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

“You will return,” my father answered.

“You’re not coming?”

His sober look told me everything. As the most powerful magic-user, he alone would speak the Word. He would unleash the impossible force that would repel Dhuul. The hope that had been swelling inside me ruptured and deflated. He held up a hand before I could say anything.

“It’s the only way, Everson.”

“Let me help,” I said. “Maybe together we can channel the force, contain it…”

But he was already shaking his head. The hand he had raised came to a rest behind my neck. He pulled me against him. “I feel your willingness, Everson,” he whispered, “but you wouldn’t survive, and the sacrifice would be pointless. Arianna and the new Order will need you.”

I squeezed him back, a huge knot of grief closing my throat.

After another moment he stood back, held me by the shoulders, and looked intently into my eyes. “I have to go. But I go with the joy that I finally got to see you, to know you.”

His imaged blurred as I blinked back tears.

He smiled, then peered past me. “Be ready, everyone.” Then to me, “Be ready.”

“I … I love you,” I said.

“I love you too, Everson.”

With a final squeeze, he turned and strode toward the pit. It was spouting up giant gouts of green bile now. The horrible whisper continued to climb as Dhuul stormed toward the surface to claim our world. My father stopped at the pit’s edge and peered down. He looked back at us, nodded once, and before I could raise a hand in farewell, dropped from sight.

I stood stunned, then ran toward the pit. I couldn’t bear the thought of him descending alone, no one to watch him. The magic-users shouted behind me. I arrived at the edge of the pit in time to see my father’s flapping robes consumed by the vast darkness. The horrid whispers continued to swell, but now something was meeting it: a Word, more potent and resonant than anything I had ever heard.

Far below, a light flashed like an exploding star and Dhuul’s whisper became a scream.

A blinding force rushed up and threw me back. In the next moment, the scream was buried by a roar. The pit was imploding. A new force pulled me from the pit’s edge. I was back among the magic-users. They were leaning toward me, trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear them. As the roaring grew, they began to disappear, popping from existence. I looked around. The entire realm was sliding toward the pit. Even the nightmare sky stretched and tore.

When you feel the membrane failing, Arianna will pull from the other side, my father had said, but you must push. With everything you have.

I glanced back at the pit where the Word continued to echo in my father’s voice.

And I pushed.

29

Two weeks later

“Your grandfather hid the blade’s power well,” Arianna said, looking up and down the length of my sword. “But it’s just as you say. He removed the blade from the Banebrand, smelted it, and from the metal fashioned this.”

“And set up his own double bluff,” I said.

“I’m sorry, a double what?”

I had spent two days in the Refuge before returning home to grieve my father’s death. I lived and relived our scant time together: his revelation about Lich, our walk together across the plain, our final embrace beside the pit. I was fortunate to have had those fleeting moments, I decided. But the fact was hard to reconcile with the pain of only having had those moments. Of never really having gotten to know the man behind the figurative mask. I spent the two weeks in a tearful fugue of thankfulness and regret until, at last, I woke up one morning—this morning, in fact—and decided to recommit myself to magic-using.

Naturally, Arianna knocked on my door shortly after.

Now sunlight streamed through her white hair as she turned from a bay window in my apartment. Though she’d adapted her attire to blend in with the modern world—a long skirt and peasant blouse with a plum-colored shawl—she still looked strange to me outside the Refuge. A place the Front no longer had to hide inside. The Front was no longer a resistance group, after all. They were no longer even “the Front.” They were the Order.

“A double bluff,” I repeated. “It’s a concept I learned from James. My grandfather hid an enchantment inside the blade, one that cleaves magic, but beneath that enchantment he’d hidden the true design of the blade.”

“Which could only be released by the story he’d bound it to,” Arianna said.

I nodded, thinking about my staff and sword in pieces across the table at the safe house. I suspected now that Lich had disassembled it to make extra certain there was nothing inside that could harm him. All he’d found was the magic-cleaving enchantment—one he tried to warp to his own purposes, using me as his unwitting agent.

“I didn’t know my grandfather was a mythologist until Marlow told me,” I said. “Grandpa passed the sword on to me after I’d begun my own studies in mythology. Bound it to me.” I remembered how, during our final conversation, he’d asked me to unsheathe the sword. I hadn’t been watching his face, but he’d no doubt been incanting to ensure that, if lost, the blade would find me again. It had already tasted my blood. “I must have been his fail-safe.”

“Your grandfather bound the blade to you, yes,” Arianna said. “But through you, it was also bound to Marlow. That was how you were able to reunite and end Lich’s reign.”

I nodded in growing understanding: my father and I had shared the same blood. And then something even more startling occurred to me. “So … Lich was the unwitting agent?”

Arianna smiled. “Even though he believed he had all the contingencies covered, Lich took a great risk in sending you to the Refuge alone. He should never have done so. But the bond between you, the Banebrand, and your father was