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

by Clara Coulson

  Meanwhile, the manticore kept gaining on Tanner. And then, Tanner fell. He tripped on something, took a painful-looking nosedive, and rolled to a stop just short of the market’s border.

  One of the SWAT agents who’d been loaned to Saul’s team witnessed Tanner fall and pointed her rifle at the manticore. Before she could pull the trigger, however, a nearby goblin head-butted the agent who was trying to handcuff him, sprang up, and made a mad dash for freedom.

  The SWAT woman, distracted by the manticore, didn’t see the goblin until he was practically on top of her. She attempted to ram the butt of her gun into his chest, but he reared back and kicked her in the hip. She spun out and crashed into a metal tent support pole, crumpling to the ground.

  Which left Tanner totally open to attack. An opportunity the manticore did not pass up. The creature pounced, claws extended, teeth bared, at the helpless man on the ground.

  Saul saw red.

  He pushed aside two civilians, jumped onto a shoddy shelving unit some goblin had been peddling, and vaulted up above the crowd. Reeling back his arm, he spit four words that burned across his tongue and emerged from between his lips in a flurry of sparks.

  A rumbling golden fireball flared to life above his palm.

  He swung his arm down, and the fireball shot forward. It struck the manticore dead center in its ugly face and flung it away from Tanner, far across the field, until it hit like a cannonball, blowing dirt and grass high into the sky. Then the fireball exploded into a raging inferno that consumed the creature whole.

  The manticore writhed wildly and screamed in an all too human way, trying to douse the flames. But the flames were powered by Saul’s life energy, and not even the hardest rain could quell them.

  “Tanner!” Saul yelled as he came down from the jump. He landed feet first on top of a kneeling goblin—there’s another brutality citation in my record—sprang off, and darted to the edge of the market.

  As he passed the last few tents, his teammates came into view. Adeline and Jill were gunning for the manticore, wisps of purple energy curling around the necromancer’s fingertips, while Jack was heading for Tanner.

  Jack and Saul reached Tanner at the same time. Both of them slid to a stop on the wet grass and dropped to their knees, one on either side of the injured man.

  “Tanner?” Saul said. “Can you hear me?”

  Tanner didn’t respond. His eyes were barely open, and his breath was coming in short, shallow spurts, as if his lungs couldn’t fully inflate.

  Jack leaned closer to Tanner’s abdomen and sniffed, then blanched. “Shit.”

  “What?” Saul scanned Tanner’s torso. “What is it?”

  Jack tugged the hem of Tanner’s shirt from the waistband of his pants and folded it up, revealing a long, narrow laceration on the right side of his abdomen. The wound was only dribbling blood, but the edges were discolored in a distinctly unnatural way. Bright green. The color of a manticore’s venom.

  Saul almost threw up for the third time that day. “The venom in his system is paralyzing him. That’s why he can’t breathe.”

  “We need to take him to the pawn shop. Every PTAD vehicle has an emergency antivenin box in the first-aid kit. We can give him four doses.” Jack scooped Tanner into his powerful arms like the grown man was made of feathers and loped off across the grassy field before Saul even got back to his feet.

  Saul chased after him, slip-sliding across the wet ground, and affixed his gaze to Tanner’s bobbing head. Tanner’s mouth hung open, his jaw now beyond his control, and his lips were starting to turn blue as a result of hypoxia.

  Manticore venom completely paralyzed the average adult male in under five minutes. If the affected person wasn’t put on a ventilator or administered antivenin, they would suffocate shortly thereafter.

  Optimistically, Tanner had two or three minutes before his heart stopped, and maybe six more for them to resuscitate him before he suffered catastrophic brain damage.

  At a hard run, the pawn shop was two and a half minutes from the market.

  “Hold on, Tanner,” Saul begged. “Please hold on.”

  Jack and Saul passed Adeline and Jill on their way to the shop, right as Adeline hawked up a guttural spell. Streams of purple energy whipped out from her fingers and wrapped around various parts of the burning manticore like lassos, holding the creature in place so it couldn’t flee.

  The beast struck out at Adeline with its flaming scorpion tail dripping green venom, but Jill activated a shield charm on her belt and blocked the strike. This allowed Adeline to concentrate on casting a far more difficult spell: the unwinding of a necromantic chimera.

  A purple pall came over Adeline’s eyes, and dark threads spread across her face like roots growing beneath her skin. Whispered words tumbled from her lips, so many so fast that she seemed to talk over herself, the snaking lines layered atop one another.

  It was both a cacophony and a harmony, a yin and a yang, a wrong and a right. It was the reversal of a heinous crime that had been committed upon nature itself, unraveled using the same apparatus that had been used to commit the crime in the first place. Necromancy. The art of binding the dead.

  An unconstrained necromancer had created the manticore, built it from the ground up using bits and pieces of fresh corpses, brought it into a mimicry of life using the unwilling souls of the dead. But there, on the grassy field outside the goblin market, a constrained necromancer reversed those grievous violations.

  She used her skills for the greater good as opposed to personal gain, and when the last word of the spell rolled from her lips, the tiny filament of reality her counterpart had pulled out of place snapped back into its proper position.

  A sound like a distant gong rang out, and the manticore fell apart.

  The human head detached from the lion neck with a spurt of dark blood. The scorpion tail broke off and fragmented when it hit the ground. The fur of the lion body fell off in one thick sheet, revealing that the skin beneath was stitched together like a doll. Shortly after, all those stitches unraveled simultaneously, and the body collapsed into a pile of naked limbs and a bare rotting trunk.

  With no magic to resist Saul’s inferno, the manticore’s disassembled parts burned away in seconds. Only a small pile of ash remained as proof there was ever a raging chimera on the loose.

  Adeline staggered back from the fire, winded by the strain of the spell.

  Jill leaned toward the fire to double-check nothing remained of the manticore, then gave Saul a thumbs-up.

  Tailing Jack toward an alley, Saul cut off the flow of his life energy, and the inferno lost its golden sheen as it reverted to a regular fire. The heavy rain drowned the flames, leaving nothing behind but a ring of scorched grass and a small crater in the dirt.

  That was the last Saul saw of the field. The walls of the alley cut off his view of everything except the sprinting Jack, the dying Tanner, and the path that led to the pawn shop.

  Saul silently apologized to Adeline and Jill for leaving them to handle an exposure incident by themselves. He really shouldn’t have blasted the manticore with such a powerful spell in close proximity to so many mundanes.

  Those without the Sight couldn’t have seen the magic fire or the raging beast. But they definitely witnessed a big chunk of the ground explode for no good reason.

  Adeline and Jill were going to have to explain that occurrence to the mundane market patrons in a way that didn’t reveal any of its preternatural truths. It was a tough, awkward job, lying to a crowd like that.

  Saul could make it up to his teammates later though. Right now, Tanner needed him.

  It’s just like when we were kids, he thought. Tanner’s hurt, and I have to make it better.

  The one time that pattern hadn’t held true, Saul had nearly died in a car accident. And no amount of effort on Tanner’s part could fix what had broken inside his brother.

  Saul couldn’t help but wonder, as he powered through the sheets of cold rain, rebuffed the
strong gusts of wind, dodged the late afternoon traffic on the flooded streets, if this incident was fate finally balancing the scales to reset that broken paradigm.

  Was Tanner going to need Saul to soothe him, to defend him, to protect him, now that he too had the Sight and all the burdens that came with it?

  Saul prayed that wouldn’t be the case. He didn’t want Tanner’s life to be as perilous as his own.

  But they were identical twins, and even when raised apart, twins often led very similar lives.

  Around the back end of the pawn shop, Jack stumbled to a stop near the trunk of the team’s car, hit the button on the remote to pop the lid open, and flipped the lid up just as Saul reached his side.

  “Get the first-aid kit,” he said as he crouched, cradling Tanner using an arm and a knee. With his free hand, he widened a tear in Tanner’s pants to expose part of his thigh. “The antivenin box should be at the bottom.”

  The standard PTAD first-aid kit was an unwieldy metal toolbox laden with wards to protect it from destruction when it needed to be used in the field during brutal magic battles. Saul lugged it out of the trunk, set it on the asphalt, and deactivated the wards.

  Popping the clasps, he lifted the lid gently, as there were all manner of magic supplies tucked into a netted sleeve on the underside of the lid, and some of them could become volatile if mishandled. The main part of the box sported the usual assortment of mundane first-aid equipment, including packets of gauze, disinfectant, bandages, and tape. Saul dug past all that and found the small wooden box at the very bottom.

  He grabbed it and tore off the little ward seal, which would alert Laura that someone had been poisoned and coax her to prep the infirmary for a potentially dying patient. He then flicked the latch up with his thumb and opened the wooden box, revealing five rows of tiny glass vials and an auto-injector into which a vial could be inserted.

  Each vial had a label above it that specified which venom it was meant to counteract. A vial of aquamarine fluid strapped in the row above the auto-injector had the word “manticore” stamped beneath it.

  Saul removed the injector and the vial from the box, slid the vial into its proper slot, and twisted the back end of the injector to lock the vial into place. Jack lifted Tanner’s leg to give Saul easy access, and Saul pressed the tapered end of the injector against Tanner’s exposed thigh. Finally, he pushed the big red button.

  A large needle popped out and plunged into Tanner’s skin, and a mechanism inside the injector pumped the antivenin into Tanner’s dying body. Once all the liquid from the vial was dispensed, the injector made a clicking noise, indicating it was empty.

  Saul pulled the needle free from Tanner’s thigh. “Should I administer the other doses back to back?”

  “The guidelines for manticore antivenin say doses should be given six minutes apart,” Jack replied, two fingers pressed to Tanner’s neck. “Too much at once can permanently damage the kidneys.”

  “Then I’ll grab the other three and administer them gradually on the way back to the Castle.”

  “Best do. His pulse is faint and erratic. His heart could give out any minute.” Jack hefted Tanner up again. “Let’s get him into the car. You monitor his vitals while I get the other antivenin boxes. The two SWAT vans have code locks, but I’ll have to break into Braxton’s vehicle since I don’t have the keys.”

  Saul rounded the side of the car, opened the back door, and climbed inside. Jack carefully lowered Tanner into the car, and Saul took hold of him, resting Tanner’s head in his lap. Jack then slammed the door shut and jogged off to the first of the SWAT vans.

  The almost nonexistent rise and fall of Tanner’s chest told Saul that his brother was barely clinging to life. He cupped Tanner’s cold cheek and said, “I don’t know if you can hear me right now, but you have to hold on, Tanner. You have way too much to live for to die like this. You’re smart and successful, and you’ve got a bright future ahead of you. You can’t let all that slip through your fingers. You have to fight for it.”

  Tanner’s fingers spasmed, a reaction to the manticore antivenin. But still, his breathing weakened further.

  Saul’s voice cracked as he pleaded, “Come on. You can’t let Mom and Dad bury you. It’ll break their hearts. And I can’t go to your funeral. I can’t. So please don’t give up. Please.”

  The driver’s door opened, and Saul started. He’d been so focused on Tanner, he hadn’t noticed Jack running back to the car. “Did you get it all?” he asked, breathless.

  Jack dropped into the seat and set three more antivenin boxes on the console. “As promised.” He shoved the key into the ignition, and as the car growled to life, he added, “Give him the next dose in two minutes. And from here on, you keep track of the interval. In order to get to the Castle in a timely manner in this traffic, I’m going to have to utilize some unorthodox driving techniques.”

  “More unorthodox than usual?”

  Jack flashed a ghost of a grin. “The way I usually drive is my definition of normal.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  It was whispered among the agents of the Castle that in his distant youth, the upright stick in the mud that was Jack Montesano had been a delinquent street racer. According to the most salacious rumor, one rainy night at the tail end of the decade of disco, the cops launched a major raid on the local street racing league of Buffalo, New York, intending to take out the big players, including Jack.

  But the wily werewolf—supposedly—outran and outmaneuvered no less than eight police cruisers during a fifteen-mile pursuit and got away scot-free.

  Saul didn’t know if that story was true. What he did know was that Jack drove like that story was true. So he buckled his seatbelt and held fast to Tanner.

  The car lurched backward across the parking lot and sailed out onto the street without so much as slowing so Jack could check both ways. Horns blared from every direction, but Jack didn’t flinch as he spun the car around and floored it.

  He jerked the wheel side to side, weaving in and out of both lanes, narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic by a matter of inches. He blew through the red light at the intersection and made a turn so sharp that the car nearly drifted into the parking lot of a gas station. But somehow, someway—Saul swore there had to be a god involved—Jack righted the car, and off they flew toward the Karthen Street Bridge.

  On the other side of the bridge, the traffic on Holliday Avenue was bumper to bumper, so Jack cut across the parking lot of the Crimson Grand Theater and emerged onto a cramped side street behind the building. From there, Jack followed a winding path of one-way streets and residential roads, ignoring every stop sign and traffic light along the way.

  The path was so complicated that it made Saul’s head spin. He’d lived in Weatherford for years now, but he lost track of where they were numerous times. When the Castle suddenly came into view, he blinked in confusion. He hadn’t even realized they’d reached the right neighborhood, much less that the parking garage was just two turns away from where the last side street met one of the highways that bordered the Castle.

  Was that street always there? Saul wondered as the car rolled into the garage. Or does Jack have some kind of dimension-bending magic skills he neglected to mention?

  He wanted to voice that question, but he knew Jack would only smile.

  While Jack was parking the car, Laura entered the garage with two nurses behind her pushing a gurney. She reached the car just as Saul finished his final countdown. With a mystified frown on her face, she watched through the window as he injected the fourth dose of antivenin into Tanner’s bruising thigh.

  Jack exited the car, quickly explained to Laura who Tanner was and what had happened to him, and opened the back door to give her access. “Saul’s been administering antivenin every six minutes since we left the pawn shop,” Jack finished, “but his breathing and heartbeat still sound pretty weak to me. I don’t think he’s getting worse, but he’s not getting better either.”

  Laura
ducked into the car and looked from Saul to Tanner, conflicting emotions dancing across her face. But her reticence lasted only a moment before her doctor instincts kicked in.

  She checked Tanner’s pulse herself, then listened to his heart and lungs with her stethoscope. Next, she flicked on her penlight, pulled up Tanner’s eyelids, and tested his pupil response. She made a noncommittal noise and backed out of the car, gesturing for the two nurses to load Tanner onto the gurney.

  “I agree with your assessment, Jack,” she said. “Looks like the antivenin has stopped the progression of the venom. But manticore venom is really vile. It can do a lot of damage to the nervous system and the respiratory system in very little time.”

  Saul reluctantly let the two nurses remove Tanner from his grasp. “But he’s going to be okay, right?”

  “You know I don’t make those kinds of promises,” Laura replied. “But I do promise I will try my absolute hardest to heal him.”

  Saul swallowed thickly. “Thanks.”

  Laura instructed her nurses to rush Tanner to the infirmary, and she followed the squeaking gurney back into the building, her low heels clicking loudly in the quiet of the garage.

  Saul climbed out of the car and leaned against the trunk, watching his half-dead brother disappear down the hall. He suddenly felt very tired.

  Jack’s reassuring hand landed on his shoulder once again. “Laura will take good care of him. She’s the best healer in the PTAD.”

  “I know that.” Saul closed his eyes. “I just don’t know if the best will be enough.”

  Part Two

  Chapter Nineteen

  Saul