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

I gripped the mirror’s metal frame and struggled to kick my way back out. The numbness climbed like water to my chest, my chin. In the next moment, my head went under.

Stunned, I stared around a luminescent darkness of shifting shapes and roaring energies. I was in the realm between life and death. The In Between.

Fingers slipping, I peeked between my legs. The gatekeeper’s face stared back from the shadows like a grim reaper’s.

I peered at the backside of the mirror, the image of my apartment beyond undulating into dimness. I could make out my hologram of the city, my lab table, my collection of esoteric books. A deep loneliness yawned inside me as I considered what I was holding onto: a life spent chasing nether creatures for an organization that barely tolerated, much less acknowledged, me—not even to tell me what had happened to my mother. Fallen to illness, as my grandmother had claimed? Or murdered, as insinuated by the vampire Arnaud?

At least in the afterlife I would know.

Yeah, but you’ll be powerless to do anything with that knowledge, I countered, a defiant anger growing inside me.

I gathered my strength to shout a Word, but the strange ether that constituted the In Between gushed into my mouth like sea water, and no sound would emerge. The fingers of my right hand lost their grip on the mirror, and my arm fell into the cold. I could feel nothing below my chest now.

Just need to hold on for a few more…

The shield around my coin pendant fractured. For an instant, all the light drew inward, as though toward a collapsing star, before the coin’s energy blew out in a detonating flash. The gatekeeper released my leg in a fading moan, and I vaulted up into my library/lab.

I landed back first into a bookcase. My head banged against the floor as tomes spilled around me. Dazed, I sat up and peered at the smoking ruins of the casting circle and fragments of shattered mirror.

“Nice timing,” I mumbled, tucking the coin back into my shirt.

My mother’s hair was gone, though, taken by the gatekeeper. Meaning only one strand remained to cast from.

Maybe it was time to consult an expert.

2

Lady Bastet held the strand of hair on either end, her deep green eyes seeming to stare inside it. She hadn’t moved for the last minute, the flatness of her dark face speaking to mild entrancement.

I gazed around the room in the back of her basement-level rug business. Beyond the tendrils of incense, a dozen or so cats stared back from shelves that held assortments of Egyptian charms and spell items. Lady Bastet had helped Detective Vega and me with a case in the spring in which her powers of divination had played a critical role. I was counting on her being able to duplicate that success.

“Yes,” the mystic said suddenly. “The potential for magic once moved through these cells.”

“What do you mean potential?”

“You did not tell me your mother’s hair was from when she was a girl,” she replied, setting it flat on the stone table in front of her. “She inherited magic from at least one of her parents, yes, but whether or not she ever developed that magic, I cannot tell you from a simple reading.”

I noted her emphasis on the word simple. “You need to go deeper?”

She pushed up the band holding her thick hair from her kohl-lined eyes. “Yes, far deeper.”

“Your price?”

“Your blood,” she replied.

I had given her a vial’s worth the last time, about which I’d been none too comfortable. Wizard’s blood could be used in powerful magic, and if that magic turned black, well … I would be in just as much trouble as the practitioner. “Can I ask what you did with the last sample?”

“I put it to good use,” she replied enigmatically.

That the Order hadn’t been in touch told me the blood had probably been used for benign purposes. Lady Bastet specialized in potion mixing, from anti-aging elixirs to male enhancement brews.

Better not to think about it, I decided, rolling up my left shirt sleeve to my elbow. Even though I had undergone the procedure before, the sensation of her wooden needle sucking the blood from my bulging vessel was no less skin-crawling.

Lady Bastet returned the wooden needle to her hair, healed the puncture, and set the clay tube with my blood into her wooden box. When she returned to the table and drew away the veil that covered her scrying globe, I leaned forward, my stomach twisting into anxious knots.

She smiled apologetically. “I should have told you, Everson. For the kind of reading you’re asking, I am going to need time.”

“How much?”

“Until dusk,” she said. “This hair belongs to a young girl. It represents her life to that point, beyond which lies a tangle of possible futures. I will need to comb them out, to align myself with the path she ultimately traveled—up to and including her death.”

“Also, anything you can learn about my father…”

I knew even less about him than about my mother. According to Nana, my mother and father had met at a hippie commune upstate. Their relationship lasted just long enough for me to form a bump in my mother’s belly before my father—whose name Nana couldn’t remember—decided it was time to move on. Heartbroken, my mother returned home.

That had been the official story, anyway. But like with my mother’s death, it now lacked a certain ring of truth.

Lady Bastet nodded. “I will tell you all I come to see.”

I glanced down at the strand of hair, the final cellular link to my mother, the final link to the truth, maybe.

“I really need you to get this right,” I said, raising my eyes to Lady Bastet’s, but she gave no sign she’d heard. She leaned nearer, as though trying to read something beyond my face. I felt movement through my mind like fingers over a stringed instrument. Minor notes played fast, speeding my pulse. When Lady Bastet spoke,