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

I nodded, but I was thinking about how he’d found me in the shadow present. I doubted it was by accident. Like with the sigil under my door, he’d been compelled. Was the Hermes box trying to draw me into its web too?

“You told me to avoid the Discovery Society,” I said. “Why?”

“Remember how I described being transfixed on the mansion on Reade Street? Well, it was just the opposite with the Discovery Society. The first time I walked past, a voice urged me to keep going. Better yet, avoid it all together. And it felt like something was watching me through a window. I got out of there as fast as I could, my vagueness rune at full power, but for the next few blocks I was sure I was being followed.”

“By whom?” I asked, anticipating a description of the perp.

But Sven was shaking his head. “It was more a feeling than anything—heart pounding, senses at high alert. There were a couple people I suspected, but they either got into a cab or turned down another street.” He blew out a shaky breath. “All I can say is something bad’s happening inside that place.”

I experienced a strange sense of déjà vu, not only with what Sunita had said about a dark presence, but what I’d experienced myself in the club’s basement.

“And you’re talking about the one in your reality, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like over there?”

“I didn’t know anything about it until a classmate of mine brought it up once. She said it used to be a meeting place for explorers and scientists, but they all got sacked, and the club went super-secret. No one’s really sure what goes on in there, but she said people started hearing chanting at night. She’s into wild conspiracy theories, so I brushed it off. But after my experience, I’m not so sure.”

I considered the info. Our raid on the club here had turned up evidence of the potion, but I wondered what a raid on the shadow version would have revealed. If Sven’s friend was to be believed, Goldburn, Strock, and Mims were probably no longer members of the explorer-club-turned-cult, much less fellows. The NYPD would have deemed them random victims in a version of the city where random murders were commonplace, especially without a wizard consultant on the force.

Which made Vega’s attempted arrest of me remarkable. We weren’t talking about an anonymous tip. The perp would have been influential for the police to have responded in force as they did.

Fear the master of many places, the Doideag had said.

I left that to marinate and reviewed everything else Sven had told me. As I did, I felt the information I’d assembled in the last couple days shift around like puzzle pieces, several of them clicking together.

A change must have come over my face because Sven said, “What is it?”

I nodded at his pack. “I think I know what’s inside the box.”

33

“You do?” Sven asked, pushing himself up in the bed.

Though his color was hard to gauge, he looked stronger. A portion of both fluid bags had already dripped into him, and the glow of my healing magic was thinning, indicating it was past the heavy-lifting phase.

“The symbols on the box, the ones you grafted onto your runes, go back to a cult devoted to Hermes,” I said.

“Really?” It came out a stunned whisper, and understandably. I’d just told him that the runic magic he’d been practicing connected to a mythology he’d been fascinated with since childhood.

“They were a thieves’ guild, in fact.”

Sven nodded and recovered his voice. “Hermes was a patron of thieves.”

“As well as of borders, which likely explains the ability to transit between your reality and mine.”

“But the other manifestations don’t necessarily follow,” he said.

“They do if you consider what’s inside the box. Have you ever heard of the Emerald Tablet?”

“It was one of the early Hermetica translations.”

“The most important Hermetica translation,” I stressed. “It became the foundation for alchemy in the West.”

“As above, so below,” he recited. “Makes sense, then. Transforming pure energy into fire and force. But the texts appeared later, during the Hellenistic Period. Why would an ancient Greek cult build a chest to protect something that hadn’t even been written yet?” Though he was verging on argumentative again, the kid was sharp. Had he been an actual student, he would’ve made a great assistant.

“You’re right to ask that. The known texts were based on earlier ones. There’s a tale left out of the main Greek myths that says Hermes stole pieces of universal knowledge from his aunts and uncles, the major gods of Olympus, and put them on a sacred tablet. It was named, appropriately enough, the Tablet of Hermes. And it was from this tablet that the later texts sprung, including the famous Emerald Tablet. They’re what gave humankind science, philosophy, medicine, alchemy. I’m starting to think the devotees in question were the Attican cult.”

Sven’s eyes widened. “The tablet is in that box?”

“At least a fragment of it,” I said. “If so, it holds Hermes’s essence.”

“I’ve been carrying the original Hermes around this whole time?” he practically shouted.

“Yes and no. It’s too deep to get into right now, but the short version is this. Mythology uses one name for gods like Hermes, but there are actually several variants, depending on the cult who worshipped him. The collective belief in a god creates the template; cultic rites and worship carried out over time shape the god into specific beings. So, yes, you’ve been carrying a version of Hermes in your pack.”

As Sven stared at the pack, the monitor on the bedside table showed the uptick in his heart rate.

“What does he want with me?” he asked.

I had a couple theories, but I didn’t want to scare him. Sven might’ve been gifted, but he was still a kid.

“I’m going to call some associates,” I said. “I want them to take a look at the nature of the bonding.”

Claudius