Sweet relief welled up in Tanner’s drooping hazel eyes when he recognized his brother, and he dropped to his knees just as Saul reached him. Saul went down as well, grabbing Tanner’s shoulders so he didn’t tip over and smack his head on the concrete.
Quickly stripping off his jacket, Saul hung it over Tanner’s shoulders to help his brother retain a few degrees of body heat. It was the best he could do until they got back to the car and retrieved a thermal blanket from the trunk.
Adeline strolled up beside Saul, peering out across the lake. “Where’s the harpy?”
Tanner mumbled, “Water nymph.”
“Ah.” Adeline pointed to the west end of the lake. A copious number of feathers floated atop the water, along with what appeared to be buoyant bits of partially decayed flesh. “It got cocky. Flew in too close and stoked the ire of the water ladies.”
“Think it’s been destroyed?” Saul asked as he scoured Tanner’s body for serious injuries. Oddly, he found none, not even the deep lacerations, punctures, and breaks that Tanner had been sporting earlier in the day.
How did he heal so fast? Even Laura’s best tinctures can’t accelerate healing rates that much.
“Close enough,” Adeline answered. “Even if it’s still kicking at the bottom of the lake, the nymphs aren’t going to release it. Eventually, the necromancer will cut their losses and unwind the spells that hold it together, and it’ll revert to its component parts. Worst case is that a mundane reels in a human torso a few weeks or months down the road. But we can hush that up pretty easily.”
Saul nodded, barely listening. He tugged his jacket closed around Tanner’s chest and tried to think of something cognizant to say to his brother. Tanner’s life had changed more over the past twelve hours than Saul’s had the day of the accident, and Saul struggled to come up with a succinct way of apologizing for the bundle of mistakes he’d made over the last twelve years that had led to this disaster of a day.
The blame for what had happened to Tanner did not fall entirely on Saul, but he had played a role in it, and that would haunt him forever.
Licking his chapped lips, Saul said, “Tanner, are you okay?”
Tanner stared at him blearily for a long moment, then he abruptly buried his face against Saul’s shoulder. His arms flew up and wrapped around Saul’s back, squeezing with what little strength remained in his muscles. And finally, Tanner began to cry. “Saul,” he gasped out, “I’m so sorry.”
Saul was baffled. “Huh? What for?”
“The accident.” Tanner hiccuped. “You woke up from your coma to all of…this…and because I didn’t know what you were going through, I treated you so horribly. I badmouthed you to Mom and Dad, and even to our friends. I shunned you at school and ignored you whenever you tried to talk to me. I…I…” His voice cracked. “Oh god, I hurt you so much. I’m sorry, Saul. Please forgive me.”
Saul sat there in shock. Never in a million years had he thought Tanner would possess this much guilt for the rift that had formed between them. Saul had felt stifled in the mundane world after learning of the preternatural reality that existed beyond mundane senses, and being a teenager, he’d acted out because he didn’t have any healthy coping mechanisms. The damage his behavior had caused to all his relationships was on him, not Tanner.
Adeline cleared her throat, urging Saul to do something to quell Tanner’s misery.
Saul rubbed gentle circles into Tanner’s back with his thumbs and spoke in a soothing tone. “Tanner, we, uh, don’t have time to work through all this painful shit tonight, but I want you to know that what happened when we were kids…that wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault at all.”
“But—”
“No buts. I won’t have you blaming yourself for my shitty behavior.” Saul ruffled Tanner’s wet hair. “We can talk about this more later, okay? Preferably over a hot meal in a warm place.”
Tanner didn’t answer immediately, but over the next few minutes, his sobs quieted and his tears stopped flowing. Eventually, he murmured, “Yeah, okay. Later is fine. Sorry for causing a scene.”
“Don’t be sorry. You’ve been through a lot today. If I was in your place, I’d be screaming my head off at this point. You’re handling all this really well.” Saul patted his arm. “Now let’s get you back to the Castle. We’ll put you in a bunkroom for the night, and you can get some well-deserved rest.”
“I wish,” Tanner said dully. “But I can’t sleep yet. We’ve got a big problem, and it has to be resolved tonight.”
Adeline shot Tanner a hard look, and the valraven on her shoulder squawked before she spoke. “This is the second time tonight we’ve been told about this ‘big problem.’ What the heck is going on?”
“We should get back to the, uh, Castle,” Tanner answered. “Some new information has come to light that I think all the PTAD people need to know.”
Saul’s throat tightened. Just what has Tanner stumbled into?
Adeline let out an exasperated sigh. “I really don’t like where this night is going. ‘The darkness is too dark. The shadows are too long. The questions are too many. And the answers are too few.’”
Saul cocked an eyebrow. “Who are you quoting?”
“Wallace Harkland.”
“The necromancer from the eighties who raised a zombie army during Mardi Gras?”
“The one and only,” she confirmed. “Those lines were what he said right before he walked into a trap set by a collective of his many rivals. A trap that resulted in him being burned at the stake for three days—alive at first, and then undead—until his soul shattered into a thousand pieces and he completely ceased to exist.”
“So you think this night’s going to end that badly?” Saul asked, disturbed.
It was Tanner who answered, “If we screw up, this night will end a whole lot worse than that.”
Chapter Thirty
Tanner
After Tanner wrapped up his embarrassing breakdown, Saul and his fellow agent with the goth hairdo, who introduced herself as Adeline Napier, helped Tanner plod along a winding trail through the park. Halfway to the street, they ran into four more PTAD agents, identified as “Cassidy’s team.”
One member of the team was an Eastern European man over six feet tall with biceps the size of watermelons. In a strong Slavic accent, this man volunteered to carry Tanner the rest of the way out of the park.
Tanner soon found himself slung over the man’s broad shoulder like a sack of flour, bobbing up and down in a way that did not help calm his queasy stomach. When they reached the street, the bodybuilder deposited Tanner in the back of a car that looked vaguely familiar. Tanner thought it might’ve been the same car he’d bled all over this afternoon.
Saul rummaged around in the trunk of the car, then came around to the open door and draped one of those metallic thermal blankets over Tanner’s shivering form. Confident that Tanner wouldn’t succumb to hypothermia, Saul then buckled Tanner in, closed the door, and turned to face the rest of the clustered PTAD agents.
All the agents lingered on the sidewalk and quietly conversed for a short time, before Saul and Adeline finally climbed into the front seats and wished Cassidy’s team good luck for a reason that Tanner was not privy to. Saul, at the wheel, pulled the car out of the tight parking space and made a U-turn.
Back to the Castle they went.
At some point during the ride, Tanner drifted off to sleep, only for the sound of a slamming door to jerk him back to the waking world. He found that Saul had parked the car in a wide garage with a low ceiling, the concrete space lit with only a handful of orange emergency lights.
On one end of the garage lay a set of doors that had been propped open, and Laura paced just inside those doors. A gurney rested beside her, a large first-aid kit set atop its cushion.
The door beside Tanner swung open, revealing Saul. “Can you walk?” he asked. “Or do I need to have Laura bring the gurney over?”
Tanner unbuckled his seatbelt, slid h
is legs out of the car, and dragged himself up into something that approximated a standing position. “I can walk. Just not very fast and probably not in a straight line.”
“You don’t have to walk if you don’t feel like it.”
“And you don’t need to baby me.”
“I’m not babying you.” Saul pursed his lips. “You’re injured, and you’re barely holding yourself upright. You need rest.”
“I’ll rest when the fate of the world’s not at stake.” Tanner pushed off the car and hobbled toward the doors. “Or when I pass out from total exhaustion. Whichever comes first.”
Saul cursed his stubbornness and followed at a short distance, wary of Tanner losing his footing and falling flat on his face. To Tanner’s own surprise, he made it to the doors under his own power. At which point Laura grabbed him by the arms and yanked him down onto the gurney so she could inspect all the injuries he’d acquired during his latest misadventure.
“Hm, don’t see anything serious,” she admitted after a short but thorough exam that involved too much poking for Tanner’s taste. “I’ll give you a few standard healing tinctures, and also a stimulant. You look like you’re about to bed down to hibernate through the winter.”
Laura handed him four tinctures in a row, and Tanner downed each foul-tasting solution with a grimace. He gagged only once, after swallowing a sludgy brown liquid that tasted like black licorice mixed with fish sauce.
The stimulant, a mildly bitter sublingual tablet, started working its magic less than a minute after Tanner stuck it under his tongue, and the world around him seem to brighten as his energy returned.
While Tanner’s medical care was ongoing, Saul waited, leaning against the opposite wall. Agent Napier, on the other hand, left to go inform Agent Smith about the fate of the harpy and Tanner’s current status.
At the same time Laura declared that Tanner was in good enough shape to be discharged from her makeshift hallway clinic, Cassidy’s team car coasted underneath the boom gate in the garage. The team had taken a detour on the way back, Saul finally informed Tanner, to see if they could figure out where the harpy had intended to land.
But instead of waiting to see what they had to say on the matter, Saul took Tanner by the hand and guided him into a concrete staircase that led down to a basement level. The stairwell spit them out into a tight hall with a tile floor whose design was a great deal more modern than the rest of what Tanner had seen of Renault Manor.
As they headed toward a metal door on the left end of the hall, Tanner realized they were underneath the parking garage. This area must’ve been a late addition to the building, constructed sometime after the formation of the PTAD as a formal branch of the FBI. It had the ambience of the dull utilitarian architecture common in the seventies.
The metal door led to a small but well-equipped gym. Treadmills and stationary bikes lined one wall. Weightlifting equipment lay neatly stacked along the other wall. And in the middle was a large space covered by a padded mat, perhaps designated for exercise classes or martial arts lessons.
Saul towed Tanner across the gym floor and into a nook that contained the doors to the locker rooms. The men’s locker room was comprised of a bank of four showers and a few rows of skinny lockers. A small linen closet near the showers contained an assortment of fresh towels and washcloths, along with wicker baskets that contained travel-size soaps and shampoo bottles.
Grabbing one of each item, Saul handed the stack of supplies to Tanner. “You can take your pick of the showers,” he said, “but between you and me, I think the one on the far right has the best showerhead.”
Heeding his advice, Tanner stepped into the dressing space of the shower stall on the far right. Pulling the curtain to, he set his supplies on a little shelf, stripped off his soiled scrubs, and leaned into the stall proper to give the shower dial a good tug.
As he waited for the spray to warm up, he called through the curtain, “Are you going to stay out there the whole time?”
“Yes,” Saul said. “I’m not letting you get more than ten feet away from me again until we take down this necromancer—and Ed Muntz. Personally, I think you’ve been kidnapped two times too many today.”
Tanner couldn’t disagree with that, but he winced at Saul’s display of overprotectiveness.
For twelve long years, Tanner had believed his brother no longer cared about him. Then, in that cold, foreboding park, he’d looked up to find that brother running to his aid yet again. As if they were back on the elementary school playground. As if they had never left.
Everything Tanner thought he knew about the great rift in their relationship had been turned on its head. That shock to his system, coupled with everything else he’d been through, had simply been too much. So he’d cracked in front of Saul, and his brother had comforted him the same way he had when they were children and a scraped knee or a brazen bully had made Tanner cry.
There was a problem with that behavior, however: Tanner wasn’t the same nerdy wimp he’d been when they were children, and Saul, clearly, was not the same undisciplined bruiser. Their personalities might not have changed completely, but they had changed.
They had both left the impulsive, fluid nature of adolescence behind and grown into mature adults.
Saul and Tanner needed to hash out their long-standing conflicts in a way that fit who they had become during their estrangement. But as Tanner stood under the hot spray and let the water wash the blood and grime off his bruising skin and down the drain, he found himself at a total loss for how to make that happen.
Apparently, Saul did too. He didn’t say a single word while Tanner showered.
What a sad state of affairs, Tanner thought as he vigorously scrubbed grassy debris out of his hair. We used to finish each other’s sentences, and now neither of us can start one.
Tanner stopped massaging his scalp and stared at the tile wall in front of him. Admittedly, that’s excellent advice, but…can you, uh, see me right now? All of me?
Kim chuckled.
Tanner pointedly looked anywhere but down for the rest of his shower.
Feeling clean and refreshed, he returned to the dressing space and grabbed his towel. At some point, Saul had dug up a basic set of street clothes, perhaps from his personal locker, and placed them on the shelf. After patting himself dry, Tanner tugged on the clothes and was surprised to find the shirt was quite loose. Saul had bulked up over the years, no doubt a consequence of his role as a “combat wizard.”
Shoving his feet into a pair of black work boots, Tanner tugged the curtain aside. Saul, who’d been lounging on a wooden bench in front of the lockers, fiddling with his phone, sat up and gave Tanner a once-over.
“Your healer knows how to do her job,” Tanner said. “I’m fine.”
“Doesn’t hurt to double-check.” Saul snapped his phone into a clip on his belt and rose. “It’s not often somebody encounters two necromantic chimeras in a single day. You never know what kind of toxic magic might bleed off creatures like that. People have developed all sorts of diseases from spending too much time around undead monsters.”
Tanner wasn’t sure if that was true, but he was sure Saul was trying to justify his overprotectiveness. “Well, if I develop a phlegmy cough or start growing wings, I’ll go straight to the infirmary.”
Saul pouted. “You’re teasing me.”
“Oh really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Hey now. This is a serious situation. No time for jokes.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of the damp
leather jacket he’d recovered from Tanner during his medical exam. It had bits of mud and grass stuck to it, but Saul didn’t seem to care. The jacket was faded and cracked, so it must’ve been an old favorite.
Tanner would’ve apologized for dirtying up the jacket—had Saul not chosen that moment to roll his shoulders back, which shifted the jacket’s collar in a way that revealed an assortment of colorful tattoos curving around Saul’s neck.
Some of the tattoos were stylized curse words. Some of them were nude women in various erotic poses. And some of them were arrays of symbols that might have been actual magic.
“You want me to be serious?” Tanner said. “Here’s something serious. If Mom saw you right now, she’d have a goddamn heart attack. What in god’s name made you think those were a good idea?”
“Those what?”
Tanner pointed a judgmental finger at Saul’s neck.
Realizing what Tanner meant, Saul flushed bright red. “Those are, ah, the results of some less than judicial choices I made during a particularly turbulent period. I stopped getting inked when I was eighteen, but by then, the damage was already done.”
“Why didn’t you get them removed?” Tanner asked, crouching to tie the laces of the boots. “In fact, why didn’t the FBI make you get them removed? I can’t imagine those pass muster with the professional codes of conduct.”
Saul scratched the back of his head. “The PTAD doesn’t really operate under the same stringent guidelines as the rest of the FBI, so they just let me off with a warning to not get any more. As for why I haven’t removed them on my own time…Well, they kind of make for a good reminder of the ‘foibles’ of my misspent youth. Every time I look in the mirror, they scream, ‘Don’t ever act like a stupid dipshit again, Saul.’”
“Do you honestly need such obscene reminders?”
Saul cast his gaze at the floor. “Some days.”
Tanner pushed himself back up. “What exactly did you get up to after you left home, Saul?”
“I, uh, well…” Saul bit the inside of his cheek. “I kind of got roped into the magic mob in Cincinnati.”
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 26
