Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9)

by Brad Magnarella

  “Carlos’s?”

  I didn’t like it any more than she did, especially since Carlos still considered me a terrible choice for his sister and her son. His main issue was and remained the extra danger I introduced to their lives. And now here I was, suggesting he look after them because of the extra danger I’d introduced to their lives.

  “That box I brought home yesterday?” I said. “Gretchen thinks it’s connected to some sort of cult worship for the Greek god Hermes. Someone took it from my lab, and it wasn’t Claudius.”

  “Someone got into the apartment?”

  “I can’t think of another explanation.”

  “You don’t think Claudius took it and just forgot?”

  “I already asked him, and he has this … biological system for working out how many times he translocates. He says he only came for it the one time and the box wasn’t there. No one else would have touched it.”

  Vega fell silent. “I’ll arrange for Tony to spend the week with his cousins,” she said at last, meaning her other brothers, who lived in the Bronx. That was some relief; those three had no problems with me.

  “But I’m not leaving,” she finished.

  “Ricki, if someone got into my lab, the apartment isn’t safe.”

  “Which is why I’m not leaving you there alone. We’ll do whatever we need to do, but it’s going to be together. This marriage thing isn’t a one-way street, buddy. I took the same vows as you.”

  “And I thank God for that every day, but we need to—”

  “But nothing. That’s it. If you’re staying, I’m staying.”

  What could I say? “Then I should probably solve this case.”

  “You will,” she said, her voice relaxing a little. “You always do. Let me know what you need from the NYPD. More importantly, tell me what you need from me.”

  Amid the wreckage of my fallen theories, I thought about Gretchen’s reminder that I listen to my magic. It had already shown me the flag in Bear Goldburn’s photo, which Vega learned belonged to an explorer’s club in the city.

  “What time is that presentation at the Discovery Society?” I asked her.

  18

  The medical examiner’s was located in the Kips Bay neighborhood. Bree-yark dropped me off and went in search of a late lunch. He offered to bring me back something, and I agreed, not considering what my appetite would be like when I finished.

  By the time I arrived in the cold lab, portions of Bear’s stomach contents had been separated into two metal bowls—one holding solids, the other a dark liquid. Even though I was double-masked, the smell hit me in the throat.

  Hoffman must have told the examiner I needed to work in private because after confirming I had everything I needed, she disappeared from sight.

  I pushed the bowl of solids aside and stared at the liquid for several moments. I was much less confident than when I’d last talked to Hoffman. At the time, I believed that whatever Bear had chugged in Cole’s car contained a magical hallucinogen. But after Vega’s updates, I didn’t know what to believe. The entire timeline of Bear’s final day seemed a mad patchwork of fact and fantasy.

  Maybe this’ll clear things up somehow.

  Signing into the air, I conjured my cubbyhole and pulled out an alchemy kit. I then went to work, titrating the stomach liquid into a row of glass tubes and adding solutions from various dropper bottles.

  On the fourth tube, the liquid began to smoke.

  “Well, hello there, lovely,” I whispered, lifting the tube to eye level.

  The particular solution was meant to react with rose oil, a base ingredient in certain potions. A small nugget was taking shape at the tube’s bottom. Enough to cast on?

  I replaced the tube in its holder and quickly built a casting circle. Using surgical tweezers, I retrieved the crumbly pink nugget and set it at the circle’s center. A couple incantations later, and my cane was inhaling the oil’s essence.

  The ingredient may have been common, but once rendered in a potion, it held the caster’s signature. If there was any more potion in the city, my hunting spell would locate it. We’d have our perp.

  My cane wiggled toward the stomach liquid. I crossed the room away from the work station, oriented the spell to the outside, and waited for a direction. My cane responded by going still.

  Frowning, I rechecked it. The essence was there, but it was too weak, dammit. The hunting spell wasn’t going to give me a direction. Like a transponder, it would only tell me if the potion were close. I tested to see how close by pacing slowly back toward the work station. When my cane wiggled again, I eyed the distance.

  In a city of roughly three hundred square miles, I only had to come within fifteen feet of the potion for a hit.

  Hoffman was going to love that.

  “So what now?” Bree-yark asked as we pulled in front of my apartment.

  I peered toward my fourth floor loft and sighed. “I start building golems.”

  The thought alone exhausted me. My plan was to shape and animate four lumps of clay—about all I could manage—infuse them with the hunting spell, and deploy them throughout the city. It was a long shot, but I’d promised Hoffman. Maybe one would get lucky, I told him. Which was about as likely as one getting a Broadway audition.

  “Need any help?” Bree-yark asked.

  “It’s nice of you to offer, but besides being a one-wizard job, it’s super tedious. And you’ve helped me a ton already.”

  “Well, call if you head out again.”

  “What are you going to be doing?”

  “Me?” He made a popping sound with his lips. “Dunno, might go catch a movie.”

  “You know, Tony is at Mae’s. I’m sure he’d love to see you.”

  “They’re up there, huh?” By the way he said it, I could tell he was buying time to think up an excuse.

  “What is it?”

  “I might’ve told Mae I was gonna be busy all day. She called this morning and asked if I wanted to join her at your place,” he explained. “I was about to say yes, but I got the shakes. It’s the damned proposal thing.”

  “Is that why you came looking for me?” I asked, remembering how he’d intercepted me at the college. “To give yourself an excuse to be doing something else?”

  He peered at me sidelong. “Maybe.”

  “What about Operation Rip?” I said. “You can’t propose to her out of the blue if you keep avoiding her.”

  “I know. I’ve just got more to think about now.”

  When he glanced at me guiltily, I said, “No. Not Gretchen.”

  “She looked good, right?”

  “Bree-yark, listen to me. This is your panic talking. It’s casting around for any excuse to bail you out, and right now it’s seized on your ex. Sure, she looked … better, but it’s like lipstick on a rhino. She’s horrible. The only reason she’s making any effort right now is because she knows if you marry Mae, she’ll never control you again. I hate to be that blunt, but it’s the truth, and I know you know that.”

  “Yeah,” he allowed. “But if she and that guy get serious…”

  “Let them! You’re way too good for her. Promise me you won’t talk to her, even if she comes looking for you.”

  He sighed. “I’ll promise if you promise to eat that.” He nodded at my wrapped hoagie. “It wasn’t cheap.”

  “Then you have my word,” I said, saluting him with the footlong sandwich.

  He laughed as I got out, but it sounded too shaky to be trusted.

  “No Gretchen,” I stressed.

  As I arrived at my door, I checked my watch. Mid-afternoon, which gave me three hours to build the golems and still have enough time to make it to the presentation at the Discovery Society, where Vega had reserved me a seat. To her credit, she wasn’t questioning my decision to pursue something apparently unrelated to Bear Goldburn’s murder, much less Sven’s attempt on my life. Like me, she was learning to trust my magic.

  I tuned into it now, asking if there were any
intruders or danger. Its motion changed, giving me a hard no.

  “Wow. Clarity.”

  After the day I’d had, I could have used those kinds of responses more often, but magic operated in its own dimension and on its own terms, beyond logic and intellect. A mage had to go to it, not vice versa. Despite my magic’s assurance, I scanned the frame before unlocking and opening the door. The lights were out and the curtains drawn, telling me Tabitha was having another one of her migraines.

  “You’re in luck,” I said, feeling for the dimmer switch. “I just stocked up on…”

  But where the switch should have been, my hand encountered crumbling drywall. As my eyes adjusted, the shapes that emerged from the darkness didn’t line up at all with my furniture arrangement.

  “Illuminare,” I called, sending up a ball of light.

  As the ball crackled and grew, I jerked my cane into sword and staff. My apartment was a flophouse. A pair of soiled mattresses lay among old couches and chairs that looked like they’d been carried up from the street. Holes and graffiti competed for wall space while garbage littered the floor. And the smell—sweet Moses!

  For a moment, my shocked brain tried to convince me I was in the wrong unit, but I’d just unlocked the door. I peered over a shoulder. Instead of the three bolts I’d installed a decade earlier, there was only one now, as well as a thick barrel bolt that was drawn. I shouldn’t have been able to open it from the outside.

  Okay, stop for a moment, I told myself. Think.

  Gretchen had been here earlier. Was this her idea of a joke?

  I activated and drank a neutralizing potion, then waited. As the magic took tingling effect, I expected the glamour to thin and my own apartment, with the framed photos Vega had hung that weekend, to return to form. Instead, I remained staring around a wasted, decrepit space that even the junkies appeared to have deserted. My invoked light, normally clean white, shone gritty overhead.

  “Hello?” I called. “Tabitha?”

  A whimper sounded from the back bedroom. Dropping the hoagie, I summoned a shield and strode behind my hovering ball of light. One way or another, I was going to get some damned answers.

  At my bedroom door, I peered over a king-sized mattress strewn with blankets. “Who’s here?”

  When another whimper sounded, I couldn’t tell whether it was human, animal, or other. But I pinpointed its source. Across the room stood my closet—only in this version, the folding doors were missing.

  Stepping to the right for a better angle, I sent my light forward. In the closet’s far corner, the light glimmered from two sets of eyes. They belonged to a young boy and girl. A dirty hand covered each of their mouths. In another step, I saw the woman huddled behind them, hugging them close. Her haggard eyes looked just as scared as theirs.

  Holy crap, a family lives here.

  In as soothing a voice as I could muster, I said, “It’s all right. I’m not here to hurt you. I just have a couple questions.”

  The children shrank, whimpering, against their mother. Her gaze darted to my right. I looked over as a figure rose. The man had been crouched behind a dresser. He was aiming a shotgun at my face.

  I spun from the room as the weapon discharged.

  “What in the actual fuck?” someone cried.

  When I stumbled to a stop, sunlight was slanting through the west-facing windows, and I was back in my apartment. Tabitha had risen on her divan, large eyes peering between me and the front door.

  “What happened?” I stammered, my heart still slamming in my chest.

  “You tell me,” she said, her hair puffed out. “I heard the bolts unlock, and the next thing I knew you were stumbling from your room like a drunken ogre. You frightened the hell out of me—and when I was in the middle of digesting my afternoon milk.” She rubbed her stomach. “Please don’t do that again, darling.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” I looked around, even craning my neck into the bedroom, to ensure I was really back. “I walked through the door, and the apartment, or at least this version of it, was gone. There were people here, and—”

  “More people?” Tabitha moaned.

  “Not here. At least not here here.”

  “I can’t pretend to understand or stay interested,” she said, lying back down. “As long as it’s just you and me, I’m content.”

  “And your contentment is all that matters,” I said thinly.

  “Thank you,” she sighed. “There’s hope for us yet, darling.”

  I returned to the outside hallway and repeated my earlier actions—unlocking the door, stepping through my defenses—but the apartment didn’t change. I looked down at where I’d dropped the hoagie, which would have been beside the coat rack. The sandwich wasn’t there. My thoughts immediately went to the box that had been in my casting circle.

  Holy crap.

  I ran across the room and clambered up the ladder to my library/lab, my mind going a mile a second. What if the perp wasn’t translocating, but using a parallel reality to travel in and out of this one? How I’d ended up in that reality was another question, but the golems would have to wait.

  I had research to do.

  19

  My phone’s ringtone broke my concentration. I looked up from my book-heaped desk and hunted for the phone, finding it in the pocket of my coat, which I’d slung over the back of the chair. The caller was Vega.

  “Hi, hon,” I answered.

  “Are you on your way?”

  “On my way where? Oh, crap.” I drew the phone back to check the time. The lecture at the Discovery Society started in twenty minutes. “Ah, not quite. I’m going to put you on speaker while I get ready.”

  I grabbed my notes and scrambled down the ladder.

  “I’m at my brothers’ place,” she said, making me think for a second. That’s right—Tony was going to spend the week there. “I’m staying for dinner. Call me when the presentation ends, and I’ll pick you up on my way home. Hoffman said you found something in the stomach contents?”

  Tabitha’s ears flattened at the sound of Vega’s broadcast voice. “God, she’s here even when she isn’t,” she complained.

  I entered my bedroom and closed the door. “Sort of,” I said, telling Vega about the weakness of the hunting spell and how it would need to come within fifteen feet of the potion to get any kind of reaction.

  “Maybe your golems will get lucky,” she said, echoing what I’d told Hoffman.

  “Well, I sort of got sidetracked and never made them. When I came home earlier, I stepped into a shadow present.”

  “A shadow what?”

  Tossing the phone onto the bed, I started pulling clean clothes from the closet. I checked both corners to make sure no one was hiding inside.

  “The idea is basically this,” I said. “Our reality unfolds in a linear sequence. Point A to B to C and so on. But in fact, reality is a sequence of probabilities—what’s most likely to happen in any given moment. The probabilities that don’t become our reality don’t just fail to appear, though. They live on as alternate realities, shadows of the one we know. Less real, but still there. Are you with me so far?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, I first read about shadow presents in a book on soothsaying. The reason good diviners are as rare as hen’s teeth is because they have to distinguish between reality and probable realities, often over a span of years or decades. One wrong turn, and they’re chasing events through a shadow realm that will never manifest.”

  That was why I was trying not to dwell too much on the Doideag’s prophecy about my death or even the war she’d mentioned.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Vega said.

  “The thing is, I didn’t know these realms could be visited outside of soothsaying, but that’s exactly what happened to me this afternoon. I opened our door and, bam, I was in a shadow present. Physically. The apartment was here, but another family was squatting in it. They were hiding in our bedroom, in fact—a man, woman, and a c
ouple kids. Anyway, when the episode ended, I was in our actual bedroom. Tabitha confirmed I never entered the apartment. I manifested from a probable reality back to our present one.” Even though I’d experienced it myself just a few hours earlier, the idea still seemed impossible.

  “But … how?” Vega asked.

  “That’s what I’ve been looking into. Turns out there’s one recorded case of shadow travel, and it goes back to an ancient Greek cult. The Atticans.”

  “The one whose markings were on the box?”

  “Yup, the Hermes devotees. The info on them is scant, but they were connected to a thieves’ guild. Hermes was a patron of thieves among other things—including border crossings. Through worship of the Hermes essence, and with the help of powerful magic, the cult may have developed the ability to cross in and out of the shadow present.”

  “Must’ve been one hell of a thieves’ guild.”

  “Right? A disappearing hoagie taught me that objects can be moved between the realities. Meaning that whatever the thieves stole could be shifted undetected through a shadow reality. I’m betting that’s how the perp got my box. He entered the apartment through the shadow present, manifested in my lab long enough to seize it, and then left the way he’d entered. I couldn’t find much more on the cult except that they were executed en masse, probably for their crimes. But they must have endowed their magic in an object for it to still exist. Dollars to donuts, that’s what was in the box.”

  “Do you still see a connection to the Goldburn murder?”

  “In my gut, yeah. I just haven’t worked out the hows yet.”

  “Well, I’ll run interference on Hoffman until you do. But I still don’t understand how you entered this shadow present.”

  “I haven’t quite figured that part out yet either. The perp’s passage into my lab may have left a weakness in the boundary, one my wards preserved somehow. I haven’t had time to check it out.”