Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9) by Brad Magnarella (ereader with android .txt) 📕

a dish towel and slinging it over a shoulder. “Let me send you something.” I pulled out my phone and texted her the shot I’d taken of Bear Goldburn’s expedition photo. When she received it, she studied the image with a frown.

“Ookay…”

“When I was looking over the penthouse for anomalies, my magic directed me to this picture on his wall. I think I was specifically meant to see the flag. It’s not a country flag—I already checked—and the symbols on the center stripe are odd. Not from any of the pictographic alphabets. While Hoffman’s rounding up the usual suspects, I’d like to find out what the flag means, whether it’s relevant.”

“I can isolate it and do an image search.”

“Excellent. I’ll go ahead and get started on the spell, then. The extra-safe spell,” I emphasized.

“Aren’t you forgetting something? You were going to tell me what was up with Bree-yark.”

“Oh, that.” I scratched my neck. “Wellll… I sort of took a cone-of-silence vow.”

“And you’re married now, so that cone extends to your wife.”

“Is that how it works?”

She cocked her head. “Do you really need me to explain that to you?”

“All right, all right.” I peeked over at Tony and Tabitha, then crouched until I was level with her ear. “He’s considering proposing.”

She turned to me, eyes wide.

“Yeah, but just considering,” I emphasized. “You saw what happened this morning. I think Gretchen’s actually right about the whole ‘emotional stress overwhelming a goblin’s nervous system’ thing.”

“Well, try to work on him. They’d be so good for each other.”

“Sure, but if he’s going to lay out every time she turns up, maybe they’re better off dating.”

Tabitha cleared her throat. “And to whom are you referring?”

“No one,” Vega and I said simultaneously.

8

I made a couple nervous adjustments to Bear’s hair sample, then stood back and looked over the arrangement on my lab floor. Satisfied, I activated and downed a slick wizard potion in the unlikely event something tried to grab me. I did the same with a second potion, this one to strengthen the bond to my casting circle.

As I smacked on the bitter aftertastes, I thought of my promise to Vega.

The scrying spell would be as harmless as I’d sworn—but I’d omitted one detail. With deaths, particularly violent ones, memories stuck to cells. Seers projected those memories onto scrying objects, but since I wasn’t a seer, I was left with absorbing the memories, essentially becoming a scrying object myself. More than just observing Bear’s final moments, I would be experiencing them.

Safe, yes. Pleasant, not at all.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered.

As my skin turned slippery with the slick wizard potion, I lit a pair of silver candles and killed the light. The candles swelled on either side of a round mirror I’d placed on the floor. Beyond the mirror, three of Bear’s hairs lay in a fresh casting circle, a sigil-enhanced line running back to the circle around my feet.

Tapping into my circle, I pushed energy until the symbols glowed the color of heated copper. The warm energy flowed out along the line, haloing the mirror and enclosing the smaller casting circle with the hairs.

A resonant hum took up in the lab. We were connected.

I drew a final potion from my coat, this one an Elixir of Seeing. It was the last of my potent ’48 batch, and I choked it down, dregs and all. Almost immediately, I began to feel light and insubstantial.

As a growing pressure built above and between my eyes, I lowered myself to my knees until I was peering at my own reflection. As I began to incant, my mind made a note to do a better shave job along the groove of my neck. But a mist was drifting in from the sides now, occluding the dark swath of bristles.

And here comes the fun part…

I drew a hissing breath as the pressure in the center of my brow turned to a gouge—the opening of my third eye. The sharp pain relented. With it went the mist, and I was suddenly staring into a pair of blue eyes: Bear Goldburn’s.

Then, in a terrifying inversion, I was him.

A hand clapped down on my shoulder.

I was hunched over, forearms bracketing a glass of something on a shiny bar. Bourbon, maybe. Hard to tell. Everything in my vision was washed out and dim. Drink, bar, the shelves of bottles opposite me.

The hand that had clapped down squeezed now. It belonged to an arm across my back.

“We just need to give it some air,” its owner said. The voice was male, friendly, and familiar to Bear. I wanted to turn, but I was merely an observer in his memories. I sipped my drink and shook my head.

“It’s bullshit,” I said, slurring the words. “The whole thing is bullshit.”

Though drunkenness rolled through me, I was furious. And it was a kind of fury I’d never quite experienced as Everson Croft. I was in the head of someone who lived life at the extreme of extremes. This was a nuclear-rod level fury—contained for now, but hot and dangerous.

“Of course it’s bullshit,” the voice replied. “But it’s too soon. Anything you do now is going to come off as desperate. Guilty, even. We need to assemble the right legal team. We need experts in data. We need a strategy.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “I’m ready to kill someone.”

Though I was observing, I was also parsing through Bear’s memories, trying to piece together what was happening. I couldn’t go deep. All I had were his associations to what was happening in that present moment.

The location was a bar in Brooklyn, a place he liked to go when he wanted to drink incognito. It was Friday night. The referenced “bullshit” had to do with his position at Ramsa Inc. There had been an emergency board meeting that day, a vote. He’d been ousted as CEO over something on an email server. Evidence, or at least a strong suggestion, he’d leaked design secrets to a competitor.

The info