The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) by Brad Magnarella (best business books of all time txt) 📕

someone trying on a pair of roller skates for the first time. Under different circumstances, the sight might have been comical. I skipped to one side and, with a hacking slash, cleaved the other wing. The shrieker fell past me into a crouch, ruined wings hugged to its body.

“All right,” I panted, drawing the tip of the blade to my hip. “Let’s call it a night, shall we?”

I focused on a spot between its wings—and slipped on a spatter of gunk. The cement floor rammed into my side, angering my injured shoulder. From my new vantage, I watched as the tears in the creature’s wings began to fuse, black tissue knotting along the repair lines.

The damage from the wards was running its course. The shrieker was healing itself.

We rose at the same time and faced off. I didn’t wait for it to make the first move. Too many precious seconds had already ticked away.

Lowering my head behind the shield that crackled from my staff, I charged. If I could get my sword through the shrieker’s core, I would hit it with a dispersive force powerful enough to get Thelonious licking his lips but not quite diving in. The still-weakened shrieker wouldn’t be able to hold itself together.

That was the theory, anyway.

In a rapid one-two, the shrieker seized my thrusting blade and brought its head down. My good shoulder exploded in white-hot pain. The creature’s teeth sunk in deeper as the horns on its wings collapsed toward me.

“Respingere!” I cried.

Energy from my shield shoved the shrieker off and into a wall, a bloody flap of my coat, and probably skin, jiggling from its mouth. As the shrieker righted itself, a segmented tongue emerged to grab the scraps and pull them into its gullet.

I didn’t need to see that, I thought, pressing my staff hand to my torn-open shoulder—a shoulder the wormy appendage had just touched.

But more worrying than its tongue was the creature’s regenerative powers. I wasn’t sure any level of blast, short of one that would invoke my incubus spirit, was going to do the job now.

And if Thelonious did escape my containment, I would be done for the night. Detective Vega? Her son? Father Vick? All dead. And if the possessed reverend succeeded in escaping the church threshold, who knew how many others would die with them? Through it all, Thelonious would drink and dance the night away, happy as a clam. And I’d awaken tomorrow to the mother of all hangovers in a city that would make the current version seem like Paradise.

Never mind whose bed I’d shared.

The shrieker flew at me. Claws raked over my shield. The impact knocked me to the floor. Flapping above me, the shrieker scrabbled its taloned feet against the shield, its foul air buffeting me in great gusts. Ignoring the pain in my shoulder, I drove my sword at its torso.

Without my legs beneath me, though, the thrust was weak, the contact glancing. I brought my sword back in time to block the horned wing diving for my neck. I had the shrieker where I wanted it, close enough to run through. But with the direction things were headed, it was going to run me through first.

Need to get the son of a bitch off me, I thought. Regroup.

I hit it with a force blast, which was barely up to the task. The shrieker rose, flapping, and circled the high-ceilinged room twice before I realized what it was doing: sniffing out sustenance.

I aimed my staff at the locked bathroom door. “Protezione!” I called.

The shrieker crashed into a shield of light energy. With another blast from my sword I could ill afford, I knocked the shrieker away from Meredith’s sanctuary. It lifted off again, coming to a flapping perch on the rail that ran along my library/lab. It stretched its wings until they were gripping ceiling and wall, like some grotesque parody of the crucifixion.

As the creature stared down with evil, unblinking eyes, I could all but feel it reconstituting the last of its lost strength. Me? I could barely keep my sword and staff aloft.

The shrieker was above my hologram, though. If I could detonate the energy inside it, as I had with the wards, I might be back in business. After all, the hologram was bound to the city-wide wards set up by the Order.

The thought deflated like a sputtering balloon. Had been bound to the wards set up by the Order—who had duly unplugged me from their grid when they sidelined me. A quick check confirmed this.

Damn.

The shrieker’s next scream shook my ear shields. I backpedaled as the shrieker tore a wing from the ceiling, sifting plaster down. It was unhooking its other wing, preparing to dive, when a hairy pumpkin landed on the back of its neck.

Tabitha!

She must have been crouched on the top of the bookcase, because now she was sinking a mouthful of teeth into the shrieker’s tarry flesh. It reared back with a cry, flailing to get one of the horns on its wings into her. Tabitha flattened her head and sank in deeper.

She wasn’t just wounding its physical form, I realized. Being a succubus, Tabitha was draining the creature’s essence, weakening it.

The shrieker’s talons scraped over the iron railing, lost its grip, and fell. With wings still writhing to dislodge Tabitha, its torso was an open book. Seizing my chance, I scrambled underneath it. Right shoulder screaming, I thrust up my sword. The blade passed cleanly through the heart of the shrieker—so cleanly, the creature’s plummeting weight flattened me.

We hit the floor together, my head cracking cement. The sensation of warm tar oozing over my hands pulled me from a daze, and I realized in horror the shrieker and I were cheek to cheek. Tabitha’s green eyes appeared from behind its neck. What the fuck are you waiting for? they asked.

I drew air into my shocked lungs and shouted the Word for dispersion. “Disfare!”

The shrieker jiggled against me for several seconds, then erupted into phlegm.