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

With a sigh, I carried the note to the waste basket. As it fluttered down, blue light broke around the circle, and the entire note erupted into flames. I startled back, staring as the paper disintegrated into gray ash.

“What the hell?”

It was a trick, I thought on the cab ride to the address Vega had sent me. Had to be.

I’d raced after Sven, but he’d disappeared into the halls of Midtown College, and I didn’t have time to go looking. Which left me searching for explanations. Something in the medium he’d used to draw the circle had clearly held a combustible component. But how in the hell had he ignited it? If he were a magic-user, he could have used a timing sigil, but he wasn’t a damned magic-user. I’d checked.

Did he get his hands on a spell book?

It seemed he’d gotten his hands on something, but there was no use blowing a mental gasket trying to figure out what. I would agree to take him on as an “apprentice”—just long enough to learn what he knew and how he knew it.

I blew out my breath. Of all the things to have to deal with the first week of class.

The cab pulled over in front of one of the Upper East Side’s palatial apartment buildings. An officer out front escorted me inside. The crime scene was a penthouse on the top level. I smelled the body the minute I stepped off the elevator, a sick, swampy odor you never quite got used to. At the far end of the corridor, beyond a barricade of police tape, Detective Hoffman was waiting for me.

I could tell by the set of his jaw that Vega had been right. He was under extra pressure to deliver.

“Took you long enough,” he growled, lifting the tape as I approached.

“I came as soon as I got the address.” I ducked under and turned toward a table of personal protective equipment.

“Just mask and gloves,” he said. “Don’t bother with the rest. Forensics has already been here.” I donned an N-95 mask, which helped blunt the dead-body odor, and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

“What are we looking at?” I asked.

“A fucking puzzle,” he replied, lifting his own mask back in place.

I usually took pleasure in riling him, but today wasn’t the day. He was really in a mood. His brown polyester suit squeaked as he led the way past an officer stationed at the door. We entered a large penthouse that was surprisingly minimalist. A few pieces of modern furniture, a few potted plants.

Definitely a bachelor pad.

Framed photos lined one wall, all depicting whom I assumed to be the victim. The middle-aged man with copper hair—traversing an icy wall here, standing atop some jungle ruins there—looked like a wealthy adventurer.

“Watch your step,” Hoffman said.

Avoiding an evidence marker on the floor, I followed him past a glass wall that looked over north Manhattan. We entered an office. The body was slumped over a desk, head atop forearms, as if the victim were merely taking a break from his open laptop. But the same copper hair I’d seen in the photos was now splayed over a pair of bloated blue hands, the fingernails the bone white of the dead.

“Bear Goldburn, forty-six years old. He was supposed to leave for a week-long conference on Sunday. His housekeeper turned up this morning and found him like this. She swears the alarm was set when she arrived. No signs of forced entry. A search of the body showed no outward signs of trauma.”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t natural causes?”

“Renal failure, according to the preliminary. His body filled up with piss, basically.” Hoffman, who was sweating like a pig, sponged his balding head with a handkerchief.

“Okay… so what am I doing here?” I asked.

He stuffed the kerchief in a pocket and jerked his head. “Take a look.”

I followed him around to the rear of the body. Reaching over the chair back, he peeled up the victim’s shirt. I winced, expecting something horrible, but the distended skin across his back was intact.

“The examiner hasn’t had her say yet, but the medic noticed something unusual. See these bruises?” He circled a finger above a pair of brown-black spots on either side of the victim’s lower back.

“Yeah?”

“That’s internal bleeding. The medic did a portable ultrasound, and guess what? The man’s missing his kidneys.”

“Both of them?”

“And without leaving a damned mark. Weren’t taken through the front, either. So here’s my question for you, Merlin. How could someone snatch two vital organs without making a single cut?”

6

I stood back, regarding the bruises where the man’s kidneys had been as recently as Friday.

“Certain spells can accomplish that,” I said. “Or a potion made to target organs. Or if we’re talking manual removal, a translocation spell. That’s where a magic-user creates a small portal, like this…” I signed into the air, opening my interplanar cubby hole. I removed a spell book, showed it to Hoffman, and put it back, signing the portal closed again. “That would eliminate the need for surgery.”

“You can put a hole like that into someone’s body?” he asked uncomfortably.

“Me, personally?” I shook my head. “Above my paygrade. And that would require two holes, one going into the interplanar space and a second going into the vic’s body. We’re talking advanced magic and, for organ removal, an absurd degree of precision. Anyone operating at that level would have alerted the senior members of my Order.”

“And yet our boy’s still dead. You sure it wasn’t one of them?”

“I’m sure,” I said thinly. “My point is we can probably rule out translocation as a mode of removal. Were there signs of anyone else in the apartment?”

“Nothing obvious. The techs collected a bunch of material for analysis, but that could take a few days. So, go ahead.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Go ahead and do what you do.” He motioned impatiently. “I need a name.”

“I can’t guarantee a name, but I’ll find out what I