All the cockroaches Tanner kicked away headed back toward the factory, as if drawn to a beacon. When they reached the doorway, they climbed up the wight’s body and crawled down its arm to the stump of its wrist, where they melded into the creature’s wrinkly flesh once again. Eventually, all the cockroaches would return to the body, and the wight would regain its missing hand.
A bit of esoteric knowledge Tanner had gained from these “revenant memories” informed him that the wight was an incorporeal spirit made flesh by compelling various types of insects to mold themselves into a wearable host body. If that was indeed the case, then Tanner couldn’t defeat the wight through any conventional means. So there was no point in searching the factory grounds for something sharp or heavy he could use as a weapon. And he was so fatigued that he wasn’t sure he could muster another golden burst of magic, or whatever it was he’d used to burn the wight.
He needed to find a way to get past the fence and flee somewhere the wight couldn’t follow. Preferably before the approaching storm blotted out the sun and gave the wight the chance to catch up to him. But as Tanner hit the corner of the property and came to the portion of the fence that overlooked a sharp embankment leading down to the rushing Connecticut River, it became clear that escaping from the grounds wasn’t going to be easy.
There were no breaks in the chain-link fence or loose sections along the bottom, and the entire fence was topped with rusty razor wire. The only gate in the fence was locked tight with a thick chain and a brand-new padlock. The fresh tire tracks in the gravel leading to the gate suggested that was how Muntz and his two goons had come and gone.
If Tanner wanted to get past the fence, he had three equally bad options: One, rummage around in the small outbuildings that dotted the site to try and find something that could cut through the fence. Two, search the grounds for a ladder he could use to climb high enough to jump over the razor wire. Or three, yell for help and hope someone came running.
Number three was the first option he cut. Because as Tanner stared longingly out at the river, wishing for freedom, he suddenly realized exactly where he was. The Karthen Street Bridge was about half a mile downstream from his location, and he was looking west across the river, at the tail end of Holliday Avenue, a popular nightlife district whose biggest attraction was the Crimson Grand Theater.
A long portion of Holliday Avenue ran parallel to the river. As Tanner had discovered during his first trip there a few weeks back, if you walked the pedestrian path built between the road and the water, you got a perfect view of what lay across the river from Holliday.
Benton Court. The worst neighborhood in Weatherford.
Muntz had brought him to the one place in the city where it was more dangerous to seek help than to fend for yourself.
Of course he did, Tanner thought sourly. He wanted to make sure his revenge against Saul wouldn’t be thwarted by any concerned passersby, so he brought me to the one place where he could be sure there wouldn’t be any.
Not only would Tanner have to escape from the premises on his own, but he would also have to steadfastly avoid running into any shady characters on his way to the Karthen Street Bridge. The last thing he needed was to get mugged before he had a chance to grab a cab to the hospital.
Lamenting these added complications to his escape attempt, Tanner skulked over to the nearest row of outbuildings, the smallest of which looked to be a tool shed. The door of the shed was locked, but the doorknob had rusted clean through due to years of neglect.
Tanner delivered a swift kick to the left side of the door. The rusted latch snapped clean off, and the door swung inward. Light poured into the shed, revealing the interior had largely been stripped clean.
Scuff marks on the floor indicated some type of heavy equipment had once been stored in the shed, but now all that remained were a few odds and ends littering the corners or hung up with rusty nails on the walls. Tanner peeked over the threshold of the door and quickly catalogued everything inside.
To his luck, he found two objects that might resolve his quandary: a metal stepladder and a blue tarp. Both had sustained water damage, the ladder more orange than gray, the tarp leached of color. But Tanner thought they were sturdy enough to help him for a few minutes.
Ducking inside the shed, he grabbed the tarp first—and nearly had a heart attack when a colony of large spiders crawled out from underneath it. He took a step back and calmed himself with a few deep breaths, then shook the rest of the spiders out of the folds of the tarp and dragged it out of the shed.
As he set the tarp down near the fence, he glanced at the sky again. The storm was rolling ever closer. At its current speed, he estimated it would block out the sun roughly ten minutes from now.
Put some more pep in your step, Tanner, he told himself and hurried back to the shed.
The ladder, by virtue of its weight, was much harder for Tanner to carry with only one functioning arm. He had to drag it across the gravel lot, the metal screeching all the way. When he arrived at the fence, it took a great deal of finagling to get the rusty hinges to open up.
Tarp bundled under his bad arm, Tanner carefully ascended the rickety ladder. It wobbled back and forth thanks to the uneven ground, but it held his weight. At the top, Tanner tossed the folded tarp over the razor wire and shook it back and forth until the barbs caught on the woven plastic.
Tugging on the tarp to make sure it couldn’t slip off, Tanner extended one foot and pressed down on the tarp and the razor wire beneath. When his foot found the pole at the top of the fence, he reached over with his good hand and gripped the pole.
In one motion that Tanner wouldn’t exactly call smooth, he heaved the rest of his body onto the tarp and slid over the top of the fence. The fence wasn’t exceptionally tall, so he was able to break his fall with a hard but controlled roll. The maneuver jarred his broken arm and earned him a new bruise or two, but he wasn’t otherwise injured.
He pushed himself back to his feet and spent exactly three seconds giving himself a victory dance. He had escaped the factory of doom, and he was still in one piece. But the storm was rapidly closing in, and soon, the wight would be back on his tail.
You can celebrate with a pizza when you get home, he promised himself. A pizza and a very large glass of wine.
The steep embankment gave him a great deal of trouble heading down to the riverside. Several times, he slipped and fell on his ass, repeatedly bruising his coccyx. At the edge of the bank, the ground evened out but morphed into a combination of mossy rocks, wet grass, and deep pockets of mud. All of which made Tanner’s progress slow and tedious.
He pressed on as fast as he could without tripping and cracking his head open on a rock. But he was only a third of the way to the bridge when the first clouds of the storm front reached the sun. The bright light faded in seconds, casting the whole of the city into shadow.
Like it had been counting down the time, the sable wight yelled in delight beneath a pulsating rise of its hum. The sound carried down the embankment and struck Tanner like a blunt object. He lost his footing and almost fell into the cold water rushing beside him.
Chancing a glance over his shoulder, he saw the wight had not yet reached the river. So with a whispered prayer that the wight did not know exactly which way he’d gone, he pressed on toward the bridge. Rising panic demanded he go faster. Steady logic demanded he go carefully.
He compromised by increasing his stride, stretching his legs as far as they would go to tackle the greatest distance with each step. This kind of movement took a great deal of effort though, and by the time Tanner was halfway to the bridge, he was huffing and puffing so loudly it could’ve been mistaken for an asthma attack.
It could also be heard by people loitering nearby, as Tanner discovered. To his dismay.
In a sandy nook that had been carved into the side of the embankment by a recent landslide, eight men sat around a smoking barrel. Tanner had crossed in front of the nook’s opening without even noticing
it—the opening was partially hidden behind the tall grass on the bank—but the men inside noticed his wheezing. Three of them emerged from the nook and cut Tanner off.
“What’ve we got here?” asked a burly white man with a close-shaven head. Faded prison tattoos ran down his neck.
“Some dumb fuck who fell down the bank?” said a short, skinny man with a deep tan and dark, beady eyes that examined Tanner’s clothes with a pickpocket’s enthusiasm.
The third man, who was completely unremarkable in every way—except for the massive pink scar that ran diagonally down his face—scoffed at the pitiful sight that was Tanner and grumbled, “Looks like some stupid rich kid on the wrong side of town.” He eyed Tanner with disdain. “What, you lose a bet or something?”
Tanner looked past the men, at the bridge that was so close yet so far, and replied, “I don’t want any trouble, okay? I just want to get by.”
“Oh, he just wants to ‘get by,’” the burly man said with a chuckle.
“Well, this is our spot, and in order to get past us, you got to pay the toll. How’s fifty bucks sound?”
“I don’t have that much cash,” Tanner stammered, painfully aware that every second he dawdled here, the sable wight drew closer.
“That’s okay, kid,” the skinny man said. “We take debit.”
As his brain processed that shitty joke, something snapped inside him.
Just a few hours prior, he would’ve been frightened to encounter any of these men, would’ve surrendered his wallet to them without a second thought. But over the course of this awful day, he’d been kidnapped and tortured and terrified by forces of great evil, all over a case of mistaken identity.
At this point, he was fresh out of fear to spare for anyone or anything that wasn’t the monster made of roaches and rage that was currently trying to murder him. So Tanner slapped on the sternest look his boyish face could produce and said, “Get out of my way.”
The men stiffened at his cold tone but didn’t back off.
“And what’ll you do if we don’t?” asked the burly man.
Tanner opened his mouth to say something threatening—he didn’t know exactly what he was going to say, but he had some vague ideas about pretending to have a weapon—only for his need to say anything at all dissipate before he made a sound. Because the hum of the sable wight suddenly intensified threefold, stealing his thunder.
His half-formed words died in his throat, and he peered over his shoulder.
The wight stood at the top of the bank, less than fifty feet from Tanner’s position. It was staring right at him with its nonexistent eyes.
Tanner’s logic and panic screamed at the same time, Run, you idiot! Run!
He took off, heading straight for the men. Shocked by the sudden move, the skinny man and the scarred man reared back, mistakenly thinking he was trying to attack. The burly man held his ground though and lifted one of his meaty arms like a boom gate to block Tanner’s path.
But the burly man was standing on the slick rocks and couldn’t maneuver quickly, so Tanner dove underneath the outstretched arm, landed in a rough slide that tore holes in his pants, and propelled himself back to his feet with his one good arm, hardly losing any speed.
The burly man whirled around to make another grab for him, and the scarred man, realizing he’d been duped by the bum rush, prepared to tackle Tanner to the ground. Neither actually made their plays, however, because they were distracted by a high-pitched shriek that emerged from the throat of their very own friend, the skinny man.
All the color draining from his face, the skinny man pointed up the embankment at the monster that was now loping down the steep decline on all four of its gangly limbs. “That’s a goddamn sable wight!” he squealed.
The burly man and the scarred man wheeled around, and the other five men staggered out of the sandy nook to see what was happening. All eight of them, it turned out, had the Third Sight, so they all bore witness to the supreme horror that was the approach of an angry sable wight.
A couple of them screamed and tried to clamber up the bank, which was practically a sheer cliff at this location. A couple of them retreated into the nook and huddled behind the smoking barrel, hoping the fire would ward the wight off. A couple of them pulled guns from their waistbands and took aim at the onrushing wight, like bullets would stop a creature made of cockroaches and cruel intent.
The burly man, his fright apparent by the tremor that rocked his entire body, lifted his hand and said something in a language that struck a familiar chord in Tanner’s strange new memories. A green flame sparked to life above the man’s palm. A magic flame.
Then the sable wight reached the nook, and chaos came to town.
Chapter Twelve
Saul
Around the back end of Wong’s Chinese Restaurant on Harrington Street, there was an empty asphalt parking lot that had once belonged to a convenience store on Lovell Road. The convenience store had been torn down five years prior, and the lot had been left to rot. Pedestrians now used the weedy lot and the alley that ran alongside Wong’s as a shortcut between Harrington and Lovell.
The lot was also a popular loitering spot for Weatherford’s small but proud homeless community, who pillaged the large blue dumpster behind Wong’s for lunch or dinner. Wong’s had a habit of cooking dishes in bulk, so there was always an abundance of food in the dumpster.
Today, two of the regular dumpster divers had gotten more than they bargained for when they flipped the lid and found a freshly charred human corpse lying atop the mounds of overcooked rice and slightly burned wontons.
The first officer on scene had jotted down in her notes that the two men had decided to swear off Chinese for a while and hang around the dumpster beside the Outback Steakhouse on Ripley Road instead. Since there was nothing to suggest the two men were anything more than hapless fools who’d stumbled upon a body, the officer had allowed them to mosey on down the road.
The rest of the homeless who usually made a pit stop at Wong’s had also been made aware of the morbid development via the homeless community’s excellent gossip mill. Thus, when Saul’s team reached the lot, the only other people there were the cops, a PTAD crime scene unit, and a trio from the medical examiner’s office.
The crime scene techs had already finished taking pictures of the body in its original position, so the ME’s team had pulled the body from the trash and laid it on a sheet of plastic to do a preliminary examination before they carted it off to the morgue for the autopsy.
Momo—aka Monique Monterey Jackson—the chief medical examiner of Weatherford and the assistant head witch of the city coven, was crouched next to the body when Saul’s team strolled out of the alley next to Wong’s. The many spells that teemed inside her horn-rimmed glasses illuminated her face with a silvery glow. The glow cast stark shadows along the contours of her brown skin and glinted off the innumerable pins in her intricately braided black hair.
Most of the spells were meant to streamline the process of examining bodies by replicating the effects of modern forensic techniques. They could, for example, compare DNA samples or identify particulates found on and near bodies.
But at least one of the spells, Saul had learned, was for self-defense. It shot laser beams out of the lenses.
Momo stood up as Saul’s team approached and stated without prompting, “Female. Late teens. Caucasian. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Soot in her throat indicates she was alive when she was set on fire. Preliminary cause of death is smoke inhalation.”
Jack eyed the cops who were securing the perimeter from the prying eyes of passersby and sidled up beside Momo so he could speak quietly. “And the fire was magic in origin?”
“Absolutely,” Momo answered in the same hushed tone. “Magic signature’s degraded now, but I took a spectrum snapshot with my glasses when I first arrived. I’ll run it through the PTAD signature database when I get back to the office, see if our killer is somebody you guys have encountered before.”
“No need,” Saul said, slowly circling the body. “I know who did it.”
Adeline, leaning against the back wall of Wong’s, scoffed. “What, are you psychic now, Reiz?”
“No. I just have this tendency to remember the people who hurt me, and how they hurt me.”
Saul squatted next to the body of the girl who’d barely gotten to experience the world before a cruel killer snuffed out her life and all the potential of her future. Half the girl’s body was nothing but bone scorched black, all the flesh and muscle seared away by the extreme heat of a short-lived blaze.
The other half was largely intact, but the skin was bright red and badly blistered, distorting what remained of the girl’s facial features. The fire had started around her left hip and swirled up and down one side of her body, leaving a well-defined pattern of counterclockwise whorls.
He traced the curves of the pattern in the air with his finger, then rolled up his right sleeve, revealing a pale-pink scar that bore the same pattern. Holding up his arm for everyone to see, he said, “Look familiar?”
Jack frowned. “Muntz.”
Momo huffed. “That small-time mobster who ran Saul’s car off the road last year?”
“Yeah.” Saul straightened up. “After he tried to burn me alive, just like this.”
“But Muntz hates Saul because he ruined that big drug deal while working undercover in Muntz’s organization, which cost Muntz millions of dollars and destroyed his reputation in the preternatural underground community,” said Jill, who stood the farthest from the body, near the opening of the alleyway. She had never been one for gore. “So it makes sense that Muntz would try to murder Saul. But a teenager? What could she have done to anger Muntz?”
“Maybe she saw something she wasn’t supposed to?” Adeline chewed the inside of her cheek. “There have been rumors circulating for months that Muntz is trying to make a comeback. But anything that could get Muntz back into the good graces of Nick Spinelli, or one of the other preternatural crime lords, would have to be big, flashy, and risky. The kind of risky that could get you noticed by just about anyone, preternatural or mundane, who happened to be looking the wrong way at the wrong time.”
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 10