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

wolves hesitated, startled more than enthralled, it seemed. Without taking my eyes off them, I removed my necklace, palming the large coin pendant, which continued to glow a pale blue, and held it out in front of me.

“This is silver,” I lied, the iron cold in my grip. “If I cast through it, it will burn you alive.”

When the wolves’ nostrils flared, I drew the coin back inside the bouquet of my coat to cloak its scent. The wolves would pick out the iron eventually, but not before my prism was restored.

I hoped.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I said. “I just want to negotiate the terms of my surrender.” The pressure of being underground was stifling my voice, stealing its power. The words themselves would have to convince them.

“We don’t negotiate with cop-killing pieces of shit,” someone called back.

“Yeah, how about we just stick a few bullets between your eyes?” someone else put in.

I squinted toward the multiplying beams of light. Though I couldn’t see the police officers holding the flashlights, it wasn’t hard to imagine their hostile faces—or the guns they were aiming. If the wolves and NYPD had something in common, it was their belief that I had willfully murdered members of their brotherhood. Like blood spreading through water, a scarlet aura of vengeance united them. I would have to tread really damned carefully.

“I just have one request for my surrender,” I said.

“Lower your weapon!” an officer ordered.

“That Detective Hoffman make the arrest,” I persisted.

There was nothing special about Detective Hoffman. He just happened to be one of the few officers I knew by name, other than Vega. And I didn’t want to get Vega any more involved than she already was. Requesting Hoffman was a stalling tactic, something to buy me a precious minute or two.

“We’re not gonna warn you again, Croft! Lower your fucking weapon and get on the ground!”

I could practically feel the tension on their triggers.

I swallowed. “Just contact him, let me know he’s on the way, and I’ll do everything you say, I promise. No one gets hurt.”

The wolves growled in the silence that followed. Like the officers, they had heard rumors of my powers, the feats I was capable of. Publicity had its perks. It was this more than anything, I suspected, that held them at bay. If they knew how defenseless I was, my face would’ve been eating concrete by now. I blinked sweat from my lashes as I chanted softly and awaited the verdict.

Hopefully it wouldn’t come in the form of a firing squad.

The officers must have been consulting in whispers because one of them finally said, “We’re calling him now.”

My legs buckled in relief, but I steeled myself. I still had work to do. I closed my eyes to the wolves, the flashlight beams—pushed them to the back of my thoughts—and returned to my training with Lazlo.

This may be the most important lesson I ever teach you, my first teacher had said. If you lose your prism, you must retain your focus. A wizard who cannot cast is a dead wizard.

I remembered the way Lazlo’s cloudy, wolf-torn eye had stared into mine.

In the tunnels beneath New York, I whispered and re-whispered the centering mantra.

Deep in my mind, the prism vibrated. Power eddied through my body. I repeated the chant until the prism’s contours appeared through the fog, glowing as they returning to form.

“Hoffman’s on the way,” an officer barked. “Now surrender your weapon and get facedown on the floor, like you promised.” The flashlights advanced above a careful procession of footsteps.

I watched the wolves stalk closer too, the lead one sniffing the air.

“He’s not packing silver,” he growled, his advance becoming more confident.

The wolves were fifteen feet from me now, close enough that I could see follicles of hair growing from their foreheads and jowls. They couldn’t hold their wolves inside any longer. The hunger for pack justice was too powerful.

A little closer… I thought.

“I’m warning you, Croft,” an officer said.

I extended the coin out in front of me, its edges crackling with blue light.

“On my order,” I caught the same officer mutter.

It had to be now.

“Illuminare!” I bellowed.

The energy that stormed through my restored prism emerged from the coin as a dazzling explosion of light. For an instant, the tunnel turned bright white. The wolves recoiled with snarling cries. I could see the officers now—eight of them—arms thrown to their faces.

A shot went off, ricocheting from the wall to my left.

“Vigore!” I cried.

Power branched from my other palm and slammed into the wolves. They cannoned into the officers behind them, flipping them like bowling pins. When they landed, several officers pawed around for their weapons, stunned and blinded. I was safe from them for the moment. The wolves, with their uncanny senses of hearing and smell, were another story. They staggered onto their hands and feet, more lupine now than human.

Replacing the coin around my neck, I turned and pressed both hands to the wall.

“Forza dura!” I shouted.

In an explosion of mortar, the wall toppled away. I scrambled over the collapse and into the sewer-like stench of the Broadway line. Following the successful operation two weeks before, armed teams had swept the lines and destroyed the handful of remaining ghouls. Restoration work had already begun. I emerged through the dust to find a string of lights running along the tunnel above step ladders and large bundles of electrical wire. No workers, fortunately.

I dropped onto the tracks. A few blocks to the north, lights glowed where the Broadway line shared the Forty-Second Street station with the Seventh Avenue line. The station was inside the cordon and could still be manned by police. I sidestepped away from it and broke into a run.

I’d have to take my chances south.

My plan was to go about fifteen, twenty blocks, then climb one of the emergency staircases located halfway between stations. I’d blow open the hatch beneath the sidewalk and try to blend into the street scene, somewhere in the Twenties. From