“Huh. That’s interesting.” Tanner pressed his hands against the mattress to support his body in case his legs gave out. Then he carefully rose from the bed. He wobbled slightly, and his lungs complained about the extra effort, but he didn’t fall or faint. “So Merlin’s one of these elevated revenants.”
“One of them? Try the most famous of them all. Each new incarnation of Merlin’s soul results in a wizard thirty to fifty percent more powerful than the previous incarnation.” She frowned. “At least, that was the case. Until now.”
Tanner pressed a hand to his chest and felt his heart beating hard against his ribcage. “Saul and I broke that cycle. There are now two Merlins, and each one’s only half the strength of the previous whole incarnation, plus whatever power our bodies added to the pool.”
She smacked the chart back down against the dresser and said, exasperated, “I just don’t understand how that happened. None of the literature on revenance even remotely suggests that a soul can split during the integration process, much less form two viable halves after doing so. Usually, when you tear a soul in half, the pieces lose stability and quickly degrade, unless they’re being influenced by necromancy. But your soul seems perfectly healthy to me. It’s even the correct shape and size.”
“Guess you’ll be writing your own paper on revenance in the near future, huh? ‘A Case Study on the Bifurcation of Elevated Revenant Souls in Identical Twins,’” Tanner said jokingly, even though he was also disturbed by the idea that some freak metaphysical accident had left him and Saul with potentially unstable souls. “Who knows? You might get published in the world’s leading preternatural scientific journal. If there is such a thing.”
“There is.” She pursed her lips. “And you might well be right. I’ll certainly have to study you and Saul extensively, so we can get to the bottom of how and why this happened—and whether it could happen to other revenant souls. If it can, this may complicate things considerably, especially if…”
“Especially if what?” Tanner pressed.
“When you access your revenant memories,” she asked haltingly, “do you notice any obvious gaps where it seems like important things should be?”
Tanner cocked his head to the side. “My collective memory across several lifetimes is full of gaps like that. The whole thing’s a bundle of confusing fragments. I’m guessing it’s not normally that way?”
“No, it’s not. The memories of older incarnations tend to be more faded. But normally, the key memories—those that evoke strong emotion or contain important information—are all completely intact. The fact that yours aren’t suggest that you and Saul each literally got half of everything.”
“Half the power,” Tanner muttered, “and half the knowledge.”
“And to think, all this time I believed Saul’s memory problems were due to his brain damage from that car accident.” Laura sighed and headed back to her desk, kitten heels clicking loudly in the quiet infirmary. “I’m going to lose a lot of sleep over you two. Like I don’t lose enough sleep patching up Saul already.”
“He gets hurt a lot?”
She snorted. “It’s Saul.”
Tanner dipped his head. “Sounds like he hasn’t changed that much.”
“Well, he has gotten a touch more responsible in recent times, I will begrudgingly admit.” She sank into her desk chair. “And he is a competent agent, in many ways. But he gets into more scrapes than any other agent in Weatherford. Honestly, you’d think he was working in Chicago with the number of black eyes he acquires every month.”
“Is he that reckless?”
“No, he’s that valiant.”
“Valiant? As in, what, he protects people?”
“To a self-destructive degree.” Laura rapped her manicured fingernails against her desktop. “And it’s entirely due to his status as an elevated revenant. He has so much more raw power than everyone else that, even though his magic skill set is rather limited in scope, he can typically overwhelm any opponent. He can take down groups of enemy sorcerers with nothing but a continuous flow of strong elemental spells.
“Practically all his fights with other practitioners degrade into battles of attrition. Nine times out of ten, he wins. And the tenth time? The enemy flees.”
Tanner ran his tongue across his bottom lip and tasted something bitter. “So what you’re implying is that, because Saul is such a powerhouse, he voluntarily puts himself into the line of fire so that other people don’t have to?”
“That’s exactly it. He always volunteers for the most dangerous missions, and in so doing, he’s probably saved many agents from career-ending injuries and, you know, death.”
She stopped tapping and curled her hand into a fist, fingernails biting into her palm. “The consequence of this perpetual self-sacrifice is that he’s putting his body through the ringer. He comes out of every fight still kicking, but many times, he’s kicking with a broken leg. About once a month, he comes in here with something that puts him in a bed for a night.”
“Christ.” Tanner shook his head. “You’d think he would’ve learned his lesson in the fourth grade, after Jumbo Jim broke his arm.”
“Jumbo Jim?”
“A bully who picked on the smart kids one grade below him.” Tanner smiled wanly. “He beat me up during recess one day when Saul was out with the flu. As soon as Saul came back, still sniffling and coughing, he cornered the kid on the playground and challenged him to a fight. To Saul’s merit, he did knock out Jim’s two front teeth. But Jim was twice his size, and once he got ahold of Saul…
“Well, there was a lot of screaming involved, followed by an ambulance ride and a stint in the ER. The upside is that Jumbo Jim never bothered me again, and he spent the rest of the year being teased by his former victims for the big gap in his teeth. So I guess Saul won after all. Or at least came to a stalemate.”
Laura gave him a poignant look. “You’re right. Saul really hasn’t changed that much.”
“I wish he would change,” Tanner said. “It’s one thing for him to put himself on the sacrificial altar in grade school. It’s another thing when he fights preternatural criminals and evil monsters for a living.
“I’ve always been afraid he’s going to send himself to an early grave. After he ran away, I spent years dreading a phone call from a morgue or a death notice visit from the cops. I had nightmares about going to his funeral.”
“He’s still here, hon,” she replied softly. “And I don’t think he has plans to leave this plane of existence anytime soon.”
“I hope not.” Tanner rubbed his sweaty palms on his pants. “I still haven’t had a chance to speak with him. Is he, uh, busy? Is that why he’s not here?”
Laura nodded. “He would’ve stayed behind to sit with you, but I told him you weren’t going to wake up until morning—because I didn’t anticipate you self-healing. And his team has a lot of work to do on a case involving three missing teenage girls who they believe are in serious trouble. He was probably planning to pull an all-nighter and then crash in a chair at your bedside come dawn.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
She blew out a breath. “I know the team went out to meet with an informant about the case. They could return immediately after the meeting, or they could pursue any leads the informant dug up. I can shoot them a text and check. If I tell Saul you’re awake, he might hurry on back, unless the team is in the middle of something important.”
“No, that’s okay,” he said. “I don’t want to bother him while he’s working on a serious case. Those girls deserve his undivided attention. I can wait a little while longer.”
“If you’re sure…”
“I am.” Tanner gestured to the infirmary exit. “Plus, I’d actually like to take a little walk, if that’s okay with you. Want to work out my muscles. They’re really stiff.”
“Oh, sure thing. Just let me write you up a guest pass with some basic permissions.” She opened a drawer on her desk and pulled out a pad
of white rectangular stickers with an indistinct logo printed across the top. “Technically, you’re not supposed to walk around the building without an escort since you’re not an employee. But I can make an exception for you, as long as you promise to limit yourself to the ground floor and the courtyard. Every other floor has, er, elements that are not safe to interact with unless you have the proper training.”
Tanner stared at the hefty wooden doors to the infirmary. “You know, you never did tell me exactly what this place is.”
“Oh, right,” Laura said with a chuckle as she started jotting things down on the guest pass, “I guess I should officially welcome you to the Castle.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Saul
Halfway back to the Castle, Adeline abruptly said, “You sure you don’t want to go take down Muntz? I can get these two chuckleheads to supply his location.”
In the back seats of the car, Don and Drew whimpered. They’d spent the ride so far huddled up against the doors, heads tucked beneath the windows. As if they anticipated the flock of valravens smashing through the glass and swarming them in a moving vehicle.
“You remember what you said about a ‘little’ vengeance being good for the soul?” Saul replied.
“Yeah. What of it?”
“Well, now that I know Muntz fed Tanner to a sable wight”—he tightly gripped the steering wheel, and tiny curls of smoke rose from his fingertips—“I would take a lot more than a ‘little’ vengeance if I ran into Muntz right now. So I think it’d be best if we leave his arrest to Cassidy. Unless you want to testify at a murder trial where I’m the defendant.”
Adeline gave him a long side-eye, considering his response, and then her lips curved into a smug smirk. “Congratulations, Agent Reiz. You passed.”
Saul tore his gaze off the road and threw it at her. “Huh? What do you mean?”
“I mean, this whole excursion to wrangle those two morons was a test. Roland was the teacher who assigned the test. And I was the proctor who oversaw the testee.” She held up her phone, waving it back and forth. “That message I got before I convinced you to change course and head to the convenience store? That wasn’t from any of my little birdies. That was from the big man himself.”
“So your whole spiel about vengeance was a complete fabrication?”
“Oh no,” she said. “I actually do believe that. I just used that belief to lend authenticity to my sudden shift in objective. If I hadn’t sounded convincing enough, you might not have taken the bait.”
Saul gawped in disbelief. “I don’t understand. Roland seemed firm in his decision to remove me from the Muntz case, and he rarely, if ever, changes his mind. Why would he suddenly do a one-eighty, especially if he had serious doubts that I’d be able to control myself due to my personal stakes in the case?”
“That, I don’t know,” Adeline said. “He was pretty cryptic about the whole thing, outside of the instructions on how to test you. But, reading between the lines, it seems like something about the situation changed significantly between the time we left to meet the spook and the time the team split up. I’m sure he’ll explain everything when we get back.”
Saul stopped at a red light and rolled a bitter question around on his tongue. He didn’t voice it until the light turned green. “So,” he muttered, taking his foot off the brake, “what exactly would you have done if I had lost my cool and gone gunning for Muntz?”
Adeline raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?”
A thump sounded to Saul’s left, and he glanced out the window to find a valraven perched on the driver’s-side mirror. The bird’s dead eyes, one of them weeping pus, bored into Saul’s face. As he turned the car left through the intersection, the wind jostled the bird, and it squawked at him. Maggots sloughed out of its beak in a writhing pile and splattered across the glass.
Saul suppressed a gag. “Would you really have attacked me with valravens?”
“Yes,” Adeline answered without hesitation.
Saul pressed his lips together. “You’re kind of scary, Ade.”
“I’m a necromancer, dipshit. What else did you—?”
Darkness fell over the street. The traffic lights went dead, leaving colorful afterimages behind Saul’s eyelids. The streetlights flickered twice and cut off simultaneously, casting the sidewalks and every shuffling pedestrian on them into impenetrable shadow. The yellow-white glow cast from a hundred windows blinked out, reducing the nearby buildings to featureless black masses.
“A blackout?” Saul said. “Seriously?”
“The Castle’s got backup generators.” Adeline clicked her tongue in annoyance. “But those won’t do us much good when we’re out on the job.”
Saul peeled his eyes to look for anyone in the street crossings up ahead. With no ambient light, he could barely make out anything besides the piercing glare from other vehicles’ headlights. Luckily, the turnoff for the Castle’s garage entrance was only half a mile farther up the street.
“Boy,” he grumbled to the men in the back seats, “you assholes sure picked a good day to bungle my abduction.”
All the little shuffling movements that had been emanating from the back seat ceased immediately, the idiot brothers falling unnaturally still. As if Saul’s words had inadvertently touched on something he wasn’t supposed to know.
Frowning, Saul added, “Unless Muntz didn’t choose to kidnap me today.”
Don and Drew didn’t respond.
That told Saul he was onto something.
“I see,” he continued. “There’s something special about today.”
Adeline swiveled her head toward the back. “What’s this? There’s more to the story than simple revenge?”
Don and Drew shifted uncomfortably under Adeline’s gaze, their handcuffs clinking, but still, they remained silent.
“All right,” Adeline said. “We can play this the hard way again, if you want.”
On cue, the valraven on the mirror squawked.
The idiot brothers flinched, and Don stuck his head between his knees, hyperventilating at the thought of being attacked by the unholy birds yet again.
Seeing his brother in distress, Drew reluctantly caved. “We were hired, all right?” he growled. “Hired to kidnap Reiz on this specific date.”
A cold dread crept up Saul’s spine.
Too many major events have occurred today for all of them to be coincidence, he thought. Could it be that none of them are?
Adeline crossed her arms. “Hired by who?”
Drew shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. The boss arranged everything. All I know is that a couple weeks ago, Ed was approached by somebody who offered him a generous sum of money to kidnap Reiz today.
“Ed had been plotting ways to get back at Reiz for months, but he was so wary of stepping on the PTAD’s toes that he didn’t want to act until he was a hundred percent sure he could get away with it. The money changed his mind. He threw his hesitation out the window and immediately started plotting the whole setup with the sable wight.”
“Was there a manticore involved in this ‘setup’ at any point?” Saul threw in on a hunch.
“Manticore?” Drew gave him a blank look. “The boss doesn’t have the connections to get access to that class of creature.”
“That’s what I was afraid you’d say,” Saul mumbled. That manticore was someone else’s doing.
Adeline grasped this crucial piece of information as well, but she kept the impromptu interview rolling smoothly. “How much money did this mystery man offer Muntz exactly?” she asked.
Drew’s reply was nothing more than a whisper: “Two mil.”
Saul was so shocked that he accidentally jerked the wheel, swerving the car into the oncoming lane and nearly clipping a pickup truck. “Who the hell is willing to pay two million bucks to assassinate me?” he shouted as he corrected course.
Drew swallowed nervously. “Actually, we weren’t hired for a hit. The guy just wanted you ‘out of the way’ for
at least twenty-four hours. In fact, according to the boss, the guy specifically said he didn’t want you dead.
“The boss decided to disregard that part and planned to have the wight suck you dry and eat you. Since the boss had already been paid half up front, enough money to tackle all his debts and fill his coffers for years, he wasn’t overly concerned about stepping on the guy’s toes.”
Adeline scoffed. “That right there is all the proof we need that Ed Muntz is a fucking idiot. You don’t cross people who can throw around millions like chump change unless you have a death wish.”
Don mumbled, “That’s what I said. But then the boss hit me with his cane, so I stopped trying to—”
Drew elbowed his brother in the ribs to shut him up. If it got back to Muntz that his most loyal goons questioned his decisions in earshot of the feds, Saul’s team would find two more charred corpses stuffed in dumpsters in the near future.
But they had already said more than enough.
If only their answers didn’t raise more questions, Saul thought. Just what the heck is somebody plotting to do in this city tonight, and why am I personally a threat to its success?
At the same moment Saul flicked the turn signal on, Adeline’s phone vibrated, and the screen lit up to reveal the nickname “Scooby,” a joke Adeline had never made to Jack’s face. Relief washed through Saul’s veins, and Adeline too visibly relaxed as she answered the call with, “You okay there, boss?”
She switched to speakerphone just as Jack said, “We’ve been better, but we’re still in one piece. And we recovered the purse from the flophouse.”
In the background, Jill said something indistinct. She sounded worried.
“What’s going on?” Saul asked.
Jack sighed. “The sorceress is pursuing us.”
“Sorceress?” Adeline said. “It’s a woman?”
“Yes.” Jill’s voice grew louder as she presumably moved closer to the phone. “We slipped past a bunch of fresh trap wards in the flophouse undetected, but she must’ve also had eyes on the building. She showed up in person as we were leaving. Tall lady. Red hair. Yellow raincoat. Nasty attitude.”
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 22