Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9) by Brad Magnarella (ereader with android .txt) 📕

Thelonious, my incubus spirit, was still too weak to claim me was little consolation. Only adrenaline was keeping me upright, and that wasn’t going to last.

Just one head left to disable.

The Cerberus narrowed his angry, calculating eyes. The shifter recognized the danger, but he was also under orders to take me out. One of his limp heads struggled up weakly, then collapsed again.

“What’s wrong?” I panted. “Necktile dysfunction?”

The goading was deliberate. I was trying to bring the creature into another careless charge. Once the final head was out of commission, I’d be able to complete my flight to the pier and finish him off.

But when the Cerberus launched at me this time, he lowered his head. I thrust my cocked sword anyway. The blade scraped off brow, clipping an ear. The flat of the Cerberus’s head slammed into my shielded body, driving me from the edge of the sidewalk, legs staggering painfully, into a graffiti-covered building. His head met my chest again, this time pinning me against the stone wall at my back.

I squinted from the pressure and called more power to my shield. The Cerberus’s rear legs dug in, upping the pounds per square inch. I grunted a Word. A repulsive force detonated from the shield, but it was too weak. The Cerberus barely faltered, and when his head bore down again, it pinned my sword arm.

This wasn’t the plan, dammit.

Worse still, the other heads were recovering. One snarled and snapped at my staff arm, which I just managed to jerk out of the way. The other bounced up and down, using the momentum in its struggle to remain upright. I attempted another invocation, but I could barely summon the air, much less the force, and this one squibbed completely. All available power went to my shield now—which was starting to fail.

Gray spots eddied around my vision. My tongue turned thick in my mouth.

If I didn’t do something fast, it would just be a question of whether I passed out before the Cerberus tore me apart or after.

With a grunted series of incantations, I reshaped my shield, pulling it inside my coat, and drove its energy as far into the ground as it would go. One of the Cerberus’s recovering heads grabbed the sleeve of my coat. The arm tore away, leaving the rest of my coat intact, including the pocket that held my two remaining lightning grenades. Thank God for cheap stitching.

“Attivare!” I shouted.

The crack that followed was less a sound than an all-encompassing force. It blinded me and struck me deaf. I seemed to float rather than drop to the pavement, my body buzzing, the air raw with smoke and electricity.

I expected the Cerberus’s teeth to seize and thrash me at any moment.

But as the street returned to hazy form, I saw my gamble had worked. The Cerberus was gone, probably limped off somewhere following the direct hit, and I was alive. My shield had channeled enough of the lightning’s energy into the ground, sparing me the brunt. But I didn’t need to see myself to know I was in bad shape. Pain burned through me as I rolled onto my side, both ears ringing.

Before I could summon healing magic, flashing lights arrived. The shadow NYPD.

I had managed to keep hold of my sword and staff, and I raised the blade weakly. The cruisers stopped a half block away, their red and blue lights arcing around the slummy stretch of Seventieth Street. A spotlight lit me up from above as a helicopter’s rotary blades thumped through my partial deafness.

Back at the cruisers, a familiar figure was stalking toward me in a sidestep, both hands gripping her service pistol. I couldn’t make out Vega’s shouted commands, but they weren’t hard to guess. She was making her arrest for the murder of Bear Goldburn. And this time, she would get it.

I cycled through my remaining resources before grunting a weak laugh. I had none.

As my vision steadied, it occurred to me Vega’s weapon was aimed high. I struggled to turn my head. A dark figure moved in. The shifter? Hands grabbed me, but I was too weak to resist. Vega’s voice rose in pitch, and her weapon cracked twice. The figure let out a cry, and I was falling again.

I landed with a thud.

A well-dressed couple jerked back in surprise, the man shielding the woman with an arm. Vega and the shadow NYPD were gone. The sidewalk I was on featured a procession of lampposts that glowed against a clean building facade. I was back in the actual present. But it was all starting to blur.

“Call an ambulance!” the woman cried.

24

I looked over to find Vega sitting in a bedside chair, the window behind her glowing with sunlight. For a confused moment, I thought I was in her custody, but the pregnant swell of her stomach and the contours of our bedroom dissolved the notion.

“Hey,” I rasped.

She looked up from her phone, her brow taut with concern.

“Hey, yourself.” She came over and grasped my hand in both of hers. “How are you feeling?”

As I squeezed back, I performed a self-check. All the hurt places from last night were either painless or, like my left thigh, pulsating dully. The healing magic that moved through me suggested someone from the Order had been here.

I kissed her hand. “Much better.”

“Here, drink some of this.”

She lifted a large cup from our nightstand and held the straw to my lips. The water, enhanced with elixir, went down cold and soothing. When I nodded that I’d had enough she returned the cup and dried her hands on the thighs of her slacks.

“How did I end up here?” I asked.

“General notified me you were in their ER, and I notified the Order. We got you out of there as soon as we could.”

My heart ached for her as I imagined the late-night call, the long drive to the hospital, the hours of waiting for me to awaken, wondering if I was going to be okay.