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

the lines around her eyes. I stole a glance at the hearth. The jets of water had doused the fire, but a few embers continued to glow in the ashes below the grate. I could work with that. While Penny grappled with the revelation, I shifted back on the couch and lifted my feet just above the water.

“Why?” Penny demanded. “What does he want?”

I silently summoned energy to my casting prism before shrugging. “Maybe he just doesn’t like you.”

Penny’s eyes blazed orange, and her fingers bit into Vega’s throat.

“Fuoco!” I shouted.

Energy coursed through me in fits and starts, gained strength, and then opened out in the embers. A fireball roared from the hearth. Penny screamed as it swallowed her.

I stood and drew my cane, shouting another Word. The force invocation sling-shot Vega from Penny’s faltering grip toward my waiting arms. She was coming in too fast, though. The impact knocked the breath from my lungs and both of us to the floor. We landed with a hard splash.

Beyond my soaked legs, Penny was roaring and beating the flames that climbed her hair. Foul smoke filled the room. I forced myself to stand, pulling Vega up beside me. She coughed weakly.

“Are you all right?” I asked her.

“I’ll live,” she said hoarsely.

Good, because I could feel Thelonious licking his chops, waiting for me to exhaust myself with another high-energy spell. With an arm wrapped around Vega’s waist, she and I splashed from the sitting room. At the front door, I pushed her across the threshold but remained inside.

She staggered against the front-porch banister and squinted back at me. “Aren’t you coming?”

“Find one of Arnaud’s blood slaves,” I said. “Tell him everything we’ve learned. That should get your son back.” Before she could respond, I swung the door closed and sealed it with a locking spell.

Drawing the sword from my cane, I stalked back to the sitting room.

Time to finish this.

38

I returned to find Penny thrashing in a puddle of water on the floor. Desperate to extinguish the last of the flames licking from her hair, she snapped and yipped, eyes rolling back into her head. Though only part-werewolf, she had inherited their fear of fire. I don’t think she even saw me as I stood over her and raised my sword.

I remained clueless as to why Arnaud had set us on her trail. Didn’t know what he stood to gain by us finding out what he already knew. But Vega and I were marked now because of it.

Unless I eliminated the threat at the source.

I tightened my grip on the sword handle. The blade was steel, not silver, which meant I would need to decapitate her. Not an act I was relishing.

I braced a foot against her stomach. Her head reared back, exposing her throat. The muscles in my shoulders and upper back bunched…

And a shot rang out.

Something kicked me in the right side of the chest. I dropped the sword and stumbled backwards, knocking over the couch. A pulsating numbness swallowed my right arm as I splashed seat down on the floor. I pressed my hand to where I’d been hit and felt warm blood.

“I couldn’t let you do that.”

I raised my face to where Budge stood on the stairs, a pistol in hand.

“She’s done some bad things,” he said. “But I depend on her. I need her.”

“Her daughter,” I managed. “We helped her earlier this evening. She’s not a monster anymore.”

“Alexandra’s okay?” The gun drifted down to Budge’s side. “She’s safe?”

From the floor I nodded my head, a gray nausea washing over me.

“Thank God,” he breathed. “Where is she?”

Penny moved in front of my view of Budge, her blackened scalp showing through what remained of her hair. Furious, orange eyes stared down on me. She spoke from a protruding jaw. “Yes, where is she?”

“That stopped being your business eighteen years ago,” I mumbled.

She straddled me and knifed a talon-like nail into my gunshot wound. White-hot pain seared through me. I bit back a scream and seized her wrist, but my strength was no match for hers. She gouged deeper until my hands fell away. I slapped the floor to keep from passing out.

“You’re sticking your nose into something you know nothing about,” Penny said. “And I know what you’re thinking. That your knowledge of Alexandra’s whereabouts is going to keep you alive, that you can use it as a bargaining chip to finesse your way out of this. But if Arnaud told you about Sonny, I’m betting he also told you about Lady Bastet.” Her lips spread into a crazy, canine smile. “Yes, that’s where you took her. I can smell the fear pouring off of you.”

“If she’s not a monster anymore,” Budge ventured from the staircase, “can’t we just leave her alone, honey?”

“Silence!” Penny shouted.

I whipped my head from side to side as she gouged my wound again. The room wavered.

“Call for reinforcements,” Penny told her husband. “I want one group to find and eliminate Detective Vega. The other will go to Lady Bastet’s in the West Village. I’ll join them when I finish with this one.”

Something glinted just beyond my left hand. The silver bullet I’d dropped earlier. I stretched and closed my fingers around it.

“I’m just not sure I like the idea of offing all these people,” Budge said.

“Well, you won’t be offing them, will you?”

As I imagined Budge nodding in reluctant assent, his marital advice from the gala floated around me: It’s pretty simple, kids. Know when to agree, when to disagree, and when to agree to disagree.

I chuckled through the haze of pain.

Penny’s eyes glared down at me, then fell further to the bullet I was aiming at her chest.

“Protezione,” I mumbled. In the wetness, magical energy hissed and snapped through my prism and down my arm. A small orb manifested around the base of the bullet. I tightened the orb, willing it smaller. I just needed the pressure to ignite a single grain of the powder charge.

Penny laughed at my grunting and seized