Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9)

by Brad Magnarella

  Gil squinted at me. “Ethan?”

  “Inside!” I repeated.

  The youngest-looking man didn’t need to be told again. He ran to the steel door of the stair tower, opened it, and waved anxiously for the others to follow. Three others backed toward him. I watched the Cerberus, expecting him to target them, but the eyes above his flaring nostrils remained fixed on me.

  “C’mon, Gil!” one of the men called.

  I looked over to find him standing beside me.

  “I don’t know who you are,” he said, “but I’m not leaving you out here alone.”

  “I appreciate that, but I sort of do this for a living. I’d rather you get yourself to safety.”

  He didn’t budge. Both of us were watching the creature now. He was stalking back and forth beyond the wall of shielding I’d erected, growls rumbling from his thickly muscled throats.

  “Is that Cerberus?” Gil asked shakily.

  “A version of him, anyway.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  It couldn’t be a coincidence that a creature from Greek mythology was menacing me only a day after I’d found a box with inscriptions from a Hermes cult. Regardless, I didn’t want to put Gil or any more of the men in his path, even if they were probabilities, shadows of their actual selves.

  “Not sure,” I replied. “But I really need you to get inside.”

  I moved away from Gil. The heads of the Cerberus followed me, confirming I was their target. I motioned for Gil to go. He hesitated before sidestepping toward the door his men held open.

  I faced the creature, sword in one hand, staff in the other, cycling through everything I knew about my opponent. Cerberus was the formidable three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to Hades. Only a few major mythological figures had managed to get past him. Orpheus charmed him with his lyre, and Hercules beat the starch out of him with his superior strength—neither one of which I possessed. But Aeneas drugged him with a loaf of bread. I may not have had any baked goods on me, but I had a sleeping potion.

  The activated tube was already bubbling as I pulled it from my coat and spiked it against the roof. The glass shattered around the Cerberus’s front paws, releasing a plume of pink mist. Nostrils wrinkling, the Cerberus stalked back, but instead of stumbling or going woozy, his muscles contracted and he launched himself against the shield. I staggered from the impact, quickly reinforcing the barrier.

  Okay, so the potion was a no-go, but he had to have a weakness.

  I put my wizardry aside for a moment and went into full professor mode. There were parallels between the Greek and Abrahamic versions of the underworld. If the Cerberus held enough demon essence, he could be susceptible to banishment.

  And what better time to test that theory.

  The creature’s six eyes canted down as the first rune on my sword began to glow white. Growling, he backed off again. With a Word, I shaped a second wall of hardened air behind him, halting his retreat. Trapped, he lunged. I thrust my blade. The Cerberus’s heads slammed into the shield, and my blade plunged into his chest with a faint scrape. I pulled in the realm’s ambient energy.

  “Disfare!” I shouted, releasing it through the rune.

  Bright banishment light swelled from the sword and swallowed the creature. His barking climbed in pitch. I brought a shoulder to my right ear and kept pushing, expecting the head-splitting sound to break apart along with the Cerberus’s form. But as the light receded, the damned mutt was still standing.

  I withdrew the sword with a grunt and backed away. Thoroughly pissed now, the Cerberus threw his body against the shield, sending sparks rolling down the sides. His next charge brought it down.

  You’re not demonic enough for banishment, I thought, digging into a coat pocket. But maybe you’re spectral enough for this!

  My hand emerged with a fistful of gray salt. I shouted at the same moment the Cerberus leapt, sending the salt blasting into his barking faces. Flames flashed on impact. I dove away as the Cerberus landed awkwardly and slammed into the retaining wall.

  He gained his feet and wheeled, smoke rising from the growling heads. A second dose of salt was already en route. This one met his chest, sending up a dark plume of fire.

  Disperse, dammit!

  The forces that held the creature together were too strong, and I was almost out of salt. I needed more—a lot more. Then it hit me. The Hudson River was only a few blocks away. If I could lead the Cerberus there, cast him in, the combo of salt and moving water would break him apart before he could dog-paddle to shore.

  Holding out the remaining handful of salt in warning, I backed from the Cerberus.

  He stalked after me, drool spilling from his muzzles and landing on the rooftop in hisses of steam. The men had all gone inside except for Gil, who was standing in the doorway, not ready to leave me.

  “I’ll be all right,” I called, not at all sure as I climbed onto the retaining wall. “I’m taking him to the Hudson.”

  Returning the salt to my pocket, I glanced down and stepped from the roof. A series of force invocations slowed my descent, but the landing was jarring enough to send a spike through my throbbing right knee. I kept my feet and limp-ran west, my destination a pier off Seventieth Street, about four blocks away.

  The Cerberus’s three heads lunged over the side of the rooftop. They peered around before finding me and exploded into furious barking. The sound paralleled me until I reached the end of the block.

  Take your time coming down, I thought at him.

  The heads disappeared. But only because the creature was taking a running start. He landed in the intersection behind me, causing a muscle car roaring down Tenth Avenue to squall into a U-turn. Loud swears sounded from the kids packed inside. The Cerberus head-butted the vehicle, knocking it off its tires and into a series of rolls. That bought me a half block, but he was coming again.

  “Attivare!” I shouted, lobbing a lightning grenade behind me.

  Branching bolts of electricity seared from the sky and hit the street in deafening whipcracks. Windows blew from parked cars. The Cerberus stumbled to his knees amid several smoking craters.

  Good, I thought. The grenades pack a punch here.

  I pulled ahead as the Cerberus’s momentum sent him into a roll.

  A police cruiser sped past the intersection ahead of me, slammed its brakes, and shot into reverse. A second and a third cruiser appeared, the three vehicles skidding to stops to form an impromptu roadblock.

  Behind me, the Cerberus gained his feet and shook his heads.

  Shit. I’d started to slow before deciding I preferred my odds with the NYPD.

  Magic hardened the air around me as I approached the roadblock. Officers jumped from their vehicles and took positions behind opened doors, weapons aimed. I was relieved to see Vega wasn’t among them. I refused to harm even a shadow version of her, even if my life depended on it.

  Shots sounded, and a bullet snapped past my head. I couldn’t tell if the officers were shooting at me or the Cerberus.

  I pulled another lightning grenade from a coat pocket, chucking this one forward. It bounced toward the roadblock. The bolts that arrived from the dark mass of clouds overhead reached the grenade at the same moment it rolled under the centermost cruiser. The vehicle’s roof collapsed in a hammer-smash of blue and red lights, and then the entire vehicle detonated in a geyser of fire. The officers fell away.

  Debris rained over my shielded body as I ran past them.

  I cut left, taking the short block to Seventieth Street, then right again. I was on the final stretch. I passed a package store, Morton’s, that also existed in the actual present. The elevated West Side Highway loomed ahead. But it was the longest stretch, and I wasn’t sure I could make it ahead of the NYPD, much less the Cerberus. For the moment, though, I had the road to myself.

  “C’mon, man,” I gasped, urging myself onward.

  As my shoes pounded asphalt, I tried to ignore the spike in my knee and the goring pa
in in both lungs. I focused on the Hudson, less a river this far down than a tidal estuary that held huge volumes of Atlantic saltwater.

  When I caught its briny scent, I pushed myself harder.

  You’re going to get there, I thought. You’re going to get there.

  My plan involved basic casting. Maneuver the Cerberus into position and blast him into the river. Nothing complicated. The salt and moving water would do the rest. I’d worry about the shadow NYPD later.

  Incredibly, I still had the street to myself. The Cerberus must have stopped to engage the officers, tying up the reinforcements. Hell, I’d take it. But at that thought, a vehicle turned the corner and roared up behind me.

  No, dammit. I struggled to find another gear, but I was spent.

  “It’s coming, Ethan!” someone shouted. “Hurry, get in!”

  I turned as a battered green SUV pulled up beside me, its passenger window smashed. Behind the steering wheel, Gil was waving desperately for me to climb inside. I peered back. Still nothing, but what was he doing out here? He’d been safe in the building. Gil leaned over and opened the door for me.

  “C’mon!” he shouted.

  “Keep going,” I panted. “Get out of here.”

  I tensed to shut the door, but hesitated. A glistening streak covered the passenger seat. More blood dotted the windshield. When I looked back at Gil, he continued to wave, but the eyes behind his glasses weren’t right. They were too dark, the engorged pupils rimmed with slivers of smoldering light.

  I lurched back from the door, fumbling to pull my cane into sword and staff.

  Gil had been coming for me, but he hadn’t made it. I pictured his mangled body being yanked from the vehicle while this thing climbed into his place, assuming his likeness. I was dealing with a shifter.

  The creature’s lips forked into a grin. “What’s wrong … Everson?”

  Glass shattered and metal keened as the Gil likeness morphed back into a massive three-headed dog. I backpedaled toward the Hudson as the Cerberus shook off the ruined husk of the vehicle and pounced.

  23

  “Respingere!” I shouted.

  The force from my shielded body knocked the Cerberus off course. But a paw, more lion’s than canine’s, raked me, leaving trenches of pain down the slats of my ribs. I reeled, an elbow pinned to my side. The Cerberus stalked around me. As if anticipating my plan, he placed himself between me and the Hudson.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I growled.

  “We could ask you the same,” the middle head said. “You’re out of your league, Everson Croft. You’re standing between armies, and you don’t even know it. Leave it alone.”

  The Doideag’s words returned to me. If ye should fail and war should come…

  But I was also thinking about the scrying spell. A couple times, Bear had noted an odd shine in Victor Cole’s eyes, and I remembered his prodigious strength when he’d lifted Bear from the car.

  That hadn’t been Victor Cole.

  “You’re the one who drove Bear Goldburn to the body shop. Hacked out his kidneys.”

  “I drove him to the body shop, yes.”

  “So who did the hacking?”

  “The one I serve.”

  “And who’s that?”

  The Cerberus barked a laugh. “What was it that killed the cat? Oh, yes. Curiosity.”

  His eyes narrowed suddenly, and he lunged. I swung my sword, shouting the banishment Word. Light flashed from the inscribed rune as the blade cleaved the Cerberus’s leading neck. He roared in agony, but a trailing head seized my leg. Pain speared the muscles of my thigh as I was lifted and flung. My shield blunted the impact against a building, but I landed hard, brain rattling in my skull.

  Heavy pads pounded toward me as I pushed myself up. Though the streetscape had gone blurry, I could see the Cerberus incoming. His right head, the one whose neck I’d banish-cleaved, was flopping like a wet noodle.

  I’d debilitated him.

  I dug out my remaining salt and sent it flying. The Cerberus reared, squinting from the flames that broke across his faces. I ducked around and swung my blade, activating the banishment rune a second time as it disappeared into the left neck. I followed with a staff thrust to the shifter’s chest. A force bolt from the opal end shoved him away before he could grab me.

  When we faced off again, two of his heads were lolling. I wasn’t in much better shape. A cut high on my brow was sending blood dribbling into my right eye; my ribs and right knee were throbbing; and my left thigh, where the Cerberus had grabbed me, was swelling to tire-like proportions.

  I was also exhausted. The fact that Thelonious, my incubus spirit, was still too weak to claim me was little consolation. Only adrenaline was keeping me upright, and that wasn’t going to last.

  Just one head left to disable.

  The Cerberus narrowed his angry, calculating eyes. The shifter recognized the danger, but he was also under orders to take me out. One of his limp heads struggled up weakly, then collapsed again.

  “What’s wrong?” I panted. “Necktile dysfunction?”

  The goading was deliberate. I was trying to bring the creature into another careless charge. Once the final head was out of commission, I’d be able to complete my flight to the pier and finish him off.

  But when the Cerberus launched at me this time, he lowered his head. I thrust my cocked sword anyway. The blade scraped off brow, clipping an ear. The flat of the Cerberus’s head slammed into my shielded body, driving me from the edge of the sidewalk, legs staggering painfully, into a graffiti-covered building. His head met my chest again, this time pinning me against the stone wall at my back.

  I squinted from the pressure and called more power to my shield. The Cerberus’s rear legs dug in, upping the pounds per square inch. I grunted a Word. A repulsive force detonated from the shield, but it was too weak. The Cerberus barely faltered, and when his head bore down again, it pinned my sword arm.

  This wasn’t the plan, dammit.

  Worse still, the other heads were recovering. One snarled and snapped at my staff arm, which I just managed to jerk out of the way. The other bounced up and down, using the momentum in its struggle to remain upright. I attempted another invocation, but I could barely summon the air, much less the force, and this one squibbed completely. All available power went to my shield now—which was starting to fail.

  Gray spots eddied around my vision. My tongue turned thick in my mouth.

  If I didn’t do something fast, it would just be a question of whether I passed out before the Cerberus tore me apart or after.

  With a grunted series of incantations, I reshaped my shield, pulling it inside my coat, and drove its energy as far into the ground as it would go. One of the Cerberus’s recovering heads grabbed the sleeve of my coat. The arm tore away, leaving the rest of my coat intact, including the pocket that held my two remaining lightning grenades. Thank God for cheap stitching.

  “Attivare!” I shouted.

  The crack that followed was less a sound than an all-encompassing force. It blinded me and struck me deaf. I seemed to float rather than drop to the pavement, my body buzzing, the air raw with smoke and electricity.

  I expected the Cerberus’s teeth to seize and thrash me at any moment.

  But as the street returned to hazy form, I saw my gamble had worked. The Cerberus was gone, probably limped off somewhere following the direct hit, and I was alive. My shield had channeled enough of the lightning’s energy into the ground, sparing me the brunt. But I didn’t need to see myself to know I was in bad shape. Pain burned through me as I rolled onto my side, both ears ringing.

  Before I could summon healing magic, flashing lights arrived. The shadow NYPD.

  I had managed to keep hold of my sword and staff, and I raised the blade weakly. The cruisers stopped a half block away, their red and blue lights arcing around the slummy stretch of Seventieth Street. A spotlight lit me up from above as a helicopter’s rotary blades thumped through my partial deafne
ss.

  Back at the cruisers, a familiar figure was stalking toward me in a sidestep, both hands gripping her service pistol. I couldn’t make out Vega’s shouted commands, but they weren’t hard to guess. She was making her arrest for the murder of Bear Goldburn. And this time, she would get it.

  I cycled through my remaining resources before grunting a weak laugh. I had none.

  As my vision steadied, it occurred to me Vega’s weapon was aimed high. I struggled to turn my head. A dark figure moved in. The shifter? Hands grabbed me, but I was too weak to resist. Vega’s voice rose in pitch, and her weapon cracked twice. The figure let out a cry, and I was falling again.

  I landed with a thud.

  A well-dressed couple jerked back in surprise, the man shielding the woman with an arm. Vega and the shadow NYPD were gone. The sidewalk I was on featured a procession of lampposts that glowed against a clean building facade. I was back in the actual present. But it was all starting to blur.

  “Call an ambulance!” the woman cried.

  24

  I looked over to find Vega sitting in a bedside chair, the window behind her glowing with sunlight. For a confused moment, I thought I was in her custody, but the pregnant swell of her stomach and the contours of our bedroom dissolved the notion.

  “Hey,” I rasped.

  She looked up from her phone, her brow taut with concern.

  “Hey, yourself.” She came over and grasped my hand in both of hers. “How are you feeling?”

  As I squeezed back, I performed a self-check. All the hurt places from last night were either painless or, like my left thigh, pulsating dully. The healing magic that moved through me suggested someone from the Order had been here.

  I kissed her hand. “Much better.”

  “Here, drink some of this.”

  She lifted a large cup from our nightstand and held the straw to my lips. The water, enhanced with elixir, went down cold and soothing. When I nodded that I’d had enough she returned the cup and dried her hands on the thighs of her slacks.