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

could catch myself. I was talking to a magic-imbued machine. And thank God, I thought, thinking of the automatons I’d decapitated and gutted on my first visit to the Refuge, believing them the enemy. Those could have been members of the Front. Or my father.

“I’m to take you to the council meeting,” the automaton said.

“Okay.”

I finished dressing and followed the automaton from the infirmary room. We walked down handsome stone corridors and climbed several stairways. As the automaton’s gears whirred quietly, the revelation I’d had before falling asleep spun through my thoughts. I felt both a short-breathed excitement to see Connell and a deepening anxiety. What did you say to a father you’d never met? Hey, Pops, how’s it going? We should, you know, go fishing sometime?

Before long we arrived in the altar room on the top level, the same room where I’d seized what I’d believed was Lich’s book. Whisperer magic polluting my senses, the room had appeared evil then, with its gunked-up statue pillars and foul pool. Now, it appeared grand.

Around the room, the massive statues of the nine First Saints gleamed marble-white, their hewn forms and faces speaking to power and wisdom. The raised pool at the room’s center was still long and rectangular, but its water was deep blue and lined in handsome stones. More than twenty magic-users sat around the pool, including James, who was easy to pick out with his cowboy hat.

Connell and Arianna sat on the pool’s far side in robes. My heart gave a hard double thud when Connell raised his eyes to mine. “Have a seat, Everson,” he said, indicating a place across from him.

I settled in beside James.

“Too bad you missed dinner,” James whispered. “They had a killer spread.”

“Tabitha must have been in seventh heaven,” I muttered, imagining her in a food coma on a plush bed somewhere.

“She could barely walk afterwards,” James affirmed.

I peered around. The other members of the Front were men and women of varying ages and races, some recruited by my grandfather, no doubt, others born and trained within the Refuge. I considered how remote the highest echelons of the Order had always felt to me. Now, for all intents and purposes, I was sitting among them.

Connell stood. “The situation is more dire than we feared,” he said. “Though our efforts slow Lich’s progress, they cannot staunch the outflow of Whisperer magic. That magic is pouring into the world, beginning the dissolution, a process that will gain momentum as it deepens and spreads. Lich has only to bide his time, but he appears intent on hastening that process.”

“How so?” a woman asked.

“When Lich was forced from the Refuge earlier tonight, he took Everson’s staff with him,” Connell said. “I believe that was intentional. The staff’s magic acts as a beacon. He’s taken the staff to where he’s building his portal to Dhuul, a parallel realm, not unlike the Refuge.”

“I’ve been there,” I blurted out. “Lich transported me there earlier tonight, or at least my astral form. He was preparing to claim my soul.” For the benefit of the other magic-users, I described what I had seen.

Connell nodded gravely. “It is Lich’s home. It’s where he’s most potent. And he plans to lure us there to destroy us and complete his work. Perhaps it is his way of getting the last laugh—using the souls of those who resisted him to finish the portal to his master.”

I considered how the power possessed by those in this room would be greater than the remaining magic-users in the world. It wasn’t a stretch to think their souls could accomplish Lich’s objective the instant he claimed them.

“So what do we do?” a young-looking man to my right asked.

“What we must,” Connell said. “We fight him there.”

My body broke out in a sweat as I recalled the nightmare realm. The creatures going up and down the stairway that spiraled into the pit had seemed endless. And the whispers… If we didn’t fall to Lich or the creatures, we’d be seduced by Dhuul’s magic.

“He’s confident,” Connell went on. “Perhaps overconfident. Not only does the staff enable us to track him, he has lowered the defenses to his realm, where he likely keeps his glass pendant. Nothing prevents our passage. This is the first time he’s given us this kind of access. It’s a trap, yes. But we must use that to our advantage somehow. With time running out, we have no other choice.”

I watched Connell as he spoke, the way his hands clasped behind his low back, the fingers of his right hand hooking his left thumb. The same gesture had bothered me days earlier because it was how I clasped my own hands when I lectured.

“But we’ve still no weapon,” an older man said.

Weapon? I thought.

Connell turned to James and me. “Though it may sound like a contradiction, Dhuul requires an organizing force to reduce our world to chaos. Someone to build the portal, harvest the souls, carry out certain rites and magic. Lich is the key to Dhuul’s designs, even in these last stages.”

I nodded, understanding he was filling us in on something the others already knew.

“In Lich’s hunger for supremacy, he made a deal with Dhuul and became an undead being. The power that sustains him lives inside a pendant protected by a rare and indestructible enchantment. Your grandfather divined as much. But through his research, he also discovered that the Elders designed a weapon to pierce any magic, no matter how powerful. The Banebrand. It was a fail-safe so that a single magic-user couldn’t become invincible. Your grandfather believed Lich stole the Banebrand and then lost it, which was part of the weapon’s magic: to not end up in the hands of the one wielding the abusive power.”

“That’s why my grandfather was collecting magical artifacts during the war,” I said, remembering what the vampire Arnaud had told me. He claimed that Grandpa had used the Brasov Pact to steal from his fellow magic-users. “He wasn’t stealing. He was searching