Tanner did not like the voice’s use of “we,” as it suggested there was some foreign entity sharing his body. But given that his situation was dire, and the voice’s goals seemed to align with his own, he suppressed his apprehension. For now.
“Do you happen to have an escape plan?” he whispered, hoping the harpy couldn’t hear him over the wind.
What? Like this? Tanner spoke inside his head.
You can hear my thoughts? You’re in my head?
For the record, I am really uncomfortable with this.
The harpy was now soaring above one of the city’s largest parks, a tangled patchwork of leafy trees and manicured grass fields. Near the center of the park lay a manmade lake approximately two hundred feet in diameter. But there was no telling how deep it was, the smooth surface like a pane of obsidian in the darkness of the night.
Let me guess, Tanner said. That’s our landing pad?
What about after “we” land? Won’t the harpy just swing back around and pick us up again?
Nymphs…?
Tanner hesitated, not a big fan of blind faith. But a slight shifting of the harpy’s talons reminded him that his situation could not get much worse. All right. Let’s do this.
Immediately, a cascade of information flowed into Tanner’s brain, as if someone cracked his skull open like a coconut and poured into it a pitcherful of pure knowledge. When that odd feeling ceased, Tanner found that he knew by heart how to cast an insanely complex spell that would temporarily disable the harpy.
But the voice had not simply taught him this spell. It had actually transferred to him the full experience of casting the spell. In so doing, the voice had allowed Tanner to bypass the inherent riskiness of casting difficult spells without extensive practice beforehand.
Astounded, Tanner asked, How did you do that?
Humbled by the magic expertise of his disembodied passenger, Tanner followed the voice’s instructions.
Six. Five. Four.
He took a deep breath so that he could speak the spell’s incantation all in one go.
Three. Two. One.
Words he had never spoken before leaped off his tongue as if he’d used them a thousand times. Bolstered by a push of will that drew his life energy from his soul, these words sparked across his lips and chin, singeing his skin.
With each passing syllable, those golden sparks zipped away from his mouth and locked into some predetermined slot in the immediate area around the harpy. As if Tanner was constructing a three-dimensional puzzle made of translucent pieces of energy.
Halfway through the incantation, the harpy noticed something was amiss. Its fierce gaze bored into Tanner, and its talons nipped at his skin, drawing blood.
The zings of pain didn’t deter Tanner in the least. Instead, he increased the pace of his casting, shot the sparking words off his tongue so fast that the air before his face lit up with a steady golden glow.
As the last few words of the spell tumbled off his lips, the harpy let out a piercing screech. The talons tightened further, slicing Tanner’s skin wide open, drawing so much blood that it soaked his shirt and almost broke his concentration.
But he held on. Because he remembered casting spells under duress in his previous lives. Because he wanted to be free from this damn creature and the master whom it served. Because he believed in himself and, strangely enough, in the voice.
Tanner finished casting the spell, and it went off with the sound of breaking glass.
From a thousand glowing golden points in the air, tiny arcs of electricity bit into the harpy. Everywhere they touched, muscles seized and cramped, until the creature lost all control over its extremities—including its talons.
The talons released Tanner from their grasp, and he plummeted toward the earth. Or rather, the water.
It was at this point that Tanner realized the voice had not taught him a spell that would slow his descent.
“Oh shit,” he whined to the night, flailing as he tumbled end over end. “I’m going to die.”
I’m falling from three hundred feet. Hitting the water will be like hitting concrete!
Tanner gathered his courage and looked straight down. At first, he was so disoriented from his continual spin that he saw nothing of consequence in the dark water or along the lake’s smoothly curving edge. But after fanning out his arms and legs to stabilize his angle of descent, he got a better look at the rapidly approaching ground and noticed something out of the ordinary.
In the middle of the lake, a whirlpool was forming.
I’m not doing that, Tanner said. Are you doing that?
Then who…?
Tanner didn’t have a chance to finish that thought. Because the whirlpool abruptly inverted into a spinning funnel, shot up out of the lake, and swallowed him whole.
Water rushed into his mouth and nose, ripping his breath away. Strong currents spun him around and around until he lost all sense of direction. Unable to see or hear or feel anything that wasn’t rushing water, Tanner was certain he was going to drown.
Then, as fast as it had begun, his turmoil came to an end.
The funnel deposited him none too gently on the tall, damp grass near a short dock off the lake’s boathouse. He lay there bonelessly, gasping for air and shivering head to toe, the cool air combined with the cold water having sapped all the heat from his body. The thin, waterlogged scrubs didn’t help, nor did the complete lack of light.
It seemed there was no warmth to be found in Weatherford tonight.
Fatigue enveloped Tanner’s body in place of warmth, and he wanted nothing more than to stay put, with his legs partially submerged and his head caressed by the tall grass rustling in the wind. But he didn’t want to die of hypothermia any more than he wanted to drown. He’d survived far too many awful things today to allow himself to succumb to the elements.
With a loud grunt of exertion, he pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet, and started some kind of forward locomotion that vaguely resembled walking. When he reached the tree line, he stumbled into the closest trunk and used the rough contours to hold himself upright.
Tanner was worryingly close to his absolute physical limit. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t fight. And casting more magic was also in doubt, since he’d used a great deal of what had replenished after the sable wight’s drain to heal his grievous injuries.
If the harpy comes back, I’m done for, he thought wearily.
The harpy had glided off course while its muscles were on the fritz, its skewed wings caught in the strong currents of the wind. Now it approached the lake from the west, flying down at a sharp angle meant to allow the creature to come in low over the water so it could swipe Tanner off the bank.
Unfortunately for the harpy, the lake didn’t take too kindly to a necromantic chimera trespassing in its airspace.
Another funnel blasted out of the water. But t
his one wasn’t meant to catch and slow a falling body. This funnel was a weapon. A solid jet of spinning water with enough power to bore through sheet metal.
The funnel struck the harpy dead center in the chest. And frankly, Tanner wasn’t sure what happened next. Between his lack of corrective lenses, the general darkness, and the enormous explosion of black feathers, the full gore of the harpy’s downfall was hidden from his view.
He was thankful for the reprieve. He’d witnessed enough horrors for one day.
When the water funnel retreated into the lake, it took the harpy’s body with it, leaving nothing behind but the cloud of feathers that gradually came to rest on the rippling surface of the water.
Unsure who or what he was meant to address, Tanner rasped out, “Uh, thanks?”
As the faint echo of his voice faded among the trees, a feminine head peeked out of the water. It wasn’t a human head. It wasn’t even a head made of flesh and bone. Rather, it was a head made entirely of water, all its facial features rendered through tricks of light and shadow.
The creature—the water nymph—smiled brightly, batted its eyelashes, and gave Tanner a cute little wave with a petite hand also made of water. Then it dipped back below the surface, and the lake went still.
So I just got hit on by a nymph?
And here I thought this day couldn’t get any stranger.
Suppressing another bone-racking shiver, Tanner said, “Is this the part where you tell me I have some crucial role to play in regard to whatever evil scheme the necromancer and his colleague are plotting?”
Tanner sank to his knees, ignoring the bite of the bark as his face slid down the trunk. Sighing, he muttered, “All right. Spit it out. What other crazy shit do I have to do tonight?”
The voice was silent for a long moment, before it replied,
“Yeah, yeah, I’m moving,” Tanner said, dragging himself back to his feet. “Sort of.”
Pushing away from the tree, he shambled over to a nearby pedestrian path. As he made his way down the path, leaving the crazy lake, the flirty nymph, and the undead bird monster behind him, he asked, Before you start weaving what is no doubt an exciting story of magic and mayhem, can you do me a favor and tell me your name?
“And what name is that?”
The voice hesitated this time, as if it wasn’t sure it truly wanted to be known under this alternate moniker. Eventually though, it relented and claimed a name that sent a soul-rattling chill down Tanner’s spine.
The voice declared,
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Saul
Adeline and Saul stared slack-jawed at the space in the sky where Tanner and the harpy had been mere moments before. The innumerable golden flashes of the magic that had disabled the harpy were fizzling out like the embers of a quenched fire, but they were still bright enough to vaguely reveal the advanced structure of the spellwork.
Saul was not capable of casting a spell with that degree of finesse. The idea that his brother, who’d been a mundane until this morning, was capable of such a feat, would’ve been laughable had Saul not just witnessed it with his own two eyes.
Adeline was the first to break out of the stupor. “I’m guessing that’s one of those ‘developments’ Roland mentioned before we left.”
“I don’t understand,” Saul said, yanking the wheel to turn the car onto a road that abutted the sprawling Garfield Park. “Gaining the Sight doesn’t grant you any special knowledge. So even if Tanner has some natural talent for spellcasting, there’s no way he could come up with a spell that complex on his own.”
Adeline massaged her temples. “You two are going to give me a stroke before the night is out.”
“I may just follow you with a heart attack.” Saul squeezed the car into a street-side parking space between a pickup truck and a delivery van. “I started having palpitations when I watched Tanner fall out of the sky. He was at least a few hundred feet up. He might be seriously injured. He might be…”
She shrugged off his concern as she unbuckled her seatbelt. “If he can effectively stun a harpy with magic, he can certainly cushion a fall. Plus, the harpy dropped him right over the lake. All he had to do was slow himself down a bit and go for a short swim.”
Saul wasn’t reassured. “He didn’t destroy the harpy though. It might make another run for him.”
“Cool your jets, will you?” Adeline opened her door and hopped out of the car. She clicked her tongue twice, and the valraven that had been riding around on the driver’s-side mirror took a short flight and landed on her shoulder.
“He survived the manticore,” she added, petting the dead bird on the head. “He’ll survive this.”
“I sure hope so.” Saul joined Adeline on the sidewalk. “God, it’s hard to see tonight. We’re going to have a bitch of a time finding our way through the park.”
All the neighborhoods bordering Garfield Park were pitch black, the power yet to be restored to a significant portion of downtown Weatherford. The park itself, peppered with dense copses of leafy trees through which snaked a dozen narrow pathways, had taken on an ominous atmosphere in the dark.
Saul was about to set off toward a path that would lead them to the lake, only for a sudden thought to stop him short. He looked to the left, looked to the right, and traced with his finger the flight path the harpy had taken from the Castle to the point where it plummeted out of the sky.
“What is it?” Adeline asked.
“The harpy never left the airspace above the dark section of the city.”
Adeline frowned. “The blackout wasn’t caused by the storm. The necromancer set it up so that the harpy could abduct your brother without any mundanes spotting a man flying through the sky.”
“An abduction plan that sophisticated isn’t something you come up with on a whim,” Saul said.
“But why go through all the trouble? What does your brother have that he wants?”
“No clue, but—”
Saul’s phone buzzed to life. He tugged it off his belt clip and swiped the screen to answer. “Hey, Cassidy.”
“Sorry for the delay. We got cut off at an intersection by a tractor-trailer that couldn’t figure out how to turn without stoplights,” she said. “Where are you?”
“Garfield Park. Harpy is down and separated from the victim. We don’t know the condition of either, but we’re assuming both are still kicking. We’re heading in now. Meet us at Borden Lake.”
“We’ll be there in five,” she replied curtly and hung up.
Saul clipped his phone back into place and strode toward the path. “Come on. We should hurry,” he said to Adeline. “And try to look alive, will you?”
“Very funny, Reiz.”
They jogged along the winding path, the dense canopy of the trees enveloping them in a shadowy shroud. The darkness heightened the finely tuned sense of paranoia that all law enforcement agents possessed, and even the most innocuous things, like wavering branches and skitter
ing bugs, took on a menacing air.
“You know,” Adeline drawled after she stubbed her toe on an uneven chunk of concrete, “I’m pretty sure flashlights were invented for this exact scenario.”
“The light will give our position away to the harpy,” Saul said, “along with all the other creatures that like to lurk in wooded places at night.”
Adeline groaned. “Oh, so now you’re concerned with exercising caution?”
Saul ignored her grousing and pressed on around the final bend in the path, where the trees thinned out and the view of the nearby lake played peekaboo through the foliage. From somewhere up ahead came the sound of heavy footsteps, and Saul held his hand up, signaling Adeline.
They both slowed to a crawl and advanced with caution, the remaining plumage of the valraven puffing up in response to Adeline’s rising anticipation of a fight. Together, they crept side by side past the low-hanging canopy of a stout tree that lay at the top of the shallow hill leading down to the lake. Saul held the weight of a force spell on his tongue, and Adeline’s eyes flashed purple as she mentally sought out any nearby corpses she could raise in case one valraven wasn’t enough to handle whatever was coming.
Peering down the hill, they sought out the source of the footsteps—and found him almost immediately. A downtrodden man dressed in thin blue scrubs, soaking wet and barefoot, was laboriously shuffling up the hill. The man was shivering uncontrollably, the unseasonably cool night leaching the heat from his body, and he looked like he was about to perform a painful face-plant.
Saul swallowed his force spell and darted toward the man. “Tanner!”
The man heaved his head up, revealing the bedraggled face of Tanner Reiz. His dripping hair was plastered to his forehead, rivulets of water running down to the collar of his shirt. His cheeks were weeping blood, thin red lines drawn on his skin by the harpy’s sharp talons. Fresh bruises were blossoming all over his body, implying his fall had ended with a rough landing.
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 25