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

The whiteness of her hair had not been an effect of the sunlight, I saw. This woman was older than my mother would have been.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Arianna.” Moving with strength and grace, she arrived at a table on the other side of the bed and picked up a bowl with a spoon inside it. She was the woman I had seen in my feverish sleep. “I knew your mother,” she said. “Can you sit?”

I pushed weakly with my arms and scooted up until I was sitting against the wooden headboard, dizzied by the effort and what the woman had just said. “Knew my mother? When?”

“Before you were born,” she answered, handing me the bowl. Inside was a broth that held what looked like a suspension of grains and minced herbs. A rich scent drifted up when I stirred them, making my stomach quiver with hunger. “In fact, I helped deliver you.”

I stopped stirring the broth. “What?”

“In this same room,” she said. “More than thirty years ago.”

I looked around as my mind crunched the numbers. If Marlow was my father and I was one year old when he killed my mother, I would have been born while my mother was infiltrating the…

“You’re a member of the Front,” I said coldly, setting the bowl back on the table.

Arianna’s white hair shifted as she straightened. I gauged the length. It was the same hair as on the magic-user who had seized my sword and driven it through Chicory’s back. I incanted quickly while pushing myself out the other side of the bed. An invisible field blocked me.

“Yes,” Arianna admitted, “but the Front is not what you’ve been led to believe.”

Her voice propagated through the air in calming waves. Whisperer magic, I thought, recalling what Chicory had told me. Making one see what isn’t there, believe what isn’t real. I was still in the palace, then, magic worming through my mind, my senses. I stared around. The stone walls weren’t really as clean and white as they appeared, but oozing with black gunk, the air swirling with poisonous spores. I inhaled sharply, trying to catch a whiff of them. And this Arianna was no woman, but a mold-covered creature, the killer of my mentor.

“Vigore!” I shouted, thrusting a hand toward her.

A surprising charge erupted from my fingers only to slam into a cocoon of energy around the bed. The transparent shield shuddered as it absorbed the blast. When the shield stilled, Arianna remained where she had been.

“I know this is confusing,” she said, no hint of scorn or menace in her voice.

I hammered the shield several times until my arms tired and then tried to break through with another force invocation. The shield felt even stronger than the last time, powerful magic maintaining it. I sagged back against the bed, my body trembling, hair matted with sweat.

Arianna, who had looked on compassionately while I struggled, said, “We didn’t expect you to understand. Not right away. Your confinement is only temporary. We’re going to explain everything.”

A soothing breeze blew through the windows and washed over me.

An illusion, I had to remind myself. All one big goddamned illusion.

“There’s nothing to explain,” I said. “You’re a clan of sickos and murderers. But guess what? Your book’s history. If Chicory got through, so can the Elders. It’s just a matter of time.”

“There are no more Elders,” a man’s voice said.

I turned toward the lean figure striding into the room. He looked to be late middle aged, strands of silver streaking through his dark, shoulder-length hair. He took a position beside Arianna. Intelligent gray eyes looked down from a handsome face etched with faint scars.

“There is no Order,” he finished.

“Keep telling yourself that,” I scoffed.

“Where are they, then?” he asked, looking around. “It’s been almost five days since your battle with Marlow.” Arianna whispered something to him, but he showed a staying hand, his gaze remaining fixed on mine. “Hmm?”

I incanted quietly, building up my prism, my capacity. I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but my mind had clearly been screwed with. That’s what the feverish dreams had been about—not detoxing, as Arianna claimed, but being poisoned by Whisperer magic.

“Rivelare,” I whispered, attempting to disrupt the veil, to peer past it to the black rot and evil from earlier. But everything remained horrifyingly pristine. Through the open windows, birds tittered merrily.

“Ask yourself this,” the man said. “Have you ever seen a representative of the Order?”

I stared at the ceiling. Don’t listen to him.

“Sure, there was Lazlo, your first mentor,” he said. “And Chicory. But other than those two? Well, how about a fellow magic-user, then? An organization that goes back several millennia, vast, branching lineages—it seems you would have been introduced to at least one or two others, no?”

“They’re out there,” I said defiantly.

“But the Order keeps everyone compartmentalized, is that it?”

“Connell, he needs to rest,” Arianna said.

“Naturally,” the man replied. “But I want to leave him with something to consider. Assume for a moment, Everson, that everything to this point in your wizard’s life was an illusion and that this is the reality. Assume that we’re not the enemy, but the ally. Assume that the Front isn’t opposing the Order, but fighting in its memory. Assume that our goal was never to call the Whisperer into the world, but to strain with the last fibers of our magic to keep it out.”

I remained staring at the ceiling, trying to bar his words from my mind.

“Assume for a moment that your mother was helping us,” he said, “and was killed for doing so. See if that doesn’t make more sense than what you’ve been led to believe.”

I turned enough to glare at him. “Don’t you dare mention my mother.”

Connell watched me intently for another moment, then turned and strode from the room. Arianna remained standing over the bed, head tilted. She seemed to be struggling with what to say.

“Call out if you need anything,” she said at last.

Then she too departed.

9

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