Night Rune (Prof Croft Book 8) by Brad Magnarella (best e reader for academics txt) 📕

If they weren’t, I was going to have a really tough decision to make. We filed out and climbed the bluff along the route Caroline and I had come down. Several trees had fallen, which made me worry for the horses. But they were standing where we’d left them, skittish, but no worse for the wear.

“I’ll check the road,” I said, already hustling toward it.

I activated the bonding sigil, but it responded weakly. I sent a summoning signal to Seay anyway. At the road, I peered south into the dusky whiteness. There was no sight or sound of her or the others.

Dammit.

I was hurrying back to my teammates when a force threw me into a tree. I wrapped the trunk with one arm and aimed my cane around, but it was the time catch going through another spasm. This time, the tops of the trees seemed to bend toward one another. When they eased back down, the landscape remained cocked at an angle. Leaning to my right to compensate, I lurched toward the others.

“We can’t stay, can’t stay,” Malachi was telling everyone.

Crazed or not, he was right. I’d never been in a failing time catch, but something told me ours could only tolerate so much twisting and bending before it split and succumbed to the vacuum that surrounded it.

“Start heading toward the departure point!” I shouted above the wind and driving snow. “I’m going back for Seay!”

Bree-yark faced me with bowed arms. “We don’t know how much longer this is gonna hold together!”

“Exactly,” I said, taking the horse’s reins.

Malachi jerked them from my grip. “I’ll go,” he said, clambering onto the back of the horse. “I know the ways in and out. We’ll meet you in Jordan’s time, Jordan’s time. It’s more stable.”

I lunged for the bridle, but Malachi swung the horse from my reach.

“You’ll find him in Belvedere Castle,” he cried over a shoulder. “The final jump is at the Morton Building.”

Then he disappeared into a fierce swirl of snowfall.

35

Swearing, I looked from where Malachi had vanished to our one remaining horse.

“Bree-yark and I can hoof it,” Gorgantha said.

The goblin stepped up beside her importantly. “That’s right, you guys take the horse.”

“It’s going to be a three-mile journey through snow,” I warned him.

“We’re up to it,” Bree-yark assured me.

I had no idea how his stubby legs were going to keep pace with Gorgantha’s powerful strides, much less the horse’s, but we were short of options. Caroline adjusted the saddle forward and mounted the horse. I set Arnaud, who still weighed next to nothing, behind her, then climbed on myself.

We headed east over the misshapen landscape, a shield invocation keeping the cold off Arnaud. Gorgantha followed in the horse’s wake, while Bree-yark huffed and puffed behind her. I kept peering past them, hoping to see Malachi, Seay, and her friends charging up in our wake, but we were alone.

The horse plowed through woods and meadows, across what would become Central Park, then into the future Upper East Side. When the East River appeared through the trees, Caroline veered north. We paralleled the thin stretch of Roosevelt Island, which sat mid-river, to where the shore bent out at the present-day mayor’s mansion.

Caroline trotted the horse to a stop. Gorgantha and Bree-yark soon arrived beside us, the goblin panting like a bellows, steam rising from his soaked shirt. To his credit, he’d kept up. We were looking out over a narrow neck of the river, where the waters swirled and churned past a cluster of jutting rocks.

“Hell Gate,” Caroline announced.

I peered around until I spotted a small snow-covered boulder field glowing in the moon light. “The interface must be in there.”

I dismounted and lifted Arnaud down. He wavered but remained upright. When I gave Caroline a hand to the ground, the demon-vampire looked at me intensely. I ignored him. The priority right now was getting out of this time catch.

“Stay together,” I called as I seized Arnaud’s arm and led the way toward the boulders.

I’d felt low rumbles on the ride here, but now they began to grow. Tree-trunks fractured like popping knuckles, and boulders shifted. I scanned the field through the whipping snow, looking for any traces of the interface. Behind me, Caroline held her hood over her brow to screen her eyes.

“See anything?” I shouted.

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

Reality suddenly flipped on an axis toward the river. We began to slide. Boulders dislodged from their deep embeddings, and trees toppled. Pivoting my cane toward my feet, I cried, “Protezione!”

The air hardened into a solid ledge, catching the five of us, along with a sheet of debris. I closed the shield around us as larger elements crashed and tumbled past. I looked back for our horse, but the poor thing was no longer there. I swore, even though she was part and parcel of the failing reality.

A massive tree split against the peaked roof of our shielding, prompting Bree-yark to wrap his head in his arms. “Holy thunder!” he shouted as the tree fell to either side of us.

Reality continued to rotate until we were perched on the equivalent of a cliff wall. Gorgantha stared between her webbed feet at the waters of Hell Gate raging below. The distorting forces were growing increasingly unruly. Molars clenching, I upped the effort to keep my shield from twisting apart.

“There!” Caroline called.

She was pointing at where the boulder field had been. With only a couple of the massive stones remaining, the interface was now in plain view. It pulsated in the ground like a large jellyfish, multi-colored and transparent. At over a hundred feet away, though, the challenge was going to be reaching it.

“Hold on,” I said.

Gotta turn this baby into an express elevator.

Opening a hole in the floor of our protection, I aimed my sword down and shouted, “Forza dura!”

The force that blasted from the blade cratered the river’s edge and produced a massive counterforce. Our conveyance rocketed upward, crashing through falling trees and