The idiot brothers flinched as Saul’s shout echoed across the lot.
“Stop trying to pretend that either of you have anything resembling morals,” Saul finished. “You’re both just trash, and unlike that poor girl, you belong in a dumpster. So if I were you, I’d keep my lips zipped, keep the magic on the backburner, and act like model prisoners until your arraignments for the array of felony charges I’m about to arrest you for. Because if you piss me off, so help me god, the next person who tracks you down will find you in pieces. Got it?”
They both nodded emphatically.
“Good.” Saul stepped over Drew and headed toward the rear of the van. “But since I know you two are about as trustworthy as snakes in a bird’s nest, I’m going to have my companion here watch over you while I take a look inside your crappy van.”
On cue, Adeline slunk around the side of the van. In the minutes that she’d been out of Saul’s sight, she’d somehow acquired a valraven—a reanimated raven corpse. The dead bird stood perched on her shoulder, its one beady black eye focused on the idiot brothers. The empty socket teemed with wriggling maggots.
Between the creepy corpse puppet, complete with visible bones and molting plumage, and the violet sheen cast over her irises, Adeline looked every bit the part of the evil necromancer.
Don whispered a swear, and Drew audibly gulped. Neither man had faced Adeline in combat, but they knew her reputation, and they were rightfully scared of what she could do to them.
As a strong combat wizard, Saul was a formidable opponent. The worst he could do, however, was kill someone. As a skilled necromancer, Adeline could not only kill someone in all manner of heinous ways, but after the person died, she could also bind their soul and continue to torment them indefinitely.
No one in their right mind wanted to wind up on the hit list of Adeline Napier. She might’ve been a “reformed” necromancer, but her recruitment by the PTAD had not made her kind. If you crossed her, you would pay dearly for the mistake.
The valraven squawked loudly, and a violet miasma spilled from its beak.
Assured that the idiot brothers weren’t going to make a break for it, Saul double-checked the van for active wards. Finding none, he hauled the rear doors open to reveal a messy interior. Crumpled fast food bags littered the corners, and old hand tools were scattered about, many of them rusted beyond use.
Clearly, this wasn’t one of Muntz’s personal vehicles. He was a slimy little bastard, but he had good taste in cars and took care of his illegally modded rides. Don and Drew had probably boosted this piece of junk from a scrapyard or an impound lot.
Two quality items, however, stuck out from the detritus.
A purple backpack and a tan satchel.
Saul tugged a pair of latex gloves from his coat pocket and wrestled them onto his clammy hands. Then he grabbed the satchel, undid the clasps, and flipped the cover back.
The small front pockets of the bag were occupied by pens, pencils, highlighters, sticky note pads, and a pair of glasses. The large main pocket contained a neat arrangement of colorful folders, printed packets whose cover pages bore course names and the word “syllabus,” a well-used laptop, and a few books, including a copy of Beowulf and something called Le Morte d’Arthur.
This was definitely Tanner’s bag.
The backpack must’ve belonged to Marlene Witherspoon.
Saul picked up both bags and hung one on each shoulder. The exterior of the van, along with the front cabin, had been doused with so much gasoline that the vapors were overpowering. A single spark would send the whole vehicle up in flames. So he didn’t feel safe leaving flammable evidence of the abductions in the back for the inordinate amount of time it took the crime scene team to arrive.
Instead, he’d shield the bags from the rain with a simple spell, carry them over to the car, and wrap them in some of the plastic covers the team kept in the trunk to preserve forensic evidence—
The air quivered.
Not from a peal of thunder. Not from a freight train’s horn. Not from an explosive blast.
No, the air quivered from a pulse of magic so profoundly powerful that a billion falling raindrops shifted course, that a million panes of glass rattled in their frames, that the hearts inside ten thousand bodies vibrated to an unheard beat, and the blood inside those same bodies chilled a fraction of a degree.
Shocked, Saul spun around, not caring that both bags slipped off his arms and dropped into the gas puddle. Breath caught in his lungs, fear deep in his gut, he peered out from under the metal canopy at the stormy evening sky. His eyes tracked the contours of the roiling clouds, pierced the rippling curtains of rain, until he found it.
A faint reddish glow, a magic aura, extending upward from the ground, illuminating a small patch of sky above Benton Court.
“Jack and Jill,” muttered Adeline. “Do you think…?”
“They caught the sorcerer’s attention,” Saul said. “No way a spell like that goes off coincidentally at the same time two PTAD agents are snooping around the court.”
“Shit. You think they’re all right?”
He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. “Jack and Jill can take care of themselves. And if they are in trouble, there’s nothing we can do for them. We’re too far away. We’ll never get to the court in time to make a difference…Hey!”
Saul whipped back toward the van just as Drew murmured the final word of a weak fire spell. The tiny rain of orange sparks the spell produced was just enough to ignite the low-hanging gas vapors. In a blinding flash, the entire van caught fire.
Kicking the two bags out from under the canopy to protect them from the heat, Saul started weaving an air spell that would suck the oxygen out of the area around the van. While he was busy with the invocation, however, Don and Drew activated their default set of basic strength and speed enhancements.
They broke out of their ice restraints, hopped to their feet, and took off around the side of the store, sprinting so fast that their figures blurred into indistinct smudges of color.
With Saul preoccupied by the van fire, the idiot brothers had one solid chance to escape. To their merit, they almost made it to the relative safety of a sidewalk abutting a major road. A highly public space where PTAD agents were more limited in what “feats” they could perform to subdue fleeing suspects.
Alas, as regular magic practitioners were wont to do, they underestimated the size of a necromancer’s tool bag.
When they were halfway across the front lot, a black bird landed in their path. Another valraven. This bird gave the idiot brothers a squawk of warning to cease their flight under threat of consequences far greater than mild shocks or cold ice.
Don and Drew didn’t heed the warning. Drew kicked the bird out of their way, and it disintegrated into a pile of dirty bones and damp feathers. Don raised one hand and told Adeline Napier what he thought of her valraven with a fat middle finger.
Adeline Napier was not pleased.
A darker hue of purple veiled her eyes, and she whispered the harsh words of a necromantic spell. Despite their low volume, the words seemed to penetrate every space.
They slunk into the alleyways like rats on the prowl for fresh garbage. They crawled across the roofs and walls like vines devouring a ruin. They held a weight that words had no right to hold, and dragged down everything they touched, the living and the dead.
At first, the words seemed to have no effect. The drizzle kept on falling. The wind kept on moaning. The storm clouds kept on billowing.
Then a black speck appeared in the sky. Hard to pick out against the stormy backdrop. So hard that Saul would’ve missed it—if more had not appeared.
Between breaths, the speck became two, then four, then eight, then more. Saul stopped counting after two dozen, and still the specks continued to multiply.
On the cusp of a flash of lightning, the innumerable small black forms cut through the clouds and dove down, down, down. Toward the convenience store. Toward its front lot.
Toward the two men who were mere steps from the sidewalk, and who wholly believed they were about to get away with nothing but a few cuts and bruises.
Don and Drew didn’t notice the descending flock of valravens until the first of the corpse birds were inches from their heads. By then, there was nothing they could do to prevent the onslaught.
The dead birds swarmed the men like bees with a broken hive. They drove their beaks into warm flesh. They raked their talons across fragile faces. They rammed their heads against hips and knees, sending both brothers to the ground. They attacked so violently, so many times, that they tore themselves to bits, and a cloud of loose feathers consumed Don and Drew, hiding the extent of their injuries.
Saul still got the gist of it. He still heard the screams.
When it was over, Ed Muntz’s mooks lay trembling atop a pile of feathers and bones. Blood wept profusely from a thousand shallow wounds. Badly scraped hands with missing fingernails shielded their crying eyes. Tatters of their clothing rustled in the wind—the tatters that weren’t glued to their blood-soaked flesh—formerly white shirts like flags of surrender.
The remaining valravens formed a circle around the two men. One of the birds occasionally squawked to remind them what would happen if they tried to run again.
Saul stared at the scene in abject horror until Adeline said, “So what’s the damage?”
He snapped back to the task at hand: the van.
His air spell had gone off while the valravens were still diving and had snuffed out the fire long before the birds finished tormenting Don and Drew. The heat had warped the exterior of the van, partially melted the tires and rubber accents, and badly scorched the seats and dashboard in the front cabin. But besides some minor smoke damage, the back of the van was intact. The crime scene techs would still be able to glean some usable evidence from the floor where Tanner and Marlene had lain.
As for the bags, the drizzle had likely washed away some of that physical material—another goof that would earn Saul an earful from Jack—but he threw up a basic shield to preserve whatever was left. And to protect the things inside.
Tanner would get his belongings back once the investigation into his abduction concluded, and Marlene’s would go to her parents, who would likely prefer that their late daughter’s things not be marred by water damage.
The van and the bags in check, Saul finally answered Adeline. “Minimal damage to the parts that matter. But we should get the van to our impound lot before anyone else has a chance to take a crack at it. It wasn’t in good shape to begin with, and now that it has fire damage, a swift kick might break it apart.”
“I’ll call in the crime scene guys.” She slipped her phone out and started tapping away at the screen. “You should go cuff those morons before they get any more bright ideas.”
“About that.” He glanced from Adeline, who had taken on a casual pose at odds with the ominous violet sheen over her eyes, to the grown men curled up in the fetal position in the middle of a graveyard of ravens. “Now, it may have been my imagination, but I could’ve sworn you criticized Frasier for crossing into ‘police brutality’ territory when I told you he beat me up after I broke Richter’s leg. And then you go and do the same thing?”
Adeline scoffed. “If you think I did the same thing to them that Frasier did to you, then you need to get yourself to an optometrist. Look harder, Reiz.”
Saul focused on Don’s and Drew’s bloody forms. “They look pretty injured to me.”
“Because you’re looking at the blood,” she countered, “and not the actual wounds. Which are all superficial. Sure, a few of those cuts might need stitches, but those two morons aren’t going to spend weeks in the hospital. They won’t even spend a night in the hospital.”
“But—”
“They’re not that hurt. They’re just scared they’re going to be that hurt if they dare to get up again. Which was my intention.” She sent the text that would summon a crime scene team to the convenience store. “If I’d wanted to inflict the kind of damage on those idiots that Frasier inflicted on you, I would’ve summoned something much bigger and badder than a flock of scraggly birds.”
Saul weighed that explanation against the sight of the cowering men. “Still not entirely comfortable with it.”
Adeline shot him a flat look. “And I should give a fuck about your comfort why?”
“Because I’m your friend and colleague?”
“You’re also the guy that let a key suspect set a crucial piece of evidence on fire.”
“That wasn’t entirely my fault. You were also distracted by the energy pulse.”
“But I’m not the team combat wizard. It’s your job to counter enemy spells on the fly.”
Saul bit his tongue. “Okay. Fine. Whatever. But if Jack asks why Don and Drew look like they went through a meat grinder, I’m telling him the truth.”
“What’s he going to do? Put me in the timeout corner?”
“He could get Roland to suspend you.”
“Woohoo,” she said with no emotion whatsoever, “a vacation.”
Saul sighed. “You’re not worried about anything except going back to prison, are you? Not even death?”
“Are you kidding?” She flashed him a manic grin. “I love death.”
“Right. Because that’s not weird at all.”
Disturbed by the direction the conversation was heading, Saul wheeled around and set off for the graveyard of ravens, two pairs of magic-binding cuffs dangling from his hand.
An angry sable wight on the loose, looking for a lost meal. An unconstrained necromancer lurking somewhere in the city. And a sorcerer of awful power attacking two of my teammates, he thought wearily. A day like this should already be over, but I have this terrible feeling it’s only getting started.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tanner
“You know, I feel stupid in hindsight,” Laura said as she slid the IV needle out of Tanner’s hand. “I should’ve noticed that your life energy had been drained to an abnormally low level when you were first brought in. But I was so caught up in dealing with the side effects of the manticore poison that I didn’t even think to evaluate you spiritually.”
“Would that have made a difference in my treatment?” Tanner pressed the provided cotton ball over the tiny hole in the back of his hand. “I would’ve needed the breathing tube regardless, right? Because my lungs were compromised by the poison.”
She fixed a band-aid in place over the cotton ball. “Initially, no, it wouldn’t have made a difference in my treatment protocols. But it would have inclined me to check on your energy levels periodically, and at some point, I would’ve noticed two things.
“One, that you were autonomously siphoning your energy into healing magic, which would’ve prompted me to discontinue most of my treatments before you woke up. And two, that your store of life energy is so much larger than that of the average person that you are obviously an elevated revenant.”
Finally disconnected from all the medical equipment, Tanner swung his legs off the bed and pressed his bare feet against the cold floor. He’d shimmied into a pair of pale-blue scrubs shortly after Agent Smith left, but a pair of those grippy hospital socks had been conspicuously absent from the offered garments.
“What’s an elevated revenant?” He furrowed his brow. “My brain isn’t readily providing the answer.”
“Accessing relevant revenant memories on command takes a bit of practice. Because revenant memories aren’t technically your memories, but rather imprints of other people’s memories left on the soul. Which is why they don’t supersede your personality.”
She grabbed her stethoscope again and motioned for him to sit up straight so she could check his lungs to make sure they were up for walking. She had instructed him to take things at a snail’s pace, as his body still had much healing to do after today’s extended ordeal.
“Eventually though,” she continued, “searching your revenant memories for specific inf
ormation will become second nature to you, like flipping through a book to find a certain passage.”
“And in the meantime?”
“I’ll humor you,” she said, pressing the disc of the stethoscope to his back. “The amount of life energy that a body possesses is largely random, with a small degree of genetic influence. When a regular person dies, the life energy within their body dissipates and the soul travels to the afterlife with only the basic spiritual energy that the soul needs to maintain its integrity.
“Generally, revenant souls follow the same process, with the caveat that they don’t stay in the afterlife. They enter a reincarnation cycle and eventually travel back to this plane to inhabit a new body.”
“So you’re saying that each time a revenant soul is reborn, their new body possesses a different amount of life energy from all the bodies they inhabited in their previous lives?” Tanner asked, shivering at the cold touch of the disc as it glided across his skin.
“See, that’s the interesting part.” She finished with his back and moved the disc to his chest. “Revenant souls are drawn to bodies that are similar to the ones they’ve previously possessed. So most of the time, their entire line of hosts have similar magic aptitude.”
Tanner nodded along. “Okay, I’m following you so far. Now you’re going to tell me how elevated revenants are special, yeah?”
“Indeed.” She wrapped up her check, hung the stethoscope around her neck, and snatched Tanner’s chart off the dresser to jot down some more notes. “Unlike standard revenant souls, elevated revenant souls absorb the life energy of the body upon death and carry it with them into the afterlife. They then bring it back to the living plane when they reincarnate and combine it with the life energy of the new body. Thus, elevated revenants who’ve reincarnated more than once have life energy stores that are substantially larger than the average human energy store.”
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 21
