A Torment of Savages (The Reanimation Files Book 4) (22 page)

“True, but Ethan isn’t the only one I have with eyes on Jian. And my other friend is a very skilled fighter and has a sword. Made of ghost fire. Because he’s a ghost, you see.”

Tielle’s eyes widened. “You would not dare kill my son.”

“You’re right; I’m not a monster like you. But I could return the favor you dealt me to your son. Did you hear about all the injuries I sustained? Would you like to see your son laid up in the hospital? Unlike me, he doesn’t have a supernatural connection to a ghost in the Afterlife to help him recover as quickly as I did. Trust me, I would rather not hurt your son in any way.” I took a step closer to her and dropped my voice. “But I will. I will fight fire with fire, Tielle, and no matter what happens, just remember that you started this.”

Tielle stood there seething for a while longer before she spoke through gritted teeth.

“What…do…you…want…?”

“Oh, it’s very simple,” I said. “I want the location of all the dead warlock bodies. Especially that of a warlock named Kyosuke Isarou.”

“The majority of the warlock bodies…are in New York.”

Each word seemed like it pained Tielle to say, and I knew she wanted to lash out at me. Only the knowledge that her son was being threatened was keeping her in check.

“Where exactly?” I asked.

“Beneath the Paranormal Library.”

“Great.” I started walking to the door. “I guess we should get a move on then.” I paused at the door when I saw that she hadn’t moved. I raised an eyebrow.

“My son,” she said tightly.

I pulled my phone out. “I’ll text Ethan and tell him to give it an hour and a half more.”

“That may not be enough time to find the body you’re looking for.”

“For your son’s sake, you better make sure it is.” I walked out of her office, and after a moment’s hesitation, she followed.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I made Tielle ride with me as opposed to driving separately to make sure she didn’t try anything. Needless to say, it was a rather uncomfortable car ride, but fortunately not a long one since the Paranormal Library was not far from the PCC. Once we arrived, Tielle indicated that we would not be going through the main entrance. She took us to the back through what looked like a service entrance—a narrow, non-descript gray door near the Dumpsters. Once inside a musty smelling hallway, we walked a short distance under flickering lightbulbs until Tielle stopped at a door. She fished out a ring of keys from her purse, found the right one, and when the door slid aside, another door was revealed. This time it was an elevator door. It contained a keypad, which Tielle used to type in a rather long code before the doors opened. With a frigid glance at me, she stepped inside and I followed suit. Once the doors slid shut, Tielle pressed one of the only two buttons there were to press. One to go down and one to go up.

“Why here?” I asked. Despite the modern keypad, the elevator was ancient and moved slowly, and I was beginning to realize that even with the slow descent it was a long ride. Just how far underground were we going?

“This Paranormal Library is the oldest in the country, the first one to be established,” Tielle said in a clipped voice. “It was built not only to house knowledge…but to keep secrets. After the events with the warlocks, their bodies were initially hidden in numerous places all over the world, but as time passed and the world developed, the witches realized that it wouldn’t be long before someone came across some of the bodies. Raze an old building, excavate an area to build on, and you might find a tomb of warlocks. So very slowly and over the course of several decades, most of the bodies were covertly moved here. Does that answer your question sufficiently?”

“It certainly does,” I replied smoothly. Her poisonous tone didn’t bother me. At the end of the day, despite my methods, I knew I was the one who was right.

“It is admirable the lengths you have chosen to go through for this,” Tielle said. Her voice was softer, but it was still hard. “With only a smattering of knowledge about what happened three hundred years ago, you decided to take on the task of righting an ancient wrong.”

“Ancient or not, it’s still wrong,” I said. “And there are wrongs still taking place, aren’t there? With the way you treat males who are born with dead magic.”

Tielle’s jaw tightened. Fact was fact. It was one thing to keep such a dark and terrible secret, and another to continue to feed into it.

“Be that as it may, don’t think for a second that the warlock hands are pristine and clean. That they did no wrong in their time.”

“Everyone does wrong. It doesn’t make what you did any more right.”

“For your sake, I hope this Kyosuke Isarou is worth your gallant efforts to unearth his body.”

I said nothing. I didn’t have to defend myself to Tielle when I was the one trying to do something good.

Finally, the elevator stopped and the door slid open. I had been wondering what I would find at the end of that long ride, but was not really prepared for what I saw.

The space was huge. Gigantic, ginormous, whatever word for really, really big that you could think of. The Library was massive, but I got the feeling that this underground space spread out from the library and probably spanned the next few blocks. And we were so far underground that we were way below the basement level of any other building in the area. Dull lights were strung along the stone walls, and I couldn’t imagine how not fun the task of getting electrical wiring down here must have been. Before electricity, many a candle surely met their end here.

It was spacious, but it was packed. With coffins. Or wooden boxes, rather. To me, coffins were made of glossy wood and were smooth and gleaming with nice hardware, but clearly the dead witches had seen no reason to lay the warlocks in anything other than a plain, pine box. And knowing how old these boxes were and the journey they’d been through to get here, their decrepit condition was understandable.

I shuddered. Tielle held herself still as she stared out over the sea of coffins, and even though I knew what I was coming to find, it was unnerving and creepy to look out and know that each and every one of these boxes held a body. It was worse knowing that many of them contained bones or decomposing bodies since Kyo said many dead warlock ghosts no longer existed. Still, a tinge of excitement went through me. Kyo’s body was here. Intact and still containing his magic. I just had to find it.

“Well, let’s get to it,” I said, walking forward.

“I told you an hour and a half would not be enough,” Tielle said. “We need more time; you have to tell Ethan to leave my son alone.”

“No service down here,” I said, waving my phone at her before shoving it in my back pocket again. “And I don’t want to waste time with that ridiculously long elevator ride. We have fifty minutes left. Best get to searching.” I glanced at the boxes I was closet to. “They have names on them, good.” What a relief. I would not have wanted this process to involve opening each box until I found Kyo.

Tielle moved like a wooden soldier over to a row of coffins and started to inspect the name tags. The light was dim, and a lot of the names were faded or obscured, so it wasn’t the easiest task. I took out my phone again and opened my trusty flashlight app. It helped with being able to decipher some of the more illegible names. As we searched, Tielle and I moved rows and rows apart, but I kept my eye on her. She very mechanically walked to a box, bent slightly to look at the name, then moved to another one.

My relationship with Tielle would likely never recover from this, and I didn’t want to think about how that would affect both my and her relationship with Micah, but it was what it was. She was a good ally to have and not someone I relished being enemies with, but there hadn’t been much choice left to me. Above all, I wanted to help Kyo, and I did what I had to do. Tielle wanted the dead witches’ secrets kept safe and she’d done what she had to do too.

I checked the time on my phone. Thirty minutes had passed. Twenty more to go. I was sure Tielle was as keenly aware of the time as I was. She’d started moving a little faster. My anxiety grew as I continued to search. I wanted to find Kyo’s body before the time was up. I didn’t want Ethan to have to spill the beans to Jian. At the end of the day, turning his world upside down and messing up his relationship with his mother wasn’t what I was after.

As I’d been searching, I’d noted that many of the names were not in English, which made sense because the dead warlocks had fallen all over the world. It had woven a nervous thread into me that grew when I came across a section of coffins where the names were written in Japanese. My heart battled between soaring and sinking. Kyo had been captured while in Japan, and I was sure his body would be in one of these boxes. The only problem was that I had no idea how Kyo’s name was written in Japanese. My hindsight was kicking me straight up the ass for not ever asking Kyo that, but it had never crossed my mind that I’d need to know that in order to find his body.

That didn’t mean the end of the road of course. It just meant I now had to go about this the not-fun way. Open each coffin until I found Kyo. I steeled myself and stepped up to the first box.

It revealed a skeleton lying in the remains of what looked like a kimono. Within the skeleton’s rib cage I saw a dull rune. It was probably the rune that had been used to connect the warlock’s magic to the witch that had been siphoning it. I felt a pang of sadness go through me but had to quickly swallow it down and move to the next box. I didn’t have time to dwell on the unfair fate that had befallen these men. I had to hurry up and find the body of the one warlock I could still help.

Ten more coffins revealed either bones or bodies in various state of decay, which was an unwelcome assault on my nose and almost had me throwing my guts up several times. I managed to keep the nausea internal as I continued to look, moving through the next fifteen coffins and finally coming across a body. It wasn’t Kyo’s though. The rune lying on the middle-aged man’s chest was glowing. This warlock’s ghost was still in the In Between, and some dead witch was making the most of his magic. My determination to put a stop to this grew. I closed the coffin and kept looking, finding more bones, decay, and intact bodies until…

Kyo.
I couldn’t help the ripple of shock and excitement that went through me when I finally opened the coffin that contained Kyo’s body. He looked exactly like his ghost did, and wore exactly what his ghost wore, but this body was tangible without needing energy runes. He didn’t look like a corpse; he looked like he was asleep. My excitement grew. I looked up and around. I had been keeping track of my location among the rows of bodies so I would know exactly where Kyo was. I was about fifty rows deep and his was the fourth coffin in this line. I exhaled a huge sigh of relief and couldn’t help but smile. I had done it. I had found Kyo’s body.

Now to find some way to get it out of here and reunite it with the ghost that belonged in it. That would be the tricky part and would no doubt involve Tielle’s further co-operation.

Speaking of Tielle…I looked around again and frowned. I had gotten so engrossed in looking for Kyo, especially when I got to the Japanese coffins, that I had lapsed on keeping my eye on her. Not good. I did not see her in my immediate surroundings.

“This place isn’t only where we keep the warlocks, we keep a lot of things here.”

I quickly turned around and saw Tielle. She was emerging from the shadows of an area that branched off from where I was in an L-shape. She held up her hand and pressed a button on what looked like a small remote control, and I heard something in the darkness behind her move. Like a door, or several doors, were sliding open. Then I heard something that made my heart feel as though it had momentarily stopped.

“You deserve this for threatening my son,” Tielle said. “I am going to make sure he’s safe. Then maybe I will come back for you.” Tielle ran off to the elevator, and being that I was no fool, I started to run in that direction too. Only I was met by an obstacle. Coming at me full speed with gnashing teeth and hungry snarls, were about half a dozen Savages.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The first thing I did was look for Micah. He wasn’t among them. The second thing I did was reach into my bag while I back peddled away and pull out the last vial of immobilizing rune powder I had. I cursed myself for not bringing more, knowing there was an ongoing Savage threat. I opened the vial and flung out the contents just as two Savages leaped for me. As soon as the powder touched them, they dropped to the ground. They continued to snarl and hiss at me though. Dropping those two was only the tiniest of victories, because there were still four of them on my ass. The coffins were making it hard to run fast since I had to remain on a path and take care not to trip, so I quickly maneuvered my way out from the coffins. I tried to run for the elevator, but a Savage launched itself on me and dragged me to the ground. He did not hesitate to try and snap my neck, however another Savage seemed upset that she wasn’t the one to get the prize and flung him off me before trying her own luck with killing me. I rolled out of the way and was back on my feet before she could tear me apart.

But I didn’t get far. Four against one just weren’t odds that were going to work in my favor. Two of them grabbed me, one each arm, and I soon found myself being mercilessly pulled in opposite directions. I was certain I was only moments away from having both arms ripped off.

One of the Savages finally yanked me away from the other, but the momentum caused me to slam into her and we both went crashing down.

My dead magic was reacting. This close to this many Savages, it was like a savage thing itself. I didn’t have time to think this through, to relive what happened with Brian and how it had made me feel, to go to war with the ethics of it and what kind of person it made me. I would not win against half a dozen Savages with punches and kicks. There was only one thing I could do.

I rolled off the Savage woman and yanked off the rune bracelet, having no time to take it off properly. Then I dropped the shields that held the dead magic back. It flew out of my body and slammed into the Savages, even the immobile ones. The ones on their feet got knocked down. With my dead magic deep inside into their bodies, the Savages were jerking around as the dead magic attached to the darkness that was inside them.