Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9)

by Brad Magnarella

  The Cronus energy was feeding off that. It was the same hunger I sensed earlier in the day while checking out the actual basement. I hadn’t been able to pinpoint the source because it was a bleed from the shadow realm, but it belonged to Cronus.

  It was also a weakness.

  Eldred’s ritual was filling the god with new energy, but I could still deny him the old. I activated the first rune on my blade, the one for banishment. The energy I’d been gathering hummed around my mental prism. I waited for the rune’s light to go pure white before releasing it.

  “Disfare!”

  The light detonated in all directions, tearing through the drifting apparitions and scattering them. They twisted and writhed, struggling to hold their forms, but the light was relentless, driving them against walls and into corners, where they had nowhere to go. One by one, the imprinted energies burst from existence.

  Be at peace, I thought as they dwindled to nothing.

  Eldred’s eyes shot up from the scythe as the protective field around him buckled.

  Lunging, I drove my sword forward. The still-glowing blade pierced the weakened field and sent it shattering to the ground like sheet glass. Around us, the cavern thinned from view and the rumbling receded.

  “What are you doing?” Eldred demanded.

  He hustled over to the steaming vat and, raising the scythe above it, began chanting in ancient Greek, trying to hasten the ritual. Before the disorganized energy could stabilize, I planted a shoe against the vat’s side and shoved. It toppled from the burner, spilling blood and organs over the basement floor.

  “What are you doing?” Eldred screamed this time. “Stop!”

  While he struggled to push the macabre contents back inside the vat, I hurried to the mortician’s table. By growing my aura out, I killed the pump. I then drew the drain tube from Ludvig’s neck, trying to ignore the way his crossed eyes stared upward, deathlike. With a spurt of blood, the tube came free. I hovered my staff’s opal over the hole, chanting words of healing. Faint light plugged the wound like cotton.

  But that was all I had time for.

  I spun and brought my sword up. It met the flash of the descending scythe with an air-ringing clang. But the scythe was no longer the small artifact Eldred had been handling just moments ago. The blade had grown along with the handle such that the weapon Eldred gripped in both fists was now taller than him.

  His eyes glinted zealously. “You won’t win.”

  “Funny, I said the same thing about you before coming. And since we can’t both be right…”

  I blocked his next blow, which came in from the side, and thrust my staff. He grunted as the invoked force that emerged from the wood blasted him across the room. I chased him down, closing the distance as he landed on his back in a skid. Though he was a small man, and he wielded the scythe awkwardly, I’d felt the power in both blows. I didn’t want to absorb any more if I didn’t have to.

  “Entrapolarle,” I called.

  With no protective shielding to interfere now, the air around his head warped, hardening into an airtight sphere. Returning my sword inside my staff, I arrived above him as he was pushing himself upright. When he saw me, he struggled to raise the scythe into striking position. I grabbed the handle.

  “Why don’t you let go of that before you hurt yourself?” I said.

  From inside the sphere, he released a soundless scream, then struggled like a man possessed. His eyes bugged and his tumor shook as he fought to wrench the scythe from my one-handed grasp. He kicked at me several times, but his legs came well short of the mark. Blood streamed from his mouth where he must have bitten his tongue.

  I could have squeezed the sphere into a small ball and ended it, but he was a vessel, much like Sven. Anyway, his efforts were only succeeding in exhausting his oxygen. Even with the weaker energy here, I could keep the sphere airtight for as long as it took, which was only a matter of seconds now.

  There we go.

  His legs buckled, and he dropped to his knees. But by some fanatical reserve, he was still gripping the scythe, his fingernails caked with the blood offering he’d tried to shove back into the vat.

  I touched my cane to his chest and released a minor force. His back slapped to the floor, head banging against concrete, and the scythe was mine. I could feel prodigious power humming the length of it, disorganized though that power was at the moment. The scythe needed to be destroyed here and now.

  I was striding toward the vat, already digging in my pocket for my most important potion, when someone shouted, “Stop!”

  I looked over and swore.

  Shadow Vega had entered the basement and was approaching in her characteristic sidestep, service weapon aimed with both hands. Not enough time had passed for her to recover from the sleeping potion, meaning she’d escaped the temple room, only returning again when the mist had cleared. Backup must have helped her take the door down, but she’d entered alone, no doubt against her superiors’ wishes.

  “Drop the weapon,” she ordered.

  She was glancing around as she advanced, her professional eyes absorbing the scene. The cavern underworld may have thinned to almost nothing, but there was still plenty to look at: the toppled vat, the spilled organs and running blood, the mortician’s table, where Ludvig lay supine. Eldred was also out on his back—and I’d been walking away from him with a giant scythe over my shoulder.

  “I know how this must look,” I said.

  “Yeah, fucked up,” she snarled. “Like that stunt you pulled upstairs.”

  But she was moving her weapon between me and Eldred now. That was progress.

  “This is where he was storing the organs of his victims,” I said, nodding at the fridge. “And that’s Ludvig Lassgard, victim number four. It was a ritual sacrifice. The gloves he used are in that bin. There should be evidence all over them.”

  “I still need you to drop the weapon and surrender,” she said firmly. “The investigation will sort everything out.”

  “No it won’t, and you know that.”

  Though her eyes appeared hard on the surface, I recognized the emotions swimming underneath: a mixture of defiance and despair. She’d joined the NYPD for noble reasons, only for her unit to be treated like a goon squad for the powerful. I didn’t know the extent of Eldred’s power here, but he and his Society clearly had pull with the police, either directly or through higher-ups in the city.

  Vega was opening her mouth when the entire basement rocked. She staggered back, and I stumbled for my own footing, eventually going down.

  Around me, the basement was becoming the cavern again. I may have cleared the space of the orphan energy, but the ritual had sent up enough of its own potency for the Cronus entity to resume his arrival. Regardless, the scythe was the focus element, and the objective remained the same. Destroy it.

  “What’s going on?” Vega shouted.

  “Stay put!” I shouted back.

  I gained my feet as the shaking fell to tremors. I tried not to look at the mess around the vat as I righted it and pulled a tube from my pocket. Uttering the activation word, I spiked it into the large container. The tube shattered, and the iron gray liquid inside grew, steaming and bubbling, until it filled the entire vat. Thin green currents of enchantment-busting magic swam through the thick medium.

  I plunged the scythe inside, blade first.

  Now for the catalyst. As I drew my sword, shots cracked.

  For an instant, I thought they were meant for me, but I looked over to find Vega aiming her weapon into the darkness, backing away from something. High above the floor, a serpentine head lunged, hissing, from the void. Another followed, and then ten more. A massive hydra lumbered into view.

  Great, the ritual also restored the shifter, I thought, recognizing the eyes.

  “Come to me!” I shouted at Vega, but the call was lost to her next series of shots.

  I manifested a wall of hardened air between her and the hydra, then turned back to my work. The scythe s
tood on its head inside the bubbling vat, but the potion would need intense heat to destroy an object this powerful. I activated the second rune on my blade. As flames licked up, I pushed, directing the fire into the vat.

  The heat excited the green currents, and they swarmed the scythe.

  Behind me, the weak invocation walling off the hydra failed. I looked over as one of the serpentine heads seized Vega’s shoulder through the spilling sparks and flung her. She landed against a cavern wall and rolled to the floor.

  “Ricki!” I shouted.

  The hydra had started toward me, but I’d shown my hand. Its two dozen eyes narrowed maliciously through the gloom before rotating its heads toward Vega, who was still down and helpless.

  I upped the power through the fire rune. “C’mon, dammit.”

  But the gathered energy wasn’t strong enough, and the magic in the scythe was fighting back, resisting the efforts to break it down. The hydra began stalking toward Vega.

  Shit, I thought, breaking off the fiery expulsion.

  I slotted my sword and pulled out the shotgun. As I ran toward the hydra, I pumped the action, expelling the last shell, and aimed high. Salt and flames tore through the hydra’s dozen heads. Shrieking, it reared back its necks. Arriving in front of Vega, I sent a shell into the monster, sending it back another step. I pumped and fired twice more before checking on Vega. She was out, but breathing.

  I eyed the recovering hydra as I pushed fresh shells into the gun. The attack wasn’t having the same effect as earlier. The flames were too fleeting. This was a more powerful version of the shifter than the one I’d scattered.

  “When you’re out of salt,” one of the heads hissed, “I’ll still be here.”

  I glanced over at Eldred—only he wasn’t where I’d dropped him. He’d staggered to the vat and was pulling the dripping scythe free. I rotated the gun toward him and fired, but the field taking hold around him scattered the blast. The field looked weak enough to take down, but not from my distance.

  “Go on,” the hydra dared, half its heads peering at Eldred, “and I’ll rip her apart.” The remaining heads looked down at Vega.

  She was a shadow, a probability. Whatever happened to her here would have no bearing on my actual wife. Even so, she was a shadow of the woman I loved more than anything, and I couldn’t separate the two.

  I raised my weapon at the hydra’s grinning faces.

  At the same moment, something kicked in a coat pocket.

  Huh?

  When it kicked again, I pulled out a bag of gray salt. I tore the shaking bag open with my teeth, spilling its contents. Something gold flashed among the salt crystals: a hand holding the end of a tusk. The protective pin Sunita had given me. It jittered over the ground, seeming to react to the shifter’s presence.

  “Attivare!” I shouted.

  I was acting on magical instinct, not sure what to expect. Certainly not what followed. A shadow of the four-armed elephant god Ganesh sprang from the pin and squared his growing body toward the hydra. The shifter’s smiles shrank as it backed away. Ganesh charged. With an ear-splitting bugle, he drove a tusk through the hydra’s chest. Necks and arms became entangled and serpentine jaws snapped.

  The two fell to the ground, the cavern now shaking with their battle.

  I picked up the pin and quickly attached it to Vega’s jacket before wheeling back toward Eldred. He’d raised the scythe over the spilled offerings, trying to resume the ritual. With Vega protected now, I sprinted toward him. He looked up as my sword came down. It flashed off the field, sending it into a wobble. I jumped back from his clumsy swing, but I could feel the scythe’s returning power.

  “Do you like jazz, Everson?” he asked in a crazed voice.

  I grunted into my next swing. The impact shook his shield again, but once more I was having to move away to avoid a counterstrike.

  “I do, and it’s strange,” he panted. “Jazz would seem the antithesis of order, yes?”

  Once more, we traded swings, but his field was strengthening. My blow barely affected it this time.

  “But that’s what I enjoy,” he went on. “The suspense, the fear of uncertainty and chaos, only to arrive at the same satisfying conclusion as your more structured genres. The same can be said of tonight. It may not have gone exactly as planned, and yet Cronus will be restored.”

  I ducked as the scythe whistled overhead, his last line pinging around the two questions the Doideag had posed:

  Can a children’s love restore lost time?

  Can the fleet of foot avert the crime?

  Fleet of foot, I thought.

  I searched for the silvery magic I’d been peppered with in the landfill. This time I found it, and I knew why. It was responding to the Hermes Tablet, which was in Sven’s possession right outside. Focusing into the magic, I infused it with energy. Immediately, my limbs began to lighten and my heart rate picked up.

  Eldred’s next swing seemed to arrive in slower motion. I stepped aside and came back in, this time landing two sword strikes. The next time I managed four, then six.

  Eldred backpedaled, wide-eyed, as his protection faltered. His tumor was lurching all over the place, pulling his facial features in grotesque directions. For an instant, the air distorted sharply around me, as if Eldred were trying to send me back to the actual present, but the Hermes magic negated it.

  “The thing with jazz,” I said, grunting into still more swings, “is that some of it’s just crap.”

  My next blow shattered the protection, the released energy knocking me back several paces. Eldred wheeled toward the mortician’s table and raised the scythe high above Ludvig’s neck. “Accept this potent life offering!” he shrieked to his god.

  Too distant to block him, I thrust my staff. “Vigore!”

  The released force shoved the table back. The descending scythe caught the metal edge and deflected at an odd angle. Eldred dropped to the floor, the bloodied scythe clanging from his grasp.

  His neck hung to one side, partially severed by his own stroke.

  Behind me, Ganesh was stomping the downed hydra with his massive feet. Under different circumstances, I would have loved a ringside seat, but I still had a scythe to destroy.

  I plunged it into the vat once more and drove elemental fire into the potion. The enchantment-busting magic took up where it left off, crowding the scythe. As before, the scythe fought back. It was pulling in all of the available energy—the ritual, the offerings, the god seed in the 7Rb variant, even Eldred’s expelling shadow spirit.

  I tapped into my own reserves, down to marrow and molecule, pushing it all through the fire rune. My blade went molten, and a shimmering white line grew along its length. The handle turned hot, unbearably so. The sweat pouring from my body evaporated into plumes. My palms began to blister.

  But still I gripped, still I upped the heat.

  Wage, young mage, till your final breath…

  Whether it was an effect of the exertion and torrid heat, I suddenly perceived a massive, wavering shadow looming opposite me. It reached down as if to claim the scythe. I gave a final gut-churning push, and the threads of magic that had been swarming the scythe disappeared inside it. The weapon trembled.

  I broke off the fire and, backpedaling, shouted, “Protezione!”

  A wall of hardened air rose around the vat an instant before the scythe erupted, sending the boiling potion everywhere. I landed hard on my back, hands throbbing, steam coming off me. By the time I sat up, the large shadow figure was gone, the basement was back, and the Scythe of Cronus was no more.

  I looked over as the elephant god shrank back inside the pin. The hydra had vanished along with everything else.

  Vega was still down, but she’d suffered no further harm. I rose on unsteady legs, feeling as if I could sleep for a week. I stepped over Eldred’s partly decapitated body to check on Ludvig. My healing magic had shrunk the hole in his neck, and his breathing was even. With medical attention, he would recover.

>   I was staggering toward Vega when a shadowy figure appeared in front of me.

  I stiffened and drew my sword back before allowing it to sag to my side. “What are you doing here? I told you to wait outside.”

  But even as I scolded Sven, I was damned glad to see him.

  “I was compelled by Hermes,” he said, hooking his thumb at his pack. He looked around at the carnage. “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s done, though.”

  “Ready to go back?” he asked.

  “Just about.”

  I completed my journey to Vega and knelt beside her. Her shoulder was torn up and she’d suffered a solid blow to the head. With my final vestiges of magic, I covered both in healing light, then watched as the tension in her brow softened and her eyes stopped shifting behind her lids. She’d be all right too.

  Grunted commands sounded from the temple room above us.

  “Officer down!” I called.

  I removed the pin from Vega’s lapel and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Boots sounded on the steps as I returned to Sven.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  39

  The burns on my hands healed over the next couple days, but recovering from my exhaustion took longer. Overwhelming the Scythe of Cronus had taken even more energy than I’d realized, and it was all I could do to get out of bed.

  Snodgrass balked at the extra week off, but a call from Vega to his wife brought him around quickly. In fact, he ended up subbing my courses, deciphering what he could from the burnt and water-damaged lesson plans Sven had written.

  I would’ve given anything to have been there.

  I received a number of calls during my convalescence. The first was from Mayor “Budge” Lowder. Political animal or not, he always gave credit where due. At the same time, he was never particularly sentimental.

  “Did you see the bond markets this morning?” he effused. “New York municipals are soaring!” Not only had he been able to announce the killer’s death, he was also in talks with Bear Goldburn’s replacement at Ramsa Inc. to go forward with the chip plant in Brooklyn, and he was negotiating with another major developer to take over the projects the late Robert Strock had been slated to complete.