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

by Clara Coulson

  Provost Banning, who’d come in place of the college’s president, spoke with the family after the funeral service and told them of a marvelous thing that the college was planning to do for Marlene.

  A memorial for Marlene would be held on campus Wednesday, and a statue sculpted in her honor would be placed in the courtyard between Stratham Hall, the literature building, and Jones Hall, the history building. The plaque on the statue would speak to Marlene’s love of eighteenth-century classics and historical nonfiction, which had been reflected in her choice of double majors.

  From Wednesday on till the day that Weatherford College ceased to be, every student who passed through that courtyard would see the statue, and so the memory of Marlene Witherspoon would never fade.

  Originally, the college had been planning to dedicate only a bench to Marlene. As a small school on a tight budget, they couldn’t come up with the cash for anything greater. But then an anonymous donation of substantial size had come in out of the blue, along with a request that the money be used for something a little better than a bench.

  That the money for the statue had come from a trust fund that belonged to Tanner Reiz, the world would never know. Tanner wanted it that way.

  When Marlene’s loved ones thought of that statue, he didn’t want them to also think of the man whose “fortune and family connections,” according to the official FBI cover story, had spurred the kidnapping during which Marlene had been reduced to collateral damage. They didn’t deserve to be plagued by Tanner’s presence, not when it had already cost them so much.

  So it followed that Tanner didn’t dare approach her family at the funeral, or even truly attend the funeral at all. He hung back, halfway across the cemetery, lurking among the headstones like a ghost.

  It wasn’t until each and every member of the family left for home, their tears half dried, their hopes all dashed, no miracles to be witnessed, no dreams to be realized, that Tanner dared to approach the plot into which Marlene’s casket had been lowered.

  Head bowed, he said nothing at all. Because there was nothing he could say that would soothe the raw guilt in his heart, much less help Marlene, who no longer dwelled on this Earth and so could not hear his words.

  Instead, he stood in abject silence for a long while, a sort of penance. Until the wind picked up and moaned through the headstones, and a dark storm front billowed high in the distance, warning of rain. Then he bent down and nestled a bouquet of brightly colored flowers in with all the other arrangements.

  His bouquet did not contain a note.

  The bus ride back to Weatherford gave Tanner time to pack away the guilt that would later be revisited on long, sleepless nights, and focus on a more pertinent topic: Saul’s upcoming visit to his apartment.

  Saul had texted him yesterday and asked if he could stop by so they could finally have a conversation that didn’t occur in the middle of a chaotic race to save the world. Tanner had readily agreed at the time. But the closer the hour drew to the visit, the more nervous Tanner felt about it. He and Saul had not had a truly deep conversation in more than a decade.

  Tanner wasn’t sure he and Saul could hold such a conversation anymore.

  But I suppose we won’t know until we attempt to hold one, he reminded himself. We were snippy with each other on Friday, but everyone was under a great deal of stress that night.

  Despite the rationalizations though, doubt plagued him the whole ride home.

  What if he couldn’t rebuild a proper relationship with his own twin? Would their dysfunction threaten other people’s lives when the bad guys came calling again? Would Weatherford suffer the consequences of their broken brotherly bond? Would the country? Would the planet?

  There was no way to tell, since they knew so little about the threats that loomed on the horizon.

  We have to close the chasm between us, he thought as the bus slowed for its final stop of the day. We have to.

  The bus spit him out at a depot. From there, he took a city bus to the corner of Sumner and Applegate, and walked the five blocks to his apartment building. On his slow ride up the elevator, he called in a delivery order for Chinese takeout, including all the dishes that Saul had enjoyed when they were kids.

  At his front door, he had to stop and deactivate the array of wards that the PTAD ward architects had helped him set up the other day. Wards that would hopefully protect him the next time a necromantic chimera swooped in to kill or kidnap him.

  Inside, he stripped off his funeral clothes, dumped them in the hamper, and took a long, hot shower, working out the phantom aches in his bones left behind by the beatings he’d taken on Friday. His new reflexive healing abilities were impressive, but he’d learned from Laura that magic attacks left wounds on the soul as well as the body. Sometimes the pain lingered on even after the marks faded.

  The soul was a lot like the mind in that way.

  The deliveryman arrived just as Tanner was tugging on his T-shirt, and he grabbed a few bills from his wallet for a tip before he answered the door. Taking the food bags and handing off the money, he turned on his heels and strode into the kitchen. He laid out the food bags in a line on the table, then changed the layout to a circle when he realized that a line would make it seem like he’d erected a wall between him and Saul.

  Table set, Tanner moved to the living room and purchased a new movie to stream, one of those raunchy R-rated comedies that he and Saul used to sneak into the house on pirated DVDs to watch late at night when they were thirteen. Tanner didn’t know if Saul still liked those kinds of movies, but at the very least, the off-color jokes would help ease the tension.

  Placing the remote back on the coffee table, Tanner glanced at the clock on the wall.

  It was just south of five o’clock.

  Any minute now, he thought, sinking onto the couch. As the seconds ticked by, his palms grew sweaty, and his hands started to shake. At this rate, he was going to look like a nervous wreck when Saul arrived. Which was absurd.

  His own twin was coming over for dinner and a discussion. This wasn’t a test of Tanner’s knowledge or character, whose pass or fail would decide his whole future. This wasn’t a trial to determine whether he was worthy of some intangible reward. This wasn’t—

  There came a knock at the door, this one softer, more hesitant than the drumbeat of the deliveryman. Tanner’s heart rate picked up, and rising from the couch felt like a monumental effort, his head swimming, dots dancing in his eyes.

  Each step he took toward the door was slow and dragging, as if he had cinderblocks tied to his feet. And he could have sworn that the distance between the couch and the door had doubled since the last time he walked it.

  Still, he made it to the door.

  But he didn’t open it immediately.

  A visceral fear gripped him before his hand reached the doorknob, and all his insecurities came spilling into his head at once.

  The childhood cowardice that had prompted Saul to become his great defender, always taking a beating whenever Tanner dumbly provoked a bully.

  The unfair frustration with the Saul who had emerged from a coma after the accident, the one who was withdrawn and moody and always glancing away—always glancing at things Tanner could not see.

  The undeserved loathing for the despondent teenager who’d run away from home because he’d found himself living in another world that no one he loved could understand.

  Each of those insecurities was a spike at the bottom of the chasm between Tanner and Saul. Could Tanner close that chasm without falling in and impaling himself in the process?

  He didn’t know.

  But…

  He exhaled, expelling his anxiety with his breath.

  …I have to try.

  The soft knock came again, and this time, Tanner opened the door.

  “Hey, Saul,” he said, wearing a smile that was only half false. “Come on in.”

  Epilogue

  It was a quarter past midnight, and the tide was coming in.
The whitecaps on the Connecticut River sloshed loudly as they collided, spraying water high into the air. Another violent autumn storm had just blown through Weatherford, had riled up the river and flooded out the streets.

  A third of the city was in the dark, this time by the decree of falling trees instead of magic’s touch. Come morning, people would wake to find their yards strewn with broken limbs, and their cars dented from a short but strong burst of quarter-sized hail.

  On any other night, Ed Muntz would have been tucked away in some crummy apartment, a glass of whiskey in one hand, a TV remote in the other. His mind would have been stuck on a conceited loop wherein he played out his favorite fantasy: that he was anything more than a two-bit thug, whose only redeeming quality was the pinch of magic power he possessed.

  The last place Ed Muntz wanted to be was the pier at the ass end of the city’s fish market, standing amid a dense, rising fog. The air was ripe with the rotting guts of countless fish. The wet concrete beneath his feet was stained dark red. The nearest lights were a hundred feet off, too dim to fully pierce the fog. And all the crates on the pier had been moved inside the market before the storm, so there was no quick cover to be found.

  There was nowhere for the little worm to burrow, and he was too far from any help to wriggle away. That was precisely why the Man in the Bowler Hat had chosen this location for their second, and final, meeting.

  He made Muntz wait for half an hour, until the slimy rat was pacing in a circle—or rather, limping in a circle. The man refused to bring his cane to business meetings, even though he had a bum leg, because he stupidly thought it a sign of weakness.

  After Muntz started slobbering out obscenities and called the person he was supposed to meet a particularly unflattering name, the Man in the Bowler Hat finally unzipped the edge of reality with a snap of his finger. Then he stepped out of the interdimensional space from which he’d been observing Muntz since the maggot first arrived.

  He approached Muntz from behind, as the thug’s weak eyes tried to cut through the fog bank rolling across the river. Muntz didn’t hear his steps, for they didn’t make a sound. He came to a stop three feet behind Muntz, tipped his hat down to obscure his eyes, and rapped his own cane against the ground.

  Muntz started and spun around, hand flying up to cast some flimsy spell. “Where the hell did you come from?” he sputtered. “I didn’t hear you walk up.”

  “You weren’t paying attention,” mocked the Man in the Bowler Hat. “Too busy bitching at the world for the misfortunes dealt by your own stupidity.”

  Muntz dropped the hand back to his side but curled his fingers into a fist. “You don’t get to pin the Reiz mix-up on me. How was I supposed to know that shithead had an estranged twin brother?”

  “You didn’t have to know in order to do your job correctly. Had you bothered to perform anything resembling due diligence before you acted, the end result might have been better than a botched snatch-and-grab committed in broad daylight, where you picked up the wrong target and killed a completely unrelated bystander.”

  The Man in the Bowler Hat had been quite peeved to learn his hired help had killed a little coed from the local college. When a mundane bystander got swept into a PTAD murder case, the FBI brass’s scrutiny was intense. And the Man in the Bowler Hat did not need the FBI brass breathing down his neck. Not yet. Not when he was still arranging the pieces on his game board.

  Many of his assets, like Morgana and Mordred, were completely untraceable. But he had a whole host of independent contractors whose connections to him and his business operations needed to remain unnoticed by the government’s clouded eye until the time was right. Regrettably, Muntz’s mistakes had allowed the PTAD to connect him to the Man in the Bowler Hat prematurely, and that made Muntz a liability.

  The Man in the Bowler Hat chastised himself for being more frugal than logical. The first person he’d approached regarding the catch-and-release of Saul Reiz had been Nick Spinelli, the city’s premier magic mob boss. But that man had come with an exorbitant price tag, not all of it purely monetary.

  The tangle of mob-controlled strings he would have had to attach to his operations had driven him to search for cheaper options. That search had stumbled upon Ed Muntz, a man with the right motivation, and just enough magic skill, to carry out the plot against Saul Reiz for a reasonable price.

  Unfortunately, the Man in the Bowler Hat hadn’t realized just how much motivation Muntz possessed. Thus, he had failed to foresee that Muntz’s emotions would drive him to act recklessly—and to act against the explicit orders he’d been given.

  The Man in the Bowler Hat would not make such a mistake again.

  From now on, he’d prioritize quality over cost.

  Also, it wasn’t all for naught. He still had Spinelli’s number, and an open invitation to use it when new opportunities became available.

  He’d give the man a call in the morning. There were already a great many opportunities in the pipeline.

  Muntz, practically fuming from the ears, dragged his lips into a sneer. It took every ounce of willpower the greasy weasel possessed to say, “Look, I admit that I made a mistake, so if you want a refund, I’ll give you one. I got the money in my account at—”

  “The money has already been reclaimed, your account closed, and all record of the transaction scrubbed from existence,” interrupted the Man in the Bowler Hat.

  “What? How’d you get into my account?”

  “I didn’t get into your account.” The Man in the Bowler Hat flashed Muntz a smile that most would use to humor a child. “I got to a person who has the power to close any account at will, using an absolutely salacious piece of blackmail material, and had them do the dirty work for me.”

  Muntz’s already washed-out complexion paled further. “Christ, you’ve got that much pull?”

  “Any pull that I don’t have I get when I need. Because I have this funny habit of picking up after myself, unlike somebody I know.” The Man in the Bowler Hat took one step forward, and Muntz took one step back, toward the end of the pier. “You see, I don’t leave messes everywhere I go. Which is, in fact, the reason I called you here tonight. Because I have to clean up a mess by the name of Ed Muntz.”

  “Whoa now!” Muntz raised his hand again, the fist glowing faintly this time. “Let’s not do anything drastic. Just because I made one mistake—”

  “You made a series of mistakes, each one worse than the last, culminating in a deliberate violation of my most important command.” The Man in the Bowler Hat struck his cane against the ground, this time in a certain rhythm whose echo carried across the river. “I told you that you could use whatever force was necessary to subdue Saul Reiz, but that under no circumstances were you to kill him. And then you turned around and attempted to kill him with a sable wight.”

  “But it wasn’t actually Saul Reiz I tried to kill.” Muntz slid his free hand around to the back of his waistband, where he kept one of two guns. He assumed that his opponent would miss the move, distracted by the glowing spell building in his fist. “It was the other brother. So it’s fine, right?”

  “You really are a complete fucking fool, aren’t you?” The Man in the Bowler Hat kept on creeping forward, forcing Muntz to retreat ever closer to the edge of the pier. “The twins are two halves of one whole, a whole that is a critical gear in the machine of change that I am building. One of them is worthless without the other.

  “Had you killed either twin during your ego trip, so desperate to prove yourself the better man, it would’ve ruined five lifetimes’ worth of planning and forced me to wait another two or three centuries to put the gears of my grand machine in motion.”

  A tremor racked Muntz’s body. “Jesus, you’re a nutcase, aren’t you? You’re trying to take over the world or something.”

  The Man in the Bowler Hat raised an eyebrow and smirked, though Muntz only saw the smirk and so felt nothing but menace. “No, I’m trying to remake the world. Though I would not at all
be opposed to sitting on the throne once my new world rises.”

  “Oh, screw this! I’m out of here.”

  Muntz threw a punch, fire flaring bright around his fist, straight at his adversary’s half-shadowed face.

  A tentacle caught his arm before the fist made contact. A thick, slimy black tentacle covered in pulsing suckers, each sucker lined with a hundred razor-sharp teeth. The teeth clamped down onto Muntz’s arm, ripping his shirt to shreds and his skin wide open.

  Blood poured down his arm, and the flame around his fist flickered out as pain blindsided him. He wailed at the top of his lungs, the sound carrying across the river. But not all the way across. The fog had been artfully laid out to make sure no one else would hear Muntz scream.

  Muntz tried to pull his arm free of the tentacle, but the teeth only dug in deeper. “Let me go!” he spit at the Man in the Bowler Hat. “Let me go, you fucking bastard.”

  “I’m not the one who’s holding you,” the Man in the Bowler Hat replied, pointing past Muntz with his cane. “If you want mercy, you’ll have to find a more appealing meal to feed my pet.”

  Muntz looked over his shoulder, at the dark, churning water of the river. Five more tentacles were rising from the surface, and beneath that surface lay the enormous shadow of what could only be a deep-sea leviathan.

  “No, no, no. Please, god, no,” Muntz whimpered out. “I’ll do anything you want. Anything at all.”

  “Yes, you will do exactly what I want,” said the Man in the Bowler Hat. “You will die. Very painfully. And then your soul will spend eternity drowning in the stomach of a kraken.”

  Muntz lost it. He thrashed around, causing the tentacle teeth to flay the flesh clean off his arm. Though the pain must have been immense, he kept on writhing, until his ruined arm, minus two fingers and most of its skin, finally tore free from the tentacle’s grip.

  Then Muntz took off across the pier at a hobbling run. His arm hung limp at his side, bleeding profusely, and left a fresh red trail that led all the way back to the tentacle from whose teeth his ripped skin hung in ragged chunks.