by A. J. Burnes
He knew that death was never pretty, and you always faced it alone and scared, no matter how many people were holding your hand when it happened. But that didn’t mean you had to die with a whimper. That didn’t you mean you had to die crying on a disgusting floor with an invisible monster hovering above you.
“Coward,” he managed to rasp, using every ounce of will he possessed. At least let me see your ugly face.
The nothing’s shadow reared up as if it was offended, and the humming sound intensified to the point where it hurt Tanner’s ears. Then the creature opened its mouth. And kept on opening its mouth, wider and wider, until the shadow of its chin touched the floor.
Oh Christ, Tanner thought. It’s literally going to eat me.
This thing drained the soul of the energy it contained, life force or mana or whatever you liked to call it. When it reached the bottom of the barrel, it finished off its meal with a more fleshy dessert. The person’s actual body. This thing was going to shove him whole into its enormous mouth and chew him up, bones and all.
Well, that certainly explained why the public didn’t know about a soul-sucking monster.
It didn’t leave any bodies behind.
Tanner’s pulse spiked, his heart beating so wildly that his vision blurred at the edges, darkness creeping in. It was one thing to have the life sucked out of him in an extremely uncomfortable but largely painless manner. It was another thing altogether to be eaten alive by something that might chew him as slowly as it had drained the energy out of him.
Tanner should’ve bitten his tongue off and drowned in his own blood when he had the chance.
Now he was in for a heinous, agonizing death, and…Are those teeth?
While Tanner had been busy panicking, the shadow of the gaping maw on the wall shifted sideways, revealing that the mouth had multiple rows of long, needlelike teeth. Teeth that were descending toward Tanner’s face as the creature bent closer to him, and closer, and closer. Its breath was so dense that it smothered the oxygen in the air, and he was left choking on microscopic particles that had once been someone else’s shredded corpse.
Tanner pleaded with every god he’d ever heard of. I don’t want to die like this. I don’t deserve to die like this. Somebody please help me! Please!
A sharp point nicked the skin of Tanner’s forehead, and blood ran down between his eyes. Somehow, that minuscule dribble of warmth breaking through the pervasive cold also broke the paralytic effect of the creature’s power. Tanner regained full control of his mouth and throat and lungs.
He sucked in a mighty breath tinged with decay, and he screamed. Screamed loud enough to wake the neighborhood. Screamed loud enough to wake the dead. Screamed loud enough to wake an ancient god that had slumbered in the earth for a thousand years.
Screamed loud enough to wake something within himself.
There came a blinding flash of golden light that chased away the shadows in the slaughter room, and Tanner felt as if he was falling. Not through space, but through time. His mind tumbled away from the here and now, back and back through hundreds of flashes of memory that didn’t belong to him.
Snapshots of lives people had lived decades before, centuries before his time. Snapshots of joy, of love, of laughter. Snapshots of pain, of grief, of sorrow. Snapshots of life’s mundanities. Snapshots of life’s major milestones.
The further back the bits of memory went, the less distinct they became. Until the spoken words were heard as if through water. Until the sights were seen as if through frosted glass. Until the flavors and smells were absorbed as if through a veil of thick cotton. Until the emotions had the edge of a dull knife, enough to bite but not to pierce the heart.
Tanner’s mind plummeted all the way back to a life in a time that was more myth than reality.
Glimpses of armored knights on strong steeds riding proudly across windswept moors, lances held aloft, swords hanging at their sides. Snippets of conversations in dim castle stairwells, using an old version of English that normally took Tanner hours to translate but whose meaning came to him now in an instant. Knowledge of magic spells painstakingly inked onto thick pages of handmade parchment by the flickering glow of candlelight in the dead of night.
Spells powerful enough to save the world…and spells powerful enough to destroy it.
Among this unfettered rush of memories that were not Tanner’s own, he caught a name. Again and again, people spoke this name. Kings. Queens. Knights. Witches. Wizards. Various creatures of the night that came in all shapes and sizes, and sought all manner of ambitions, from the bleakest of the dark to the brightest of the light.
Some of them spoke this name in reverence. Some in respect. Some in revulsion. But all of them spoke this name with the understanding that it denoted a power unlike any other. For the name belonged to the greatest practitioner of magic who’d ever lived, and a man who kept on living, again and again, as his soul was recycled into new lives in new places in new ages.
This name belonged to a revenant, a soul set in a reincarnation cycle. This name belonged to a wizard, a man with an absolute command of magic. This name was Merlin, and all of history trembled in its wake.
Chapter Six
Saul
Saul met Adeline and Jill on the stairs going up to Roland’s office and found that the latter had brought him a slice of pepperoni pizza. After thanking Jill profusely, he stuffed the whole slice down his throat in five bites, licked his fingers clean, and wiped his damp hand off on his jeans.
His lack of manners provoked Adeline to call him a slob. But that elicited only a shrug and an admission that he did indeed fit that description. He never cleaned his apartment. He rarely used napkins. And he did laundry once a month, if he ran out of clothes.
He was a single man with no intention of getting married or having children anytime soon. Therefore, he had no incentives to clean up his act. So he would be as slovenly as he wanted to be, and if his behavior made Adeline crinkle her nose in disgust, all the better.
He still hadn’t forgiven her for that time she smashed a lemon curd pie into his face at Nellie’s and posted the video on the latest-news page of the PTAD’s intranet. Which led to months of ridicule via email and instant messaging from agents all over the country.
Suffer, you neat freak, he thought, smiling at her as he passed her on the stairs. Suffer!
The top of the winding staircase let out into a waiting room that had been converted from a sitting room. The walls were still lined with mahogany paneling, and numerous recessed bookshelves were set into those panels. But the abundance of vintage books with leather bindings had been replaced with worthless knickknacks and paperweights purchased in bulk from an office supply wholesaler.
Likewise, the original furniture, heavy and handmade and worth a small fortune, had been swapped out for economy models that came in your choice of medium gray with white accents or matte black with machine-stitched whorl patterns. Saul was sure he’d seen the exact furniture set on some HGTV remodeling show.
Sandy sat behind a glass-topped desk off to the side of the door that led to Roland’s office. She had a dual-monitor computer setup, with one screen off center to the left and the other off center to the right. This arrangement left a gap through which you could glimpse Sandy as you were nearing the top of the stairs, and through which Sandy could glimpse you.
On the corner of the desk sat Roland’s vaunted daily schedule book. The PTAD had a calendar app that all agents could utilize to schedule meetings with others. But for some reason, Roland stuck to the paper and pen version. And the only person allowed to make changes to his schedule, other than the big man himself, was Sandy.
Presumably, this was because Sandy was the only person who could physically manage Roland’s bonkers schedule. A schedule that involved more boring meetings and frustrating phone calls with people in high places than most mortal beings could endure without suffering a myocardial infarction.
As Jill had mentioned earlier, Sandy always
seemed to be able to find space in Roland’s overstuffed schedule, even when there was literally no space to be found. Some agents believed she could manipulate time and space. Some agents thought she could control fate or probability.
But most agents didn’t make any sort of hypothesis at all regarding Sandy the secretary. Because it was well known among the permanent denizens of the Castle that Sandy was a reserved woman who greatly disliked being the topic of gossip.
Sandy had worked for the various incarnations of the PTAD since at least 1946. According to the many organizational group pictures that lined the walls of the various corridors of the mansion, she had not visibly aged a day in all that time.
She appeared to be a petite woman in her early twenties, with a blond curly bob that had been lifted straight from a fifties-era ladies’ magazine on health and beauty. She wore conservative skirt suits, kitten heels, and pearl necklaces, and at all times she sported that faux-polite smile all secretaries used when they were trying very hard to mask the fact that they wanted to throw you out the nearest window.
At least, that was what Sandy looked like when you saw her straight on. When you saw her from the corner of your eye, however, she looked like something else. What that something else was, no one seemed to know for sure.
The last guy who’d made it his mission to uncover the truth—Paulie Gregson, whose illustrious career at the PTAD started and ended in 1975—went missing for four whole days after he set off on his ill-advised quest. A janitor eventually found him in a supply closet. Sitting in a pool of his own urine. Rocking back and forth. And speaking some sort of gibberish about “unwound gods from the boundless void.”
Paulie was retired to a long-term psychiatric facility. Since then, no one had dared to look at Sandy in their peripheral vision for more than five seconds at a time.
Saul paused at the top of the stairs and called out, “Afternoon, Sandy!”
“Hello, Agent Reiz, Agent Napier, and Agent Ford,” Sandy said cheerily. “I’ve got your team in with Agent Smith at quarter to one. You can take a seat anywhere you’d like and wait, or you can head downstairs and otherwise occupy yourselves. As long as you come back in time for the meeting.”
It was already twelve forty. If they were five seconds late for the start of a meeting, Sandy would bar them from entering Roland’s office and give them a look that could flay small children alive for their disrespect of the boss’s time, which she considered more precious than gold.
“We’ll wait,” Adeline replied, trudging past Saul and plopping down into one of the artfully arranged chairs near the tall, narrow windows on the right side of the waiting area. Saul and Jill followed her example and sat in the chairs on either side of Adeline’s.
Jill turned around in her seat and stared out the window at the street below, which ran through the heart of Weatherford’s busiest entertainment district. She enjoyed watching pedestrians and making up stories about who they were and where they were going. A favorite childhood pastime of hers, from the days where smartphones and public WiFi were in short supply.
Adeline and Saul, on the other hand, had fully embraced the digital age. They both browsed various social media sites, liking tweets and upvoting Reddit posts, until Jack clambered up the stairs at exactly one minute before the huge clock on the wall behind Sandy’s desk struck quarter to one.
At his appearance, the three of them rose from their chairs, almost in sync, and scuttled over to Jack as he came to stand in front of the heavy door to Roland’s office. There, the whole team waited while the clock loudly ticked away the final minute.
At twelve forty-five on the dot, the door creaked open by itself. There was no magic involved, as far as anyone could sense, so the door’s autonomous movement had baffled agents for decades. Numerous theories about the door abounded. That it was imbued with some kind of spirit or djinni. That parts of the Castle had obtained sentience due to its continuous exposure to magic over the course of the preceding century. That a group of kobold sprites lived in the walls and operated the door at Roland’s behest.
Personally, Saul thought the phenomenon was more mundane: that there was a hidden switch in the floor that Sandy tapped with her foot. He’d asked Sandy about it when she was scheduling him for his last annual performance review with Roland and Jack. But she had pointedly ignored the question and given him that same steady smile that gradually grew creepier the longer she held it.
He hadn’t asked a second time.
Regardless, the door always opened and closed by itself whenever people entered Roland’s office. Upon exiting the office, however, you were on your own.
Today, Saul’s team crept into the office with no small degree of caution. Because Roland was seated at his desk at the far end of the expansive room, eying his phone as if he was compelling it to spontaneously combust.
While Roland was many human generations removed from his ancient forefather, the actual Thor, he still possessed several powers befitting of a demigod. Among those powers was the ability to manipulate electricity, and on more than one occasion, Roland’s ire had caused something electronic to explode in a rain of sparks.
Today was his desk phone’s lucky day, as the team’s arrival distracted him from his anger.
“Ah, Jack.” He stood up and waved the team forward. “Come on in. We’ve got a little under ten minutes to discuss the missing girls before I have to take a call from the Justice Department regarding the treatment of immortal preternatural criminals at black site prisons.”
“A fun topic,” Jack drawled.
“Indeed.” Roland gestured for them to sit anywhere they pleased. Once they were all as comfortable as they could be in the presence of a man whose magical voice could burst eardrums if he yelled loud enough, Roland said, “So tell me about the girls. What’ve you learned?”
Jack quickly reviewed the details the troll at the Karthen Street Bridge had provided. “We’re going to have to venture into Benton Court if we’re to have any chance of finding those girls, alive or dead.”
Roland ran a hand through his pale-blond hair. “I agree, but we’ll have to use a gentle touch.”
“Gentle in what way?” Saul asked.
Adeline quipped, “As in not you, Reiz.”
Saul scowled at her. “That’s not nice.”
“Neither are you.”
Roland cleared his throat, and they shut up immediately. “When I say ‘gentle,’ I mean we can’t utilize a standard investigative team at all. You’re too geared toward combat—by necessity, since most of the cases you deal with inevitably devolve into physical altercations—and if we send obvious preternatural combatants to snoop around Benton Court, we might as well pour gasoline in the streets and throw a lit match at it.
“I’ll call up one of the spooks instead, have them take a good look around the court this afternoon. They’re usually quite fast on the turnaround, so they should have some viable intel for us by this evening.”
The “spooks” were a loose collection of preternatural free agents with a variety of useful skill sets. They occasionally took jobs on Uncle Sam’s dime to investigate or infiltrate people or places that the PTAD’s official agents couldn’t touch without serious repercussions. They signed no formal employment contracts with the FBI, or any other organization to which they lent their myriad services, which was great for plausible deniability.
The problem was that there was no guarantee they wouldn’t double-cross you for a better payday.
Most of the time, using a spook for a job worked out moderately well. But using them to locate a trio of vulnerable teenage girls who, at this very moment, might have been dead or dying?
“I’m not comfortable with that, Roland,” Jack said, voicing aloud the opinions of the entire team.
“I’m not either,” Roland admitted. “But we have to play it this way. You know that.”
Jack massaged the scar that ran from his right eye to his chin. It ached when he got stressed out, and also when
a storm was approaching. “Yes, I know. I just…I want to find those girls, and I don’t trust a spook not to take advantage of such a precarious situation in some way.”
“There are a handful of spooks I feel we can trust for this type of sensitive job,” Roland said. “People I’ve hired for many jobs and with whom I’ve developed a good rapport. I’ll have Sandy contact them first. Hopefully, one of them will rise to the occasion, if not for the girls then at least for the green.”
“We spend way too much money on those assholes.” Adeline balanced her chair on two legs, rocking it back and forth. “They’re a drain on our operational budget. We should just form our own group of shady spies and have them take up residence in the basement with the rest of the top-secret stuff.”
Roland smiled wanly. “Believe it or not, I pitched that idea to the director in the nineties.”
“Oh really?” Saul said. “What’d the director say?”
“He said we already have enough preternatural spies in the CIA.”
Adeline scoffed. “Yet again the CIA gets all the fancy toys for overseas missions, and us domestic suits are stuck with the leftovers.”
“We work with what they give us.” Roland shrugged. “Spooks are approved by the men in DC, so that’s what we’ll use for this case.”
He said that with a degree of finality that no one would dare contradict.
“Okay then,” Jack said. “When should we expect the report from the spook?”
“I’ll try to arrange a rendezvous with your team for no later than seven o’clock.” Roland bent forward and used his mouse to click a few things on his computer screen. “You can just make it a dinner meeting at, say, Santana’s Bar & Grill?”
Santana’s was a rundown restaurant known for its dim lighting, drug deals, and lack of adherence to indoor smoking laws. It was the perfect place to meet a spook, because even a vampire’s keen sight couldn’t cut through the carcinogenic haze that perpetually blanketed the interior from its uneven front doors to grimy back bathrooms.