“I’ve seen what they are now. The witch and her knight. To hunt the witch, I must become the witch. And that means I require a knight. Will you be mine?”
“A knight? Y-you mean like…like a samurai?”
Savannah tilted her head. Her neck cracked. A strip of bandage fell away, baring a single eye. Wide, mad, and black as midnight.
“Sure,” she said.
He swallowed, hard.
“I guess I can do that.”
She waved her clawed hand. He fell backward as the cell door swung open, unlocking on its own. She brushed past him without a word, her walk jittery as her bones shifted and clacked under her skin.
Interlude
The floor of the interrogation room rumbled again. Engines, thought Carolyn. We’re on a ship. Across from her, the interrogator sat in sullen silence. It had been a while since he’d taken any notes.
“So,” Carolyn said, “let’s tally up the scorecard. Vanessa and Marie fled New York with a price on their head and hunters on their trail. Specifically, the NYPD, the FBI, the black-bag government agents posing as the FBI, Senator Roth and a handful of bounty hunters from hell—literally—and…you people, via your not-at-all-terrible decision to send the reborn Savannah Cross and her murderous frat-boy samurai henchman. Oh, and Mr. Smith, Esquire, as their personal cleaning service. For as long as that partnership lasted, anyway.”
The interrogator stared down at his notes.
“So they knew about the cycle of reincarnations at that point,” he said. “But they didn’t know why.”
“No. That came next, when they met me. But I’m jumping ahead. They had a few ordeals to face before I came into their lives, and more than a few bullets to dodge. Again, literally. They didn’t know it at the time, but their final destination was on the other side of the country. Las Vegas, Nevada. Two thousand, five hundred miles on the open road, with the entire occult underground and the authorities gunning for their heads.”
“How did they survive?”
Carolyn didn’t answer right away, suddenly cagey.
“Magic,” she said. “You know, I’ve been talking for hours and my throat isn’t what it used to be. Before I tell you about the road trip…perhaps you could get me a glass of water? Maybe with a little bit of lemon?”
He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not concerned about your comfort.”
“Will you be concerned when I can’t talk anymore? You can torture me all you want, a sore throat is a sore throat.”
He pushed his chair back.
“Torture,” he said as he rose, “is still an option.”
“Have I spoken a single lie?”
He stared down at her. His hooked nose twitched.
“Stay put.”
She held up her cuffed wrists as he walked past her. “And I’m going to go where, exactly?”
The interrogation room door slammed. She heard a deadbolt slide shut.
She tugged a pendant from the neck of her sweater. It was a small antique key on a brass chain. The tip of her thumb rubbed against its ornate curves. It might have looked like a nervous habit. Or a gesture of prayer.
“All right,” she breathed, “let’s get to work.”
Sixty-Four
Nessa and Marie sat in a greasy spoon on the Jersey side of the Hudson River. The aroma of scrambled eggs and black coffee hung thick in the warm morning air. Marie could see the span of the George Washington Bridge from the diner window. And beyond it, the spires of her city. Her home.
“We’ll come back again,” Nessa told her. “Someday. We’ll find a way.”
Marie shifted in her seat and winced. She was a mess of bruises, with a big purple splotch on her jaw, and her ribs were taped tight under her blouse. The pain she could live with. She would heal.
“Did we break the cycle?” she asked Nessa. “Are we free?”
Nessa glanced to the window. She shook her head.
“I don’t think it’s that easy. If it was, we—I mean, one of our previous us-es—would have done it already.”
“So what do we do?”
Nessa sipped her coffee.
“We go west. You remember what I told you about magic, Marie? When you let it into your life, it changes everything. Your old world is gone forever and there’s no going back.”
Marie nodded. She pushed hash browns around on her plate. She couldn’t find the appetite to lift her fork.
“Well,” Nessa said, “your new world—our new world—is right outside that door. I’ve read rumors, in my books. America has secrets of its own. On the highways, the back roads, in small towns and big cities. There are legends, mysteries, wonders. Terrors.”
“Magic,” Marie said.
“The mirror-Nessa said that if we’re going to have any shot at surviving this, we have to find Wisdom’s Grave. The wellspring of magic. So let’s go and find it.”
“Sounds like an adventure,” Marie said.
Nessa gave her a lopsided smile and a mischievous wink.
“You’re damn right it does.”
They set off hand in hand and hit the open road. New York City faded in the rearview mirror. Marie waved it goodbye with a pang of heartache. Still, she believed in Nessa. And if she said they’d come back home someday…they’d come home. For now, the witch and her knight had a new quest, and the fight of a lifetime ahead of them.
The fight of a thousand lifetimes.
That was all right. Marie didn’t mind a good fight. And as she watched the warm spring breeze catch Nessa’s hair in its fingers, the glow of the sun on her pale face, she knew exactly what she was fighting for. The odds were grim, but that didn’t matter.
They had each other. They couldn’t lose.
Afterword
The Wisdom’s Grave trilogy was born from a happy collision of ideas. When I began work on the four-book Revanche Cycle back in 2014, I fell in love with a certain traumatized bounty hunter and the owl-masked witch on her trail. I wasn’t the only one, it turned out, as Mari and Nessa quickly became reader favorites. I didn’t want their time to end with the series; I believed they could carry an entire story on their own, given the chance, I just had to figure out how.
At the same time, I was starting to unravel the cosmic aspects of my ongoing urban-fantasy series, laying clues about a handful of people who had been cursed to continually reincarnate and relive their tragic stories again and again. An idea sparked. I drew the connection, spent an entire day frantically scribbling notes and ideas down, and laid a foundation. Three years later, here we are, and our (anti)heroines’ adventure has just begun. As I write this, on a cold winter morning with my supply of coffee looking dangerously low, I’m a fair distance into the manuscript for book two. It’s tentatively titled Detonation Boulevard, and I can tell you there’s one heck of a wild ride ahead. I hope you’ll join us for it!
In any event, thank you so much for coming this far. I’m grateful you took the time, and I hope I was able to keep you entertained. Of course, if I did, I didn’t do it alone. I have to give thanks to my editor, Kira Rubenthaler; my cover designer, James T. Egan; Susannah Jones, my amazing audiobook actress; and Maggie Faid, my steadfast assistant. Maggie is always a great help, but this time around she was able to lend her psych background to several scenes and become Dr. Cassidy’s real life stand-in. Susannah also gets an extra heaping spoonful of thanks for showing this wide-eyed traveler around New York City, and introducing me to many of the real-world locales that appeared in the story. (If you go to Kashkaval Garden, heed Nessa’s wisdom and order the tapas.)
And special thanks to the bartender at Lantern’s Keep — I’m so sorry I didn’t get your name! — who stepped up when I needed him most. I told him, “I’m looking for a signature drink for a West Village socialite who might be planning to kill her husband.” Without missing a beat, he said, “I’ve got you covered.” One minute later, I was sipping a Bobby Burns with a cherry garnish.
Want to know what’s coming next? Head over to http://www.craigscha
eferbooks.com/mailing-list/ and hop onto my mailing list. Once-a-month newsletters, zero spam. Want to reach out? You can find me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/CraigSchaeferBooks, on Twitter as @craig_schaefer, or just drop me an email at [email protected].
Also by Craig Schaefer
The Revanche Cycle
Winter’s Reach
The Instruments of Control
Terms of Surrender
Queen of the Night
The Daniel Faust Series
The Long Way Down
The White Gold Score
Redemption Song
The Harmony Black Series
Harmony Black
Red Knight Falling
Glass Predator
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