arms to make sure she remained upright. Sometimes, she lost her balance when she had a vision, and a few times, she’d conked her head on a hard floor or a sharp corner.

  Jack, hot on Saul’s heels, took out his notepad and pencil again, turned to a fresh page, and set the pencil to the first line on the paper just as Jill started to speak in a deep, resonating tone that was completely at odds with her normal bubbly voice.

  “Today. Half past five. Driving rain. Strong winds. Rushing river. Creaking docks. Scared Saul. Fleeing fast. Manticore chasing. Goblin market.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Jill’s pupils shrank back to their normal size. She blinked rapidly, tears gathering, as if sand had blown into her eyes. She tugged her arm out of Saul’s grasp, plucked her glasses off, and rubbed at each eye until the irritation settled.

  Squinting, she glanced from Saul to Jack, who both stepped back to give her some space. Then she completed her usual ritual by vigorously shaking her head and smacking her cheeks to ward off the lingering disorientation.

  Jill was one of the PTAD’s most powerful precogs, and at her age, only twenty-three, she was something of a prodigy. Her visions lasted an average of ten to twelve seconds, twice as long as most precogs could manage. They were always crystal clear, with no peripheral blurring or blind spots. They often included sound, which was extremely rare. They were usually related to whatever case the team was working, which was helpful and frequently vital. And they were never, ever wrong, not even the ones that depicted the most unlikely situations.

  Some precogs were more in tune with the most probable future than others, and Jill seemed to be attracted to it like a magnet.

  The only problem was that, because the strong visions taxed her brain so badly, her memories of what she saw were more transient than those of the average precog. She couldn’t transfer most of the information to long-term memory. If someone didn’t jot down what she saw while she was seeing it, whatever critical clues her visions might contain would simply fade into the ether.

  That was the reason why Jill lived with a roommate, and the reason why everyone on the team had become adept at shorthand.

  “Did you get everything?” Jill asked Jack with an abnormal sense of urgency. “Because I know I saw something super important, but it’s already fading.”

  “I wrote down every single word you said,” Jack assured her.

  She sighed and rubbed her eyes again. “That was a powerful one. Really vivid. I felt the emotions. Fear. Anger. Pain.” She worried her lip. “Lots of pain.”

  “You don’t feel emotions that keenly very often,” Saul said.

  “And when you do,” Jack added, “it usually means the event depicted in the vision involves death and destruction.”

  Adeline, who’d ended her phone call to whatever unfortunate college admin she’d chosen to verbally eviscerate, joined the gathering around Jill. “Was I imagining things, or did I hear the word ‘manticore’ in there somewhere?”

  “Oh, you definitely heard that.” Jack tapped the corner of his notepad page with his pencil, leaving a cluster of tiny graphite dots.

  “Well, that’s not good.” Adeline rolled her shoulders back, as if she’d felt a chill. “Chimeric creatures that large and complex are far beyond the skill level of a novice necromancer.”

  “So there’s a high-level necromancer walking around in Weatherford?” Jill asked.

  “Yes,” Jack replied, gazing up at the stormy sky. “And according to your vision, he’s going to crash the goblin market down near the docks by siccing a manticore on Saul later this afternoon.”

  Saul tossed his head back and allowed a few fat drops of rain to splash against his cheeks. “As if my day hasn’t been exciting enough already.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tanner

  Despite the burly man’s ability to conjure green fire from thin air, he was no match for the sable wight. The series of small fireballs he hurled like a professional pitcher practically slid off the sable wight’s skin, leaving only a few red marks and tiny blisters. Then the sable wight was on him, and he had no more time to perform magic tricks.

  One elongated hand rammed the man’s chest and sent him down into the mud, breathless. Before he could recover, the creature opened its maw wide, and that was when Tanner felt it: that creeping cold that had sucked the life out of his soul back at the factory.

  The wight performed the same morbid process on the thrashing burly man, until that little green flame in his palm was snuffed out. No more energy. No more magic.

  Realizing he was now defenseless, the man screamed for help. But none of his buddies from the nook came running. They had all taken the opportunity to flee while the wight focused on him. So he died, the burly man who’d been so self-assured just moments ago when he confronted Tanner.

  Died shrieking with his head inside the sable wight’s mammoth mouth. Died as it closed those pointy teeth around his neck and sheared his head clean off. Died in a powerful spray of blood, red on the rocks, on the mud, on the grass, in the water.

  Then the sable wight maneuvered the severed head to the side of its mouth and crunched.

  Tanner almost threw up. But he kept his bile down through sheer force of will and pushed his aching legs to run faster across the slick ground. The steepness of the embankment lessened as it neared the Karthen Street Bridge, so Tanner set off at a shallow angle and dashed up the bank diagonally. Though he had to run farther, the less strenuous climb still made for a quicker trek.

  As the other men from the nook learned too late.

  They’d tried to ascend the bank at its steepest point, so the most nimble among them was only halfway to the top when the sable wight picked up the rest of the burly man’s corpse and stuffed the whole thing into its mouth. The wight chewed up the body and swallowed, licked its bloody teeth, and
turned toward the men who were clambering up the slope.

  This was the point at which Tanner, who’d been engrossed by the horrifying gore, finally made himself look away. And good thing too, as less than a second passed before a flurry of screams echoed down the riverside, interspersed by the sounds of tearing flesh and cracking bone.

  Don’t look back, he commanded himself. You’ve already seen enough nightmare fuel for a lifetime.

  Stumbling over the top of the grassy embankment, he jumped the low metal barricade that separated the sidewalk from the bank. He came down hard on the concrete, straining his knees, and sprinted toward the bridge, which was now only thirty feet away.

  But more than zero feet could make all the difference in Benton Court, he’d heard, a rumor that seemed to hold quite a bit of water.

  Curious residents four lanes across the street, lounging on stoops or loitering in alleys, followed every step that Tanner took. Several of their gazes held malicious intent.

  He didn’t acknowledge their stares for fear that it would invite some of them to act. Instead, he kept his attention fixed straight ahead, at the bridge that would take him back to the safety of the neighborhoods with which he was familiar.

  When he was ten feet from the bridge, a man hiding in the shadows of an alley called out with amusement, “Hey, Agent Reiz, you get beat up by a troll again?”

  Tanner silently cursed Saul. What the hell is he even an agent of? And why do so many people on the wrong side of town know his name?

  He set off across the bridge’s pedestrian walkway at a brisk jog, the best he could do at this point, his legs wobbling like Jell-O. His poor physical state didn’t hamper his mood though, as he caught sight of the busy streets on the other end of the bridge. All Tanner had to do was make it there, and he could grab a cab or hop on a bus, ride far away from this cursed neighborhood and the sable wight that wanted to devour him.