“Wait, what?”
Saul made to answer, but his phone buzzed loudly. He plucked it out of the clip and checked the message. “Aw darn. Looks like I’ll have to save that embarrassing story for another time. We’re wanted upstairs. Roland has finally managed to corral all the teams on duty into a conference room for the all-important emergency meeting he’s been trying to arrange for an hour.
“Besides Jack and Jill, we’re the only two bodies missing from the herd. So we better get up there before he brings a lightning bolt crashing down on our heads.”
Tanner blinked. “Jack and Jill?”
“My team leader and my team precog.”
“Precog? Like ‘precognitive’?”
Saul spun him toward the exit. “I’ll explain on the way upstairs.”
As they retraced their steps up the concrete stairwell, Saul gave Tanner a perfunctory overview of his PTAD team:
Jack Montesano, the werewolf and esteemed team leader.
Jillian Ford, the young, talented precognitive.
Adeline Napier, the reformed necromancer.
And Saul himself, the team’s combat wizard, responsible for wrangling the most violent of the preternatural offenders the team pursued.
Each member of the team had a standard set of FBI skills and thorough knowledge of the preternatural underground, but they all had specialized abilities that made the team well rounded.
“As a good PTAD team needs to be,” Saul finished. “Preternatural creatures are extremely diverse, so a team has to be able to handle a little bit of everything. And I mean everything.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Tanner said, coming to a halt behind Saul at the door to the ground floor. “I’ve seen an absurd number of unbelievable things today. But it’s obvious that I haven’t even scratched the surface.”
Saul grasped the door handle but didn’t pull it quite yet. “Sorry to say, but seeing all that shit day in and day out will take a long time to get used to. You can’t turn the Sight off once it wakes, so you have to acclimate to constantly observing two vastly different worlds that occupy the same space.”
Tanner shook his head. “I appreciate your concern, but I can handle it.”
“You think that now,” he warned, “but it can really wear on you, constantly pretending that you don’t see the preternaturals when you’re in the presence of mundanes. Especially when those preternaturals are having a significant impact on your immediate surroundings. It’s a huge burden, Tanner. A lot of people struggle with it.”
“I understand that,” Tanner said mildly, brief flashes of his previous lives flickering through his head, indistinct in specifics yet clear in overall theme: the hardships caused by standing with each foot in a different world. “I’ve dealt with it before. I’ll deal with it again.”
Saul’s brows drew together. “What do you mean you’ve dealt with it before?”
“The answer to that question belongs in a conundrum of a conversation we don’t have time to solve tonight.” Tanner gestured to the door. “We need to move along before your boss starts sparking again. He was leaving scorch marks all over the floor last time I saw him.”
Saul was unsatisfied with Tanner’s evasion, but he abandoned his desire to block the door until Tanner spilled the truth when thunder rumbled down the hall, rattling the stairwell door. “I’m starting to think I’m missing an important chunk of the big picture,” he said, yanking the door open. “And I’ve got this ugly feeling that I’m not at all going to like the details in that missing piece.”
“You’re not,” Tanner admitted as he slipped past Saul into the wide corridor. “But you’ll get over it. I’m the sensitive one, remember?”
Saul let the door slam shut behind him. “Now you’re just being facetious.”
“Facetious?” Tanner snorted. “When did you start learning big words?”
“Screw you.” Saul skirted by Tanner and strode off down the hall. “Just because I’m not a huge nerd like you doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
“I didn’t say you were stupid,” Tanner countered, following a few paces behind his brother. “I just implied you’re not much of an academic.”
“And you’re too much of an academic. Even Mom and Dad thought so. At least, they did when we were teens. That’s why Dad kept trying to bribe different coaches to get you on the varsity teams.”
Tanner flicked the back of Saul’s neck, something he’d always done when Saul ticked him off. “Low blow. That’s still a sore spot between me and Dad.”
“Targeting my intelligence is also a low blow.” Saul turned onto a side hall lined with thick wooden doors that had no labels to identify their purposes. “Do you have any idea how much it hurt to come home with a report card full of D’s when I tried my hardest to study?”
“More than it hurt me to get shot down by Veronica Dwight when I asked her to prom, only for her to go with you instead,” Tanner said. “And less than finding the note you left on my desk describing how you couldn’t stand your family anymore, so you were running away and never coming back.”
Saul staggered to a stop in front of the last door on the right. “Why are we squabbling about bullshit that happened over a decade ago?”
“Because we haven’t seen each other in all that time, so our images of one another never matured with the rest of us,” Tanner answered. “There’s this massive, ragged fissure between us that makes us incapable of conversing like regular adults.”
Saul pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. “We need to fix that.”
“Yes, we do.” Tanner reached around him, turned the doorknob, and gave it a good tug. “But the crappy thing about time is that it’s always an expensive luxury when you need it the most.”
The door swung open to reveal a jam-packed conference room. Around the circular oak table in the center of the room sat ten people, including Agent Smith, Agent Napier, Cassidy’s whole team, and four others to whom Tanner had not yet been introduced. Seven more people leaned against what sections of the wall were not occupied by built-in bookshelves, and among the standing was Laura, tucked into a corner beside a decorative end table.
At the soft creak of the door’s hinges, everyone turned their attention to the two men with the same face standing in the hall. An impressive variety of emotions struck the various meeting attendees, particularly those who had clearly not been informed that Agent Reiz’s long-lost twin had arrived on the scene. One man with a buzz cut and a beefy neck looked like he was about to have a stroke, cheeks red and veins bulging at his temples.
In the true fashion of a man in charge, Agent Smith didn’t give the gawkers the opportunity to start a frenzied round of Twenty Questions. He sniffed in a manner that indicated he was annoyed the brothers were unfashionably late to the party, pointed to the two empty chairs opposite him at the table, and said, “Sit down, will you? We have an impending apocalypse to discuss.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Saul
“Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together so far,” Roland started as soon as Saul’s and Tanner’s butts landed in their respective chairs. “Last night, someone abducted three teenage girls who were returning home from the Crimson Grand Theater, using a compulsion spell to drive them into Benton Court against their will. This afternoon, a woman, whom I strongly believe is the sorceress responsible for those abductions, was seen by Mr. Reiz in the presence of a powerful necromancer at a construction site on Dewalt Street, near the docks.
“From a delivery truck parked at this construction site, the necromancer and the sorceress took possession of the genuine Excalibur, the legendary sword of King Arthur. Based on what Mr. Reiz overheard, it seems that some sort of nasty magic ritual is in the works. And I believe we can safely assume that both Excalibur and the abducted girls are meant to be used in the ritual.”
“We talking sacrifices, boss?” Adeline hissed.
“The amount of energy required to manipulate magical objects in ways that def
y their nature is directly proportional to the amount of power an individual object possesses,” Roland replied, speaking more to Tanner than anyone else, since he was the only one in the room who hadn’t been through the PTAD academy. “I can’t imagine a ritual seeking to bend or invert the nature of a ‘good’ object like Excalibur would require anything short of multiple murders. Spilling the blood of innocents has always been a great way to pervert the moral alignment of strong magical objects.”
“So these girls are going to die,” muttered Cassidy, “if we don’t find them.”
Romano hummed thoughtfully. “There is one bright side: The girls are guaranteed to stay alive up until the part of the ritual that requires their deaths. Which gives us some time.”
“But not a lot.” Berkowitz glanced at the clock on the wall behind him. “A ritual of this caliber will either go off at the stroke of midnight, or at three AM, the witching hour. So we have a minimum of three hours and a maximum of six to figure out where this necromancer and sorceress are planning to stage the ritual.”
“Hopefully, the psychometrist that Jack and Jill are meeting will come up with useful information regarding the location,” Saul threw in, drumming his fingers on the table.
Irritation prickled across Saul’s skin, an itch he couldn’t scratch. He struggled to understand how Tanner had managed to stumble into two different harrowing preternatural situations in one day. Though he had a suspicion that the situations were related, there was no earthly reason that could explain how Tanner had wound up at that construction site at the perfect time to witness the delivery of Excalibur.
Once you dipped even a single toe into the preternatural world, coincidences of that scale never happened.
Frasier snorted. “Psychometrists can only read the history of objects. Whatever Jack and Jill picked up at that flophouse won’t lead us to any secondary or tertiary locations that the girls were transferred to. The best we can hope for is that the sorceress, or someone in her employ, spilled the beans about the ritual staging area in earshot of the girls, and the focus object retained that information. But that’s a long shot.”
“It’s all we have to go on right now.” Roland dropped a heavy fist onto the tabletop, and an errant spark jumped from a knuckle to a nearby stack of papers, setting them alight.
Roland quickly patted the fire out and added, “Cassidy’s team attempted to determine where the harpy was planning to deposit Mr. Reiz, based on the pattern of the blackout, but there are several large buildings in the target area. We’ll have to search them all, and we’ll have to do it carefully to avoid setting off any wards. If we tip these people off to our presence before we have a solid attack plan, they’ll split, and they’ll take the sword and the girls with them.”
Tanner nervously cleared his throat. “Um, actually, that first statement you made was not entirely true.”
Roland’s eyebrows shot up. “Pardon?”
“About not having any more information to go on,” Tanner clarified. “It just so happens that I have recently gained some crucial intelligence about the necromancer and what the goals of the ritual might be.”
“You said something about that back at Garfield Park, but…” Saul half turned his chair toward Tanner. “Between being comatose and being kidnapped by a harpy, when did you have time to get new information?”
Sheepish, Tanner pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal his wrist. Something inside his wrist was faintly glowing. “Turns out my visit to the construction site was more eventful than I initially realized.”
Saul grabbed his brother’s arm and brought it close to his face. The pale-pink glow was a magic signature, and that signature did not belong to Tanner. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s a piece of the box in which Excalibur is magically sealed. And inside that piece is a ‘shadow consciousness’ of the sword’s long-time guardian,” Tanner answered in a way that sounded as if he’d either rehearsed it—or someone was feeding him lines.
“Shadow consciousness?” Adeline said. “That’s something that develops when you split a small piece off a soul. The piece develops an imperfect copy of the whole soul’s consciousness. So when you say that there’s a shadow consciousness in that little sliver of the box in your arm, you mean…”
Tanner’s nose scrunched up in that way it always did when he was thinking about something unpleasant. “Technically, I guess you could say I’m possessed.”
Half the people around the table jumped up and shouted in alarm. Saul would’ve been among them, had Tanner’s mannerisms, which were almost exactly the same as those from his teenage years, not convinced Saul that his twin was the one in control.
Rarely were spirits or demons able to perfectly replicate a host’s behavior, as they couldn’t access a person’s mind, only suppress it. In fact, most possessive entities were so bad at pretending to be their hosts that “recent behavioral changes” was a criterion built into the PTAD computer program that parsed police reports.
Clearly, his brother wasn’t possessed in the traditional sense, which Tanner tried to explain to all the panicking people in the room. But a few of them, not willing to entertain the idea a possessed man could have free will, insisted he be purged of the entity immediately. And Frasier—big surprise—actually started reciting a dodgy exorcism spell that had the tendency to cause the target to suffer grand mal seizures.
Saul smacked his hands on the tabletop and shot a weak force spell through the wood. It burst out from the rim of the table and sent everyone stumbling back. Frasier, who’d been leaning over the table, lost his balance, fell forward, and conked his forehead on the table’s hard edge.
“Enough!” Saul shouted. “My brother is in control of himself.”
“You don’t know that, Reiz,” Frasier spit, rubbing his forehead.
“He’s my twin,” Saul countered. “You think I wouldn’t be able to recognize if a complete stranger was wearing my twin’s body?”
Frasier sneered, “Well, considering you haven’t seen each other in years because you were a delinquent who ran away from home, I’d be surprised if you even recognized his voice over the phone.”
Saul growled. “Look here, you miserable fucking—”
Deafening thunder rocked the room, knocking books from the shelves and shattering one of the ceiling lights. Broken glass rained down onto the center of the table, and by the time it stopped clinking and plinking, everyone was back in their seats, hands in their laps, dead quiet.
Roland leaned forward, arms crossed, lightning dancing in his eyes, and said coolly, “Please continue, Mr. Reiz. We will discuss the matter of your apparent pseudo-possession at a more convenient time.”
Tanner glanced from the pile of glass to Roland’s stormy eyes. “Um, okay. So here’s the deal.”
He launched into a story about a woman named Kim Ballard, the latest incarnation of the legendary witch Nimuë. Known as the Lady of the Lake during the time of King Arthur, Nimuë was granted guardianship of Excalibur until such time as Arthur proved himself worthy of wielding the blade. After Arthur’s death, the sword was returned to her care.
Wanting to ensure that the sword never fell into the wrong hands, each subsequent incarnation of Nimuë’s soul was compelled by the memories of her past self to seek out the hiding place where the previous incarnation last stored the sword and transport it to a new location for safekeeping. Several times over the centuries, the sword had been stolen by malicious practitioners and other lowlifes, but Nimuë’s revenant always recovered it.
“‘Until two weeks ago,’” Tanner said, obviously quoting Kim Ballard. “‘After so many years of successfully guarding the sword, I’m afraid I may have grown rather complacent. I was not prepared for the arrival of another prominent revenant from my original time period.’”
“Whose revenant?” Adeline asked.
“‘That of Mordred, the necromancer knight and traitor to the Round Table, he who caused the downfall of Logres,’” Tanne
r answered. “‘He’s the necromancer that you seek. I don’t know the name of his current incarnation, but I can tell you that his necromancy skills have not waned over his revenance cycles. He is stronger than he has ever been, having embraced all the dark magic knowledge collected by his previous lives.’”
Adeline huffed. “Well, that explains it. I was wondering how the hell some modern-day necromancer had both a manticore and a harpy on his payroll. Even high-level necromancers these days can barely drum up a crappy version of one of those, because the practice of necromancy has degraded a lot over the past century. But this guy, he’s drawing on old necromancy, an art largely lost to time.”
“Damn,” said Romano, slumping down in his chair. “This guy sounds supremely dangerous.”
“‘He is,’” Tanner said, his voice mimicking a bit of Ballard’s English accent. “‘If you underestimate him, like I did, you’ll end up just as dead as me.’”
“What about the sorceress though?” Berkowitz said. “If the necromancer is this Mordred guy, then is the sorceress a revenant too? Or is she just some regular sorceress recruited by the same guy that Mordred is working for?”
Tanner was quiet for a moment, presumably listening to Kim “speak” in his head, before he relayed, “‘My mind was mostly dormant during the transit of Excalibur, but based on what I saw of the sorceress at the building site, I have a strong suspicion that the woman is the revenant of Morgana le Fay.’”
Tension dense as concrete choked the room.
“The Morgana le Fay?” Frasier pressed. “Like, King Arthur’s evil witch sister?”
“‘The one and only,’” Tanner said.
Saul rubbed his temple. “So, let me get this straight. You’re telling me that a revenant necromancer and a revenant sorceress, both originally born in Arthurian times, are working together to perform a sacrificial ritual involving the ultimate Arthurian object, the sword Excalibur.”
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 27