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

  All of Tanner’s thoughts were wrong. But he figured this out seconds too late—figured out he should have run the instant that silence blanketed the basement—when he caught the faint thumps of hard, fast footsteps approaching the other side of the slaughter room door.

  The door burst open, tearing off its hinges. It crashed into the opposing wall with the screech of metal grating against stone and landed broadside on the floor.

  No longer contained by the twisted door, the wight emerged from its temporary prison. And for the first time, under the harsh glare of blue fluorescents, Tanner saw the sable wight in its full, horrifying, grotesque glory.

  Tanner Reiz realized something in that moment, something that had never occurred to him before: he had a woefully inadequate imagination.

  “Oh my god,” Tanner said as the wight turned its head his way. “I’ve died and gone to hell.”

  Chapter Eight

  Saul

  “Maybe that troll hit him harder than we thought?” was the first thing Saul heard as he came to. He was lying on a bed in the infirmary, with his entire team and Laura staring down at him.

  The person who’d spoken was, of course, Adeline. She also took it upon herself to repeatedly poke him in the forehead. Like that would resolve any medical problem serious enough to cause Saul to hurl and pass out on the floor.

  With a grunt, Saul lifted a quaking arm and batted Adeline’s finger away. “What happened?” he murmured.

  “That was what we were hoping you could tell us,” said Laura. She clicked on a penlight and waved it back and forth in front of Saul’s face.

  Saul squinted, his eyes overly sensitive. “I don’t know what happened. I felt extremely sick all of a sudden, and after I threw up, I just…blacked out.”

  “Are you sure it’s not a concussion?” Jack asked Laura.

  “I checked him for the typical signs when he was down here earlier.” She clicked off the penlight and tucked it back into the pocket of her white coat. “And if he had increasing cranial pressure or a growing subdural hematoma, then he would still be getting worse. But all his vital signs are returning to normal. So I don’t think the episode had anything to do with the sucker punch from that troll.”

  Adeline crossed her arms. “Then what caused it?”

  “Maybe an underlying medical condition?” Laura offered. “I can take some samples and send them out for testing. Or we can send him over to Paxton General and have them do a thorough workup.”

  “No.” Saul pushed himself into a sitting position. He was still a little woozy, and he was covered in a sheen of cold sweat that had glued all his clothes to his skin. But those were the expected aftereffects of vomiting and fainting.

  “The team can’t afford to lose a member today,” he continued, “especially the combat wizard. Let’s just keep this in house. I’ll give you all the samples you want, and you can test them to your heart’s content.”

  “Saul,” Jack said in that growling tone he reserved for admonishment. “While I appreciate your dedication to the job, you’re more of a risk than a boon if you’re liable to pass out at any time.”

  “I’m not.” Saul grabbed a few tissues from the box on the bedside table and dabbed at his sweat-slicked face and neck. “I don’t think the ‘episode’ was physical in nature.”

  Laura quirked an eyebrow, skeptical. “Oh? And you got your medical degree from where?”

  Saul waved the damp tissues at her. “I don’t need a medical degree to sense spiritual problems.”

  “What do you mean by ‘spiritual problems’?” Adeline asked.

  Saul pressed the wad of tissues to his sternum, a place he frequently touched when he focused on the compounded layers of memory developed across his soul’s entire “revenance chain,” the amalgam of lifetimes his soul had experienced before its current incarnation.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened, but it feels like something in my soul was ‘shaken up,’” he said.

  “Hm.” Laura bent down and placed her hands on either side of Saul’s head. A soft green glow lit up her fingertips, and Saul felt her gently probing not his brain but something less tangible. “You know what? You might be right. Your soul looks, for lack of a better word, wobbly. Like a pond disturbed by falling rain. Lots of little ripples running through it, most of which are starting to settle. Which I suppose explains your recovery.”

  Jack frowned. “Is his soul damaged?”

  Laura shook her head. “I don’t think so. There are no obvious cracks or missing pieces.”

  “Maybe it was a failed spiritual attack?” Adeline suggested. “Saul’s got his fair share of enemies after all. One of them could’ve attempted to lay a soul curse.”

  “Those sorts of spells tend to slide right off revenants though,” Jill pointed out. She was rocking back and forth on her heels, bumping the closed blue curtain with her derriere. “Unless you possess a great deal of magic strength and you perform the spell in close proximity to your target. But there are only a handful of sorcerers in all of New England capable of producing that kind of bang. On top of that, no dark magic being can cross onto the Castle’s grounds without setting off the perimeter wards, many of which go boom.”

  “It’s definitely a mystery,” Laura said. “But whatever it was no longer appears to be affecting him.”

  “So unless it happens again,” Jack picked up, “he should be fine?”

  Laura shrugged. “As I said, I don’t see anything physically wrong with him, and it’s well documented that spiritual disturbances often result in physiological symptoms. So I think it should be safe enough to put him back to work. For now.”

  She shot Saul a reproachful look. “If this happens again, however, I recommend you put him on desk duty until you pin down the source of the spiritual disturbance.”

  “Desk duty?” Saul sputtered. “Seriously?”

  Jack snorted. “I should put you on desk duty anyway. You’re about six months behind on your paperwork.”

  “That’s because he can’t read,” Adeline said under her breath.

  “Hey!” Saul rose from the bed with one hand braced on the side table, just in case the dizziness smacked him upside the head again. Thankfully, it let him be, so he didn’t fall flat on his face and embarrass himself. “I misread a menu one time. And it was a menu at a freaking Chinese place. So shove it.”

  “You told the waiter you wanted two plates of ‘go fuck yourself,’” Jill chimed in.

  “It’s not my fault Chinese has all those weird tone things.”

  “But it is your fault that our beloved janitor Daniel is mopping up your vomit in Roland’s office,” Jack said. “So how about you wind up the witty repartee before I decide to send you up there to help him.”

  “Oh, but I like witty repartee,” Jill said.

  Jack slowly turned his head to stare her down.

  “But silence is golden too,” she amended.

  After Saul got his bearings, he provided Laura with a few vials of blood for testing, just in case, and brushed his teeth in one of the infirmary bathrooms to wash out the taste of vomit mixed with humiliation. Then he joined the rest of the team in the hall outside the infirmary, and together, they headed to the garage.

  According to an amused Adeline, while Jack had been carrying Saul’s deadweight down the stairs, they’d received a call stating that Momo, fresh off her last autopsy of the day, was now available to examine the body in the dumpster. They were going to meet the medical examiner at the scene instead of at the city morgue and learn her impressions as she gathered them.

  On one hand, this meant they might glean important case info sooner. On the other, Momo was fond of lecturing to people like they were first-year medical interns with no common sense.

  As the team crossed the expanse of the garage to reach their car, they ran into another team heading into the building. To Saul’s annoyance, that team was Braxton Frasier’s.

  The six-foot-five brick wall of a blond man int
entionally placed himself in Saul’s path so that Saul would either have to stop and confront him, or defer to a man he loathed by altering his course.

  Usually, Saul would go for the confrontation. He and Frasier had butted heads many times in many ways. Including one instance where he’d literally head-butted the man so hard it had knocked them both unconscious. (He’d been suspended for a week over that decision, and he didn’t regret it at all.)

  But Saul wasn’t feeling up to snuff right now. The loss of his lunch had left his stomach gnawing at its own juices, and his vision still blurred if he turned his head too fast.

  Also, Saul had three missing girls to find and the foundation of a case to build against whoever had murdered that poor person in the dumpster. He could score more points for his bitter rivalry against Frasier when he had some downtime. And there would be downtime.

  Weatherford wasn’t exactly a hotbed of preternatural crime. There were days when the team just went on regular patrols or ran through practice drills or slaved over government-mandated reports.

  Report days were Saul’s top choice for going AWOL to pick a fight with Braxton Frasier. So he’d save his ire for the next time one of those came around.

  Refusing to meet Frasier’s gaze, Saul sidestepped the man.

  Irked that Saul hadn’t taken the bait, Frasier jabbed his elbow into Saul’s ribs.

  Stifling a grunt, Saul kept on walking toward his team’s car, even when he felt Frasier’s beady eyes boring into the back of his neck. He had almost reached the front passenger door when the tingle of magic crackled across his skin.

  Saul spun around, raised one hand, and spoke three words. In a burst of sparks, a spell zipped from the end of his fingertips and struck Frasier’s ankles, sweeping the man off his feet. Like a lasso, the spell dragged Frasier across the garage and deposited him at the doors that led into the building.

  The spell dissipated with an audible pop and a golden flash, leaving Frasier lying on his stomach, dazed from smacking his chin on the concrete. He brought his hand to his chin, and it came away streaked with blood.

  “You little bitch,” Frasier spit. “You knocked one of my teeth loose.”

  “You tried to set my coat on fire,” Saul replied. “And as you’re aware, I’m not so great at shields, so the grab-and-drag is my most innocuous alternative.”

  “You call this innocuous?” He raised his hand, showcasing the smear of blood.

  “I call it a fair warning,” Jack said, looking at Frasier over the roof of the car. “You were out of line, Braxton. You and Saul can snap at each other’s throats on your own time, but not on PTAD time. Right now, we’re on the clock, and it’s ticking very quickly.”

  Frasier deflated. He would badger Saul all day and night, but he wouldn’t challenge Jack without a damn good reason. No one challenged werewolves without a damn good reason. Unless they fancied being found spread across town in ragged bloody pieces the morning after the next full moon.

  “Sorry, Jack,” Frasier said, wiping his soiled hand off on his jeans. “You’re absolutely right. That was inappropriate. I’ll save the games for another time.”

  “Oh, is that what you’re calling your schoolyard bully BS now?” Adeline drawled. “Games?”

  Frasier almost dropped his false humility to scowl at Adeline, but he caught himself just in time.

  Jack made a shooing gesture at Frasier and his two flunkies. “Off with the lot of you. You have an important assignment to prepare for, I’ve heard, and you best get to it before the goblin market packs up and moves elsewhere. You know we only find those things once in a blue moon.”

  Frasier produced the most strained smile Saul had ever seen. “Right again, Jack. We should get on top of that. So we’ll be going now.” He opened one of the doors, and his teammates hastily entered the building. But before he himself slipped past the threshold, he said in a sugary-sweet tone, “See you later, Reiz.”

  Saul flipped him off.

  Chapter Nine

  Tanner

  A sable wight, Tanner learned during the single most petrifying moment of his life, was a gaunt humanoid creature whose limbs were twice the length they should’ve been, and whose hands and feet were long and thin like spider legs. The wight had no body hair to cover its tightly stretched skin, and it appeared to have large tendons and very little muscle mass. Each movement, therefore, made its skin jerk and shudder, and it looked for all the world like something that had glitched into reality.

  The eerie effect was amplified by the fact that the wight had no eyes and no ears, just a smooth dome of skin that sat atop a mouth filled with three rows of pointy teeth. It had no nose either, just two oval-shaped nostrils gouged into its face.

  Bits of rotten flesh were caught between the wight’s teeth, and the blood from whatever the wight had last devoured had dried all over its chin and chest. Some of that blood had dribbled in thin curling streams all the way to its crotch, which had no discernible genitals.

  It didn’t look real.

  Yet the wight turned its eyeless head toward Tanner as if it saw him there, and stretched its large mouth into something that no one would ever call a smile but that carried a sense if triumph all the same. A snakelike tongue slipped out from between its teeth and licked at a dab of fresh blood on its cheek. Tanner’s blood.

  This little taste of blood invigorated the wight. The hum restarted, and Tanner heard the wight’s voice again, even though its mouth didn’t move to form the sounds. “Going to eat the nasty wizard, going to eat him whole,” it sang. “Going to eat the organs first, and then the skin and bone.”

  The words hit Tanner like an electric jolt and freed him from his stupor. He lunged into the stairwell, slammed the door shut behind him, and grabbed the railing of the stairs, hauling himself up the first four steps in a single bound. He was still disoriented and weak, but the fresh injection of adrenaline gave him a burst of speed.

  Though he bounced off the wall at the first landing, having misjudged the angle of his turn, he didn’t slow or stumble. He took the fresh pain in his arm as a warning—if you fail, you’re going to suffer a hell of a lot more than that—and hit the next flight of stairs at a dead run.

  He was half a flight from the ground-floor landing when the sable wight burst through the stairwell door. It had obviously expected that door to be locked like the slaughter room door, because it came through far too hard, lost its footing, and spun out into the wall. The speed at which it hit the concrete would’ve knocked a human silly, but the wight absorbed the blow like it was nothing.

  Rebounding as if the wall was made of rubber, the wight used its gangly limbs to propel itself up the entire first flight of stairs in a single bound. It swung around to the bottom of the second flight just as Tanner reached the door to the ground floor.

  Tanner wrenched the door open and dove through at the same time the wight leaped toward him. He landed in a hard roll and scrambled up as the wight crashed into the closing door. The door only caught half the wight’s body, and it reached through with one hand, its knobby fingers grabbing at Tanner.

  One of the cracked brown fingernails raked Tanner’s cheek, drawing blood. But Tanner pulled himself clear before the fingers got a grasp on his neck.

  The ground floor of this disused building had once been a factory of some kind. Old conveyor belts snaked across the expansive floor, and rusting pieces of industrial equipment lay quiet and still, slowly breaking down under the ravages of time.

  Only two lights on the high ceiling were in working order, so the bulk of the floor was bathed in long shadows, hiding the innumerable hazards that could trip Tanner up. Nonetheless, he had to cross the floor. The only exit that wasn’t a padlocked rolling door lay at the opposite end of the building.

  That door was cracked open, and that crack let in a thin beam of yellow light from the sun.

  As the sable wight pulled back so it could fully open the stairwell door, Tanner raced across the factory floor. Loose pie
ces of machinery littered his path, so he jumped and he swerved and he ducked, moving as quickly as he could without running face first into something with jagged edges.

  More than once, a sharp corner tore a hole in his coat sleeve, and in his arm. More than once, a nail or a screw jutting out from somewhere nicked his face or neck, and a few times came far too close to gouging out an eye.

  Behind him, the sable wight escaped the confines of the stairwell. It loped across the floor, climbed over objects too tall for Tanner to climb, slunk through gaps too narrow for Tanner to fit. The wight rapidly gained on him as he reached the part of the metal jungle with the densest tangle of machinery.

  His sense of urgency increasing with each haggard breath, Tanner boosted himself over a conveyor belt and hit the ground running on the other side. The wight, only steps behind him, took a swipe at his head. Tanner dropped and slid under a piece of equipment whose legs held it two feet off the floor.

  The underside of the machine wasn’t smooth. Odds and ends scraped at Tanner’s face, ripped out locks of his hair. But Tanner’s momentum carried him all the way to the other side, and he rolled out to safety just as the wight took the bait and peered underneath the equipment.

  Tanner hauled himself up and took off running again.

  Twenty feet to the door.

  The wight realized it had been tricked and hissed in anger.

  Fifteen feet to the door.

  The wight clambered overtop the machine under which Tanner had slid and took a running leap, soaring through the air.

  Ten feet to the door.

  The wight landed right behind Tanner and plunged forward with its hands outstretched to grab him and drag him back.

  Five feet to the door.

  Those hands began to close around Tanner, a trap from which he would never escape.