Night Rune (Prof Croft Book 8) by Brad Magnarella (best e reader for academics txt) 📕

I braced an arm against the cornice and peered back now, terrified of what I would see. But there were no trees or raptors, not even the one we’d put down. Just the empty thoroughfare, one side ruined by the Great Fire of 1776.

Bree-yark swung his stocky frame toward Caroline and bared his teeth.

“All right, you blasted fae,” he growled. “What’re you playing at?”

“It’s not her,” I said. “There’s a time bleed.”

“A time what?” he barked, his anger seeming to shift to me now.

“Another time catch is seeping into this one somehow,” I said.

He jabbed his blade in the direction we’d just come from. “Then why can’t I see it?” he demanded.

“Because this is the view from this time period,” Caroline explained. “Just as our view from the prehistoric period was all forest. Though the two share a boundary, you can’t see one from the other.”

I moved my gaze along the blackened plots again until I arrived at St. Martin’s. A shaky understanding sunk in. “So the church site isn’t actually here,” I said. “The time bleed displaced it.”

“Which explains why the energy here is so weak,” Caroline agreed.

I tuned into my wizard’s senses again. With an intense focus that made my head throb, I could just make out a membrane about a half block up Broadway. I’d been standing on the boundary when the first raptor attacked.

“How does that even happen?” Bree-yark asked.

“The time catches move in something like orbits,” Caroline said. “Arnaud distorting the energies and then abandoning them may have displaced the 1776 orbit, pushing it into another time catch.”

“But instead of an apocalyptic collision,” I said, “they became stuck together, creating the bleed.” Though I had no experience with such things, I couldn’t imagine that was a stable arrangement. I looked from Caroline to the demon-vampire. Maybe Arnaud hadn’t been bluffing after all.

Bree-yark peered up and down the empty streets. “So everyone became dinosaur chow?”

“Or fled,” Caroline offered. “As visitors, we don’t feel the boundaries. For the inhabitants, though, a repulsive force keeps them in their respective periods. Even so, bleeds can occur along the boundaries.”

I rubbed my bruised chest. “Yeah, no kidding.”

“And the boundary is in flux,” she continued. “After so many contacts with creatures of the prehistoric age, the surviving inhabitants of 1776 New York may have decided to relocate far from the boundary.”

“Then it’s just a matter of us avoiding the boundary, right?” Bree-yark said. “Following it around to wherever the real church site is?” He was shifting his weight like he was anxious to get going. Frankly, so was I. The sooner we got there and completed the tasks, the sooner we could recover the Upholders and go home.

“Caroline?” I prompted.

She was peering up Broadway at the church site—or where the church site appeared to be. She angled her face westward, as if following the boundary line through the burn zone and the former encampment of British soldiers, their field of white tents gone now. At the Hudson River, I lost sight of the line.

“I see no other way,” she said.

Taking lead again, I headed east. The boundary ran at an angle to the northeast, which meant backtracking down Broadway and cutting over to Nassau.

After a few blocks, the line pushed us east again, this time to William Street. Still reeling from the knowledge I’d battled an actual dinosaur, and having no interest in a rematch, I kept a healthy distance between us and the line. At the next street, I paused to gauge whether we needed to detour another block, which would take us still further from St. Martin’s.

“I don’t quite get how this works,” Bree-yark said, arriving beside me. “The boundary runs across the street up there, right? But we can still see past it?”

“Yes and no,” I answered distractedly. “That’s how the street would look if it were there.”

“And someone on the other side looking this way? Same thing?”

“Same thing. The time catch plays on a loop, remember. It knows what it’s supposed to look like at every point in its trapped time and from every perspective. Right now, it’s filling in all that missing information.”

As I set off east again, Bree-yark muttered behind me, “And I thought the Fae Wilds were screwy.”

At the next block, I stopped and swore.

“What is it?” Caroline asked, coming up now.

I pointed north and drew my finger back and forth across the street. “The boundary line cuts straight across here, separating us from the rest of Manhattan.” And that included my grandfather’s farm, which was two miles north on Bowery Lane. Blowing out my breath, I looked toward the East River. Beyond Queen Street, I could make out its wharves, and beyond them, moonlight glinting off the water itself.

“What about going straight through the prehistoric period?” Bree-yark asked. “We’d come out the other side eventually, right?”

“Eventually being the kicker,” I said. “It could be a hundred feet or a hundred miles.”

“And we might emerge into another part of 1776 New York,” Caroline added. “These realms aren’t uniformly shaped. They twist and contort.”

“Any boats around here?” Bree-yark asked.

“Probably at the harbor.” His question got me thinking. “Hey, since we’re already on this side of Manhattan, would you mind if we took a row out to Governor’s Island? That’s where I left the Upholders. Could be a clue as to what happened, where they went.” I was thinking reveal spell, but they could even have left a message. “If not, we can access Brooklyn and see how far the boundary extends over Long Island.”

With both of their votes in favor, I led the way down King Street.

And found myself in the middle of a stampede.

21

Bodies rammed into me, sending me one way and then just as suddenly the other. Through a harsh whiteness—daylight, I realized—shouting faces jostled past my dazzled vision. The road had gone from packed dirt to mud-slick cobblestone, and I jerked my arms around like someone ice-skating for the first time.

The next hard collision sent me crashing into a pair of