A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1)

by Clara Coulson

Kim answered. Her voice was barely there. She’d be gone before this battle ended.

  Oh, that’s just what I need to top off my night, Tanner said. A ruptured spleen.

  After a short break against a small mausoleum to catch his breath, Tanner pushed off across the final stretch of the cemetery, the fence just twenty-odd feet away. Of course, since nothing in Tanner’s life as a newly woken revenant could be easy, a manticore emerged from behind a nearby statue before Tanner could slur out the wind spell.

  He was more frustrated than scared. Before today, he wouldn’t have thought you could run low on fear. But apparently you could if you faced enough nearly fatal bullshit in a very short period of time.

  Tanner spun toward the chimera and lifted Excalibur with both hands. Beyond play fights with stick swords when he was under the age of ten, Tanner had never used a sword in his life. Thankfully though, the power of Excalibur spoke for itself. The manticore wavered on whether or not to attack him, shifting back and forth on its paws.

  Not thankfully, the necromancer, who’d stalled Saul with another barrage of those dead birds and hopped the cemetery fence, spotted Tanner warding off the manticore and gave it a direct command to attack. Its will overridden by its creator, the beast lunged at Tanner, mouth wide open, bloody teeth on display.

  Tanner reacted on instinct, digging one heel into the damp soil to ground himself and swinging the sword with all his might. He gasped as the sword forcefully drew a substantial amount of energy from his soul, the blade shining bright gold as it came into contact with the manticore’s dead flesh.

  The blade cut through the creature’s neck like butter, and the head fell at Tanner’s feet while the body collapsed atop a short headstone. A moment later, both head and body caught fire at the point of contact, and the entire chimera was quickly reduced to ashes.

  Something flitted out of those ashes—something made of lightless shadow that Tanner vaguely recognized as a human soul—and disappeared into the night. Off, perhaps, to the afterlife it should have entered a long time ago.

  “Wow,” Tanner panted out, “that went a lot better than I anticipated.”

  “Did it now?”

  Tanner whipped around to find the necromancer had caught up to him. The man gripped a blood-streaked knife in one hand while the other hand glowed dark blue, and he glared with hateful eyes that stoked inside Tanner memories he’d first visited in half-forgotten dreams.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t the other brother,” the necromancer said. “I didn’t get a good look at you back at the construction site, but I don’t guess I should be surprised that both twins would butt into this operation. Although I could’ve sworn you didn’t have the Sight, and that you worked as something ludicrously mundane. A history teacher?”

  “Literature,” Tanner said. “I’m a literature professor. At Weatherford College.”

  The necromancer blinked, then let out a guttural laugh of disbelief. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. Of all the schools in this goddamn country, you chose to take a job here?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “That can’t be a coincidence, and yet, it can’t be a matter of brotherly bonds either. You and your brother have been estranged for more than a decade.”

  He knew, said a voice in Tanner’s head that didn’t belong to Kim Ballard. A voice of cold logic. He knew from the beginning that you and Saul each possessed one half of Merlin’s soul, which is why he’s so upset you’re here. He didn’t want you and Saul to be near each other…for the same reason he wanted to get Saul out of the way today.

  Because together, Tanner and Saul had the power to ruin this plot that had clearly been long in the making.

  Tanner gave the necromancer a crooked smile. “Guess it’s a matter of fate then, and fate is saying it doesn’t want you to win.”

  The necromancer snorted. “Even the strong force of fate can’t blow the coming storm off course. The power that sits on the throne in the shadows behind me, behind her”—he inclined his head toward the sorceress, who was once again fending off Montesano—“is greater than any you can imagine. Greater than Mordred. Greater than le Fay. And greater than Merlin. Especially given Merlin’s current…predicament.”

  Tanner threateningly adjusted his grip on the sword. “You failed to cast the full mass revenance ritual, and now the tide of the battle is turning. Your drones are all dead, you’re running out of chimeras, and as strong as you might be, there’s no way you can take down all the PTAD agents and the vampires before our backup arrives. You’re never going to finish the spell. You’ve already lost.”

  The necromancer flipped his knife around and pointed the tip at Tanner’s face. “All we need to attempt the spell a second time is that sword and three stupid kids. And you can’t keep that sword out of my hands, Professor Reiz. You might have a wealth of raw power, but you’re a whole revenance cycle out of practice. Me, on the other hand? I’ve been preparing for this since I was ten years old. I can kill you in a matter of seconds, if I wish.”

  “Then why haven’t you?” Tanner spit, then internally screamed at himself for the barb. Are you trying to egg him on, you moron? You should be working on an escape plan, not trading insults with a guy who can literally build monsters out of dead bodies.

  The necromancer’s eye twitched. “Because,” he said, with more than a touch of irritation, “I have orders not to kill you and your brother. Yet. You’re unfortunately just as important to this narrative as you are a detriment to its completion.”

  “Huh?”

  He dismissively waved his glowing hand. “Never you mind. Just give me the goddamn sword. Or I’ll beat the shit out of you until you let it go.”

  “The hell you will,” said a gruff female voice to Tanner’s right.

  Adeline Napier, covered in blood and graveyard mud, her eyes glowing bright purple, marched out of the darkness beneath a nearby tree, holding the severed head of a harpy. She tossed the head at the necromancer’s feet, then flipped him off. “I’ve been itching for a go at you this whole fight, and I’m not letting you out of my sight again until I’ve taught you a few necromancy lessons.”

  The necromancer scoffed. “You? Teach me? You’re a constrained necromancer now, Napier. The skill set you allow yourself to pursue is woefully limited. Once upon a time, when you were a wild and reckless young woman rampaging through the preternatural underworld on the front of raw necromantic power the likes of which the world hadn’t seen in centuries, then yes, perhaps you would’ve been a challenge. But you allowed the PTAD to neuter you, and threw all your potential away.”

  “See, that’s the problem with unconstrained necromancers.” Agent Napier hawked a glob of bloody spit onto the ground. “You think that since using human souls to power your creatures makes each one a great deal more robust than a necromantic creature powered by the creator’s life energy alone, everything you make is naturally superior to a constrained necromancer’s creations.

  “What you don’t grasp is that constrained necromancy pushes a necromancer to hone their skills to a sharp edge. Whereas unconstrained necromancers just rely on enslaved souls to do the heavy lifting. And that makes their work sloppy. Even work that, at first glance”—she flicked her gaze at the severed harpy head—“seems impressive, is often woefully unstable and easy to destroy.”

  “Ha.” The necromancer plucked two vials off his belt and mockingly waved them back and forth. “If you think I haven’t spent my whole life honing my skills, then you have another thing coming.”

  He popped the stoppers on the vials and tossed them over his shoulder. They landed between a tight group of graves, a family plot. A sludgy blue substance poured out of both, soaking into the ground. For a split second, Tanner could have sworn the blue globs formed tortured faces, but they were gone before he could get a better look.

  Throwing his hand back toward the family plot, the necromancer rapidly spoke an i
ncantation. Energy the same color as the sludge shot out of his hand and formed a ring around the grouping of graves. A few moments passed, and then two separate areas of earth within the ring began to tremble.

  As the trembling grew more violent, the ground bowed upward, until finally, a skeletal hand poked up out of the mud. Another followed in the second area. And then a foot popped out. And then another foot. And then…

  What on god’s green earth is happening here? Tanner thought, perplexed.

  The number of limbs protruding from the soil kept growing, so many clustered in close proximity that Tanner couldn’t figure out how all those different bodies even fit in the same space. Distressingly, his unspoken question was answered when a trio of skulls, partially fused together, burst out of the earth, followed by the monstrosity that was three different rib cages woven into each other.

  One of the sludgy globs—what Tanner now realized was an enslaved human soul—floated in the center of the mutated rib cage. The glob’s misshapen mouth was frozen in a silent scream.

  A second skeleton emerged from the other area, this one a combination of two adult bodies and one child body. The child’s skull stuck horizontally out of the side of one of the adult skulls, and as the monster rose on four bone legs, the other two dangled uselessly.

  This second skeleton monster clambered around the graves and came to stand beside the first.

  The skulls of each monster, their eye sockets filled with faint blue light, stared at Agent Napier. Their multitude of arms rose, fingers dancing in violent anticipation.

  Napier didn’t so much as blink. “You seem to know me by reputation, and yet you think I’m going to be impressed because you slapped a few skeletons together on the fly? Just because you can practice fast necromancy doesn’t mean you can practice good necromancy.”

  The necromancer snapped his fingers, and the skeletons went rigid, preparing to attack. “I’d like to see you do better.”

  A wry smile stretched across Napier’s face. “It would be my pleasure.”

  With a flourish, Napier lifted her arms, and a pulse of violet energy shot out of her palms. The pulse encompassed the entire cemetery, leaving in its wake a million tiny purple sparks that vanished when they touched the ground.

  Then Napier sucked in a breath so deep it should’ve burst her lungs and began to speak an incantation in a gravelly, distorted voice, a violet vapor rolling off her tongue. The violet sheen across her eyes grew brighter and brighter, until her irises were entirely eclipsed by the disconcerting glare.

  After the final syllable of the spell hit the air, a deathly silence fell over the cemetery, drowning out the sounds of battle. A silence so absolute that Tanner couldn’t hear his own heartbeat, even as a deep shiver ran down his spine, spurred by a feeling of intense wrongness. A feeling that nature, the order of things, had been ripped to shreds within the cemetery’s boundaries, and a gate to some hellish dimension was about to fly open and unleash monstrosities to which even the sable wight couldn’t compare.

  All at once, the total silence abated, and as the sound rushed back in, the earth quaked.

  At one corner of the cemetery, a skeletal hand emerged from the mud. At another, a fleshy skull, one mushy eye still in its socket, peeked out from behind a headstone. Near the front side of the fence, a heavy stone grave cover flew up and over, like a door that had been kicked open. And from the small mausoleum Tanner had skirted past just a few minutes prior came the sound of fingernails clawing at the gate.

  Everywhere that Tanner looked, things were moving inside the cemetery. Clusters of ancient skeletons rose up and shambled away from resting places that had been set in stone a century before. Half-decayed corpses left trails of wormy flesh as their empty eyes sought out the source of the power that had woken them from eternal slumber. Bodies that looked almost alive glided away from freshly dug graves, their sharp suits and pretty dresses gathering mud.

  There were over two hundred people buried in this cemetery, and Adeline Napier had raised them all with a single spell.

  Wide-eyed, lips flapping like a fish, the necromancer sputtered, “You can’t be serious. If you don’t infuse a corpse with a chained soul to allow it to follow instructions indefinitely, then you have to exert direct control over it at all times. There’s no way on this plane of existence—or any other—that you can competently command an entire army of bodies with constrained necromancy.

  “You can’t split your attention between that many mediums for more than a minute or two without suffering a psychic collapse. And even if you could, there’s no way you have the mental capacity to execute complex battle tactics with so many different bodies. Nobody can think that fast. Nobody can think that well. That’s beyond the limits of a human being, even an elevated revenant.”

  He barked out a harsh laugh. “You’re just bluffing, Napier.”

  Agent Napier stared him down with her shining violet eyes, smiled an awful smile, and said with a voice accompanied by the echo of screams, “You want to bet on that?”

  Then she snapped her fingers, and the corpse army attacked.

  Dozens of bodies flung themselves at the skeleton creatures, weighed them down until they fell over and then ripped them bone from bone. The rest of the many corpses rushed the necromancer, trying to subject him to the same fate. But his magic was potent and precise.

  He raised a shield to fend off the swiping hands and rapidly shot spheres of dark-blue power out of his fingers. Each time a sphere made contact with one of Napier’s corpses, the violet energy resonating within its skull fizzled out, and the corpse collapsed, rendered inert.

  However, Napier had so many bodies at her disposal that they were able to pile themselves on top of the shield, even as it tried to zap them off. Their collective weight gradually began to sink the shield into the soft mud.

  Seeing he was being pushed into his own grave, the necromancer shifted his focus away from his current spells and started to gather a great deal of energy, presumably intending to unleash a powerful wave that would knock all the corpses off the shield. What he didn’t realize was that Napier had been waiting for him to make that move.

  Once the bulk of his attention fell away from maintaining the integrity of the shield, Napier had a dozen corpses punch the same section of the shield with all their decomposed might, again and again in rapid succession until a crack formed in that spot. Then, with a final punch from all twelve at once, the crack imploded, and the entire shield destabilized.

  The shield vanished in a flash, and the necromancer was caught off guard as the corpses that had been on the shield came crashing down on top of him. Letting out a stream of obscenities, he lashed out with an unfinished force spell that only knocked half of them away.

  Still, he clambered back to his feet, face caked with mud and blood. As the remaining corpses clawed at his skin, he set his sights on their lord and master.

  Bloody spittle ran down his chin as he growled, “You think you’re so fucking clever, don’t you? But you are nothing compared to me. I was Mordred, knight and necromancer, centuries before you were even a twinkle in this universe’s eye. And I will not be brought down by the rotting shells of some pathetic mundanes”—he drove his foot into a writhing body, crushing its skull entirely—“controlled by an upstart bitch of a necromancer leashed like a dog by the feds.”

  He stretched out one hand, and from nowhere, a black sword materialized. The blade of the sword seemed to suck in ambient light, as if it was a singularity. The sharp edges shone like an event horizon, matter and energy trapped within.

  When the necromancer swung that blade, up and down, side to side, every corpse it touched fell still, the magic powering their locomotion stripped away in an instant.

  Agent Napier narrowed her glowing eyes at the energy-eating sword, then glanced at Tanner and mouthed, Run.

  And as the necromancer dashed forward, black blade hacking and slashing, cutting down everything in his path with abandon, run was exac
tly what Tanner did. He jumped the fence with a quick iteration of the wind spell, came down so hard on the other side that it almost knocked the wind out of him, and took off as fast as his tired legs would move.

  Through the woods. Away from the fight. Into the darkness of the stormy night.

  Behind him, several brutal magical battles reached a concurrent peak, putting such a strain on the spiritual fabric of the world that Tanner felt reality quiver inside his very soul.

  In between his painful breaths, Tanner mouthed a prayer for Saul and his allies. Whatever god is listening in, please, please let them win.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Saul

  The sorceress lashed out with a whirlwind of sharp ice, and Saul dove to the left. The edge of the whirlwind nipped at his ear, but he was already so riddled with cuts and bruises that he hardly noticed the additional pain. Bringing up his gun, he fired three times at the sorceress, whose last-ditch effort at erecting a shield had failed thirty seconds prior, when Jack had rammed it with his bloody head.

  It had collapsed. Jack had also.

  The wolf was spent, and the sorceress wasn’t far behind.

  She’d expended a great deal of energy setting up the sacrificial ritual, along with painstakingly breaking into the hexed box. While she was an elevated revenant and carried a vast amount of energy within her soul, her store still had a limit, and the constant bombardment from Saul, Bankroft, and Jack had nearly driven her past it.

  Landing in a controlled roll, Saul bounded back to his feet and used his momentum to sling another fireball at the sorceress. She responded by conjuring a strong air current to bat the fireball away. But before the fireball hit the fast-moving wall of air, Saul splayed his fingers, and the fireball split into five parts.

  Each part zipped off in a different direction and swung around the rippling air current. The sorceress had no choice but to take evasive action and leap away from the magic circle.