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

You’ve seen our version of the city. Yours is only a crisis away from the same. Much better to start over, return to the way things were. A single race of obedient humans.”

“And you’re okay with being purged?”

“It’s the only way,” he said, as if the answer were self-evident.

Cronus may have been speaking through him, but I suspected that Eldred the control freak had been a ready vessel.

“Truth be told, you alarmed me last night at the club,” he said. “I’d no idea how you knew to go there, but when I saw your name on the list, the mayor’s beloved wizard, I figured it could only be for one reason. I brought you here and thought that was that.” He was confirming he’d supplied my name to the police and then pulled me into the shadow realm where they were waiting. When they failed to apprehend me, he released the shifter.

“I didn’t count on you having help,” he chuckled, referring to Sven pulling me back out. “But that’s all behind us now. It was never personal, Everson. Like you, I was assigned a task, one I’m also duty bound to fulfill.”

“Duty bound? You murdered three people, and you’re killing a fourth.”

“I’m honoring them.”

“Really.”

“Think about who these men are, Everson, what their blood represents. They come from lines of mapmakers, discoverers, and creators. They take unknowns and turn them into knowns. In so doing, they bring order to the world, something I value greatly. Indeed, I love these men. I love what they represent. Lacking their gifts, I was happy to serve them for as long as I did. But even these luminaries with their god-blessed blood couldn’t forestall the descent into disorder and chaos. Until now—as honored offerings to Cronus.”

As Eldred stepped back, I noticed that the sound of leaking air had stopped. The blood trickling from Ludvig into the vat became a steady pour. The casting circle glowed deep red and the gathering steam turned dark. The cavern features, disrupted by the shifter’s demise, hardened again.

Eldred peeled off his gloves and lifted the small scythe reverently from the tray.

“This kind of legacy,” he said, staring at the blade, “these men could never have achieved in life.”

When a low rumble shook the basement, Eldred turned toward me. The growing mole I’d seen in his portrait had become a pendulous tumor mapped with purple veins and covering half his face. A smile grew beneath it.

“He’s coming,” he said.

38

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Eldred said.

I didn’t know whether he meant the scythe’s blade, which he’d resumed staring at, or Cronus’s impending arrival. The basement cavern rumbled again, making his tumor jiggle.

Not long ago, I would have thrown everything I had at the protective field around Eldred and the scythe, hoping something, anything, would bring it down. In fact, a part of me still wanted to do just that but, I would only exhaust myself. And trusting my magic meant believing it had provided me everything I needed.

While Eldred had been talking, I’d been taking stock, gathering all the shadowy energy I could.

I thought about what Sunita Sharma had told me regarding the building’s history. Troubled orphans locked away in the basement. The god seed in the 7Rb gene variant may have attracted the Scythe of Cronus to the club, but it was the energy down here that had enabled its ancient power to take hold. Cronus was a swallower of children after all—his own, the eventual gods of Olympus. And I didn’t doubt his most zealous cults had made sacrifices to him in kind.

The spectral faces I’d seen, which continued to drift around the cavern, all belonged to children. Not spirits, but embodiments of the intense fear and loneliness their seclusion had imprinted on the space.

The Cronus energy was feeding off that. It was the same hunger I sensed earlier in the day while checking out the actual basement. I hadn’t been able to pinpoint the source because it was a bleed from the shadow realm, but it belonged to Cronus.

It was also a weakness.

Eldred’s ritual was filling the god with new energy, but I could still deny him the old. I activated the first rune on my blade, the one for banishment. The energy I’d been gathering hummed around my mental prism. I waited for the rune’s light to go pure white before releasing it.

“Disfare!”

The light detonated in all directions, tearing through the drifting apparitions and scattering them. They twisted and writhed, struggling to hold their forms, but the light was relentless, driving them against walls and into corners, where they had nowhere to go. One by one, the imprinted energies burst from existence.

Be at peace, I thought as they dwindled to nothing.

Eldred’s eyes shot up from the scythe as the protective field around him buckled.

Lunging, I drove my sword forward. The still-glowing blade pierced the weakened field and sent it shattering to the ground like sheet glass. Around us, the cavern thinned from view and the rumbling receded.

“What are you doing?” Eldred demanded.

He hustled over to the steaming vat and, raising the scythe above it, began chanting in ancient Greek, trying to hasten the ritual. Before the disorganized energy could stabilize, I planted a shoe against the vat’s side and shoved. It toppled from the burner, spilling blood and organs over the basement floor.

“What are you doing?” Eldred screamed this time. “Stop!”

While he struggled to push the macabre contents back inside the vat, I hurried to the mortician’s table. By growing my aura out, I killed the pump. I then drew the drain tube from Ludvig’s neck, trying to ignore the way his crossed eyes stared upward, deathlike. With a spurt of blood, the tube came free. I hovered my staff’s opal over the hole, chanting words of healing. Faint light plugged the wound like cotton.

But that was all I had time for.

I spun and brought my sword up. It met the flash of the descending scythe with an air-ringing clang. But the scythe was no longer the small artifact