The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

I was beginning to worry that the link wasn’t working, that he couldn’t hear me, when the place on my forehead where he’d mashed his thumb began to tingle. The sensation spread over my body. Any moment I expected to find myself back in the basement. But as quickly as the sensation came, it began to fade. Chicory’s voice echoed through my thoughts.

  Go back to the place where you arrived.

  The forest? I asked, still racing down the stairs. Why not here?

  The barrier is thinner there.

  But I destroyed the book—there shouldn’t be a barrier!

  His voice broke in and out, but I caught something about the dissolution process taking time. The tingling sensation disappeared from my forehead. A pressure remained behind my eyes and deep in my ears, but those had persisted since he’d first stamped me.

  Chicory? I tried again.

  No answer.

  Great, so I was going to be escaping the palace and re-crossing the plain of wargs with the place on full alert. I grunted out a curse. The hunting spell had shown me the shortest route in; retracing my steps seemed the surest bet for getting back out. If I could remember the way.

  I emerged from the staircase, raced down a corridor, and found myself in the pillared room where my mother had been executed and I had slain the two creatures. It still smelled of burned blood.

  I was halfway across the room when a robed figure filled the doorway ahead of me. “Stop,” he commanded. Recognizing his voice, I skidded to a halt, heart pounding in my ears. A gold mask glistened from the figure’s hood as he strode forward and drew his wand. Marlow had escaped the altar room, evidently, but how in the hell had he beaten me down here?

  The mask turned from one side to the other, searching for me.

  “Vigore!” I shouted, thrusting my sword toward him.

  A storm of energy burst from the blade. The Death Mage sliced his wand through the air, and the force broke to either side of him, shaking the walls. I dug in my pocket for the remaining lightning grenade as he continued his confident advance.

  Let’s see how you like a face full of electricity, pal.

  “Attivare!” I called and winged the grenade at him.

  “Ghioccio,” he answered, slicing his wand again. The magical grenade thudded to the ground at his feet, encased in a snowball.

  I summoned a shield around me and began to search for another long-range weapon when I remembered that with the absorbing properties of the staff, the Death Mage couldn’t hurt me. Conversely, with the magic cleaving properties of the sword, I could hurt him.

  Badly.

  Still, Chicory’s warnings about Whisperer magic stole through my thoughts. I couldn’t just run at him headlong. I eased beside the charred pillar and adjusted my sweaty grip on the sword.

  “Show yourself,” Marlow demanded, coming nearer. “Who are you?” Though the mage could sense me, the robe was still cloaking my identity. His footsteps came closer and closer until they were almost beside me.

  Someone who thinks you’re a lowlife piece of shit, I thought, and stepped out. The sword glinted as I put everything into my swing. The blade disappeared into the neck of his gown and came out the other side. Only there had been no resistance. And the mage was still standing.

  What the…?

  “Ah!” he called triumphantly.

  In a blink, he was several feet from where he’d been standing, black energy curling around the end of his wand. An illusionist? He snapped the wand toward me. The bolt collided into my shield, knocking me backward. I recovered my footing and thrust the sword at his torso. Once more, the blade disappeared into his gown as though it were thin air.

  Marlow was suddenly on my other side, fresh black bolts cracking from his wand. They slammed into my shield one after the other, the second bolt lifting me from my feet. I landed against a pillar with a grunt, sword and staff falling from my grasp. The shield shattered into sparks around me.

  No, I thought, pawing for my weapons.

  The skirt of the mage’s black gown swished toward me. He spoke a Word. Vines broke through my mother’s ashes in the floor cracks and climbed around me, binding me to the pillar. Before the cinching tendrils could crush the air from my lungs, I drew in a breath.

  “Resping—”

  A vine wrapped my neck, choking off the Word. The Death Mage stopped in front of me. I raised my eyes to that awful gold mask with the empty eyes and the mouth set in a frown. The mage was holding his wand at shoulder level, ready to cast again. I struggled, but the vines were like steel cables, growing thicker. I knew how this would end. Any second, flames were going to burst around me. In my peripheral vision, I could see other black-robed figures drifting into the room to witness my execution.

  At least I destroyed your damned book, I thought. And when the Order gets their hands on you…

  But the Death Mage seemed to hesitate, head tilted to one side.

  The vines had torn the robe of John the Baptist apart, and I was visible to him now. He turned and said something to the others, his voice taking on the gargling quality from earlier. A pair of mages came forward, one lifting my sword from the ground, the other my staff.

  Marlow turned back to me. “Everson Cro—”

  A bright fireball exploded against his side, blasting him across the room. The other mages let out choking sounds as their robes began to strangle them. I cut my eyes toward the sound of footsteps. My mentor was running toward me, corduroy jacket flapping at his back.

  Chicory!

  “I decided it would be easier to just come myself,” he said in a pant. “And with the book destroyed…” He waved his wand, and the vines around me withered. I broke my arms free from the pillar and tore the tendril from around my neck. I then began to kick my legs free.

  Meanwhile, Marlow had recovered and gained his feet. Chicory turned and hurled another fireball at him. Marlow repelled it with a slice of his wand, but a third Chicory fireball knocked him back with a grunt, flames flashing off his gold mask. Marlow’s magic might have been powerful, but it was fading, and Chicory was throwing haymakers.

  I struggled to break the last of the vines from my legs so I could help him.

  Marlow incanted quickly. Tendrils of dark magic writhed from his wand like tentacles and sprung out to encircle Chicory. The energy swallowed him, blacking out his light. Panic rose in my throat. But in a blinding flash of magic, Chicory blew the tentacles apart.

  He and Marlow circled one another, wands raised.

  “You won’t defeat us,” Marlow said.

  “You’ve already lost,” Chicory replied matter-of-factly.

  Light and dark magic exploded from their wands in a savage exchange. The other magic-users were still struggling against their throttling robes with both hands. I spotted the one who had taken my sword. White hair spilled down either side of a moldy face. A woman?

  The sword, fallen from her grasp, had landed beside her. As I scrambled toward it, the woman’s robe released her neck, and she drew a ragged breath. Marlow must have broken the strangulation spell. I lunged for the sword, but the woman grabbed the handle first.

  Crap.

  She shouted something in her gargling tongue as she swung the blade toward me. I jumped away, but too slowly. A force blast numbed my right side and knocked me the length of the room. I landed on my back and skidded across the floor several more feet. When I came to a stop, I lifted my head. The woman was rushing Chicory from behind.

  I stretched a hand toward her and shouted, “Vigore!”

  But the energy that stormed through my prism died inside me, stolen by the magic-cleaving power of my own sword. The woman closed in on my mentor and drew back the blade.

  “Chicory!” I cried.

  But among the detonations of magic, he couldn’t hear me. I recoiled as she drove the blade forward, my mind supplying the crunch of flesh and bone as the blade disappeared into his back.

  That didn’t just happen, I thought. That couldn’t have just happened.

&nbs
p; Chicory sagged, his wand clattering from his grasp. The blinding magic around him blinked out, and the room fell dim. The woman withdrew the sword, and I watched in horror as my mentor collapsed to the ground.

  Chicory? I called through our rapport.

  But the connection was severed, the pressure behind my eyes and inside my ears releasing like a dying breath. The Death Mage looked down at Chicory, then over at me. I imagined the smile behind his mask. The same smile he’d worn while watching my mother burn.

  I stood slowly. “Think that’s funny?”

  The room wavered with odd colors, like the ones I’d seen in the dream of the forest. I took a drunken step forward. I would die too, but not before ripping the mask away and beating his grinning face to a pulp.

  Marlow sent the Order her ashes in a trash bag, I remembered Chicory saying, referring to my mother.

  “You think that’s fucking funny?” I asked more loudly, breaking into a shambling run.

  Marlow’s frowning mask continued to watch me. The colors of the room grew more intense and discordant. They spiraled around, making my head pound. I was no longer aware of the other magic-users, couldn’t even see them. The room seemed to have been reduced to a crazy, spiraling tunnel, Marlow at its far end, but growing larger, getting closer.

  “I’ll show you funny,” I promised.

  The pounding swelled in my head. I staggered and willed myself upright again. I was going to reach him, dammit … was going to tear the mask away … was going to pound his…

  And then Marlow was right in front of me, uttering something I couldn’t understand.

  With a clawed hand, I stretched for his gold mask and collapsed into blackness.

  8

  I was in a dark forest, running for my life, but everywhere I turned, there were the black-robed creatures, their fish eyes staring, mouths opening and closing, scimitars slashing. Everything hurt. God, everything hurt, down to the marrow in my bones. But I had to keep running, had to find the place in the forest where Chicory would bring me back. Most of all, I had to escape the whispers.

  Everson … erson … son.

  Sweating and shaking, I doubled over and vomited up a green bile that seemed to come from a deep and evil pit inside me. I willed myself to stand and run, to push my way past the fungus-coated trees and festering pools where wretched things lived, past the jabbering, stabbing creatures, none of which seemed to end.

  But every so often they would end, and I’d find myself in a clearing, and I would fall onto my back, succumbing to the pain and exhaustion. My mother would be speaking over me, wiping my face with a clean, cool cloth, while sun shone down through her hair, turning it a radiant white.

  “Help me,” I would mumble. “Help me to the place where I can go back.”

  She would only smile and continue to speak in what I realized was a chant as soft and melodic as a lullaby. But as the chant carried me into sleep, I would find myself back in the dark forest, running for my life, trying desperately to evade the evil creatures and the whispers.

  Especially the whispers.

  Everson…

  I cracked open my swollen eyelids. I was on my back, tucked into a bed of white sheets. A light dew of sweat coated my body. When I swallowed, my stomach felt as tight as a stretched drum.

  “Everson,” the person repeated.

  My head swam when I rotated it. A woman was rising from a chair to my left, the sunlight through a window behind her infusing her hair with hazy white light. Morning light. I fought to think back.

  The forest, the creatures…

  No, that hadn’t been real. I’d been dreaming. Or more accurately, nightmaring.

  I strained to remember how I’d gotten here. The evil ceremony, Lich’s book in flames, my confrontation with the Dark Mage. The horrible image of a blade—my blade—crunching through Chicory’s back. And then my effort to reach the mage, to rip the mask from his face, only to fail, to fall.

  Had I died? Had the experience in the forest been some kind of purgatory? Was this my… I squinted at the woman. …mother?

  “You’re awake,” she said in a strong, maternal voice.

  I peered around the small room. Walls of handsome stonework shone white up to a high ceiling. Colorful rugs covered the floor. I’m not in the palace anymore, that’s for damn sure.

  I looked back at the woman. “What is this place?” I croaked.

  “It’s an infirmary,” she said.

  “Infirmary?”

  “We had to sedate you for several days while the poison was purged from your system.”

  Though fresh air breezed through the room’s open windows, I picked up an odor of illness. I remembered the vomiting from the dream—or whatever that had been. Poison, she’d said. I struggled again to think back.

  “What happened to the Death Mage? Those … those creatures. How did you get me out of there?”

  “We’ll answer all of your questions, but first you need to eat.”

  I watched her as she stepped from the sunlight and walked around the bed. Without the backdrop of light, her face aged, her cheekbones becoming more stark. The whiteness of her hair had not been an effect of the sunlight, I saw. This woman was older than my mother would have been.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “My name is Arianna.” Moving with strength and grace, she arrived at a table on the other side of the bed and picked up a bowl with a spoon inside it. She was the woman I had seen in my feverish sleep. “I knew your mother,” she said. “Can you sit?”

  I pushed weakly with my arms and scooted up until I was sitting against the wooden headboard, dizzied by the effort and what the woman had just said. “Knew my mother? When?”

  “Before you were born,” she answered, handing me the bowl. Inside was a broth that held what looked like a suspension of grains and minced herbs. A rich scent drifted up when I stirred them, making my stomach quiver with hunger. “In fact, I helped deliver you.”

  I stopped stirring the broth. “What?”

  “In this same room,” she said. “More than thirty years ago.”

  I looked around as my mind crunched the numbers. If Marlow was my father and I was one year old when he killed my mother, I would have been born while my mother was infiltrating the…

  “You’re a member of the Front,” I said coldly, setting the bowl back on the table.

  Arianna’s white hair shifted as she straightened. I gauged the length. It was the same hair as on the magic-user who had seized my sword and driven it through Chicory’s back. I incanted quickly while pushing myself out the other side of the bed. An invisible field blocked me.

  “Yes,” Arianna admitted, “but the Front is not what you’ve been led to believe.”

  Her voice propagated through the air in calming waves. Whisperer magic, I thought, recalling what Chicory had told me. Making one see what isn’t there, believe what isn’t real. I was still in the palace, then, magic worming through my mind, my senses. I stared around. The stone walls weren’t really as clean and white as they appeared, but oozing with black gunk, the air swirling with poisonous spores. I inhaled sharply, trying to catch a whiff of them. And this Arianna was no woman, but a mold-covered creature, the killer of my mentor.

  “Vigore!” I shouted, thrusting a hand toward her.

  A surprising charge erupted from my fingers only to slam into a cocoon of energy around the bed. The transparent shield shuddered as it absorbed the blast. When the shield stilled, Arianna remained where she had been.

  “I know this is confusing,” she said, no hint of scorn or menace in her voice.

  I hammered the shield several times until my arms tired and then tried to break through with another force invocation. The shield felt even stronger than the last time, powerful magic maintaining it. I sagged back against the bed, my body trembling, hair matted with sweat.

  Arianna, who had looked on compassionately while I struggled, said, “We didn’t expect you to understand. Not right away. Y
our confinement is only temporary. We’re going to explain everything.”

  A soothing breeze blew through the windows and washed over me.

  An illusion, I had to remind myself. All one big goddamned illusion.

  “There’s nothing to explain,” I said. “You’re a clan of sickos and murderers. But guess what? Your book’s history. If Chicory got through, so can the Elders. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “There are no more Elders,” a man’s voice said.

  I turned toward the lean figure striding into the room. He looked to be late middle aged, strands of silver streaking through his dark, shoulder-length hair. He took a position beside Arianna. Intelligent gray eyes looked down from a handsome face etched with faint scars.

  “There is no Order,” he finished.

  “Keep telling yourself that,” I scoffed.

  “Where are they, then?” he asked, looking around. “It’s been almost five days since your battle with Marlow.” Arianna whispered something to him, but he showed a staying hand, his gaze remaining fixed on mine. “Hmm?”

  I incanted quietly, building up my prism, my capacity. I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but my mind had clearly been screwed with. That’s what the feverish dreams had been about—not detoxing, as Arianna claimed, but being poisoned by Whisperer magic.

  “Rivelare,” I whispered, attempting to disrupt the veil, to peer past it to the black rot and evil from earlier. But everything remained horrifyingly pristine. Through the open windows, birds tittered merrily.

  “Ask yourself this,” the man said. “Have you ever seen a representative of the Order?”

  I stared at the ceiling. Don’t listen to him.

  “Sure, there was Lazlo, your first mentor,” he said. “And Chicory. But other than those two? Well, how about a fellow magic-user, then? An organization that goes back several millennia, vast, branching lineages—it seems you would have been introduced to at least one or two others, no?”

  “They’re out there,” I said defiantly.

  “But the Order keeps everyone compartmentalized, is that it?”

  “Connell, he needs to rest,” Arianna said.