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

His eyes winced in agony, then seemed to fix on mine. “I’m so sorry, Everson,” he whispered. “I wasn’t deceiving you when we spoke. I just … I didn’t know the things I was doing…”

“Sathanas was doing,” I corrected him. “But you’re back now, and I have your Bible. We can drive him out.”

After another wince, he nodded heavily. “Yes, yes … all right.” Father Vick sounded ripped up inside, but more like himself, the awful garbling gone from his voice. “Begin with the prayer.”

I flipped open the Latin Bible to the section he indicated and began to read. “Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis…”

As I moved the silver cross over Father Vick’s chest, a part of me felt like a fraud. I wasn’t ordained. I hadn’t even attended a Mass in ten years—during which time I managed to contract an incubus spirit and challenge a core belief on which St. Martin’s was based. But I shut that all away and focused on the power of the words, driving them into Father Vick. I concluded the opening prayer, making the sign of the cross twice more.

Father Vick’s next wince turned into a grunting cry. His head whiplashed back, bloody teeth bared. But for the first time, hope stirred inside me. It wasn’t pretty, but the exorcism seemed to be working.

“C’mon, Father,” I whispered as I checked the next steps. “Hang in there.”

I opened the bottle of holy water and wet the first two fingers of my right hand. I touched the moist pads to his right ear and then his left, saying, “Ephpheta, quod est, Adaperire.”

Steam hissed up, and Father Vick released another cry. I was reaching for his lips when my hand hesitated. Had he just cried … or laughed? The sound hardened and took on a cruel rhythm, until there was no longer any doubt. I backed onto my haunches, ice water breaking through me.

“Father Vick?” I asked.

His grinning face shot up like a Jack-in-the-box, but it was no longer his. The smile was too large, too mocking. His irises had blackened and spread, taking on fierce glints of red. And the skin between his brows was fissuring, as though someone had laid into it with an axe.

“Fight him, Father,” I urged, splashing him with holy water. “Fight, dammit!”

The wet laughter became riotous as, with blood streaming down his face, the demon rose to his full height. I stumbled backwards, the holy items falling from me. Though I couldn’t see it, I could hear the water glugging from the tipped-over bottle. I imagined it seeping through layers of bones, lost.

“Stupid wizard,” Sathanas taunted in that awful voice. “You cannot banish a demon lord.”

I watched as his robe began to shift and jut out in places, as though something were emerging from Father Vick’s body. Something was, I realized in horror: the massive form of the demon. The fissure growing along his forehead broke through his nose in a crackling burst and then split his grinning lips. Oh God, Father. His ears sloughed off next. When horns erupted through his red-bearded cheeks, the little strength in my legs gave out, and I collapsed to the floor.

47

The last vestiges of Father Vick dropped away, and a demon lord crouched inside the grotto, horrid wings scraping the walls. Horns studded his face, including two black blades that erupted from his temples like a Brahma bull’s. A clawed hand tore away the remains of the robe, revealing a grotesque fusion of muscles and exoskeleton. At the demon’s back, a barbed tail raked the bones.

I struggled to see the being analytically, even as I began shoving myself away. Demon lords were elementals, expressions of our darkest emotions and urges. No pure embodiments of the elemental virtues remained to oppose them—only the lineage of Saint Michael. Me, in other words. And right now I was about as dangerous to this thing as a chewed-up sock.

Sathanas’s laughter died off. “Alone,” he rumbled. ‘The poor wizard is all alone.”

I eyed the bishop, who had begun to stir. Had the demon pulled enough power from her to break the cathedral’s threshold? The million dollar question. If I managed to escape with the bishop while the demon remained entrapped, I could alert the Order, bring in Elder-level magic.

Assuming they listen, I thought.

Sathanas’s fiery red eyes tracked mine. Bones crunched under his hoofed foot as he stepped over the bishop, separating us.

“Alone,” he repeated. “All alone. How does that make you feel, wizard?”

His words penetrated my mind, cracking like flint against my resentment toward the Order. Dark sparks kicked up inside me.

“Yes, angry,” Sathanas said, hungrily. “And rightfully so. You have been threatened, dragged over jagged stones, abandoned like a pathetic pup. And by the same ones you have so dutifully served.”

I struggled to suppress my crackling rage.

“And what about those who prattle of cultivating knowledge, delivering justice, and yet who gleefully deny you both?”

He was speaking of Midtown College now, the NYPD. Despite my efforts, the sparks inside me swelled and broke into flames. I watched them climb the administration wing of the college, the walls of One Police Plaza. And as the flames blackened the institutions and pulled them down, an ecstatic energy beat in time with my heart. I was becoming the powerful wizard I knew myself to be. Before I could recoil from the dark fantasy, Sathanas spoke again.

“And this holy place,” he sneered. “You know what they did to your forebears. Rounding them up like animals. Beheading them. Burning them at the stake while they screamed for mercy.”

Fresh images of the Inquisition slashed through my mind’s eye, too horrible to watch, too horrible to look away. I witnessed a woman I knew to be a direct ancestor pursued and hacked to death, her head paraded on a pike. Fury roared through me, searing my injuries closed, shaking hot tears from my eyes.

“Make no mistake, they hate