The café was busy but quiet enough, the traffic noise muffled by thick windows and soft instrumental music. A lot of businesses in Weatherford had this relaxed atmosphere, something that set the city apart from the largely hectic natures of the other cities he’d visited throughout his life. This quality, among others, had endeared the city to him from the moment he got off the train.
Tanner had moved to town a month ago and been pleasantly surprised by many things, like the quality of his studio apartment. It was small, for sure, but the floors were genuine hardwood, the fixtures were brand new, there was a laundry nook with a washer and dryer, and there was a balcony off the living area that overlooked the building’s courtyard. The place hadn’t come cheap, but it was located near the center of downtown, twelve blocks from the college campus.
Tanner’s scribbled math had told him he’d save more money by forgoing a car and a commute than by renting a cheaper place farther out. He’d probably come to regret his decision when rent increased next year, but he was satisfied for now. Satisfied with the apartment, and satisfied with his life overall. He was based in a very trendy area, had scored a coveted professorship with a tenure track, and had finally earned the approval of his parents, who’d given him an opulent going-away party at their country club in Denver last month.
For years, his mother and father had been disappointed that Tanner had “wasted” his intellect—and their money—on multiple literature degrees, including a PhD with a focus in medieval literature. But after he’d scored a respectable job in academia and solidified his status as an up-and-coming young scholar through three well-reviewed journal publications, they’d settled down and admitted that perhaps his interests “weren’t so bad after all.”
They still cringed when he brought up Chaucer at their fancy dinner parties though. But that might’ve been due to the fact that he made a game of slipping raunchy jokes from The Canterbury Tales past stuffy old ladies whose late husbands had earned their millions in the steel and oil industries.
The point was, after twenty-eight years of life, Tanner was finally living the dream.
Except for the eight AM classes. Those were the devil’s handiwork.
Once he was satisfied that the syllabus wasn’t a testament to his shoddy typing skills, he packed up his laptop, grabbed a refill on his coffee, and set off for the college library. The quickest path there cut through the small park wedged between the credit union on Caffrey Avenue and the gothic cathedral on Mortimer Street. Tanner took the north-south path, which spit him out two blocks from the library.
He spent an inordinate amount of time waiting at another crosswalk, then squeezed past a group of elementary school kids mobbing a jumbo soft-pretzel cart outside Weatherford’s small history museum, no doubt a popular destination for field trips. The children’s teacher, a frazzled middle-aged woman, badgered the children to form an organized line. To no avail. Tanner tossed her a sympathetic smile as he passed by, and she gave him that exasperated look all teachers wore when they thought their rowdy pupils weren’t looking.
The kids always caught it though, out of the corners of their beady little eyes. And it made them act out all the more because they thought they were “winning.” What they believed the prize was, Tanner never did figure out, not even when he himself was a juvenile brat. He just remembered that he and his brother had taken great pains to drive every single one of their elementary school teachers up the wall, through the roof, and straight into high earth orbit. They’d been such terrible demons in the third grade that they lost recess privileges for six whole months.
Instead of being upset, they convinced themselves they’d broken a record and that one day their names would end up in the vaulted pages of one of those hefty Guinness World Records books.
Tanner chuckled at the memory as he left the poor teacher to wrangle her charges.
Pausing to let a delivery truck turn into the access street between the library and the museum, Tanner checked his phone and noted the time. He had thirty-seven minutes to print his syllabus copies, staple them all together with that nineties-era library stapler that screamed like a cat in heat, and then power walk back to the literature building to set up in the basement room with the broken projector that he’d been generously gifted for his Beowulf course. The only good thing was that that room was twice as big as the seminar classroom, so his eighteen students might actually have some breathing room.
Assuming there was even enough air down there for that many people to breathe. Tanner could’ve sworn the ceiling vents didn’t work when he ventured down there last week.
And wouldn’t that be the icing on the cake? he thought wryly. Suffocating during a lecture on—
“Professor Reiz!” someone called out from behind him.
One foot on the bottom step leading up to the library entrance, Tanner stopped and peered over his shoulder. A young woman was jogging toward him, a packet of stapled papers flopping about in one of her hands. A purple backpack dotted with pink stars hung off her shoulder, and her tennis shoes sported the exact same color scheme as the pack, with star-patterned laces to match. Tanner’s brain couldn’t reconcile her face with anyone he knew, but the accessories were unmistakable. The woman was one of the students from his seminar.
The bedraggled freshman staggered to a stop a few feet away from him, gasping for air, and stuttered out, “Sorry to bother you, Professor, but I have a question about Monday’s reading assignment. I know I should’ve asked at the end of class, only I didn’t think about it until I was already halfway to the math building. I was going to email you about it when I got back to my dorm, but then I saw you walking down the street, and I thought—”
“It’s all right,” Tanner cut in, ending her breathless rant. “You can ask me now.”
“Awesome! Thanks so much.” She flipped the syllabus open to the second page and pointed her finger at, much to Tanner’s irritation, one of the typos he had failed to scrub out.
“Let me stop you right there,” he said before she voiced her question. “I meant to write ‘feat’ as in ‘accomplishment,’ not ‘feet’ as in the body parts at the ends of your legs.”
“Oh.” She squinted at the page. “Yeah, okay. That makes a lot more sense.”
“Was that all?”
She gave him a sheepish grin. “That was it. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t misinterpret something and come to class unprepared on Monday.”
“As long as you complete the reading, I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
“Oh, I will absolutely do the reading.” She nodded emphatically. “I’ll take notes and every—”
An earsplitting screech interrupted the neurotic student’s rambling assurances, and Tanner, startled, turn to find a rusting relic of a white van skidding to a halt on the road beside them. He had just enough time to note that the van was completely unmarked, no company decals on its dented siding—and to recall that unmarked white vans were the hallmark of kidnappers on primetime crime TV Shows—before the van’s back doors flew open, and two men jumped out onto the street.
One man was six and a half feet tall, with a buzz cut and a neck as thick as a watermelon. The other, balder man was a few inches shorter yet somehow even beefier, with biceps so big around that his shirtsleeves were threatening to burst at the seams. The two men had the same chiseled double chin, the same hawk nose, and the same hooded eyes, indicating that they were produced by the same set of parents, who Tanner assumed belonged to a mythical race of bodybuilding giants. They also wore the same scowl, lips pulled down at one corner, as they strode around the end of the van and jumped onto the sidewalk.
Their angry gazes settled on exactly one person in their immediate vicinity.
And that person was Tanner Reiz.
Tanner wasn’t sure what he’d done to earn the ire of these two burly men he’d never met before, but he was one hundred percent sure he didn’t want to stick around to see what kind of punishment they’d dish out for his unknown sl
ight. He was also certain that he didn’t want his eighteen-year-old student to get mixed up in whatever physical altercation was about to occur. Which was why he grabbed her by the wrist, spun her around, and pushed her toward the library steps, shouting, “Run!”
The student took the hint, and with a squeak of terror, she dashed up the steps. Tanner followed on her heels so as to shield her with his wider frame. Unfortunately, the two men also picked up their pace when they noticed their quarry trying to escape. And despite their hulking size, they were ridiculously fast.
In the second it took Tanner to climb six steps two at a time, the men crossed the wide patch of sidewalk between the steps and the road, and lurched up the same six steps in a single bound. Tanner could’ve sworn the men actually blurred as they moved.
A meaty hand wrapped around the back of Tanner’s throat, and the next thing he knew, he was flying. The taller man had ripped him right off his feet and tossed him like a sack of flour. He sailed backward over the steps and most of the way over the sidewalk before he smacked the concrete with so much force that it rattled every bone in his body.
Tanner would’ve screamed at the flash of white-hot pain that surged up his spine—had he not come face to face with a metal light pole as he rebounded off the ground. His head struck the pole so hard it produced a resounding twang, and Tanner’s vision filled with stars. He collapsed next to the pole, thoughts scrambled, and let out a faint, breathless moan.
Only half aware of the world around him, Tanner heard a muffled scream—his student’s—followed by a guttural swear from one of the men. Then someone lifted Tanner from the ground by his coat collar, dragged him around to the back of the van, and threw him inside with the same degree of care that you’d use to toss a garbage bag into a dumpster. Tanner landed limply on the grimy floor of the van, his aching head cushioned by a surprisingly comfortable plastic toolbox.
His spotty vision cleared up just enough for him to watch the two abductors manhandle the wildly writhing student into the van. She managed to wiggle free from their grasp at one point, but she slipped when she tried to jump out of the van. The shorter man caught her by the arm and yanked her back inside.
The taller man then slammed the doors shut, casting the interior into a darkness too thick for Tanner’s struggling eyes to penetrate. So when a third man, who must’ve been seated in the front of the van, began to speak in low, rolling tones, all Tanner observed was a menacing voice calling out to him from within a black void. “Long time no see, Agent Reiz,” taunted the specter of death. “We’ve got quite a lot of catching up to do.”
Chapter Two
Saul
Had you asked Saul Reiz, at eleven o’clock in the morning on that blustery Friday in the city of Weatherford, what he hated most in the world, his answer would have been bridges. Not because he was scared of bridges in any capacity. If nearly drowning in the dark, icy depths of the Connecticut River after someone intentionally rammed his car off a bridge last winter hadn’t given him a phobia of those architectural wonders, nothing would. Rather, he hated bridges because of what creatures tended to live beneath them. Creatures with a knack for stubbornness, poor hygiene, and attitudes that were nearly as ugly as their faces.
Some people called these creatures “trolls.” Saul preferred to call them “raging dickheads,” particularly when they decided to start throwing punches.
An hour ago, when an anonymous call from the tip line indicated that the trolls under the Karthen Street Bridge might have seen something related to the disappearance of the three teen girls that Saul’s team was currently investigating, he’d tried to convince Jack to send someone else, anyone else, to interview the trolls. But Jack was a proactive guy. He preferred to do all the gumshoe work himself. And so, being the supervisory special agent who led the team, he frequently forced the rest of them to slog through the nastiest places and interact with the nastiest people. Generally to the detriment of their physical and mental health.
Today was no exception to that rule.
The three trolls camped out under the bridge on the west bank had armed themselves with a motley assortment of blunt objects the moment Saul, Jack, and Adeline slid down the steep embankment. At first, the trio of FBI agents had attempted to converse with the trolls from afar. But the trolls pointedly ignored their questions and resumed cooking something over a barrel fire, which Saul believed was a particularly large sewer rat that had been shish-kebabbed with an unwound metal clothes hanger.
Consequently, after Saul lost a game of rock, paper, scissors against Jack—Adeline refused to even entertain the notion of getting closer to the trolls, because, as she put it, “They smell like a bag of gym socks”—he’d ambled over to the troll’s disheveled camp and started asking the interview questions from scratch.
Thing was, people had this funny habit of getting angry whenever Saul Reiz opened his mouth. Partly because Saul Reiz had a variety of colorful tattoos on his arms and neck, some of them offensive to mundanes, some of them offensive to preternaturals, and none of them in good taste. Partly because Saul Reiz always wore a slight grin that most people interpreted as a sign of arrogance, though it was actually an affectation from facial nerve damage. And partly because Saul Reiz couldn’t say a single goddamn thing without sounding like he was insulting someone’s mother.
Saul got exactly two questions down his exhaustive list before one of the trolls reared up and punched him in the face. The troll’s hand was damp and oily and had a texture akin to scales. So as Saul staggered back, clutching his jaw, he felt very much like the troll had just smacked him with a dead fish. That feeling was amplified by the foul-smelling film that the troll’s hand had smeared across Saul’s cheek. A stench that triggered his gag reflex and almost made him upchuck the McDonald’s egg and cheese biscuit he’d eaten for breakfast.
“What the hell was that for?” he shouted at the offending troll. “I didn’t do anything to you.”
The troll sniffed loudly, his wide nostrils flaring. “You did the same shit you feds always do. Came sniffing around us innocent citizens who ain’t done nothing wrong because we’re easy targets. You think you can pin anything on us, make a quick arrest, so you can kick back and relax at your fancy castle and not lift a finger to find the real criminal.” The troll hawked out a glob of green mucus. It landed with a splat on Saul’s brand-new shoes, which were already caked with mud from the soggy riverbank. “We’ve had enough of your bullshit, fed. Go find someone else to frame.”
Saul moved his jaw from side to side until the pain lessened. “Okay, first off, I didn’t accuse you of anything. I literally just asked if you saw any of these missing girls”—he bent down, yanked his dropped phone out of the muck, and held it out toward the troll again to show him the photo on the screen—“walk by the bridge last night. I don’t think you had anything to do with their disappearances. I honestly don’t. We’re just here fishing for information about where they went and what they did between nine and midnight yesterday. Okay? We’re trying to find them and save them, if they are indeed in trouble.”
The punch-happy troll flashed Saul an indecent gesture with his warty green hand and turned back to the smoking barrel. But one of the other two, a younger troll, leaned closer to the phone to get a better look at the photo. The picture showed three fourteen-year-old girls, Anna Smithson, Rebecca Reed, and Patty Dewitt, who’d been best friends since preschool and were known by all to be inseparable. True to form, all three girls had mysteriously dropped off the face of the earth last night while walking home after a double feature at the popular Crimson Grand Theater, which was nine blocks north of Karthen Street.
The young troll picked at a smear of half-dried mud on his face and nervously glanced between Saul and his uncooperative elders. Eventually, to Saul’s relief, he decided to do the right thing. “Yeah, I saw them about half past ten last night,” he said softly. Or, well, as softly as a troll could speak with that guttural trill. “They walked over from Peters
on Street and crossed the bridge onto Oxley. Last glimpse I got, they seemed to be heading straight into Benton Court. Don’t know what business mundane girls that age could have in Benton Court, but whatever they thought they were going to do, they seemed pretty excited about it. Meeting up with some older, ‘tough guy’ boyfriends, maybe?”
Saul cringed. Benton Court was the worst neighborhood in Weatherford. By an order of magnitude. It was the only neighborhood in the well-polished city that had refused to budge during the gentrification process that had swept through over the past fifteen years. In some ways, the court seemed to have intentionally worsened itself—with declining property values egged on by increasing rates of violent crime—in order to offset the city’s shiny new coat of paint with a few stains that couldn’t be scrubbed away.
“Were the girls talking as they walked by?” Saul pressed.
The troll shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything specific. Just giggling and stuff. Sorry.”
The other two trolls gave him a side-eye for apologizing to a fed, and the young troll tensed up. Saul knew he wouldn’t be able to get much more out of this conversation, so he attempted to end it on a high note by asking, “Did you happen to sense any active magic on, in, or near the girls?”
“Hm.” The troll scrunched his gargantuan nose. “Now that you mention it, I did catch a whiff of something metallic as they were walking overhead. Didn’t pay any mind to it at the time. It was faint and faded fast after they left the bridge. But I guess that could’ve been one of those…what do you call them?”
“A phantasmal olfactory cue,” Saul offered. “More commonly called a ‘curse vapor.’”
“Right, that.” The troll rubbed his hands against his knobby knees, a nervous tic. He was ready to call it quits with the impromptu chat. “Might well have been one of those.”
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 3
