“I’m guessing that was around the time that powerful spell went off?” Saul slowed the car to make the turnoff into the garage.
“Your guess is correct,” Jack said in a strained tone. “She cast an extremely potent multidirectional force spell. Tried to crush us to a pulp from all sides. We narrowly evaded it by dropping into a storm drain. But the drainage system was so badly flooded by the heavy rain that we had to return to street level a couple blocks from the flophouse. So the sorceress—”
“Jack!” Jill shouted.
Jack swore, and the sound of skidding tires shrieked across the line.
Saul stomped on the brake, bringing the car to a stop half turned into the garage entrance. “What happened?”
“She threw a big wall of water at us,” Jill whined. “And it just flooded three whole stores.”
“You guys need backup?” Adeline asked.
“No,” Jack said firmly. “We’re still in Benton Court. If you come to back us up here, the situation will quickly devolve. The denizens of the court are already on alert, and we’ve passed more than one person who looks ready to start a magic street brawl.”
Saul gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles cracked. “Then what do you want us to do?”
“Whatever you were doing before we called.” Jack leaned away from the phone and said something to Jill too quietly for the speaker to catch. “I just got off the phone with Roland, and he suggested we call you two to let you know we aren’t dead.”
“But you guys sound like you need help,” Adeline pointed out.
“Not yet,” Jack countered. “We have a few more tricks up our sleeves. And I’m certain at least one of them will get this sorceress off our ass long enough for us to get back across the river. Once we shake her, we’ll be heading straight for the psychometrist. Roland already brought the guy into the fold, so he’s just waiting for us to arrive with the goods.”
“Which psychometrist is it?” Saul asked.
“The one on Willard.”
“Can we meet you there?”
“Unless you have something better to do,” Jill said with a touch of snark. “But give us, what, thirty minutes to get ourselves straight?”
“Yes, half an hour should do it,” Jack confirmed.
“Perfect.” Saul let the car roll up to the boom gate. “We have a couple packages to square away in holding, so we’ll head to Willard as soon as we drop them off.”
Jack went silent for a moment. “What packages?”
Saul grimaced. “Ah, Roland didn’t tell you?”
“It was a short status call. He didn’t have time to tell us much of anything,” Jack said. “What packages?”
“We’ll tell you all about them later,” Adeline replied. “There’ve been a few changes to the game plan while you guys have been slinking around the court. We can all play catch-up while the psychometrist is working through the spiritual contents of that purse.”
“She’s on the roof of that Chinese place up ahead,” Jill cut in. “Hope she doesn’t flood that too.”
“I see her,” Jack grumbled. “Persistent bitch, isn’t she?”
“Oh, she’s using fire this time.” Jill whistled. “That’s not good.”
“Uh, guys?” Adeline said.
Jack sighed again. “Yes, yes, very well. We’ll speak at the house on Willard. Until then, please stay out of trouble.”
“Shouldn’t that be our line?” Saul asked as he waved his badge in front of the scanner, prompting the boom gate to rise. “We aren’t the ones with a sorceress tailing our…Wait. Where did you two even get a car?”
Neither of them answered.
Then Jill said, “Nice talking to you guys. But the crazy sorceress is about to throw a big fireball at us, so we have to go. Bye!”
The line went dead.
Saul took his foot off the brake again, and as the car glided into the garage, he pondered aloud, “Do you think they stole a car?”
Adeline threw up her hands. “Maybe they borrowed it?”
“In Benton Court?”
“Yeah, okay. They stole it.”
“Roland’s going to love that.”
From the back seat, Drew said under his breath, “Especially when the car ends up in the river with two bodies in it.”
Adeline spun around, her eyes flaring violet. “I’m sorry. Did you just ask for another ass-whooping?”
The valraven on the mirror squawked again, and the sound echoed eerily through the garage.
Drew flinched away from Adeline. “No. I’m good.”
“That’s what I fucking thought.” She looked at Saul, the violet glare bleeding from her irises. “Hurry up and park the car, will you? I’ve had enough of these morons. It’s time to lock them up and throw away the key.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Tanner
Renault Manor had been posited to Tanner as a bit of a local curiosity. It was widely understood that the building was owned by the federal government, but with no exterior signs suggesting its purpose and no public acknowledgement from the city that the place was even in use, busybody citizens constantly spun wild yarns about it, and curious tourists made a habit of snapping selfies in front of its ornate main entrance.
Tanner had walked by the building several times since he’d moved to Weatherford, never knowing that his own twin worked within its halls.
That the FBI would even operate one of its departments in such a building baffled him. The manor had no functioning office spaces, and its layout was a befuddling mishmash of drafty, spacious corridors and tight hallways that seemingly led to dead ends.
Between the wonky architecture and what must have been monumental upkeep costs, he wondered why the FBI didn’t just sell it to the city and let them turn it into a museum. It would certainly generate more revenue that way.
Then again, Tanner thought as he ambled down one of these long, drafty corridors, goose bumps prickling at his skin, Laura did say the belowground levels are filled with things that would present great danger to the general public. Maybe those things can’t readily be moved elsewhere.
Based on a handy sign—courtyard to the left, cafeteria to the right—he took a left at the next intersection and found himself traversing a hall that looked strangely similar to the last one. For a moment, he had the keen fear that the building was playing tricks on him, leading him around in circles through the use of some preternatural quality.
Then he came upon a set of double doors with gilded filigree trim that he knew he hadn’t seen before. The wooden plaque to the right of the doors, original to the building, proclaimed that this was the entrance to the library.
A dash of childlike precociousness urged Tanner to crack one of the library doors open and take a peek into what Laura had deemed “a musty death trap filled with dangerous texts, where the dust will kill you if the books don’t.” But he decided he’d had enough exciting excursions into the preternatural underworld for one day.
Also, the library would still be here tomorrow. Perhaps he could come back with an escort who would ensure that the books didn’t…do whatever they did to threaten people’s lives.
He continued down the hall toward a second, plainer set of doors with glass insets—the entrance to the courtyard. Laura had informed him that unlike many areas of the building, the courtyard was magically inert, beyond the wards at its corners that provided continuous protection against unwanted guests.
Tanner approached the doors and rose to his tiptoes to peer out one of the little windows. As he did so, something tickled the corner of his left eye. He looked back the way he’d come.
One of the library doors was cracked open. It hadn’t been that way before.
A chill zipped up Tanner’s spine, and he hurriedly pushed open the courtyard door, slipping out into the cool, humid night. Letting the door slam shut behind him, he stepped backward onto one of the numerous stone pathways that cut sharp angles through the square courtyard.
; As he slowly retreated from the door, he observed the hallway through the window.
Nothing appeared at the glass. Nothing was following him.
Even so, he had the unshakeable feeling that something in the library had been watching him.
Shivering, Tanner whirled away from the door and proceeded deeper into the courtyard.
The center of the courtyard consisted of a burbling stone fountain with a mossy statue of a man, probably Martin Renault, in the middle, one hand pointing toward the sky as if he was making a declaration to the gods. Stone paths flanked the basin of the fountain on all four sides, and behind each path, a black metal bench sat beneath the dense, reddening canopy of a squat tree with gnarled roots.
Tanner picked the driest-looking bench and sat down. The fresh air combined with the faint patter of the dwindling rain soothed his jumpy mind and weary soul.
Sitting alone in the nighttime quiet always did him good; the shade beneath the ancient oak on his parents’ property had been his favorite hangout growing up, especially after Saul’s departure. So even in this unfamiliar place, with strange dangers all around him, the edge of his worry bled away like ink at the touch of water.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, silent for nigh on fifteen minutes. Until finally, he felt that he was calm enough to consider what his next moves should be. He’d accumulated quite the list of problems to solve, and most were so far out of his comfort zone, he had no clue where to begin.
One, the man who’d killed his student—Marlene—and kidnapped him was still out there somewhere. Laura had promised that the PTAD would bring the hammer of justice down on Muntz, but Tanner strongly felt like he should be involved in, if not the arrest, then certainly the subsequent trial.
Tanner didn’t know how the preternatural side of the court system worked, though he was sure they must have need of witness testimony at some point during the process. He swore that he would do all in his power to get put on that stand and rake Muntz over the coals for all the horrible things he’d done.
Two, the necromancer in the black coat and his female companion were probably aware that Tanner had not been killed by the manticore and that the PTAD had destroyed the creature. Since Tanner had already been in the hands of the PTAD for several hours, the duo had almost certainly surmised that he’d told the feds everything he knew about the delivery of Excalibur and this ritual they’d been chatting about at the construction site.
It was possible then that they would cut their losses and leave Tanner be, since the information he possessed had already done its damage to their plans. But he couldn’t count on that.
People with the kind of power that necromancer possessed often had an equivalent amount of pride. Tanner had thrown a wrench into plans that sounded as if they’d been in the making for some time, and he’d soured the necromancer’s crowning achievement—the successful theft of Excalibur.
Depending on the man’s temperament, he might hold a grudge against Tanner indefinitely. Meaning that Tanner would have to constantly look over his shoulder until the necromancer was either imprisoned or dead.
Three, Tanner still had to reconcile with Saul. And honestly, that almost scared him more than the prospect of running into another manticore. Everything he’d learned about his estranged brother over the course of the day had completely changed his perspective, and now he stood neck deep in the kind of guilt that never completely washed away.
Tanner had spent more than a decade believing his brother was just some rebellious delinquent who ran away when he failed to readjust to reality after the terrible accident that had nearly taken his life.
The truth of the matter was that Saul’s reality had violently shifted away from everyone else’s, including his own twin’s. No one in his life back then had had the ability to perceive the world the way he did after his Sight woke up. Naturally, Saul had left home in search of people who could.
Tanner hung his head and breathed out, “Oh, Saul. If I’d been able to—”
A jolt of pain lanced up his arm. He reeled back and clutched his wrist.
“Ow,” he hissed. “What the hell?”
Holding his right arm up to catch the glow from the light poles that dotted the courtyard, Tanner examined his wrist. When he didn’t find an injury that could explain the sudden zing, he wondered if he’d damaged a nerve or a tendon during his strenuous physical exertion this afternoon.
Laura had told him that his subconscious healing would target the worst of his injuries first and work its way down to the tiniest cuts and bruises. So it was possible that he still had injuries under his skin that just weren’t a major concern to his health.
Either that, he thought wryly, or I’ve developed carpal tunnel from all that syllabus writing.
Snorting at his lame joke, he made to drop his aching arm into his lap—only to spot something out of place as the light caught his hand. A slight discoloration of the skin in the exact center of his palm.
Tanner brought his hand close to his face—he’d lost his remaining contact lens in the river, so now he couldn’t see for shit—and ran a finger over the discoloration. It was almost perfectly circular and had the texture of a fresh scab. Tracing a straight line down from the mark, he felt a tiny lump partially buried underneath the tendons in his wrist.
He was looking at a deep puncture wound.
That’s not a wound I got at the factory. It must’ve happened at the construction site. But when?
Tanner thought long and hard about it, because something, he knew not what, about the puncture wound struck him as wrong. Mentally rewinding through his memories of the events at the construction site, he played them over again, from the moment he descended the ladder in pursuit of the wisp to the moment the manticore crashed through the pallets.
Every second of Tanner’s memory was flawless—except for the moment where he accidentally revealed himself.
Something had happened in that moment, in that span of two or three seconds. Something that, for an unknown reason, Tanner couldn’t clearly remember. It was like someone had erected a pane of frosted glass between Tanner’s conscious mind and that crucial part of his memory. When he tried to peer through it, all he saw was an indistinct blur.
Tanner understood that sometimes the mind blocked out traumatizing memories. But it made no sense that that one moment, out of all the terrible things that had happened to him today, would be lost while everything else remained intact.
His chest tightened, and his breath caught in his throat.
“Somebody tampered with my memory,” he spoke to the silence of the courtyard. “Somebody planted something in my arm.”
Tanner decided to head back to the infirmary forthwith. Laura could examine his arm, confirm an object was lodged under his skin, and remove it before it hurt him—or other people.
Christ, I might’ve brought a magic bomb or something into a government building, he thought. And if not a weapon, then maybe a magic tracking chip that will lead the necromancer right to…
All the lights in the courtyard went out, followed by the illumination cast through dozens of windows along the courtyard’s walls. Even the residual glow from the streetlights and buildings beyond Renault Manor faded to black, leaving Tanner to the mercy of the night, the darkness made all the more total by the thick clouds rolling overhead.
“Of all the times for the storm to knock out the power,” he grumbled as he rose from the bench. “What is it with my luck today? Did Muntz lay a curse on me or something?”
It would take him ages to find his way back to the infirmary in the dark, given the complicated layout of the unfamiliar building. And that was assuming the entity in the library didn’t use the darkness as an excuse to slink into the corridor and gobble him up.
Shuffling along, he attempted to retrace the same path he’d taken to the center of the courtyard. Up ahead, he could just make out what he thought was the outline of the doorway, the color of the wooden doors slightly darker than
the walls around them.
A panicked voice in his head urged him to hurry up, before the object in his wrist activated and did whatever terrible thing it was designed to do. But he forced himself to move at a methodical pace. It wouldn’t do him much good to slip on the wet stones and break his neck.
When he was ten steps from the doors, several dim emergency lights came to life inside the building, and the distant hum of backup generators vibrated across the grounds.
Relief washed through Tanner—at least he wouldn’t have to navigate the creepy corridors in total darkness—only for anxiety to rear its ugly head again as something soft tickled his toe.
Squinting to cut through the dimness, Tanner scoured the ground and spied a long, narrow object near his left foot. It was the right size to be a leaf, but it wasn’t the right shape, and the finely split edges were bunched up in places.
Oh, it’s a feather, he told himself, feeling stupid. A bird must’ve lost it as it was flying overhead.
Just as that thought came to him, however, another feather landed in a puddle of water beside the walkway. And, Tanner noticed with an immense spike of terror, this feather was faintly glowing dark blue.
Choking on his breath, Tanner looked up into the night sky. Fifty feet above and closing fast, an enormous birdlike figure was diving straight toward him.
Its wingspan was wider than the length of a car. Its hooked talons were the size of chainsaw blades. Its torso, bare and bluish, was that of a human woman’s. And its head, its awful human head, had eyes like burning coals and a mouth frozen forever in a scream of agony.
Tanner let out a pitiful whimper that was lost to the moaning wind. Then he ran. Slipping and sliding across the slick stone. Hands reaching blindly for the door handles. Mind racing a thousand miles a minute, cluttered with prayers and a deluge of disbelief.
This can’t be happening to me again. It can’t!
On the cusp of a distant roll of thunder, his fingers finally caught the edge of a handle. At the exact same moment, two sets of sharp talons closed around his shoulders and hoisted him off the ground.
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 23
