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

More of the golem disappeared, until he was a messy whirlwind of flames.

But as my blade went from red to a molten orange, my hope faltered. The handle was becoming uncomfortably warm. That hadn’t happened before. Wherever the fire was going, it wasn’t going there fast enough, and the backed-up energy was gathering in the blade. A blade whose metal was reaching its limits.

Swinging my sword at the other golem, I shouted, “Disfare!”

The gathered fire released with such violence that I staggered back and the engulfed golem dropped his cables. His contours wavered as the magic struggled to sustain his form. A couple times the golem disappeared altogether. At last, he succumbed for good, the torrent of fire sweeping him into nothing.

“Hallelujah,” I sighed.

I closed the rune and stood panting in the blistering space. Worried the animating magic would recover before I did, I limped to the back of the box car. At the top of three steps, a rear door stood ajar.

Draining another warding sigil, I inched the door open, ready to spring back. But no more flames erupted. Across the dark interior, a ragged breath rose and fell. I grew out the light from my staff until a lump took shape in the far corner, a figure curled on his side in a dirty sleeping bag. Even in the light, he looked like a shadow.

“Sven?”

“Go awaaay…” he moaned again.

He pushed a hand out, as if he were fighting something in a dream. The movement made him grimace and he clutched his shoulder. The protective animations may have been game for a fight, but he was in no condition himself, shifter or not.

But I was becoming more and more certain he wasn’t the shifter.

I dispersed my shield to lessen the chances of triggering any remaining sigils and made my way toward him. The backpack I’d seen him carrying the day before lay near the foot of his sleeping bag, a couple soup cans spilling from its open mouth. When I squatted beside him, I smelled blood.

“Sven,” I repeated. “It’s Professor Croft.”

Forgetting his pain from only a moment earlier, he attempted to shove me away with the same arm before contorting suddenly and dropping back into semiconsciousness. The kid was badly hurt.

Regretting I hadn’t brought gloves, I inspected the shoulder of his gray shirt, black with blood, until I located a hole in the fabric. I ripped it open, laying bare a swatch of pale skin that turned gory around a gunshot wound. He mumbled feverishly as I peered under his shoulder. An exit wound had made an even bigger mess in back. Judging from the amount of blood-caking, the injury was hours old, and the droplets I’d seen en route indicated it had happened elsewhere.

“What in the world have you been up to, Sven?” I whispered.

Soft light swelled from my cane’s opal as I started into a healing incantation.

He’d managed to make it down here without being seen, suggesting he’d been shot last night or early this morning, but his condition had worsened with blood loss and probably the start of infection.

I stopped suddenly and stared at him.

I was remembering the dark figure who’d grabbed me last night in the shadow present. Vega had fired at him twice, the figure crying out before dropping me again in the actual present.

“Holy hell,” I said. “That was you.”

Sven Roe had brought me back.

31

With layers of healing light swaddling him, Sven’s breaths deepened with his sleep.

I lifted one of his eyelids to make absolutely sure he wasn’t the shifter before sitting back on my heels. I’d performed enough healings in my time that for the past twenty minutes my mind had been free to ponder. But I was still no closer to understanding who he was, why he’d planted a fire sigil under my office door yesterday morning, and then rescued me from the shadow present last night.

Reaching over, I pulled his pack toward me, spilling the remaining soup cans. Inside the main compartment, I found a spare shirt, a toiletry bag, matchbooks, a portable music player, and a handful of scavenged things: among them, a bag of condiment packets. It was as if he’d packed hastily for a trip and then improvised once he’d gotten there.

In the small pockets, I found a notebook and writing utensils, one of them the silver-flecked grease pencil he’d used to draw the casting circle he’d left me. I opened the notebook to discover practice drawings of other circle renderings. He’d penned little notes here and there, as I might have done.

But how in the hell was he powering them?

As the pages progressed, I noticed the patterns suddenly go from round to more angular, like those on the Hermes box.

He has it, I thought with certainty.

I stood and searched the rest of the car but found only mundane odds and ends. Outside, I crawled beneath the car and peered into various compartments. I was finishing up when the obvious struck me. Back inside, I unzipped Sven’s sleeping bag, and there it was, clamped between his knees—the small box. It was still in the salt bag, explaining why the citywide wards hadn’t detected it again and alerted me.

I started to reach for it, then stopped.

I thought about the powerful guardian animations I’d encountered, first in the landfill, then here. Those hadn’t come from Sven, but the Hermes box. For whatever reason, it wanted to be with him, not me.

But for good or ill?

The best answers would come from the kid himself, but that was going to be a while. My healing magic was having to pull triple duty—repair bone and tissue, restore a very depleted blood supply, and fight an infection.

Maybe I could get some help with the last two. Surprised to find a bar of signal on my phone, I called Vega.

“I located Sven,” I said, crossing to the far side of the box car.

“You did? Is he in custody?”

“Not exactly. We’re under Grand Central Terminal. He suffered a gunshot wound and is in bad