The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

truck, destroying the upper hinge and dropping me to my knees. The door threatened to collapse. With a shouted Word I slammed it back into its frame, muscles burning, body streaming sweat.

The door rattled and shook. I had expended too much power in too little time and could feel my hold failing, could feel Thelonious whispering around my thoughts. “She’s coming through,” I grunted.

“Let her,” Blade said from her crouch.

“Huh?”

Blade licked her pierced lips. “Just partway. If you can pin that thing in the doorway, I can make her think twice about wanting to come out the rest of the way.”

The door stopped rattling. Beyond, I heard talons scratching over cement, gaining speed.

I braced as the creature collided into the door, overwhelming my counterforce. The weathered rectangle of metal crashed to the floor, and the creature filled the doorway, larger than she had appeared in the storm drain. A fang-filled jaw jutted through hanks of dark hair, her muscled body bloodied from her assault on the door. Her red gaze cut from me to Blade, a deep growl growing in her chest.

The space rang with explosions as I aimed my revolver and squeezed off two shots. Black blood burst from the creature’s chest, and she recoiled.

I took aim at her heart—to stun her, if nothing else—but Blade darted into my line of fire. Silver sword flashing, she slashed the creature back into the basement room. Aluminum cans and debris scattered around their feet. The creature screamed and threw her arms up to block the slicing blows.

I followed, glowing cane held aloft. But as hard and fast as Blade struck, the creature’s tissue was regenerating too quickly. And the creature was no longer backing up.

“Blade!” I called. “Get behind me!”

With an angry scream, the creature swiped a clawed hand at Blade’s face. Her sword flashed into a parry, catching the creature’s wrist. Though the talons didn’t rend flesh, the force knocked Blade to the floor. The creature pounced, her jaw of nail-sharp teeth diving for Blade’s throat.

“Forza dura!” I cried, aiming my cane.

The explosive force blew the creature into a graffiti-smeared wall. Blade’s sword went along for the ride, clattering beside her. The creature recovered and watched us from a snarling crouch.

“Alexandra, listen to me.” I pushed power into my entrancing wizard’s voice, remembering how I had been able to reach Father Vick when the demon possessed him last fall. “You’re a bright young woman in her final year of high school, not the monster that’s taken you over. If there’s the smallest part of you that can hear me, stand your ground. Don’t allow these impulses to drive you. They are not you, Alexandra. Do you hear me? They are not—”

The creature’s muscles bunched up and she sprang at me, not a spark of humanity in those glowing red eyes.

I backed from her bounds and fired twice, missing high. My heel caught what felt like a stuffed sack. I lost my balance backwards. The cane tumbled out of my grasp as I slammed into the floor. When the creature was almost on me, she buckled off course, skidding over the trash-strewn floor.

She righted herself and rounded on Blade, who had rammed into her side. A pair of spear-head-sized blades flashed in the punk rocker’s hands.

“Come and get some,” Blade said.

She ducked and spun beneath the creature’s leap, finger blades flashing up. The creature screamed as she passed overhead, blood spraying from her stomach. Staggering to a stop, the creature turned around. Blade, whose face was stippled red, grinned back at her.

She’s dancing with death, I thought.

As I pawed behind me for my cane, I saw that I had tripped over a blood slave, their bodies littering the room in shapeless mounds. Against a far wall lay the creature’s latest victim, his neck obliterated.

The hybrid charged again. Blade ducked, but the creature didn’t leap this time. At the same moment I grasped my cane, her lowered head cracked into Blade’s, the sound resounding throughout the cement space. Blade was out before she even flopped onto her back, finger blades spilling from her grasp.

“Protezione!” I shouted, bringing the cane overhead and aiming between Blade and the creature. A light shield glimmered into being, the creature’s jaw smashing into it in a spray of sparks.

“Respingere!” I cried.

A force pulsed from the shield, shoving Blade toward the doorway and the creature deeper into the basement room. But I had sacrificed too much energy. The shield faded out. I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled forward until I was standing between Blade and the creature.

Straining to see through wisps of Thelonious’s creamy white light, I aimed the revolver at the creature’s head.

35

Panting, blood and adrenaline souring my mouth, I stared at the creature across the room. The creature glared back, torn and blood spattered but healing. I wasn’t going to be able to stop her. Not with three bullets. Not with my powers running near empty and no useful spell items to speak of. Maybe not even with my powers running at full.

The vampire and werewolf parts of Alexandra seemed to be having a boosting effect on one other. Strength, brutality, the uncanny ability to heal… Damn near invincible is right, I thought, remembering what Dr. Z had told me back at their apartment.

I holstered my revolver in the front of my pants and drew my cane into sword and staff. My best chance was to keep her off balance with low-level blasts while attempting to sever her head at the neck. The hybrid’s death would also mean the death of the young woman inside her, but I probably wasn’t going to be alive long enough to weigh the morality of that decision.

I cleared the aluminum cans from around my feet and widened my stance.

The creature crouched back on her hands and haunches, nostrils flaring. Distracted, she broke eye contact to sniff something near her hand—a cast-off drug envelope. When she raised her eyes again, I could feel the violent hunger radiating from