A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1)
Page 41
The Man in the Bowler Hat gave Muntz a three-second head start, if for no other reason than he was bored and wanted some entertainment.
Once that third second passed, he whistled sharply. All six tentacles sprang forward at blinding speed, showering the Man in the Bowler Hat with a fine mist of cold water.
Muntz, who picked the perfect time to look over his shoulder, saw the tentacles coming. He shrieked and launched a volley of white-hot fireballs toward them.
However, Muntz’s skills with fire lay not in strength but in finesse. He could produce extremely hot fire and direct it with great accuracy, but he couldn’t make his blazes very large. And to a beast like a kraken, if a spell couldn’t obliterate a bus in one fell swoop, it was nothing more than a nuisance.
Half the fireballs seared patches of flesh off the tentacles, but the tentacles kept on going. The first to reach Muntz hooked his ankle and sent him sprawling face first onto the concrete. Dazed, Muntz was too slow to react before the other tentacles arrived.
One took his other leg. One took his good arm. One took his torso. And one took his neck. The final tentacle picked up where it had left off, digging deep into the muscle of Muntz’s ruined arm and peeling it from his bones.
Muntz’s final scream thundered like a foghorn, but no one who could help him heard it. Then the tentacle around his neck tightened, cutting off his air supply. All Muntz could do as the tentacles lifted him into the air was choke and gasp and sob.
Tears streamed down his cheeks. Snot dripped off his chin. Blood poured from a thousand cuts as the tentacles dug their teeth ever deeper.
Muntz had already been an unattractive man, but now his appearance was as ugly as his soul.
The Man in the Bowler Hat rather enjoyed it when he got to reveal a person’s true face.
As the tentacles slowly reeled their prey on past, Muntz shot the Man in the Bowler Hat a desperate, pleading look. But the Man in the Bowler Hat didn’t even lift his hat to look Muntz in the eye. Instead, he peered down at the water and said, “You shouldn’t play with your food. It’s unbecoming. Hurry up and finish your meal so we can go.”
The tentacles paused, holding Muntz aloft, before they suddenly, violently yanked Muntz into the river. Muntz barely had enough time to register the shift before his head was underwater, his eyes bulging, his trapped arms frantically reaching for the air. To no avail.
The tentacles pulled him down, down, down into the dark water. Until his form dissolved into a silhouette. Until that silhouette merged with the bulk of the enormous black creature lurking near the bottom.
Just like that, Ed Muntz was gone.
The Man in the Bowler Hat waited for thirty seconds. First for the air bubbles to stop rising. Second for the blood to rise in their place.
When the choppy waves began to disperse the dark-red pool, the Man in the Bowler Hat gave a nod of approval. “Run along to your den now,” he said to the kraken. “You have an early day tomorrow.”
The tip of a single tentacle rose from the surface and gave a little wave goodbye.
The Man in the Bowler Hat waved back.
Ten minutes later and two hundred miles from Weatherford, Connecticut, the Man in the Bowler Hat exited a tear in the fabric of space to find his two favorite dunces playing poker at a table in his study. They jumped at his unexpected arrival.
Morgana’s hand accidentally bumped the deck at the table’s edge, spilling cards onto the floor. Mordred shrank back into his chair and hid his face behind his amazingly poor hand—nothing but a pair of twos against Morgana’s royal flush.
The Man in the Bowler Hat stifled a smile. He hadn’t disciplined the pair for that fiasco at the church yet, and they’d been antsy about it for days—he never let a failure go unpunished. They probably thought he was going to turn them into fish again and make them fight for too little food in a tiny bowl until they were on the verge of death.
That had been a particularly amusing punishment, if he did say so himself. But it was past the time for playing around. Things were starting to get quite serious, and he needed all his subjects, dunces or not, in good shape.
Not that he wouldn’t punish them, of course. They’d get what was coming to them. As soon as he thought up a creative way to torment them without diminishing their ability to do their jobs.
“Sir, I, uh, didn’t expect you back so soon,” said Morgana.
“Clearly.” The Man in the Bowler Hat pointed his cane at the scattered cards. “Though I’m not sure why you believed it would take me more than forty-five minutes to dispatch that little worm.”
Morgana sank to one knee and quickly picked up the cards. “I just thought you’d want to spend some time working on him, given how much he negatively impacted your plans.”
The Man in the Bowler Hat grunted. “He wasn’t interesting enough to waste that much time on.”
Mordred tentatively set his cards on the table. “I could’ve gone for you, sir. You didn’t have to make the trip yourself.”
“I was the one who hired him,” the Man in the Bowler Hat quipped, “so it was my job to fire him.”
Morgana gave a slight shrug. “If you say so.”
“I do say so.” He struck his cane against the carpeted floor three times, and two pieces of folded paper appeared from thin air, one on the table in front of Mordred, the other on the floor beside Morgana. Each piece of paper contained a list of names and locations.
“I also say that you two have new jobs to do,” he continued. “The mass revenance ritual may not have been a total success, but I moved most of the key players into position throughout the US and Canada beforehand. So we have plenty of pieces we can use to begin the game.”
Morgana plucked her list off the carpet. “Why is the word ‘convince’ written at the top of the page?”
“Mine says ‘capture,’” Mordred threw in. “I’m guessing that means I have a list of enemies? And Val has a list of allies?”
“You think correctly,” the Man in the Bowler Hat said, “for once.”
Mordred cast his gaze at the floor. “So you want me to go abduct all these people, and…?”
“Toss them in the dungeon for safekeeping.” The Man in the Bowler Hat rounded his desk and sank into his soft leather chair. “I don’t want any of them dead—we’ll need them when the time of change arrives—but if they resist, you have my permission to knock them around until they comply.”
“Understood.” Mordred tucked his list into the pocket of his stupid black coat, which hung over the back of his chair.
Morgana frowned as she read over her own list. “Ah, sir, not that I question your judgment, but some of the people on my list don’t strike me as allies. My original incarnation killed several of them.”
“And now your current incarnation will recruit them to our cause.” At the snap of his fingers, a glass of his best whiskey appeared in his hand. In between savoring sips, he said, “The point of instigating a mass revenance event wasn’t to dredge up the same stale alliances from ages past. In order to achieve the great change we seek, we must forge new agreements with those who have the power to affect this dreadful modern world in crucial ways.”
He downed the last gulp of his whiskey and tossed the glass aside. It vanished before it hit the floor. “Dirty as it may be, we need an effective deconstruction of the old regime and the establishment of something new and better. We need to lock away the riffraff who deserve no say in the future, for the harm dealt by their pasts.
“In those who remain, the worthy, we will rekindle the fiery passions, for justice, for honor, for pride, that fueled so many battles in the time of the Round Table. Only this time, we’ll unite them all under a single banner, a single purpose: to build a better world.”
Morgana and Mordred idly nodded along, their wills lost within the cadence of his voice. But since they were revenants, the effect was only transient.
Mordred snapped out of the stupor first. “That sounds like a fine plan to me. B
ut I do have two questions.”
“And they are…?”
Mordred cleared his throat nervously. “Firstly, uh, what do you want us to do about Excalibur?”
“Nothing.” The Man in the Bowler Hat shrugged. “We know where it is. When we need it again, we’ll go retrieve it. Until then, let the PTAD think they’ve accomplished something by locking it up in their basement.”
“Oh. Okay then. My other question is…” Mordred tugged at his collar. “What do you plan to do about the Reiz brothers? As I understood it, the ‘grand scheme’ hinged on the brothers remaining estranged until the great change came to pass. But now they’ve been reunited, and spending a few hours together was all it took for them to throw a huge wrench into our plans.”
The Man in the Bowler Hat dropped his hand to the desk and rapped his fingers against the polished wood. “To be frank, I never expected the estrangement to last. That it stretched on for twelve years delighted me immensely, but that it ended just in time for the twins to interfere in our plans didn’t surprise me in the least. I bent the strings of fate to pull them apart. It was inevitable that fate would eventually straighten those strings out. But I still believe the estrangement did all the damage we need.
“The brothers might be back together, but they don’t know how to work together, and one of them is totally untrained in the magic arts.” He slapped his palm against the desktop, and the door to the study, which had been locked since he left, swung open, giving Morgana and Mordred permission to leave. “The next stage of the plan is set to occur in only three weeks. Even if they study and practice twenty-four seven between now and then, they’ll only make up a fraction of the difference between us and them. It won’t be enough.”
Mordred pulled his coat off the back of his chair and rose, creeping toward the door. “Is there a reason we can’t throw them in the dungeon also?”
The Man in the Bowler Hat scowled. “There are several reasons. Not the least of which is that they are Merlin, a wizard who commands a million times more respect than you will ever deserve.”
Mordred bowed his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to sound impertinent.”
“Yes, you did, and you always will,” the Man in the Bowler Hat countered. “Because you’re Mordred, bastard knight, necromancer, and cheat. And if you weren’t more useful than you are aggravating, I would’ve thrown you in the dungeon years ago. Now get out of my sight.”
He looked to Morgana. “That goes for you too. We have a great deal of work to do, and yet here you two are, dawdling. So unless you’d like another vacation to the fish tank…”
Mordred and Morgana hustled out of the room, speaking over each other as they babbled out promises to do their new jobs right. The Man in the Bowler Hat waved his hand, and the door slammed shut in their wake, cutting off their tripe.
Lord, it was hard to find good help these days.
Reveling in the blessed silence that now blanketed the study, the Man in the Bowler Hat rested his cane against his desk and finally removed his namesake, setting his hat before him on the desktop. Then he nestled back into his comfortable chair and once more took to his favorite pastime.
A pastime he would wallow in for hours, for days, if he wasn’t a busy man with the shadow of a new world hanging high above his head. A pastime that, in an age long reduced to myth, countless knights in shining armor had considered the greatest privilege a person could ever be granted.
It wasn’t reading. It wasn’t writing. It wasn’t drawing.
No, it was simply looking. Looking and admiring.
Looking across the room at the glass case in which sat the greatest object in all the world, and admiring its every contour, its every scuff, its every dent—admiring the unimaginably immense power that lay beneath so ordinary a form as an old gold cup.
“Your time will come,” said the man to the Holy Grail. “Your time will come very, very soon.”
To Be Continued
IN A BALLAD FOR THE BLIND!
Coming soon!
LEAVE A REVIEW!
To let Clara know what you thought of A Knight of Cold Graves, please leave a review!
THANK YOU FOR READING!
Join the Mailing List!
When you subscribe to Clara Coulson’s Newsletter, you’ll get access to the latest news, free books, giveaway opportunities, exclusive content, and so much more!
[ SUBSCRIBE NOW! ]
Books By Clara Coulson
CITY OF CROWS
Soul Breaker
Shade Chaser
Wraith Hunter
Doom Sayer
Day Killer
Spell Caster
Dawn Slayer
Storm Master
Night Seeker
Novellas
Dream Snatcher
THE FROST ARCANA
What Fate Portends
What Man Defies
What Gods Incite
What Dawn Demands
What Dusk Divides
What Night Conceals
KING AND CROWN
Lock and Key
Ask and Answer
THE REVENANT REIGN
A Knight of Cold Graves
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank the following people for their continued support:
1.) Alishia Wallace, Arthur Crosby, Kimi Wallace, sundriedrainbow, and all my other Patreon patrons, who give me money each month simply because they want to.
2.) Christian Bentulan of Covers by Christian, who bears the brunt of my pickiness when it comes to cover design.
3.) All my social media followers, who cheer me on when I finish drafts and encourage me to continue writing.
About the Author
Clara Coulson was born and raised in backwoods Virginia, USA. She holds a degree in English and Finance from the College of William & Mary and recently retired from the hustle and bustle of Washington, DC to return to the homeland and pick up the quiet writing life.
Clara spends most of her time dreaming up new story ideas, studying Japanese, and slowly reading through the several-hundred-book backlog in her budding home library. If she's not occupied with any of those things, then you can probably find her playing with her two cats or lurking in the shadows of various social media websites.
Join Clara on:
Patreon | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
For more information:
www.claracoulson.com
claracoulson.author@gmail.com