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

by Clara Coulson

  She clicked her tongue. “You, on the other hand, appear to have squandered a great many of my tinctures and charms by overriding their effects and healing yourself much faster and more efficiently.”

  She glanced at the monitor again. “Not that you’re in good condition or anything. You’re still pretty fucked up, and you’re going to be feeling the aftereffects of that manticore venom for a while yet. But you’re not on the verge of death anymore, which is a significant improvement from just a few hours ago.”

  Tanner dragged his gaze toward the tube in his throat and spent a monumental amount of effort lifting his brows in a questioning manner.

  “Ah, yeah, you probably want that thing out, don’t you?” she said, grabbing her stethoscope. “Let me give your lungs a listen. If they sound up to it, I’ll end your torment. If not, I can put you back to sleep—this time, with a sandman charm, something you can’t override—and you can pass the rest of your intubation time in peace. How’s that sound?”

  Tanner wasn’t keen on the idea of going back to sleep after that horribly confusing cascade of…What were they? Revenant memories? But even so, the tube in his throat made him feel like he was constantly on the verge of gagging. He didn’t know how long he could handle it before he went stark raving mad.

  Tanner used all the muscle control he possessed to nod once.

  “Awesome.” The doctor folded the white sheets down to reveal Tanner’s bare chest and pressed the cold disc of the stethoscope against the right side, then the left. Each time the disc came into contact with his skin, it lit up with a faint green glow. A magic glow.

  Fascinated, Tanner wondered exactly what jobs the magic inside the stethoscope performed. Did it let the doctor—or healer, as she called herself—hear things that regular stethoscopes couldn’t? Or did it provide some kind of extrasensory perception that let her examine his organs in an unconventional fashion?

  He made a note to ask her about it, when he could finally talk. And when his head wasn’t filled with a million more-pressing questions.

  “Your lungs don’t sound spectacular,” the healer said, “but I think you should be able to breathe on your own.” She slung the stethoscope around her neck again. Pinching the edge of the tape holding the tracheal tube secure, she peeled the strip off Tanner’s cheek, balled it up, and tossed it into a waste bin attached to the wall. Then, she took hold of the tube. “I want you to cough as I pull this out. Got it?”

  Tanner blinked at her owlishly, and she took that as a yes.

  “Okay. Here we go.” She tightened her grip on the tube and pulled swiftly. “Cough!”

  Tanner forced out a sound halfway between a cough and a gag as the tube slid out of his throat. Laura grabbed a bedpan from somewhere and held it close to Tanner’s face. “I don’t like people throwing up all over my infirmary, but I won’t hold it against you if you do. Not after the day you’ve had.”

  Tanner dry-heaved a few more times before the sensation of a foreign object in his throat finally faded. “Infirmary?” he rasped. “This isn’t a hospital?”

  The doctor set the bedpan aside. “What would a mundane hospital have done if you’d been brought in suffering from the effects of a venom that belonged to a necromantic chimera?”

  “Uh…” Tanner squinted. “I understand some of those words.”

  The doctor cocked her head to the side, mildly amused. “You don’t know much about necromancy, huh?”

  “I don’t know anything about necromancy,” Tanner said automatically.

  But a moment after the word “necromancy” left his mouth, a flurry of memories flashed across the back of his mind. Memories of terrible creatures made from many different organic pieces. Corpses rising from the grave and shambling along on half-decayed sinews. Birds with empty eyes flying through the night sky, bones poking through the flesh of their rotten wings.

  “Or maybe I do,” Tanner amended.

  “Come again?”

  He shook his head. “Never mind. My head hurts.”

  “I’m sure a lot of things hurt,” she said. “But to begin with, let me get you something to soothe your throat. You sound like you’ve been chain-smoking for forty years.”

  The healer backtracked to the curtain and tugged it open some more as she slipped through, revealing a pristine room that looked nothing like any medical facility Tanner had ever seen. Sure, there were hospital beds lined up along the walls, cabinets that contained all manner of medical supplies, and a desk in one corner piled high with medical charts. But the architecture of the room itself looked like something straight out of Victorian England. Intricately carved wooden panels. Chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Solid-oak doors with crystal handles.

  Dumbfounded, Tanner asked, “Where am I exactly?”

  The healer snorted as she opened a glass case full of small vials. “Can’t tell you that yet. You have to sign the NSPSA first.”

  “The what?”

  She popped the cork on a vial of blue fluid and poured it into a small plastic cup, then diluted the fluid with water from a pitcher on her desk. “It’s a nondisclosure agreement that requires you to keep whatever you learn about the preternatural and the PTAD hush-hush from mundanes. As if everyone doesn’t do that already.”

  “PTAD,” Tanner muttered. He’d heard that acronym before. Muntz had used it when he ranted about his disdain for Saul. Ah, the PTAD must be the organization that Saul works for. But what is it exactly? Some kind of law enforcement agency?

  Tanner couldn’t imagine Saul working as a fed.

  The healer walked back to the bed and motioned for Tanner to open his mouth so she could help him drink the concoction in the plastic cup. “My name’s Laura, by the way,” she said, tilting the cup against his bottom lip. “Oh, and this stuff is super bitter, so I apologize for torturing your taste buds.”

  Her warning came too late for Tanner to back out, and he was forced to gulp down a liquid that tasted like metal shavings mixed with vanilla extract suspended in rubbing alcohol. His gag reflex complained again, and he almost spewed it all back up. But shortly after he swallowed, the ache in his throat began to wane, and that relief soothed his gag reflex as well as his careworn mind.

  “There. All better,” Laura said. “Well, I mean, not all better. You still won’t be running any marathons for a while.”

  “I don’t run marathons anyway,” Tanner said with a voice that sounded slightly better than someone grinding sandpaper against a rugged surface. “I don’t have the stamina for that.”

  “Really?” she said. “Saul runs a few, so I thought you might do the same.”

  Tanner was mystified. “Saul runs marathons? Seriously?”

  “Yeah, he runs the three local charity marathons every year.”

  Tanner squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, but found the world around him hadn’t dissolved like the rest of his dreams. “You sure you’re talking about my brother,” he asked, “and not some other Saul?”

  Laura tossed the empty cup into the waste bin. “What, you didn’t know your brother likes running and giving money to soup kitchens?”

  “The last time I saw Saul,” Tanner said slowly, “he liked exactly two things: skipping school and smoking weed, usually in concert.”

  Laura was taken aback. “When was the last time you saw Saul? Jack said it had been a while, but—”

  “Twelve years.” A hint of bitterness crept into his voice. “The last time I saw him before today was twelve years ago, when we were sixteen. He ran away from home two weeks after our sixteenth birthday. Since then, I haven’t heard from him, or of him, until this morning. No phone calls. No emails. No letters. Nothing. Then he just shows up out of the blue, throwing magic fireballs at monsters and acting like he cares about my well-being.”

  “He does care,” Laura replied, her tone sitting on the ragged edge between hard and soft. Like Tanner had said something that offended her, but her bedside manner wouldn’t let her fully express her feelin
gs. “When I picked you up in the garage earlier, Saul looked like he was on the verge of crying, like his heart was breaking into a thousand pieces. I’ve known him for six years, and never once have I seen him express that kind of anguish.”

  Tanner opened his mouth, but no words emerged. He honestly didn’t know what to say.

  Tanner had spent more than a decade thinking that the accident that nearly took Saul’s life had also wiped away all the affection he felt for his family, all the camaraderie he had with his twin. But now, as Tanner lay on the crisp white sheets of a hospital bed in the infirmary of what was clearly the base of some kind of organization that dealt with the preternatural, it occurred to him that he’d been seriously lacking in perspective all this time.

  He’d been lacking the Third Sight.

  In those past the age of innocence, said a voice in his mind that belonged to a half-remembered dream, the latent Third Sight is only ever awoken in the course of a severe physical or emotional disturbance.

  “The accident,” Tanner murmured. “Saul’s Sight woke up because of the accident.”

  Laura’s hard edge folded back, and understanding took its place. “Wait. You didn’t know that?”

  “I didn’t know anything! About the Sight. About the preternatural. About magic. I learned about all of that today.” Tanner’s voice broke as the full guilt of the revelation settled like a lead weight in his heart. “But Saul has known all this time, since he was eleven years old. He could see these things, these monsters, that I, his own twin, couldn’t see. And so…he couldn’t relate to me anymore. That’s why he pulled away from me. That’s why he left me behind.”

  “Oh, honey.” Laura rested her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t talk like it’s your fault.”

  “He was hurting and scared, and I couldn’t figure out why,” Tanner whispered. “And he never told me.”

  She gave him a sad smile. “Would you have believed him?”

  Tanner gripped the bedsheets tightly. “No. I would’ve thought he was hallucinating. Because of the brain damage.”

  “Exactly.” Laura gently rubbed his shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. You were a kid, and so was Saul. Neither of you had the emotional maturity to properly handle a situation like that. Hell, most adults who gain the Sight struggle to navigate the sudden clash of mundane and preternatural. It takes a great deal of effort to adjust to seeing the world beneath its mask while still acting as if the mask doesn’t even have a crack. Many find it to be their greatest struggle. And there’s no shame, or blame, in that.”

  Tanner took the deepest breath his healing lungs would allow. “I get that. I do. But I still feel like I let him down.”

  “Funnily enough,” Laura countered, “when I was in the garage picking you up, I got the impression that he felt like he let you down. So I guess you really are two peas in a pod.”

  “Peas in a pod?” Tanner said. “It’s been a long time since anyone called us…”

  A sudden thought struck Tanner like a speeding train, and he would’ve sat straight up if his spine had allowed it. As it was, he arched his back, smacked his palms against the mattress, and blurted out, “Is Saul a revenant too?”

  Laura started at his shout. “What?”

  “A revenant,” Tanner repeated at a volume that wasn’t loud enough to shake the furniture. “Is Saul also a revenant, like me?”

  “You’re a revenant?” Laura stared at him blankly. “That can’t be.”

  “Surely it can be, since it’s true. I hit my, uh, ‘revenance point,’ when I was being tortured by the sable wight.”

  She tugged at her braid and cast her gaze at the ceiling, like she was rifling through a great deal of information. “I don’t understand. Revenants are rare enough as it is. The odds of identical twins each inheriting a revenant soul is so astronomically low that it’s a practical impossibility.”

  “So Saul is a revenant?” Tanner pressed.

  “Yes, but…” Her head snapped down. “Hold up. Did you just say you were tortured by a sable wight?”

  “He did indeed,” said a deep male voice. “And I’m sure he has many other interesting things to say.”

  A man in a black bespoke suit stood on the threshold of the infirmary’s entryway, an arm braced on each of the heavy wooden doors that neither Tanner nor Laura had heard open.

  Tall and broad-shouldered, blond and blue-eyed, with a strong chin and chiseled pecs straining against the tight shirt beneath his suit jacket, the man looked like an actor who’d just waltzed off the set of a TV show about Vikings. His posture spoke of supreme confidence, an unshakeable resolve, and the stringent expression etched into his face defined him as a mountain, a man who moved for no one.

  Had it not been for the literal sparks in those sky-blue eyes, Tanner would’ve found the man astoundingly attractive. Instead, he felt like he’d stepped on the toes of a haughty god who had no patience for foolish humans, and a bolt of lightning was about to descend from the heavens and strike him down while he was incapacitated in a hospital bed.

  “Tanner Reiz,” said the man, “I’m Roland Smith, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Weatherford Branch of the FBI’s Preternatural Threat Assessment Division, and I do believe the two of us need to have a chat.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Saul

  Santana’s was the same bleak shithole that Saul remembered. Dim lights with grimy covers hung low over booths with peeling faux-leather cushions and chipped wooden frames. Paint peeling off the walls revealed dark mold stains that seemed to ooze every time the humidity ticked up over ninety percent. Smoke lingered in the air, from cigarettes and joints, mixing with the strong tang of alcohol that permeated every corner of the restaurant.

  It was eight o’clock, late for anyone who wasn’t a criminal to patronize Santana’s, and later than Saul’s team had planned to rendezvous with the spook. But after her near miss with that death curse, the spook had gone to ground for a little over an hour. To throw the sorceress off her tail. To shake off any tracking spells that might’ve accompanied the curse. And, of course, to tend to the long, razor-thin laceration that curled around her neck like a noose.

  When Saul’s team reached the shadowy booth in the far back end of the restaurant, they found the spook sprawled out on one cushion, knees poking up above the table. She wore a black hoodie underneath a long black raincoat, and both the hood of that hoodie and the collar of that coat had been turned up to conceal her face and neck.

  Even so, when Jack cleared his throat to spur her into acknowledging their arrival, and she sat up, the movement of the fabric exposed a sliver of her throat. A red, puckered scar glinted in the orange light.

  The spook had healed, but the curse that tried to strike her down had not gone gently into that good night. That scar was going to stick around. Probably for the rest of her life.

  Saul almost felt bad for the woman. Until he reminded himself that spooks were handsomely rewarded for the risks they took to uncover the secrets of the most devious criminals in the preternatural underworld.

  Adeline and Jill slid into the booth, leaving Saul and Jack to obscure the table with their broader figures. Suspicious gazes tickled the back of Saul’s neck, the lowlifes in the restaurant trying to figure out if a hostile foreign element had invaded their space.

  The team had changed into their street clothes though, and only Jill, with her feigned childlike expressions, stuck out like a sore thumb. Without their business casual wear, the rest of them looked like they could be criminals, and since at least two of them had been criminals, as a group, they possessed the right demeanor.

  So after a few moments of intense scrutiny, the regulars of Santana’s returned their attention to their myriad types of illicit business.

  The spook waved over a waitress, ordered a pitcher of the cheapest beer on tap, and waited until the waitress dropped it off before she started talking. “Normally,” she rasped, “half the people in Benton Court will sell out their own neighbors
for chump change, as long as the purse doesn’t belong to someone who looks like a fed. So when I had twelve doors closed in my face despite offering a wad of Benjamins in exchange for info on those missing girls, I should’ve walked away from this job.

  “But I don’t like black marks on my record—Uncle Sam doesn’t like to pay people with poor results—so I pressed on anyway.” She let out a wheezing laugh. “And look where that got me.”

  “What happened exactly?” Adeline asked.

  The spook poured herself a mug of beer. “Roughed up a couple thugs until they coughed out some rumors about crying girls in a flophouse on Potter’s Row. Went down to the row, found the flophouse, broke in through a window. Easy peasy. Place wasn’t even warded—on the outside.”

  She raised the mug to her lips and downed almost half the beer in two gulps. “The door to one bedroom had a tiny alarm ward concealed in its frame, so low power that I missed it despite doing three passes. The second I stepped across the threshold, the ward went off.

  “I tried to get out of there, but it was too late. The ward sent an alert to the sorcerer and left a tag on me. Before I was able to shake the tag off, the death curse hit. I felt it coming, so I was able to partially block it. But it still almost took my head off.”

  The spook rubbed her scarred neck. “I’ve been around for quite a while, done a lot of jobs, and I’ve never come up against power and skill like that before. Not even close. That curse was immensely complex and cast across a significant distance, but it hit me like it was thrown from somewhere in the room. Like the sorcerer was right there. And it hit hard. Like a goddamn freight train.”

  She drained the rest of her beer and set the mug down with a heavy clunk. “Not saying I’m an expert in the field, but I’m almost certain you’re dealing with a revenant sorcerer. You don’t see magic like that from modern-day practitioners. That was old magic. That was war magic. From the dark days of the preternatural.”