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

empty barrels along the roadside. A family of speckled pigs scattered as I landed ass-down in what I hoped was mud, my back slamming against a plank wall. My vision went gauzy, as much from the impact as the sudden displacement.

Pulling my cane against my chest, I stared at the human stampede.

They bore a crude look that matched the ungodly stench rising from the street. There were men in dirty hats and coats, women in patched skirts, and children with worn-through pant knees and shoddy shoes—when they had anything on their feet at all. But their common direction suggested purpose. Ahead of them, above a mad collection of leaning buildings, stood a dark column of smoke.

Usually people run away from a fire, I thought blearily.

The harsh clanging of bells made me turn. Men in red flannel coats and floppy hats were running a pump wagon up the street. They cleaved the crowd, which was beginning to tail off now, and disappeared around a corner.

Fire brigade?

“Are you all right?”

A pretty woman with blond hair approached. She wore a homely blue dress with large buttons down the front and a bow at the waist. Her arm was hooked inside a thin man’s, a brown scarf wrapping the lower half of his face. A kid with a surly expression followed. I assumed the family had seen me go down before I realized I was looking at Caroline, Arnaud, and Bree-yark, all three glamoured to the gills.

“Fine,” I said, coughing out a relieved laugh. Using a toppled barrel, I pulled myself upright. My British army uniform had become plain brown trousers and a patched homespun coat. “How about you guys?”

“When you vanished, we followed,” Caroline said.

“Yeah, don’t do that again,” Bree-yark added in a scolding voice.

By the time I’d shaken the gunk off my pants, the stampede had dwindled to stragglers, the shouting and clanging rolling out like a spent wave. I looked around at a small dirt park bordered by cobblestone roads and a crowd of rickety wooden buildings. We’d clearly crossed into another time catch.

“I didn’t even see the boundary,” I said.

“That’s because it was under you,” Caroline said. “A seam in the road.”

As I looked down at my mud-spattered boots, I remembered a brief, helpless sensation of falling.

“Someone wanna tell me where this is?” Bree-yark asked.

Before I could answer—because I had an idea—Caroline said, “New York’s Five Points neighborhood, around 1860. At the time it was a poor quarters of low-skilled laborers and immigrants, mostly Irish.”

I was going to ballpark mid-1800s and the Bowery. It paid having an expert on the team.

Caroline peered toward the smoke now. “The crowd’s in a race to reach the building before the fire brigade gets there or it burns to the ground.”

“Why?” Bree-yark asked.

“To claim whatever’s inside.”

The goblin grunted as if that sounded fair enough.

“It appears we’re sticking to another time catch,” Caroline said to me.

I nodded, wondering just how many time catches ours had collided into. That couldn’t be doing anything good for the stability factor, but at the moment I was more concerned with getting back to 1776.

Venturing from the spilled barrels, I shifted to my wizard’s senses. I’d only gone a few steps upon arriving here, so the boundary had to be close. But where was the damned thing? I peered up and down the street, then tilted my head back, expecting to find the seam between me and the washed-out sky.

“I’m not seeing a boundary,” I said, trying not to sound as panicked as I felt.

“No, I don’t sense one here either,” Caroline said. “But we’re in a different part of the city than where we entered. This would have been country in 1776. In fact, there was a large pond right over there.”

I remembered circling the pond on the way to my grandfather’s farm.

“You’re familiar with Columbus Park?” Caroline asked.

Two years earlier, I’d projected from my prison in Arnaud’s vault to a clay golem I’d animated and that remained under my control. I arranged to meet Caroline at a pavilion at the north end of Columbus Park. There, she restored my magic and glamoured my thoughts for my final showdown with Arnaud, where I cast him to the Below. Shortly after, Caroline disappeared into Faerie, never even having said goodbye. Now her eyes looked as if they hoped to ignite some spark of nostalgia between us.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling the same discomfort from earlier. “I know it.”

“Well, this is the park’s humble beginnings.” She pointed to a plot in the center of the converging streets where the pigs I’d scattered were now rooting in the mud. Squalid kids played at the other end, while women pulled gray linen from a line near a public water pump. Thanks to Caroline’s glamours, none of them paid us any attention. “This eventually becomes the park’s southern end and the start of Chinatown, which puts us about a half-mile north of where we left 1776.”

“But if we’re near a boundary,” Bree-yark grunted, “what’s with all the people?”

That was a great point. I peered toward the smoke, where the distant clamoring continued to build. The sheer size of the crowd suggested people here weren’t having the same boundary problems as the 1776 New Yorkers.

“They may not be dealing with boundaries,” Caroline said. “The seam Everson disappeared inside was small. The periods could be sticking at discrete points, making it less likely there’s a bleed.” She turned to me. “Queen Street will take us back to the intersection where you dropped out.”

“And you think we’ll find a boundary—or point, rather?”

“It’s where we should start.”

“Hey!” Bree-yark cried. “Get back here!”

The goblin had taken a few strolling steps away from us, and now he broke into a run. A boy of nine or ten was fleeing ahead of him. The urchin had snatched something of Bree-yark’s, but it wasn’t until flashes began going off in his arms that I realized it was Dropsy. Caroline conjured a mist of fae light, but the boy broke through it and ducked