A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1)
Page 32
Ah. I’ll remember that one.
Montesano came over the com. “Be advised, I’ll be shifting in fifteen seconds. After that, Cassidy will take lead on the com.”
The feed dropped out again, and the tension in Tanner’s body reached its peak, his every muscle pulled taut.
The seconds passed, and Cassidy said, “Assault team, commence operation in five seconds. Everyone, get ready!”
A short silence veiled the neighborhood, but to Tanner, it felt like a lifetime. And then…
Saul threw a roaring fireball at the front door of the church, and in the wake of a bone-chilling howl, all hell broke loose on holy ground.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Saul
Saul chucked a fireball at the front door of the Episcopal church, and as it blasted that door to bits, throwing fiery wooden shrapnel halfway to the pulpit, Jack howled at the top of his werewolf lungs and broke in through the back.
The revenant of the necromancer knight Mordred, who had been waiting for their attack, blocked all the shrapnel with a strong shield that cut off the altar, the pulpit, and a third of the nave from the rest of the church’s main room. All the pews had been pushed against the walls, leaving the carpet bare, and a large hole had been cut into the carpet directly before the pulpit, revealing the boards beneath.
Upon these boards, a large magic circle had been painted in deep-red blood, and the three girls lay bound at each point on a triangle drawn within the circle. The revenant of Morgana le Fay stood before the circle, chanting a spell, but her focus hadn’t yet fallen to the girls. The overturned pulpit was being used as a makeshift dais, and upon it rested the metal box in which Kim Ballard had stored Excalibur.
The protective spell encompassing the box, hexed by the loss of that sliver of Ballard’s soul, was encased in a field of wildly flickering light. Every half second, a shower of sparks burst out from one or more corners, the unstable spell balking at the sorceress’s attempt to bring it down. Even so, the field of light seemed quite thin, and displayed none of the layers associated with a high-level defensive spell.
The sorceress was close to victory, which meant their opponents were close to defeat.
But to get to the revenant of le Fay, Saul and his cohorts first had to defeat the revenant of Mordred.
“That idiot Muntz can’t do a damn thing right, can he?” the necromancer said as Saul marched through the empty doorway, Bankroft on his heels. “You’d think it would have been a simple task, entertaining a wizard for a day.”
“Ed Muntz didn’t even kidnap the right wizard,” Saul spit. “Next time you hire somebody to do your dirty work, you might want to make sure they have a working brain first.”
A flash of surprise darted across the necromancer’s face—he hadn’t known about Muntz’s colossal screw-up—but he quickly buried it beneath contempt. Not contempt for Muntz, but for Saul.
“Oh well.” He shrugged. “I kind of wanted to fight you anyway. The abduction scheme wasn’t my idea, or my preference.”
“What’s so special about me?” Saul asked, though he already knew the answer. He just wanted to see how much the necromancer would admit.
“The same thing that’s special about me.” The necromancer raised one hand, and a dozen figures rose from behind the stacks of pews on either side of the room. “You and I both hail from a time of kings and courts, an epoch of magic and mayhem, a century whose earth-shaking wars and world-changing reigns have been relegated to myth and legend among the mundanes.
“That makes you a threat to our cause. But in my opinion, it also makes you an interesting opponent. Which is something I’ve been sorely lacking in this life.”
At the snap of the man’s fingers, the figures clambered overtop the pews and charged at Saul. Their lumbering gaits and slobbering mouths gave their natures away even before the dim lighting of the church caught their eyes. Milky-white irises. Bloodshot whites. And a small purple mark above each eyebrow.
Nullified mind slaves. Or in the modern parlance, drones. Humans who’d been lobotomized and then spelled into servitude by a sorcerer through the use of mind magic.
The lobotomies left them unable to think properly, and thus, eliminated their ability to resist mind control spells with the substantial fortitude that most adult humans possessed.
In all his time at the PTAD, Saul had never even heard a whisper about drones being used in the twenty-first century. There’d been a rash of incidents involving drones in the sixties, but that had been brutally stamped out by the PTAD, and the preternatural community at large.
Practically everyone was appalled by the practice of drone creation. Even the worst criminals Saul had come into contact with in his life wouldn’t have dared to sully their names by making or buying drones. If not out of ethical concerns, then out of fear of reprisal from the preternatural authorities.
Saul had read extensively about drones and watched some grainy, grayscale footage featuring the poor damned souls. But he’d never imagined that he would wind up fighting two dozen of them in the middle of a church, of all places.
This situation was so profane that the mere idea of it gave him the urge to laugh in utter disbelief.
But this wasn’t the time for laughing. This was the time for fighting.
Bankroft flitted off to Saul’s right. A moment later, six heads went rolling and six decapitated drone bodies hit the floor, sliced necks spewing blood across the carpet. Saul grimaced at the callous disregard for life as Bankroft swept back around to strike down more drones, and then chastised himself for his reticence.
The brain damage done to prep a person for drone-hood couldn’t be repaired. Neither could the damage they kept on incurring as the mind control spell continually put pressure on their brains, frying millions of neurons every day.
These people weren’t whole, and never could be again. They were innocent souls with their minds on the fritz, trapped inside broken bodies. The kindest thing Saul could do was end their suffering and let them pass on to the afterlife, where they could hopefully find some modicum of peace.
Saul took a deep breath—he hated spilling innocent blood more than anything else in the world—and let loose.
Whispering words that tasted of fresh-cut steel, he swiped his hand toward the drones on his left. Twelve invisible blades of force shot outward from the air in front of his fingertips and skewered the skulls and necks of the drones. Over half of them fell, brains damaged beyond function or spines completely severed.
The survivors of the onslaught tripped over the bodies of the fallen, their fine motor control compromised by their mental states, along with their ability to make intelligent decisions. Drones were compelled to follow basic commands, but nuance was lost on them.
While Bankroft and Saul were busy tackling the drones, the necromancer closed his eyes and moved his fingers to a discordant rhythm, like he was playing an invisible instrument. Through the blackened front doorway of the church came a flurry of startled shouts, and a wave of gravel rolled into the church, accompanied by the stench of decay.
The necromancer had buried some of his pet chimeras under the parking lot. Now he’d commanded them to come out to play.
Killing the necromancer would set the chimeras free, and though it wouldn’t stop them from rampaging, it would stop a coordinated assault on Saul’s allies. So Saul shot another round of force blades at the remaining drones and left the rest for Bankroft to mop up.
The vampire magistrate seemed to be having the time of his life, ripping out throats with his fangs and ripping off heads with
his bare hands. Saul knew, however, that the apparent glee hid a raging fury.
There were only two sorcerers in the small church. The other sorcerer, the one who’d cursed Moretti, hadn’t shown up to watch the sacrifice show.
They couldn’t cure Moretti until that person was found.
As Saul darted toward the necromancer, Bankroft called out, “Leave one of them alive. I need information.”
Saul raised a hand in acknowledgement—he was a firm believer in long prison sentences for criminal filth anyway—and then punched the air, launching another fireball at the center of the necromancer’s shield.
The moment it hit, disrupting the man’s concentration on his small army of chimeras, Jack in his massive wolf form rammed the opposite side of the shield, the side that was blocking the door behind the pulpit.
Werewolves had a certain degree of immunity to magic, and shields often faltered at their touch. The revenant of Mordred might have been a powerful necromantic sorcerer, but even he wasn’t immune to the many quirks of the preternatural.
The combined strain of splitting his magic attention on the shield, the chimeras, and the drones proved too much. The weak link broke: the shield shattered into a downpour of sparks, and the necromancer stumbled back toward the sacrificial circle.
At that same moment, the two big stained-glass windows on either side of the room shattered inward, and the shards coalesced into two swarms of jagged bits. The swarms rocketed toward the necromancer and the chanting sorceress behind him.
Lehigh, controlling one swarm, vaulted up onto the empty windowsill to get a better look at her target: the sorceress. She then split her swarm into multiple groups to assail the woman from all sides.
Meanwhile, Frasier flung his heavy body into the church, crushing one of the half-dead drones underfoot, and directed his whole swarm of glass at the necromancer’s left side. Frasier himself lunged for the man’s right side, his magic-powered fist poised to break a skull.
The three-pronged attack strategy would have worked—against anyone else. But when the glass was three feet from the targets, two harpies dropped down from where’d they been hiding, tucked against the vaulted ceiling of the church.
One of them dove low and rammed Frasier’s chest, throwing him halfway down the nave, where he crashed into an overturned pew. The other harpy shot straight to the floor and extended its wings, protecting the necromancer and the sorceress from the swarms of glass.
Ten thousand colorful shards pierced the harpy’s dead flesh from head to toe. But the creature weathered the immense damage with only a grimace and a gasp.
At the necromancer’s sharp whistle, the injured harpy heaved itself at Lehigh. Caught off guard, Lehigh was forced to retreat back through the window, and the harpy followed her out into the night.
The second harpy, swinging back in for another shot at Frasier, instead found its neck in the viselike grip of an old and angry vampire. Bankroft looked the dead creature in its bulging eyes, and summarily tore its head off.
He dropped the decapitated chimera to the floor and said to the necromancer, “Tell me where the other practitioner is hiding, the one who hurt Sofia, and I might let you leave this perverted place of worship without ripping off your arms and legs.”
The necromancer, breathing hard from the effort of so much simultaneous magic usage, laughed dryly. “I’d flay myself alive before I’d betray him in any capacity. You aren’t nearly as intimidating as you think, vampire, and neither is the wolf.”
Near the pulpit, Jack was creeping up on the magic circle, his enormous teeth bared, a predatory glint in his eyes. Behind him, Cassidy and the two other agents, guns drawn and charms at the ready, had their sights set on the girls.
If the necromancer tried to stop Cassidy and crew from rescuing the girls, he would be set upon by a wolf, a vampire, and a combat wizard in quick succession. And clearly, the sorceress wasn’t going to be of any help to him until she broke that hexed spell, so he’d be on his own for the brutal brawl.
Yet the necromancer showed no hint of concern that he might lose.
Which could only mean he had another trick up his sleeve.
Is the third person here after all, obscured by a veil? Or are there cleverly hidden trap wards in the church? Or—?
A sound caught Saul’s ear. A sound like low static that grew louder and louder, until it resolved into the unmistakable roar that accompanied hundreds of furiously beating wings. Saul scrambled to raise a shield, but it was too late.
A flock of valravens poured in through the broken window to his left, and his entire world was consumed by feathers as the birds mobbed him. Beaks rammed into his chest and back. Talons tore at his face and neck. His nostrils filled with the scent of fresh blood mingled with the stench of rotting flesh.
Somewhere behind him, Frasier squealed from the agony of a horrible injury. To his right, Bankroft swore loudly as he batted birds so hard they disintegrated into feathery puffs. Directly in front of him, a flash of light erupted around Cassidy and her two teammates as one of them managed to activate a standard shield charm.
The valravens viciously beat against that shield, however, sacrificing body after body to kamikaze attacks that quickly wore away the energy contained in the charm. No member of their team, except Lehigh, who was now outside the church, had the magic capacity to refuel the charm. And the necromancer lay between them and Saul.
Jack did what he could, ripping into the birds with his claws and teeth. But there were just too many. Even though he was hardy and healed very fast, he couldn’t find a break in the flock through which to move to defend Cassidy’s team, or attack the flock’s master.
In fact, more birds attacked Jack than anyone else, and the combined strength of the horde was just enough to outmatch his own. Slowly but surely, the birds pushed him away from the sacrificial circle.
The necromancer, observing everyone’s plight, let out a delighted cackle.
And that, the crass display of enjoyment of other people’s suffering, set Saul off.
Saul raised his bloody hands high, and as the birds swooped in to claw at his face, he shot out a wave of energy. The wave tagged every single valraven in the church with a tiny pinch of energy, and Saul used all those pinches as the focal points to cast several hundred tiny spells simultaneously.
The church lit up with an explosion of sparks not unlike a firework, and in a flash, golden fire consumed every single bird. Necromantic flesh burned bright from a dizzying array of frenzied lights. Then the ruined bird puppets began to plummet from the air. Onto the carpet. Onto the pews. Onto the altar.
And as fire was wont to do, it spread from the blackening bird corpses to everything else within its grasp. In seconds, two dozen fires took hold of the building’s holy bones, and a hellish heat filled the church on the cusp of roiling smoke.
“Good going, Reiz,” spit Frasier, who was clawing his way back to his feet. One of his eyes had been caught by a talon, blood streaming down his face. “We’re supposed to save the girls, not put them on a funeral pyre.”
Saul couldn’t think of a rebuttal to that. He’d acted impulsively and screwed up this whole operation. Or at least, he thought he had. Right up until the sorceress stopped chanting and wrenched her eyes open as the smoke choked her lungs.
The light around the box containing Excalibur faded along with her chant, indicating she’d stopped trying to bring down the hexed protective spell. Saul’s dumb mistake had inadvertently bought them more time to stop the ritual.
The church might be a total loss, but at least this mission is still in the green.
“Who the hell set the building on fire?” the sorceress shouted, smacking the necromancer upside the head.
“Hey, it wasn’t me!” The man pointed at Saul. “It was that failure of a Merlin revenant.”
Damn. Even the criminals knew how big a disappointment Saul was to the PTAD.
But just because he wasn’t all the FBI brass had hoped didn’
t mean he was useless.
Focusing on the necromancer and the sorceress, Saul parted his lips to conjure fire’s opposing force—water—so he could at once douse the flames and distract the enemies long enough for Cassidy and crew to swoop in, ruin the magic circle, and retrieve the girls. With the open door behind him, and the cool night rife with moisture from the storm, Saul had all he needed to conjure a huge wave of water.
It was poised to be an epic spell, a spell that would propel them to victory.
But Saul never got to cast it.
The sorceress brought up two fingers and rapidly hissed a stream of words in a language Saul could not decode. Between heartbeats, the whole section of the church floor containing the circle, the pulpit, the sorceress, and the necromancer simply…vanished, leaving a huge hole at the front of the nave.
A moment later, that same segment of reality reappeared in the parking lot outside the church. And it landed on top of someone, a woman, who let out a scream of terror that was cut horribly, horribly short.
Oh fuck, Saul thought, panic shooting through the roof. That was a short-range translocation spell, and the matter rematerialized right on top of Lehigh.
Everyone still in the church sprinted for the window Lehigh had retreated through a short time ago. Saul reached it first and vaulted over the sill without concern for his well-being, landing right in the middle of the fray between two manticores and two vampires. One of the manticores, startled by Saul’s appearance, struck out with its scorpion tail.
Saul brushed off the attack by shooting a fireball at the manticore’s head.
The creature reeled away from the fireball, only to put itself in the path of a vampire’s powerful hands. Its head popped off its neck shortly after and bounced across the parking lot.
Saul raced toward the spot at the edge of the lot where the translocated section of flooring had reappeared. Long before he got there though, he saw that there was nothing he could do for Lehigh. All that remained of her was a misshapen lump of flesh pinned beneath the floor, one limp hand sticking out, the fingers slick with blood.