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

  There was something in those hazel eyes, something weighty, something dark, that spoke of a quest that had gone unfulfilled since time immemorial. A quest the man’s soul was ever so tired of pursuing but that his pride would not allow him to abandon.

  Kim suddenly understood what she was up against. Not just a sorcerer. Not just a necromancer. But another revenant, just like her. Someone who’d experienced a traumatic event and inadvertently awoken within himself the memories of all the lifetimes his soul had lived before. The memories and the knowledge and the skills.

  A revenant necromancer. This was the worst-case scenario. Because the man magically beating down the front door of Kim’s cottage was likely someone she had fought before, perhaps several times, during her previous incarnations.

  If that was indeed the case, then this man might be familiar with her magic style, with the spells she favored, with the strategies she most frequently employed. And since she had such a pitiful energy store this time around, her ability to improvise, to try new and crafty magic, was woefully limited.

  I’m only going to get one shot at this, Kim thought. If I screw it up, I lose.

  By the time she reached the end of her drive, she had a bold idea in mind. With a few mental flicks, she aligned the energy inside three of her four remaining charms with three different elements that existed in abundance in the Shetland Isles. Wind. Water. Earth.

  She siphoned the energy out of the charms, and with a puff of hot breath on the cool air, commanded each stream of energy to merge with the element to which it had been aligned across the largest area possible around the little cottage. The energy flitted away from Kim in three wispy pink streaks and did what it was told.

  With a crackle of fire across her teeth, Kim invoked the earth-aligned energy first. The ground around her cottage flared light pink and began to gently tremble. A downward glance indicated the necromancer had figured out her play, but he was so wrapped up in the process of dismantling her wards that he literally could not move.

  His right arm was connected to her house by countless strings of blue energy that were embedded in the currents of the wards on the cottage’s front door. If he cut the connections, the wards would resume full function—and the necromancer would have the honor of greeting a giant ball of fire.

  So he didn’t budge. Even as the tremble became a tremor, and the tremor became a shake, and the shake became a quake that groaned like a giant waking from a long slumber beneath the island’s hills. Kim slowed to a stop at the edge of the earth spell’s effective area and watched as the ground before her front door opened up into a gaping maw that threatened to swallow the necromancer whole.

  The man was quick on the draw, however, and did not fall. He cast a telekinesis spell and hovered in the air above the sinkhole. But it was a strain, Kim could see. The hand he was using to hold the telekinesis spell was shaking like a leaf, and the man was gritting his teeth, a fresh sheen of sweat on his reddening cheeks.

  He was using so much of his power to thwart her wards that he had little left for self-defense.

  Confident that her plan was working, Kim softly sang a few bars. This time, the heavy concrete top of the well on the east end of the property ground its way off the edge of the rim and hit the earth with a puff of dirt. A vortex of quickly moving water peeked up over the rim, as if searching for something. When it found what it was looking for—a necromancer ripe for the picking—it shot out of the well toward the floating man.

  The necromancer swore in what might’ve been French and tried to conjure a shield of some sort. But his attention was split too many ways, and the shield failed to form in time. The water spout cut through the shimmering field of the half-shaped energy and struck the necromancer in the side.

  Water was a powerful force. It carved canyons through solid stone. It swallowed large ships. It flooded whole cities. And the necromancer was far from the greatest foe water had ever faced.

  So it flung him through the air as if the man was a piece of worthless debris that had lain in the water’s raging path. The necromancer spun head over heels, again and again, until the water vortex strayed too far from its source and lost a great deal of its strength. Then the man plummeted down in a sharp arc and smacked the ground not unlike a bag of rocks.

  But somehow, he didn’t lose his hold on the cottage’s wards.

  Startled, Kim realized that the man had let her strike him. For the sole purpose of preserving his ward-breaking effort. The frail attempt to raise a shield had been a ruse to draw Kim’s attention. So that she wouldn’t notice he’d wormed his way to the base of the second ward layer and eaten a tiny hole in the critical spells that kept the layer stable—until it was too late for her to stop him.

  Now, as Kim watched in muted shock, years’ worth of ward-weaving collapsed before her eyes in a cascade of tiny pink flashes that fizzled out like dying flares along the walls and rooftop of her little cottage.

  Heat crept up Kim’s cheeks as a renewed wave of anger surged through her veins. She spun to face the necromancer, who was crouching in a dip in the grass near the fence that marked the edge of her property.

  The arm to which his ward-breaking strings of energy were attached hung limply at his side, the shoulder dislocated. One of his ankles was twisted in the wrong direction and could barely hold his weight. His face was a bloody mess, smears of red across his chin and cheeks from where his nose had been crushed on impact with the earth. And his heavy clothes were soaking wet, the fabric of his cloak clinging to his wiry frame.

  Yet the necromancer rose as if he felt no pain at all.

  He grinned at Kim, flashing red-tinted teeth. “Cute trick,” he said. “My turn.”

  Kim prepped her final spell, the one whose energy lay waiting in the very air around her cottage. But as the words to cast the spell snapped and crackled off her tongue, a stench like rotting meat wafted up from the sinkhole that had formed in front of the cottage’s door.

  There was a second manticore, she grasped with a flutter of her heart. It had dug itself a tunnel that led right to her house and obscured its strong scent beneath deep earth.

  Panicking, Kim threw herself backward, off the edge of the drive…and slipped on the grass left slick by the mist her water vortex had shed.

  She lost her footing. And that was that.

  An enormous scorpion tail shot over the edge of the sinkhole and struck her in the chest. The venomous barb rammed straight through her sternum. Paralysis quickly grasped her nervous system, and Kim’s vain attempt to regain her balance failed miserably.

  She collapsed in a heap on the wet grass. On impact, a faint gasp emerged from her throat in place of the wind spell’s final word. The spell discharged improperly and went wide. A whirling wall of air skirted past the necromancer and barely ruffled his damp hair.

  Kim pointlessly clutched at her chest, knowing she was dead. Her brain simply had yet to receive the memo.

  The worst part of it was that she had manticore antivenin stored in a trunk at the foot of her bed—she always had it, just in case. It pained her to know she could not get to it before she succumbed.

  Already, her legs were growing numb, her fingers were losing dexterity, and all the voluntary muscles in her chest and abdomen were completely unresponsive. She could not move. She could not breathe. Either she would suffocate in the next few minutes, or the venom would stop her heart from pumping.

  Tears sprang to her eyes, and she cursed herself for growing so complacent. The last few years had instilled in her a false sense of security, and she hadn’t been as diligent as she should have been.

  Now, a dangerous necromancer was going to claim a weapon of unimaginable power, and if he was wicked enough to create the abominations that were manticores, then he was certainly cruel enough to wield that weapon to the detriment of the entire world.

  People were going to suffer because Kim had failed here today. People were going to die. And Kim herself would be too dead to have any impa
ct…

  Too dead? she thought, struck by a sudden, insane idea. A person can’t be too dead to have an impact on the world unless they’re stuck between revenance cycles. The normal dead can impact the world anytime they please, any way they want. If they’re brave enough to cross back over from the afterlife and risk the well-being of their eternal souls.

  As Kim’s heart skipped a beat, and then two, and then four, she was consumed by an intense desire to strip victory from the necromancer in any way she could.

  On the one hand, the half-baked plan rising in her fading mind would put her entire existence at risk. If she botched it, her soul might be destroyed, her revenance cycle broken, and the guardian of that precious object lost forever to oblivion. But on the other hand, if it worked, she might stop, or at least delay, whatever horrible plans this necromancer had in store for the world.

  Her blurring gaze drifted to the far horizon, to the dark storm clouds building beneath the sun. She took the storm as an omen, an addendum to her morning nausea.

  Something was coming. Something dark and dangerous. Something destructive and depraved.

  She was only one step, she was sure, on a list of many that this necromancer sought to complete to the detriment of everyone but himself and perhaps some unknown allies. Likely, she was not the first step, and she would almost certainly not be the last.

  I have to do whatever I can, she told herself, even if it merely stalls him. I have to give the world as much time as possible, so others can have the best chance of defeating whatever evil looms on the horizon.

  Kim lost control of her head, and it lolled to the side. In so doing, her gaze shifted from the sky to the charm necklace that now lay beside her. All the charms were dark, save one.

  A single tiny glowing piece of quartz. A single tiny beacon of hope. A single tiny chance to redeem herself and preserve the peace of this world for a short while longer.

  She couldn’t part her lips to speak, much less pass air through her throat, but she didn’t need to. You could cast spells without speaking aloud. It simply took a bit more effort, a slightly stronger force of will. And right now, Kim had the force of will of sixteen lifetimes combined.

  Sixteen lives spent in service to protect a weapon few in this world were worthy to wield. Sixteen lives spent under constant threat, from the ambitious, from the foolish, from the evil, from the ignorant. Sixteen deaths, counting this one, some natural, some not, and more of the latter than the former.

  If the necromancer overcame her last-ditch effort, there might be no seventeenth life. On some level, a selfish level, Kim was okay with that. But still, she would not fall without a fight.

  Kim focused her weakening consciousness on that one remaining crystal. She carved the words of the spell across the walls of her mind, silently spoke them to herself, loudly sang them to her heart, stoked the waning fire in her soul for its final charge.

  At the moment when she felt her soul begin the process of detachment from its mortal shell, she did not let go of the living world as she always had before. She forced her essence to stay put, forced it to obey the orders of the newly minted spell.

  Her soul tried to buck the oppressive yoke, but she demanded that it fall in line. And it did.

  While the last few lines of the daring spell were locking into place, a shadow fell over Kim. She could no longer move her eyes any more than she could move her head. But she didn’t need to look to know who stood before her.

  The necromancer, panting from exertion. The water spout and the resulting fall had broken so many bones that every step he took was a chore, though she suspected he’d long blunted his ability to feel physical pain, as necromancers often did. They numbed themselves to all sensation, and most emotion, so they didn’t run the risk of being hurt by a psychic or physical backlash from the awful spells they cast on other creatures.

  This man was almost as dead as the manticore that now prowled the lawn behind him.

  Yet he was still vindictive enough to bend over Kim’s paralyzed body and taunt her. “Got to say, Nimuë,” he said, “I expected a better fight from you. The last time we clashed, we burned down half of London. Of course, it was all held together with sticks and pig shit back then. But it was a lovely spectacle all the same. A pitiful duel in the middle of a sheep pasture doesn’t have quite the same appeal.”

  Kim mentally fixed the final few words of the spell in place and let the magic fly, the energy zipping from the quartz crystal and into her soul itself. The necromancer noticed this—his eyes followed the energy’s movement—but the initial effects of the spell were so subtle that he must’ve thought it a weak attempt at healing magic.

  He was too confident in the completeness of his victory to bother stamping out something he didn’t believe would affect the outcome.

  In the end, hubris is always the downfall of man.

  That applied to her as well as the necromancer.

  The necromancer whose identity she now knew.

  With what little life energy remained in her dying body, Kim worked up a ghost of a spell that attached to her lungs, her throat, and her mouth. It gave her the ability to suck in one breath, to pass that air back out of her throat and over her vocal cords, and to move her lips and tongue just enough to produce a single whispered sentence.

  Kim said to the traitorous knight who had once brought down a mighty kingdom with a cold deception, “After all these years, Mordred, you really should have learned that you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

  At the close of her last words, there came a bright burst of pink light.

  Kim Ballard smiled, and then she died. The necromancer gasped, and then he swore. And the treasure buried underneath the floorboards of the little cottage gave the soul of its long-time guardian a happy hum of greeting.

  Part One

  Two Weeks Later

  Weatherford, Connecticut

  Chapter One

  Tanner

  “And don’t forget to finish reading books one and two of Le Morte d’Arthur for Monday’s class. We’ll be doing a comparison of Malory’s characters to modern fantasy archetypes, and I expect everyone to contribute to the discussion,” said Tanner Reiz as he squeegeed the last bit of blue marker off the dry erase board. Not that it did much good. The ancient board had already been stained back when Tanner was a waddling toddler. Rolling his eyes at the immutable ink smudges, he added, “Got to earn those participation points, you know.”

  None of the zombie-like students produced more than an indistinct grumble as they shuffled out the door of the virtual closet in which his freshman seminar, “A Survey of Medieval Literature,” had been so kindly placed by the administration of Weatherford College’s literature department. Of course, Tanner hadn’t expected his students to be exceedingly enthusiastic at the prospect of showing up at eight in the morning to tackle Arthurian legends through the scope of literary criticism. But he’d thought at least a few of them would pretend they hadn’t signed up for this course because it was the only one of the required seminars that still had seats when they registered for classes.

  As the last student trudged out and almost ran into the doorframe in the process, the poor boy’s eyes barely open, Tanner stifled a sigh and stuck the magnetic eraser on the bottom corner of the board. He’d known that being a first-year professor at a small college in a small city wouldn’t exactly be the most glamorous of jobs, but he felt that the admins had focused their efforts on shafting him in particular because he hadn’t brought in the same number of grants as the other new professors in the department.

  As if it was Tanner’s fault that medieval literature was considered less exciting than Austen or the Brontë sisters.

  Tanner stuffed his books and notepad into his satchel, pulled on his tan coat with the faux-fur interior lining—Weatherford got some surprisingly brisk autumn winds despite being pretty far inland—and exited the classroom, flicking off the lights on his way out. His next class, “Beowulf Th
rough the Ages,” wasn’t until eleven, which meant he had enough time to grab a bagel and some coffee at that lovely café on the corner of Loburn and Ashton, and review his syllabus for typos before he printed out a bunch of copies at the expensive library printer.

  It had been embarrassing to catch three homophone errors while he was reading the seminar syllabus aloud to the class. Though he was sure no one but him was awake enough to notice them.

  The front entrance of the literature building let out onto a set of polished stone steps that overlooked the four broad lanes of Loburn Street. It was one of Weatherford’s main thoroughfares, and by nine, it was exceptionally busy. School buses grumbled along, two tires over the yellow lines. Delivery vans sat parked haphazardly in street-side spaces while their drivers threw cardboard boxes at front doors. Garbage trucks beeped loudly as they shook upturned dumpsters like elementary school bullies shook their victims for pocket change.

  Tanner halted halfway down the steps and scanned the crush of traffic, trying to estimate how long he’d have to stand at the crosswalk waiting for the light to change to the walking man. This was supposed to be a pedestrian- and cycler-friendly city, with freshly painted bike lanes and lots of shopping venues within walking distance from the recently gentrified residential neighborhoods. But when it came to the trials and tribulations of Friday-morning traffic, Weatherford wasn’t much better than any other American metropolitan area.

  Still, Tanner had seen worse traffic situations. Like New York.

  At least the cabbies in Weatherford didn’t try to run you over.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was tucked away at a two-person corner table inside Café Alicia, with a blueberry bagel topped with cream cheese laid on a paper napkin, and a steaming cup of black coffee set beside it. He brought up the Beowulf course syllabus on his laptop, which had seen better days, and proofread it four times in a row as he sipped his coffee and nibbled on his bagel.