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

“Just be open to whatever you find out there,” Arianna said. “When you’re ready, return to the portal on your side and we’ll help transport you back here. Just remember. Four days.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” I muttered.

She presented a small glass vial with a clear liquid inside. “Take this,” she said. “The same magic that purged you is concentrated within. Should you find yourself beset, use it.”

Sure, lady, I thought, but accepted it.

“Are you ready?” Connell asked me.

I gave a nod, and he and Arianna began an incantation. The mastiff, who had been sniffing around, dropped onto his haunches between them and gave a single, friendly bark.

A moment later, I was staring at complete blackness.

“Illuminare,” I called in a panic.

The opal in my staff flickered and then cast an orb of white light. A dirt floor and empty space stretched out around me. Shadows shifted in the rafters overhead. I was back in the basement, standing in the casting circle Chicory had drawn days before. The Front had actually released me.

I stepped from the circle and found the staircase at the far end of the basement. Mounds of earth, where my mentor had manifested elementals during my training, stood on either side of me. I looked back, half expecting to see Chicory, but a hollowness in my gut told me I was alone. I ascended the stairs quickly, emerging through the door beneath the staircase to the attic.

“Hello?” I called. “Chicory? Tabitha?”

The inside of the house creaked and clicked in the stifling heat of high noon. I made a tour of all the rooms, starting in the kitchen. Everything appeared as I’d left it, down to the dirty plates Chicory had deposited around the house, only now black flies picked over them. With Chicory’s death, the protective energies that once shielded the house were gone.

“Tabitha,” I called again.

“In here…”

The weak voice had come from under the sink. When I opened the cabinet doors, a pair of green eyes squinted at me from behind pipes whose rusty joints glistened with moisture.

“Tabitha? What are you doing in there?” I reached a hand inside and, curling it beneath her stomach, hefted her out. She had lost a few pounds. I set her on the kitchen table and examined her.

“I thought you left me,” she said in her hurt voice. She plopped onto her side as though her legs were too weak to support her.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”

“I couldn’t get into the fridge and had to live off the spoiled crud Chicory left out. And then the water stopped running. After lapping up everything in the toilet, the only place I could find any water was on those disgusting pipes.” She grimaced and smacked her mouth as though trying to rid it of the taste. “Where were you?”

I sat in a chair facing her. “Things didn’t go exactly as planned.”

She raised her head enough to look over a shoulder. “And Chicory?”

Chicory is Lich, I heard Connell telling me. “The night he went through the portal, did he say anything?” I asked.

“Oh, not now, darling. I’m starving and wretched.”

“Please, just answer the question.”

“He said he’d be back. Typical man.”

“This is serious, Tabitha. I need you to think back. What were his exact words?”

“What do I look like, a stenographer?” My eyes must have looked as frighteningly intense as they felt because her own eyes cut to one side as though searching her memory. “He said you were in trouble and that he was going in to help. That he would come back with you soon.”

“Anything else?”

“What happened down there, darling?”

“You and Chicory are close,” I pressed. “Did anything about him ever strike you as, I don’t know, funny?”

“Besides his green shoes?”

“No, anything he said? Anything he did?”

“Well, his sudden interest in you struck me as odd. I tried to tell him you were hopeless.”

I thought about that. Aside from the brief visits here and there, usually to issue a warning, Chicory was absent for months, sometimes years. And all of a sudden he’s committed to training me? That did seem odd.

And it had all begun the day I’d brought my mother’s hair to Lady Bastet to divine from. In fact, it was only hours after the mystic’s murder that I’d come home to find Chicory sitting in my apartment. All consistent with what Connell had told me. Chicory claimed to have been sent by the Order with information about my mother, but he’d damned sure been interested in the gatekeeper I’d summoned to learn about her death.

And what did the gatekeeper say? he’d wanted to know.

But that wasn’t evidence of anything. If the Order had sent Chicory, the timing could have been incidental. And he would have been interested in any summoning, given that it was forbidden.

I looked back at Tabitha. Through her, the Front had access to my words, my actions.

“Here,” I said, getting up quickly and opening the fridge. I pulled out a bottle of milk and some leftover food, fixed a meal for Tabitha, and set the plates and bowl on the floor. She hopped down from the table, wasting no time plunging her face into the fat and protein she’d been unable to get to.

While she ate, I returned to the bedroom Chicory had been using as a laboratory. On one side, a table held different-sized beakers with dirty distillation tubes running between them. A disorganization of spell implements and spiral-bound notebooks lay in scattered piles. Inside the notebooks, I found scribblings on various spells, all of them benign as far as I could tell. Nothing to suggest Chicory was anything other than who he’d appeared to be.

I didn’t sense any active magic either, but I spoke a reveal invocation anyway. Nothing new appeared. I glanced over a pile of newspaper clippings on the table, the topmost one about the robe of John the Baptist being on exhibit at Grace Cathedral. Chicory had once remarked that, in