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

you, wizard. Hate you. They will come for you again.” I didn’t recoil as Sathanas extended a grotesque hand toward me, horned wings looming above. “I feel your power,” he said as he pulled me to my feet. “But it can be so much more, wizard, if you would only claim it.”

Ugly or not, Sathanas was speaking to emotions that had been swirling inside me like combustible fuel. I was sick and tired of being marginalized and threatened. Take the Order, a bureaucracy with a God complex. Everything I had learned since my earliest training had come from my own initiative, not the Order. They hadn’t assigned me a mentor in Chicory, but a goddamned warden. Now the Order was threatening me with death, and for what? Being a wizard? Why should I feel any allegiance to them? Why shouldn’t I seek power elsewhere? To defend myself—and, if it came to it one day, to overthrow the Elders?

“Yes,” Sathanas hissed, “you know it to be true.”

Whoa, Skywalker, I thought from a distance. This is a demon talking, a master manipulator. And you’re letting him inside your head.

I took a step back, but Sathanas quickly closed the space, his nightmare face bowing low. “There is no sin in passion,” he insisted, his eyes like stoked coals. “No sin in righteous anger. I will teach you to cultivate it, bring it to its glorious expression. You have no idea the power, wizard. All who once stepped on you will come to cower at your feet.”

Over the years, I had resorted to wisecracks and self-deprecating humor to deflect my anger. But the anger felt so much richer. So much more … redemptive. I ached now to punish those who had wronged me, even if it meant destroying them. I burned for them to know my terrifying power. A malicious smile broke across my face. Yes, that was true redemption.

And yet…

“What do you get from the deal?”

“What do you mean, wizard?” Sathanas demanded.

The flames inside me began to thin, as though reason were pulling oxygen from them. “A demon does not give selflessly,” I said, my voice strengthening. “There’s something you want.”

Huge black knuckles cracked inside the clenching fist he held out. “Like you, wizard,” he boomed, “I wish to exist according to my nature.” Fire breathed inside him. His body turned an incandescent red, and smoke plumed from his horrid wings. “I wish to be free.”

That’s all? I thought dryly, the anger guttering lower, the fire it had stoked leaving me. Mortal pains broke throughout my body, and I staggered against my cane.

But why is Sathanas appealing to me?

My gaze slid from the demon to the bishop, who remained down. Her faith, twisted from her, had given the demon form. But because I had ended the ceremony prematurely, he must not have acquired the power to break his confinement. He needed fresh fuel. He was trying to stoke my wrath into a force he could command. He would use it to free himself, then he would destroy me.

Unless I used that wrath to destroy him first.

I met his blistering gaze.

“Tell me more,” I said.

48

I listened as Sathanas stormed above me, recounting the times I had been slighted, shoved aside, stepped on. I opened myself to the dark, manipulative fingers writhing through my mind, twisting my thoughts. I nodded at the rush of charges and insinuations he leveled—some against those I loved. I allowed the flames of indignation to rear up again, to roar through my compassion, my reason.

And with the frothing wrath came power. God, the power. It didn’t require a mental prism to channel. It was already raging inside me. The demon Sathanas hadn’t lied about that.

But amid the exhilaration, I clung like sin to a single mantra:

He’ll use you and then kill you. He’ll use you and then kill you. He’ll use—

“Drink in the power, wizard,” he said. “Let it become you.”

At the potent suggestion, something withered to ash inside me. The last of my will. Flames gushed into the space, and I lost the mantra. A beautiful weightlessness overcame me. I was levitating, phantom fire roaring around my flapping coat. I’d read of magic users becoming demigods, but holy hell. Why would someone not elect this power, already latent inside him?

Sathanas cackled in delight as he poked a single talon against my shoulder, rotating me until I was facing away from the grotto. “Now, train your vengeance on those who wronged you.”

Their faces flashed through my mind’s eye—Professor Snodgrass, Detective Vega, Chicory, others from my past—and yes, I hated them all. I drew my sword and staff apart. The steel blade glowed red hot, orange flames licking up and down its length. I would break from the cathedral, climb into the red-lit night like a glorious archangel, and rain hellfire on my enemies.

But there was something I was supposed to remember.

“Go now,” Sathanas said. “Break the hold of this wicked, wretched place.”

I flew forward several feet, then wheeled with a thundering “FUOCO!”

The forces that roared down my sword and staff were more concentrated than anything I’d ever commanded. Like jet fuel, they merged into a single column of fire that broke against Sathanas’s chest. In blissful release, I watched him blast across the grotto. Flames plumed as Sathanas’s form drove into the rear wall, bones and skulls erupting around him.

When the catacombs fell still again, Sathanas was buried, save for a black flap of wing and his serpentine tail, which lay limp beside the bishop. My wrath spent, I fell to the grotto floor, weary smoke rising from me. But I couldn’t rest. I sheathed my sword and crawled to the bishop’s side.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “Can you walk?”

She looked from the demon’s tail back to me, her face creased with fear. “I believe so.”

I helped her up, wrapping an arm around her waist, even though I wasn’t in much better shape. Her first few steps were uncertain, but by the time we reached the grotto entrance,