The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) by Brad Magnarella (best business books of all time txt) 📕

She needed her fix.

I chanced a glance around the room. My gaze hit on more drug envelopes, cans, empty snack bags. A flicker of hope took hold inside me. I didn’t have my spell items, no, but maybe I didn’t need them. A few small investments of energy, a few lucky breaks…

I sheathed my sword and stooped slowly to retrieve one of the drug envelopes. I ran a finger around the inside of the brown package, my skin picking up a faint coating of dust. The creature sprang.

“Fuoco!” I shouted, blowing on my coated finger.

The spell that I used on dragon sand to create fire was an amplifier. Now, a burst of energy entered each tiny granule sailing off my finger, intensifying its chemistry a hundredfold. I held my breath and scrambled back from the pluming white cloud as the creature plunged into it.

She emerged on the other side in a stagger, eyelids sagging, jaw hanging to the side. She blinked around languidly, but the muscles of her face were already beginning to tighten. I didn’t have much time.

I jabbed my cane around the room, calling everything conductive. Cans, metallic snack bags, scattered change. They tumbled and skittered inward. With another incantation, I arranged the items into a casting circle around the creature, pushing as much energy into it as I dared.

The creature stared at the garbage glowing into formation around her feet, an angry roar building in her chest. Her muscles bunched up to spring.

“Serrare,” I called.

The circle snapped closed. The creature rebounded from a manifested wall of energy. A wall the casting symbol was now sustaining. Exhausted, swimmy-headed, I tamped down my power and leaned back against a wall. I’d gone to the very brink. One more invocation and Thelonious would come sweeping in to pay the ladies of Frederick Douglass Housing a visit.

The debris comprising the circle rattled as the creature took up her attack against the field. As with the door, the field wouldn’t be able to contain her for long, but I was shooting for long enough.

With the creature’s next strike, the aluminum cans shuddered and the field wavered.

“Cease,” a voice commanded, its power propagating through the room.

The creature halted her assault and stared past me. I turned to find Lady Bastet stepping through the ruined doorway, Vega close behind, her pistol drawn. I laughed in weary relief.

“All hail the cavalry,” I said.

In one of Lady Bastet’s hands, a clutch of what appeared to be dried wolf’s bane plumed smoke. In her other, she carried a bejeweled flail, with which she beat the air in rhythmic strokes.

“I bound you once,” she said in ancient Egyptian, striding forward. “I tied your lupine and vampiric natures together. Fastened them with intricate knots. As each struggled to free itself, they only pulled the knots tighter, allowing the child to live a life unencumbered. But a foreign substance broke those knots, undid what had been done, and your lupine and vampiric natures fed. By the grace of Mut, I will bind them again. I will free the girl inside.”

A snarl curling her bloody lips, the creature watched Lady Bastet circle the field.

Vega came up beside me. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, just weak.” I pulsed energy into the symbol to help sustain the casting circle. I nodded toward Blade, who was struggling to sit up, a hand to her head. “Would you mind checking on her?”

Vega nodded and went over to Blade.

“Sleep … slumber … dream,” Lady Bastet chanted.

I eyed the creature, who didn’t appear on the verge of any of those. But the smoke from the wolf’s bane had begun to change, the strokes of the flail shaping it into small hawk-like spirits. They sprang from the air and into the casting circle. The creature screamed and swiped at them, but they evaded her hands. One by one, they thinned and slipped into her nose and mouth. In weakening fits of coughing, the creature sagged to the floor.

“Release the circle,” Lady Bastet said.

I looked from the slumbering creature to her and back. “Are you sure?”

“Release it,” she insisted.

I did as she said, withdrawing energy until the field collapsed. Lady Bastet caught the creature’s head and, kneeling, cushioned it with her thighs. She brushed the dank hair from the creature’s temples, then pressed her palms to them, incanting in whispers, her head bowed.

I walked over to where Vega had helped Blade to a wall, against which the vampire hunter now sat. An angry gash cut across Blade’s brow, and her eyes looked bleary. “So who are you guys?” she asked. “Magic Inc?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Here.”

I applied enough healing energy to Blade to stabilize her. Then we all watched Lady Bastet work. A turquoise aura enveloped the creature, who lay supine, legs straight, arms across her chest, as though the energy were swaddling her. Muscles trembled and jumped and she bared her teeth, but her eyes remained closed. I sensed the battle raging inside her, the vampire and werewolf parts of her makeup resisting Lady Bastet’s magic.

But Lady Bastet worked meticulously, moving from one binding to the next. What bindings the creature pulled free, Lady Bastet refastened. And I recognized the pattern of the bindings as one large plaited knot. I had a flash of an Egyptian goddess on the banks of the Nile, weaving strips of palm leaves. Now, when the creature parts of Alexandra strained, the fibers pulled taut, securing the larger knot.

At last, Lady Bastet sat back with a sigh.

“It is done,” she said.

The aura dimmed, and the creature it had once held was a young woman. Her dark auburn hair was distressed, her body bruised and bleeding, but she was the girl in the photo. Alexandra Mills. Shedding my coat, I stepped forward and placed it over her. I then lifted her limp body into my arms.

“Looks like she needs a hospital,” I said.

“No, the binding is too fresh,” Lady Bastet said. “Western medicines may undo it. I