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

love with. If I somehow managed to get out of this, I would tell her. But whatever happened, I hoped Caroline would have some sense that I tried. That I never gave up.

That determined, a pervasive calm settled over me. It was time.

“Hey, Sathanas,” I mumbled, holding his blazing eyes, “Take your gift…”

I drove my sword arm forward and watched the blade plunge into the demon’s throat.

“…and choke on it.”

I threw open my prism to the torrent of ley energy. It smashed through me, white and raging, like dam waters. I strained with all I had to contain it, to channel it into the demon, whose angry eyes flared wide. But my prism was breaking up like a paper straw. I didn’t know how much longer—

Silence hit me.

I was a young boy again, sitting in the middle row of pews, looking on the great stained glass window. My gaze had come to a stop at Michael. He was depicted as an angel, but I knew that wasn’t quite right. He had been an elemental, a First Saint. Someone occupied the seat beside me, but not my grandmother. I tried to turn my head, but I was in the stained glass now, light pouring through me.

Sathanas’s horrid scream wrenched me back to the present. Or maybe that was my own cry, the final expression of a blown mind, because I felt myself crashing into a blackness of collapsing bones.

49

I woke up to a cliché, which was to say in a hospital room. I did blink around, but no confused murmurings leaked from my lips. The antiseptic smell, sounds of distant monitors, and blue curtain that encircled my raised bed cued me in immediately.

I looked down to the right, where a pair of IV tubes fed blood and saline into the crook of my arm. On my left side, thick padding hugged my chest and shoulder, a spot of red striking through its center.

I remembered Sathanas’s tail piercing me and struggled to sit up, but something restrained my left wrist. I pulled the cover away. I was handcuffed to the bedrail.

“Do you know the punishment for imprisoning a cop?”

Someone stood from a chair beside the head of my bed. A second later, Detective Vega stepped into view. I looked her up and down. Same serious face, pulled-back hair, and black suit as just about every time I’d ever seen her, but man did she look stunning. Maybe it was just the fact she was alive.

“You’re all right,” was all I could think to say.

“Are you?” she asked.

Except for a little pounding in the back of my head, I wasn’t in nearly as much pain as I should have been, considering. “Just foggy,” I said. “How in the hell did I end up here?”

A corner of her mouth smirked. “Your buddies brought you in.”

“Buddies?”

“Dempsey and Dipinski. The acolyte at the cathedral called my office late last night and spoke to Hoffman. When Dempsey and Dipinski arrived to pick the kid up—in a taxi, for some reason—the whole cathedral shook. Like a bomb had gone off, they said. This kid, Malachi, insisted on going back inside for you. They dug you out of a boneyard in the subbasement. Boy, the officers just loved that.”

“And the…?” I almost said demon, but stopped myself. That Detective Vega was alive—that I was alive—told me all I needed to know. Somehow, someway, Sathanas had been destroyed.

My body relaxed into the mattress.

“Do you want to tell me more about my visitors last night?” Vega asked. “Or should we save it for another time?”

“Definitely another time,” I said wearily. “But you were … protected?”

She looked at me a long moment before nodding. “Around the same time the cathedral would’ve been shaking, those screaming creatures fell apart, evaporated. And then that field, or whatever you put up, disappeared.”

“And your son?”

“Safe as can be.”

I nodded at her softening expression. The dissolution of the shriekers occurred when their source, Sathanas, was destroyed. The subsequent breakdown of the shield was me tumbling into la-la land—and under a pile of bones, apparently. I remembered the centipede I’d seen crawling out of the ear canal of one of those skulls and fought the urge now to check my own.

Vega lowered her voice. “So what happened down there, Croft?”

I thought back to the experience of becoming Michael in the stained glass window. In that final instant, the power of the cathedral and my magical bloodline had aligned. And it was all because…

“I forgave,” I said.

“Forgave?” Her face scrunched up. “Who?”

“Um…” I looked down. “A few people. But I had help, too.”

“There was someone with you?”

“Yeah. Father Vick.”

His had been the presence beside me on the pew. I was certain of that now. Like strong hands over the backs of mine, he had helped me hold the prism together long enough to destroy the demon. Without him, I was sure I would have perished instead. And Sathanas would be loose in the world. I took a moment to compose my face before raising it again.

I expected Vega to say something skeptical—she had that look in her eyes—but she sighed in what sounded like accession. “The bishop told me what happened. Father Vick … the demon … how you saved her butt.”

“Then what’s with the handcuffs?” I gave them a little rattle.

Vega snorted and shook her head. “You woke up a few hours ago and tried to dance a tango with the night nurse.” She separated a small key from the others on her chain as she circled the bed. “The cuffs were put on for her sake as much as yours. She wasn’t amused.”

Thelonious, I thought with an inward groan. At least it settled the question of whether I owed him a night out.

I watched Vega unlock the cuffs, conflict furrowing her brow. I didn’t need to read her mind to know what was going on upstairs. She was considering just how in the hell she was going to explain to her higher ups what had happened