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

were picking up on Tabitha’s plane. We didn’t know you were being sent so soon.”

I found another hole in Connell’s account. “If I was so important to Lich’s plan, why has he allowed me to take on such dangerous work?” I was thinking of all the close calls I’d had over the years.

“Did he allow it?” Connell asked. “Consider the times you were ordered to stand down or that someone intervened directly on your behalf.”

I thought about Chicory showing up to save me from the druids in Central Park. It was the same night he’d ordered me off the demon cases.

“The rest of the time,” Connell said, preempting my next challenge, “you were aided by Whisperer magic. Coming up with a solution, often a lifesaving one, at just the right moment.”

“That’s called a luck quotient. All wizards have it.”

“Is that what you were told?” Connell asked, the genuineness in his tone rankling me.

I rounded on him. “You’re telling me there’s no Order and that’s why no one’s coming. That’s the argument you’re going with, right? Fine. I can use it too. There’s no Lich. Want to know how I know? Because I destroyed your book, and look…” I peered over both shoulders. “…no Lich.”

I crossed my arms smugly. Checkmate.

“He already came,” Connell said calmly.

“When I was out?”

“No, before.”

“Before?”

“Everson,” he said, looking at me gravely, “Chicory is Lich. It’s one of his guises.”

I uncrossed my arms, unsure now what to do with them. For a disorienting moment I was sitting beside Chicory in his car after the druid encounter. The Order can seem like an abstraction sometimes, he was saying, but when it comes to their mandates, they’re rather black and white. Trust me. I’ve had to take care of two wayward wizards this month already.

I remembered how dark and mercenary my mentor’s eyes had looked.

“Forget it,” I said, shaking off the memory. “You’re never going to convince me of that.”

“My job isn’t to convince you,” Connell said. “It’s to give you enough information so you can investigate the claims for yourself. You need to decide whether what I’m telling you is true.”

“I know what I saw.”

“You saw what he wanted you to see.”

I was barely aware of my fingers massaging the spot where Chicory had mashed his thumb. I felt a ghost of the pressure that had manifested behind my eyes and deep in my ears.

“If this crap you’re telling me is true, why the hard sell?” I asked. “You killed him.”

“Destroyed his form,” he corrected me. “And only because he’d activated the powerful enchantment inside your blade. No, the being that is Lich can only be killed by destroying the glass pendant in which he stores his claimed souls. Naturally, he keeps the pendant hidden. His new body is forming beside it as we speak, coalescing from the magic within. He will be back soon.”

An involuntary shudder passed through me. “Are you done?”

“For now, yes.”

11

I followed Connell and Arianna down the steep steps of the palace to where the rocky hill flattened to the plain. Arianna had returned everything to me, including my sword and staff, claiming to have purified them of Whisperer magic. I carried both in my hands and kept a charge of energy around my prism. Neither of my escorts seemed to mind, which bothered me.

When we arrived on the plain, Connell whistled and one of the mastiffs hustled over, tongue lolling. I looked the dog over carefully as it sniffed me and then trotted beside us, escorting us toward the forest. It wasn’t acting like a warg, but that could be illusory too, I reminded myself.

“To avoid additional holes in our realm,” Connell said, “we’re sending you back the way you came through.”

Or are you taking me into the forest to sacrifice me? I thought.

But they’d already had plenty of opportunities, and that bothered me, too.

Soon, the trees took us in. Not the dark, fungus-riddled trees I’d arrived through, but a healthy growth of what looked like oak and spruce. After several more minutes we arrived at a small clearing.

“Here,” Connell said, stopping.

As I arrived at the center of the clearing, he and Arianna stepped back.

“Do you have any more questions?” he asked.

“No.”

“I’m sure you’ve been wondering about your father,” Arianna said. “He visited your bedside while you slept. He is anxious to meet you and for you to meet him, but only when that is what you desire.”

I had been wondering about him, of course, but I didn’t let it show on my face. The man had killed my mother. I’d seen it, experienced it. The horror stuck like barbs around my heart. Even so, Connell had done his job. He’d managed to plant enough doubt in my head that I had no choice but to investigate his claims. Try to figure out what in the hell was going on.

“Are we going to get this party on, or what?” I asked impatiently.

“There is one more thing,” Connell said. “Once Lich reconstitutes himself, he’s going to come after you. Whether to seduce you anew or end you, I can’t say. He got what he wanted by sending you here. The Elder book contained powerful magic to keep Dhuul from the world. Its destruction did not weaken our stronghold here so much as increase Dhuul’s, and thus Lich’s, power. Knowing you have spent time with us, Lich will see you as a threat.”

“You have four days,” Arianna said, “no more.”

“And then, let me guess, I have to come back here, right?”

“If you want to live,” Connell said bluntly. “You’ll have no defenses against his magic out there.”

“Why do you care?”

He looked at me for a moment. “Because you’re one of us.”

“So are all magic-users, if what you’re saying is true. Why aren’t you helping them?”

“We have no way to reach them,” he said. “When Lich discovered us, he sealed us in. Though your arrival came with a cost, it also presents a new opportunity. We can’t come and go, but you can.”

Is that why they