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

white bedspread and over the shoulders of her open blouse, her blue-green eyes gleamed up at me. I saw in them fear and at the same time a determination to hold onto her old world.

I smoothed each slender eyebrow with a finger and kissed her forehead.

“I do love you,” I said. “But are you sure about this?”

She nodded and pulled me back to her.

“I’m sure,” she breathed.

Purge City

Book 3

1

“Svelare.” The word vibrated from my mouth, dispelling the magical veil over my floor-to-ceiling bookcase.

I paced the length of the shelves as encyclopedias and academic texts rippled and became magical tomes and grimoires. At a flaking, leather-bound tome, I stopped and pulled it from its slot. A book of Final Passage.

I flipped it open to a marked page and set the book on a stand on my iron table. My gaze roamed across the ornate script to an old and sacred ritual that ensured swift passage for the deceased by calling forth a gatekeeper.

I took a resolute breath and nodded. I was going for it.

For the past week I’d studied the ritual, weighing the pros and cons of actually enacting it. But it wasn’t like the Order had left me a choice. After several inquiries into my mother’s death, the first sent four months ago, I hadn’t received a single response. Not even a boilerplate: “We appreciate your correspondence. Please be patient as we look into the matter.”

So, yeah, the Order could bite me.

I consulted the book and some notes I’d jotted into the margins as I pulled spell items from my storage bins. Before long, the table top was arrayed with candles, an urn of graveyard dirt, a funeral veil soaked with a copal resin, a bloodstone, and a manhole-sized standing mirror. On the table’s far end was the porcelain hair brush that had belonged to my mother when she was a girl, two strands of her light-brown hair caught in its bristles.

Two chances to get this right, I thought.

I walked in a circle, sprinkling the graveyard dirt into a symbol of the dead. I then placed five candles around the circle’s perimeter and, chanting, lit them in a star-shaped sequence. As the flames rose and thinned, the room seemed to dim and cool by several degrees.

At the center of the circle, I propped the mirror on its stand and then placed the bloodstone and a strand of hair drawn from my mother’s brush before it, covering both with the funeral veil.

“And now for my insurance…”

Focusing on the coin pendant that hung from a chain around my neck, I incanted softly, lips, tongue, and tone imbuing the family symbol with energy. The coin began to hum over my sternum. I switched chants, encasing the coin in a small shield.

If I calculated correctly, the energy building up in the coin would overwhelm the shield spell in about five minutes. A time bomb for if things went sideways.

“Gatekeeper,” I whispered in an ancient tongue as I stood from the circle and drew my sword from my cane. “You who grant passage to the dead and the dying, who safeguard the In Between. I beseech you to carry our beloved to the world beyond, to spirit her soul with all haste.” Wincing, I drew the sword’s blade across my palm. I held the wounded hand forward, allowing the blood to drip over the artifacts in the center of the circle.

“Take her,” I said.

The charcoal smell of the copal thickened, and the room dimmed further. A sound like distant thunder rumbled in. Black clouds filled the mirror and began twisting into a deep vortex.

“She is ready to pass, and time is short,” I said, the spell elements amplifying the power of my mother’s hair, wrapping it in a potent aura of fresh death. “Take her!” I repeated, fog issuing from my breath now.

The rumbling deepened and a powerful entity, more shadow than form, emerged into the circle and drifted over the blood-spattered objects.

Aiming my staff at the circle, I cried, “Cerrare!”

The portal behind the mirror slammed shut. The gatekeeper jerked up and then circled several times, as though sensing its confined state. When the entity stopped, empty sockets, impossibly deep, stared back at me. A whispering voice spoke, raking me with chills.

“She is already claimed.”

I went mute as I studied the being as ancient as humankind. Left to its work, a gatekeeper was harmless. When tricked and trapped, not so much. But I needed to know what had happened to my mother, and a gatekeeper could tell me.

“Yes, I know,” I responded between grunts. Though I’d closed the portal, I could feel a force beyond, like a riptide, pulling back toward the In Between. Even at my full strength, I wouldn’t be able to withstand the pull for long. Beings from that plane didn’t belong here.

“I need to know how she died,” I said.

The room rattled around me. “Release me, mortal.”

“I will once you tell me.”

“Release me or I will claim you.”

I planted my feet and leaned away from the riptide until I was nearly sitting, but the force only strengthened. My right foot stuttered through the graveyard dirt. The containment broken, a frigid hand emerged from the circle and seized my ankle. The cold bit into me like blades slicing into bone. I let out a ragged cry, but I was determined to get an answer.

“Tell me … what happened … to my mother!”

A second hand seized my knee and pulled me toward the portal. This wasn’t going to work. I had to abort the summoning.

“Liberare!” I shouted.

The portal blew open like an emergency hatch on an airplane. The gatekeeper disappeared into the mirror, sucked back to its realm. But its ice-cold hands hadn’t released me.

I fell and twisted onto my stomach, dropping my sword and staff. They tumbled off behind me as though reality had rotated on a ninety-degree axis. My fingers scrabbled over the floor for purchase. When coldness enveloped my lower half, I realized I had