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

to the club’s founding. As he’s always saying, exploration is in his blood. We’ve felt that should count for something, which is why we’ve kept him on as an associate, even though he can’t really contribute to our mission. That may seem cruel, but it gives him access to the meetings and most of the club. He’s a little strange, you may have noticed. I always considered him a harmless enthusiast, but twice in the last month, I caught him coming out of collection rooms he shouldn’t have been in. He claimed he got turned around, but it was like he was looking for something.”

“Any idea what?”

She shook her head. “Our collections are pretty extensive and more maps and artifacts arrive every few months. It could have been innocent,” she hastened to add. “I just thought it unusual at the time, and since you asked…”

“No, I appreciate it. We’ll follow up. You mentioned artifacts. Has there ever been a box like this in your collection?” I pulled out my phone and showed her the shot I’d taken in the landfill two days earlier.

She cocked an eyebrow. “A flip phone?”

“Yeah, it’s the most complicated thing I can manage.”

“You can say that again,” Tabitha muttered, prompting a warning look from me.

But Sunita was engrossed now in studying the image. “It’s pretty, but no,” she said at last.

Still convinced the Hermes box was connected to the murders somehow, I’d been hoping for a conclusive link to the Discovery Society. But Sunita’s mention of artifacts arriving regularly interested me.

“Who curates the collection?” I asked.

“That would be Walter. And he takes it very seriously.”

I nodded. Walter Mims, our next stop. He’d be able to tell me more about the holdings. Maybe he would recognize the box.

“Has anything in the collection ever stood out to you?” I asked.

“Nothing specific, but—this is going to sound really out there,” she interjected self-consciously.

“More ‘out there’ than that thing in your pond?” Bree-yark asked, peering warily out a window onto the backyard. The creature was still entrapped in ice, but the sun had melted the frost from its hide and several eyes were starting to blink.

“There’s a basement in the building,” she continued. “It’s where Walter stores newly arrived artifacts. He takes us down there from time to time to show us pieces. I never like going. It always feels as if there’s something shadowing us, something dark. The building is old. It was an orphanage before becoming the Discovery Society’s headquarters.” Remembering my trip to 1800s New York, that didn’t surprise me; the city had been crawling with orphans.

“The orphanage would lock troubled children in these small isolation chambers in the basement, so I attributed the feeling to trapped memories or lingering spirits. Ever since I was a young girl, I’ve been sensitive to subtle energies. But it wasn’t just me—the right hand of Ganesh would start vibrating when we were down there. God, listen to me,” she laughed, touching the protection pin. “Nobel Prize-winning scientist. But now that you mention it, I suppose the feeling could have come from an artifact. The climate-controlled cases hold a dozen of them at any one time. Walter can show you.”

“Isn’t that who we’re seeing next?” Bree-yark asked me.

“Yeah, I have an amulet for him too.”

Sunita snorted. “Good luck getting him to wear it.”

After the way he’d reacted to my mythology-and-lore credentials the night before, I’d been afraid of that.

“Just one more question before we grab our clothes and get out of your hair,” I said. “Did Bear happen to mention anything in the last month about being watched or followed? Or just anything unusual?”

Sunita’s gaze dropped and she sniffled. “To be honest, we stopped talking about six weeks ago. Some things happened that I won’t get into, but he thought it was for the best. If there was anything unusual, he wouldn’t have mentioned it to me. You might want to ask someone closer to him.”

She seemed to be confirming the rumor of her and Bear’s affair.

I was going to leave it there—we needed to get to Walter Mims—but since she’d given me an opening…

“Did you two meet through the club?”

“No, at a bioengineering conference.”

“Huh. Did it have anything to do with his work at Ramsa Inc?”

“It was one of his passion projects. He’d become interested in a gene called 7Rb, obsessed with it really.” Seeming to catch the fact she was talking to laypeople, she said, “That’s a variant of what’s commonly called the ‘explorer gene.’ It appeared in the human genome roughly twenty-five hundred years ago and shows up in a small percentage of the population. The variant acts as a super driver for exploration and innovation. Bear wanted to patent a therapy that could maximize its expression, give visionaries like him an edge. He was using himself as a test subject, even though his profile for the variant was already in the top thousandth of a percentile. But he confided in me that the trials were making him edgy and aggressive. I urged him to stop. He did, not long after. But he’d become so enamored with bioengineering by that point, he talked me into applying to become a fellow.”

She opened her hands as though to say, And here I am.

It sounded as though he’d become enamored with her too, but that wasn’t my business. I stood and straightened my towel skirt. “If you think of anything else that might be relevant, give me a call. And please, stay home. Don’t let anyone in, even if you know them. We’re working on this as fast as we can.”

The Doideag’s haunting verse came back to me:

If ye should fail and war should come, if seas should boil and lands should run…

Sunita’s green eyes peered into mine as if picking up my troubled thoughts.

“This is bigger than just me and Walter, isn’t it?” she said. “Or Bear and Robert?”

“I think the perp is using the organs for something that could prove catastrophic,” I said. “If we let it happen.”

Nodding decisively,