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

Praise for The Death Mage…

There was no time for second-guessing. I would only talk myself back into a fifty-fifty stalemate—or Chicory would do it for me.

I rushed forward.

With my cane locked, I wasn’t sure I would be able to cast through it. Rather than risk it, I raised the cane overhead and, using all of my strength, brought it down on the back of Chicory’s head.

20

The blow landed at the base of Chicory’s skull with a dull thud, and he collapsed to the floor.

“Darling! Have you gone fucking mad?”

I spun to where Tabitha was entering the room, her eyes large with alarm. I stared back down at my mentor, terrified now that I’d been wrong and had killed or severely injured him. I backed from him, the cane limp in my suddenly-cold hands.

Blood spread through the back of Chicory’s moppy gray hair in a bloom so dark it was nearly black. I imagined Marlow watching through Tabitha’s eyes and congratulating the Front on their successful manipulation of me.

My gaze jerked to the opera announcement, still on the table, the cover featuring the robed figure in the gold mask. An illusion? But something was releasing in my mind, as though a hand that had been balling up the vessels was letting go. Familiar colors swirled around my vision. I’d last seen them in the Refuge, after I’d watched Chicory fall. They dissipated quickly this time, and I looked around until I spotted my dropped packing list. It was a flight itinerary again. I snatched it up and held it toward Tabitha.

“Can you read this? Tell me what it says.”

But Tabitha was backing away, refusing to look.

I dropped the itinerary and lifted my shirt. The ugly blue-green lash across my stomach was back. “Or how about that? Can you see it?”

“Um, darling,” she said, nodding past me.

I turned and almost lost my balance. Chicory was pushing himself up from the floor, but he wasn’t Chicory anymore. He was changing, shifting. A red layered robe replaced his professorial attire while his mop of gray hair shed to reveal a bald, vein-mapped head. When he turned toward me, his eyes glowed the same yellow I’d glimpsed on the night Chicory had appeared in my apartment following Lady Bastet’s murder. Violent power warped the air around him.

“No more artifice,” he said, his voice deep and strange.

I was vaguely aware of things fluttering down around me. One landed next to my foot. I glanced down. It was a message from James Wesson, updating the Order on our situation. Other messages were spewing from the column of fire still hidden behind the table, landing around the room. I spotted the one I’d sent from the Refuge. No Order meant all of the messages had gone to the only Elder still alive. Murderer of his siblings. Pawn of Dhuul.

There was no longer any doubt.

“Lich,” I said.

“I know what I penned in the archives,” he said, “but I did not create the fissure to the Whisperer—I merely found it. Dhuul’s coming is inevitable. That is what my brothers and sisters refused to accept. They wanted to expend all of our power and resources to stall Dhuul’s arrival—for that is all we could have done, stalled it—while I proposed we align our purposes to the being’s and become true immortals.”

“At the expense of the world and every living thing in it,” I said thinly.

As Lich’s transformation finished, he loomed on the far side of the room, his wasted head nearly touching the ceiling. The gray skin around his starved mouth was so tight and sunken that I could see the outlines of his teeth. His lips peeled back into a gruesome simile of a grin. “The world and every living thing would have been pulled into chaos anyway.”

“Is that why you’ve been sacrificing magic-users?” I asked, remembering Lazlo’s fungus-riddled corpse.

“I am not sacrificing them, Everson,” he replied, his teeth continuing to show. “I am taking them with me. When I attain immortality, so too will they.” He stepped toward me. “So too will you.”

I turned and lunged for the doorway but collided into an energy field. A mind-numbing charge ripped through me, dropping me to the floor. I looked around for Tabitha, but she had already fled.

“I have little more use for you,” he said. “Your soul is too green to harvest. Ending you would be the most prudent action, but you did destroy the Elder book, and for that you’ve earned a place among the immortals. It’s what you’ve longed for.”

I had been fascinated by the idea of the Elders, of one day attaining that state, but not like this.

“You’d only be fighting the inevitable,” Lich reminded me.

“Inevitable, my ass. You murdered the Elders because you knew they had the power to close the fissure and keep Dhuul from our world. Or maybe I should say Dhuul had you murder the Elders.”

Lich’s brow bunched together and his yellow eyes flared. He raised a hand of long fingers and stretched them toward me. I felt my mind begin to twist and bend.

“Vigore!” I shouted, thrusting my cane toward him.

But instead of a force blast, a torrent of nightmare bats spewed from the end of my cane. I covered my head as they flapped around the room on membranous wings the color of human flesh.

Beyond them, Lich said, “You are in my world now.”

I peeked beneath a forearm, and discovered that I was no longer in Chicory’s room, but standing at the edge of a monstrous hole that plunged into the earth. The bats I’d unleashed flapped around its opening, poisonous vapors drifting up from the roaring black depth. I peered over the precipice. A matrix of bile-green energy held the hole open. I understood these were the souls of those Lich had murdered and claimed over the centuries. I sensed they were still living, still conscious. I hurt, Lazlo’s voice rasped in my mind.

My head pounded with the