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

side. Something about the grip reminded me of our final embrace, which made sense. My father would have willed the blade into being, then imbued it with his own magic. I was, in essence, carrying a part of him.

“He designed it to better channel your specific energies. As your power grows, it will unlock certain enchantments.”

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“I have something else for you,” she said, reaching a strong, vein-lined hand into a skirt pocket. I imagined that same hand helping deliver me from my mother’s womb more than thirty years before—much as she’d helped deliver me from Lich’s imploding realm, her powers pulling me back into the Refuge. I was the last to arrive, and though Arianna hadn’t said so, I sensed it had been close. When her hand emerged now, it was holding a misty orb the size of a tennis ball.

“Your mother wanted you to have this,” she said, handing it to me.

The mist stirred as the orb settled inside my cupped palm. A feeling of profound warmth and what I could only describe as love overcame me. I hadn’t felt anything quite like it since Nana’s death.

“What is it?”

“It’s an emo ball,” Arianna explained. “After you were born, your mother invested it with her feelings for you. She knew well the danger of her work, and if something were to happen, she didn’t want you to grow up without knowing the love of a mother for her child, for you. After Lich sealed us in the Refuge, we had no way to get it to you. But the feelings of an emo ball do not fade. They are as authentic as the day your mother put them inside.”

I caressed the orb. As the mist stirred again, I felt another rush of warmth and love.

“This is incredible,” I said, my voice beginning to tremble. The feeling of my mother’s presence was a lot how I’d imagined it would be, but also wonderfully different. Deeper. “Thanks for safeguarding it all these years.” I looked from the orb to the sword and back.

“I’ll leave you now,” Arianna said, “but we’ll be in contact.”

“And if I need to reach you…?” I asked. My mind was already going to cups and flames and special parchment paper and strange formalities, wondering how that was going to work now.

“Give us a call,” she said.

“A call? You mean, like, on a phone?”

“I’ve left a number on your counter.”

I turned to where she nodded. A rectangular business card sat on the kitchen counter beside the telephone. “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“And remember,” she said as she strode toward the door, “until we repair the fissures, the world will be a little stranger.”

At that moment, my fog-horn alarm sounded and the hologram upstairs began to flash red.

“Good luck,” she said.

30

“What in the hell happened to you?” Vega asked.

“Oh.” I touched the bandages on my forehead. “A group of teens thought it would be cute to call up their recently-deceased friend. An acid-flinging bug showed up instead. I … was flung at.”

She smirked. “In that case, you’re forgiven for being late.”

I started to tell her that the encounter had happened before I’d called to invite her and Tony to dinner, then decided against it. I’d take the mulligan. I slid onto the bench beside her. The venue was a popular restaurant in Brooklyn, its interior set up to look like a Latin American plaza: picnic tables arranged around a stone fountain, trikes and Big Wheels strewn about for kids to ride and fight over. “Mr. Croft!” Tony shouted as he flashed past, pumping one of the trikes like it was a scooter. He was gone by the time I waved back.

I smiled. I figured he’d enjoy it here.

“I went ahead and ordered,” Vega said. “Hope you like street tacos.”

“Delicioso,” I said.

“In the meantime…” She lifted a sweating margarita pitcher and poured me and her a salt-rimmed glass apiece. “I think we’ve earned it.”

The collapse of the portal had pulled with it the Whisperer magic that had begun flowing into the world. Those who had lost their minds regained their baseline sanity—or baseline insanity, in some cases. In the hours prior, the NYPD had followed through and fumigated the city with cannabis smoke. The smoke stopped the rioting in its tracks and spared large swaths of the city. The cleanup and rebuilding were another story, but it could have been a lot worse.

“No kidding,” I said wearily as we clinked glasses.

I took a large swallow, glad to be out in the world again, glad to be drinking margaritas with a … friend? Remembering my conversation with James, I snuck a sidelong look at Vega. Her midnight hair was down, spilling over the shoulders of a simple V-neck shirt that she managed to make look amazing.

Yeah, I liked her.

“Hey, slow it down,” she called to her son as he zoomed past on another circuit. But Tony was too absorbed in his laughing, hair-whipping fun to hear. She frowned and shook her head.

“How’s his sitter?” I asked.

“Camilla? Aside from the two pounds she gained binge-eating, she’s fine.”

“Caught the munchies, huh?”

“Yeah, I don’t think she’s ever smoked before.”

That made me laugh hard enough to get Vega laughing too. As our chuckles wound down, a small fold appeared between her dark eyes and she peered around. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but what did you mean on the phone when you said New York might get stranger?”

I shared what Arianna had told me about the collapsing portal creating tears in the boundaries between worlds. The alarm that morning seemed to lend proof to that. I doubted the teens would have been able to call up a nether creature that large or mean even a month ago.

“Great, just what the city needs,” Vega muttered. “What will you need?”

“Cooperation with the NYPD, for starters.”

“Well, you have a lot of goodwill there after coming up with the cannabis idea. I don’t know that there’s enough money in the budget right now to pay you, though.