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

the street. I looked up, road-rashed and reeling. Beyond my splayed legs, fire consumed the lower park and presumably the remaining goblins and bugbears.

I let my head fall back again. “Holy hell.”

Thelonious’s creamy white light lapped around the edges of my consciousness, my incubus sensing weakness. I had expended all of my energy with those final invocations. I looked over to where Vega was scooting past me. Using her arms, she lifted herself onto the curb. She sat there without speaking, in shock, firelight glistening over the skin of her face.

“You all right?” I asked.

“I owe you, Croft,” she said, her voice distant.

For a moment, I thought she said I love you. A conflicting brew of emotions swam through me, casting up strange vapors, until the words resolved into what she’d actually said.

“Let’s just call it even,” I replied.

“No. I mistrusted you … one of the few good guys in the city.”

From the direction of Grand Army Plaza, footsteps pounded up the street. I turned my head to find Captain Cole flanked by two NYPD officers. A block beyond them, more officers were working to keep the press in their cordoned-off zone. Half of the cameras were aimed at the inferno, the other half at me.

Cole arrived in front of us, his expression either one of concern or anger, I couldn’t tell. Everything was going hazy. His gaze fell to the arrow in my leg.

“Ambulances are on the way,” he said.

“How many did we lose?” I asked, not wanting to know, but needing to.

“You don’t have to worry about that right now,” he replied.

“How many?” I repeated.

“Thirty-six men.”

Thirty-six. The number echoed numbly in my skull.

I had buried myself in the Central Park operation. I had poured in everything—my resources as an academic, as a wizard—to assess the monster threat, to determine the safest, most effective way to combat it. But I’d been kidding myself. With specters of revenge whispering around me, I’d missed things that should have been obvious. The goblins’ tunnel networks under Paris were storied. Why couldn’t their race have done the same under Central Park? And now, as a result of those oversights, more than a third of the Hundred were dead. Men with wives and children…

“I’ve already spoken to the mayor,” Cole said. “He’s meeting with advisors to determine the next step.”

The first ambulances rounded the corner and slowed toward us. Beneath the strobing lights, rear doors opened. Attendants in blue coveralls emerged. Thelonious’s growing presence made me waver as I pushed myself to my feet. I couldn’t even feel the arrow in my calf anymore.

“Her first,” I slurred, nodding at Vega.

The attendants wrapped her in a foil blanket and, squinting from the heat, helped her into the closer ambulance. Her eyes lingered on mine until the doors closed. I bent to retrieve my sword and staff, slotting them back together. When two more attendants approached me, I turned away in a limping half circle, the creamy waves really storming in now.

I didn’t fight it.

“Croft,” Cole barked. “Where are you going?”

“To catch a cab,” I said faintly.

21

Foul smoke laced the air outside my apartment the next morning. Hungover and sore, I limped up the street alongside a truck delivering morning editions of the Gazette. That the delivery was late told me printing had been delayed to carry the news of last night’s operation. I didn’t know how the mayor had spun the bungled job and didn’t want to. Adjusting my sunglasses above my fake beard, I looked away so as not to catch any headlines.

I did the same on the bus ride to Midtown, averting my eyes from the spread-open papers. I didn’t even want to glimpse the expressions of the commuters reading them. Smoke from Central Park drifted past the windows. North of Twenty-third Street, it became so thick that I started to see pedestrians in surgical masks.

I entered Midtown College through a back door and removed my disguise. I had nearly canceled my morning class, but it was almost finals week, and I’d already canceled last week’s classes to work on the operation. The college was one bridge I couldn’t afford to burn.

My right calf throbbed with magic as I climbed the empty stairwell. I’d awoken before dawn in a doorway in Times Square, a flat bourbon bottle between my legs and quarters everywhere. I did the post-Thelonious check, patting my pockets for wallet and keys. Both there. Clothing, cane, and necklace intact as well. I then craned my body around to read a flashing sign overhead. Thelonious had ended up at a peep show, which explained the quarters. His visit this time had been short and tame. Maybe he was tiring of using me as a vessel. For once, though, I hadn’t minded the oblivion.

Upon returning home and treating the arrow wound, I had a sober hour to reflect on the horror of last night’s operation. Of what I had allowed to happen. Thirty-six dead. Men who would still be living if I’d been thinking clearly instead of about what the mage had done to my mother, what he could still do to me.

I had decided then and there that I was no good to anyone until I hunted him down and destroyed him.

That would be my priority.

In that vein, if there were any potential positives to come from last night’s operation, it would be my removal from the program. Budge’s first act to save face. He didn’t need a wizard now, anyway. He could simply napalm the rest of Central Park. He wouldn’t get his cookout, no—at least not the kind he wanted—but neither would he suffer the fallout from further casualties. And he’d have dump trucks full of charred creatures to show for his effort.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said as I stepped into my classroom.

Two students stared back at me: Denise and Brie. I checked my watch as I unshouldered my satchel and dropped it onto my desk. I wasn’t that late.

“Where is everyone?”

“We didn’t think you’d come,” Denise said.

I