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

too hard and fast. My mind stretched at the joints, threatening to pull apart. Was this Gretchen’s idea of punishment?

Stop, I pled.

You want my help? she repeated, this time in my thoughts.

Stop!

And just like that, the cascade of images ceased. I was flat on my back, but not in the kitchen.

I was in an abyss. Four others lay around me, and we were rotating as if on a giant millstone. Energy swirled and piled into giant storm clouds on all sides. I’d dreamt of this damned place. It had followed the dream with Arianna. I struggled to lift my head, to see who the others were—that felt important. But a force held me fast.

“Liberare!” I shouted.

Though energy poured through my prism, I remained pinned. Harsh lights crackled and burned the air. Thunder rumbled into low laughter. The sound came from above, where taloned hands were curling through a growing seam. A pair of eyes—enormous, demonic eyes—peered out. Flashes of harsh, ozone-like energy highlighted the contours of a craggy face. The eyes narrowed hungrily.

It was Arnaud’s master, Malphas.

I struggled with everything I had against the force restraining me.

“This was inevitable, Croft,” Malphas rumbled. “You were inevitable.”

He reached an arm through the void and punctured my forehead with a talon. A black pain split my head, threatening to drive me insane, but no blood ran. The tip of his talon was on my casting prism. I focused through the agony, focused all my energy on forcing him back out. But Malphas had stolen my power.

“The great savior,” he mocked.

His talon flicked.

5

Something cold and flat struck me across the face.

I opened my eyes with a gasp to find Bree-yark straddling my chest, his knees pinning my arms to the ground. My lower body was bucking as if possessed by Saint Vitus, but the goblin, with his low center of gravity and compact mass, held fast. In his right fist he clutched the spatula from Gretchen’s kitchen.

I sagged to a rest. “It’s all right,” I panted. “I’m back.”

Bree-yark hesitated, the spatula back in striking position.

“I’m good,” I said.

With a grunt, he tossed the kitchen implement away and pushed himself off me. Even at a stocky four feet, he must have weighed close to two-hundred.

Drawing a full breath, I sat up. We were on a grassy lawn planted with saplings. A palatial building rose before us. For a moment, I thought we were in Faerie, but when I saw scaffolding around the building’s stone wing, I recognized it as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in east Central Park.

“What happened?” I asked.

Bree-yark looked at me askance. “What didn’t? One minute we were in Gretchen’s kitchen, and the next we ended up here. Only you were thrashing and screaming like a banshee. I thought for sure she’d snapped your mind as payback for your faceoff back there. Man, you and me must’ve wrestled for a good five minutes before I pinned you. Knew we should’ve taken off when we had the chance.”

I could only imagine what our tussle had looked like, but I was thinking of the vision.

You were inevitable, Malphas’s taunting voice echoed in my thoughts. The great savior.

Had Gretchen been responsible for the vision? If so, why? As I considered the questions and the demon master’s words, I rubbed the spot on my cheek where Bree-yark had spatulaed me. For the first time I really felt the sting.

“Yeah, sorry about the smack. Even pinned, you were outta control.”

When I noticed the closest saplings leaning away from us, leaves blown from their thin branches, I remembered my effort to summon a release spell in the dream, or vision, or whatever the hell it had been.

“Did I cast?” I asked.

“As if the screaming and thrashing weren’t enough,” he confirmed.

Gaining my feet, I checked to make sure the starter potions in my coat pockets hadn’t burst. “Any idea why Gretchen sent us here?”

Bree-yark snorted. “Are you really asking me why that woman did something?”

He had a point, but I couldn’t forget the promise I’d felt behind her question: You want my help?

“Well, maybe we should take a look around,” I said.

“This is the Met, right?” Bree-yark glanced at it doubtfully. “Hell of a search area.”

I looked over the scaffolding and piles of building material. The rear of the museum had suffered burn damage during the mayor’s napalm assault on the park during the purge campaign. Beyond our island of green, Central Park’s charred landscape stretched for blocks, much of it bulldozed into massive debris piles. Replanting was supposed to commence in the spring. Back at the museum, I considered the two million pieces that had been returned to the Met’s permanent collection.

“Oh, fuck this,” I muttered, anger rippling hot inside me.

I pulled out my phone and dialed Gretchen. No answer, and no way to leave a message. Cramming the phone back into a pocket, I oriented myself toward the road that would take me out of the park.

“Hey, where ya going?” Bree-yark barked.

“Back to Gretchen’s.”

The goblin hustled after me. “Not a good idea.”

“Have you got a better one?”

“Wait, I didn’t tell you everything.”

I slowed to face him. “What do you mean?”

“She said something before she zapped us out of there.”

I stopped. “What?”

Bree-yark was wearing a bomber jacket over a turtleneck that matched his gray wool hat. He fidgeted with the jacket’s zipper before answering. “She said neither of us are welcome back there. Only she put it a lot more colorfully and with some serious threats thrown in.” By his downcast eyes, I could see he’d taken her words personally.

“Well, that’s tough.” I resumed my march. “If she dropped me here to find something, she needs to tell me what the hell it is.”

Bree-yark jogged beside me. “Look, just give her some time to cool down.”

“There isn’t time,” I growled. “That’s the point.”

“Isn’t there something else you could be doing?”

“No.”

But as I scrambled down a cindery embankment leading to East Seventy-ninth, I wondered if I was only going to succeed in wasting more time. Gretchen was unlikely