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

“No,” he finally admitted.

“Then let’s start there. What’s your real name?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve been using Sven Roe. For the sake of consistency I’d like to keep using it, at least until this is over.”

“Until what’s over?”

He glanced toward his pack. “I’m not sure.”

“How did the box come into your possession?”

“I found it.”

“At the Discovery Society?”

“No, but you shouldn’t go there.”

“Why not?”

“You just shouldn’t.”

He was being evasive, and I thought I knew why.

“The police search has been called off,” I told him.

“But I’m in your custody, right?” he said, confirming he’d caught wind of the hunt.

“You’re in my care. You’re not under arrest, though, no. Whether it stays that way is up to you.”

Understanding the deal, he nodded. “I stole the box, last month. From a mansion in Tribeca. It was in the owner’s private collection.”

“So you’re a cat burglar?”

He let out a dry laugh. “No, Prof. I’d never stolen anything before in my life. I mean, beyond the odd pack of gum when I was a kid. Wish it had stayed that way. Guess I should start at the beginning?”

“Please do.”

“About a year ago, I found an old rune book in Benson’s Books on Ninth. It spoke to me. Not literally. It spoke to me like mythology does. In fact, I was there hunting for a rare book on Sumerian myths.”

I almost asked him if it was the one by Fleming, but I didn’t want to interrupt.

“Anyway, I got the rune book—paid for it—and started practicing. The runes were pretty basic. Bending light, jiggling small objects, that sort of thing. Parlor tricks that I could sort of do, but not great. The big leap happened with the final rune, Vagueness. Once I got that one to work, I could walk all around the apartment without my mom noticing. She even called me for dinner a couple times when I was standing right next to her. It also helped with some problems I’d been having.”

“Bullies?” I asked, noticing the lateral crook in his nose.

“Street gangs. I had the rune tattooed on my thigh in silver ink. Cost half my savings, but it was worth it. Whenever I saw the Skulls or Boyz coming, I could invoke it and walk right past them.” His eyes shone at the memory. “It was like having an invisibility cloak. I started taking longer walks around the city. Seven, eight, ten miles at a time. I even went out at night, got into historic places I wasn’t supposed to. That’s how I fell in love with New York, as messed up as it is.”

He and I had some things in common, but I didn’t want him getting too comfortable yet.

“Did you use the vagueness rune to steal the box?” I asked.

The excitement left his eyes. “That rune and a couple others, yeah. I can’t even really explain how it happened. I was taking one of my walks, and I found myself in front of a mansion on Reade Street. Nothing about it stood out from the others, but I couldn’t stop staring. When I finally continued, it felt like a voice was calling me back.”

The Hermes box, I thought.

“That night, I dreamt I broke into the mansion. It was incredibly vivid—from which runes I used, to my path through the house, to entering a walk-in vault and retrieving a little metal chest.” He glanced toward his pack again. “The next morning I thought, ‘Huh, weird dream.’ But it stayed with me, only it was more like, I don’t know, an obsession. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Every day the pressure around it built and built until it felt like if I didn’t do what the dream showed me, I’d go insane.”

He was describing an enchantment, no doubt given off by whatever was inside the box.

“So one night, I did it,” Sven said simply. “I stole it. The trunk was exactly where it had been in the dream. By the time the adrenaline hangover went away, the obsession was gone. Still, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the chest. I tried to open it a few times, but the lid wouldn’t budge.”

“You don’t know what’s inside?” I asked, concealing my disappointment.

“No, so I started rendering the symbols on the lid, testing their power.”

I nodded, remembering how the drawings in his notebook had changed.

“Nothing really happened except that over time I came to understand their features.”

That was the enchantment bonding him more strongly to the item, infusing him with arcane knowledge.

“I began adding some of the features to my existing runes, and whoa! I could create fire. The rune ignited half my bed that first time before I beat it out with a pillow. And with the rune I’d been using to move small objects, I could suddenly generate huge forces, even scarier in some ways than the fire. But when I added the features to my vagueness rune…” Excitement returned to his eyes. “I found myself in another reality, another version of the city. The same place, but really different.”

He’d evidently become imbued with the magic that had coated me in the landfill, enabling my own journey to that other version of the city.

“And excuse me for swearing, Professor, but that’s when shit got serious. The vivid dreams came back, only now they were about a big war.”

“A big war?” I echoed, remembering what the Doideag had prophesied.

“And not just any war. The Titanomachy.”

The Titanomachy was the battle between the Titans, led by Cronus, and the Greek gods of Olympus, led by Cronus’s son, Zeus. The original clash of the Titans, it pitted the older generation of gods against the younger in the highest-stakes battle in Greek mythology, for control of the entire Universe.

“At least that’s what I think it was,” he said. “I could see lightning bolts, the Hecatonchires were chucking stones with their hundred hands, cyclopes were running past. There was smoke everywhere and earth-shaking explosions