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

The short silence was broken by hooves pounding asphalt and the cries of pedestrians. Our driver had gone full wereboar and was charging the fae. I shouted as his monstrous form bounded past me, trying to call him off. The last thing we needed was a full-blown battle before Caroline could overwhelm the demon.

But the wereboar ignored me. Snorting, he drove his thick head into the chest of the male twin and gave a savage twist. The fae cried out as tusks tore through flesh and threw him through the air. Pedestrians screamed and backed away. The wereboar wheeled on the female, but she was ready for him.

I cast a barrier between them, but the fae’s enchanted blade smashed through it. The wereboar absorbed three rapid slashes and his bulky form disintegrated to the street. Behind me, the druids reacted with blasts from their staffs. The fae blocked them, but like Jordan’s attacks on me earlier, these carried sneaky cantrips. With each seismic collision, yellow dust burst out and wisped around the fae.

“Time displacements!” Jordan shouted.

Indeed, like videos being rewound, the fae underwent a rapid dance until they were standing at attention as they had been shortly after arriving.

“How long?” I asked him.

“Fifteen seconds, give or take.”

I glanced at where Caroline stood over her husband. Fae light radiated from her eyes. Angelus remained down, a hand clawing at the asphalt, clearly weakening. I could just make out the tight cord of power she was driving into his heart. She had to be pushing her limits, both energetically and emotionally. And if Angelus recovered, we were going to be looking at a major fight against him and his loyalists.

“Hit the fae,” I called to my teammates. “Hard.”

Bree-yark didn’t need to be told twice. His gun went off in a rapid series of pumps and shots, silver ammo blasting into the seven standing fae, knocking them around. Under the cantrip, the fae didn’t resist. They were viewing everything as it had happened seconds before the magic possessed them.

Pushing power through my cold iron amulet, I dropped the reeling fae with a cone of blue light. Transparent white flames burst over their protective magic. I withdrew my attack as the druids moved in with quarterstaffs, pummeling the downed fae with charged blows and then pummeling them some more.

We were cheap-shotting the hell out of them, but we needed to bring their power down to a level we could manage before they recovered. With time winding down on the cantrip, I turned to Caroline.

“How’s it go—?” I started to ask, then broke off.

She had drawn a fae dagger from under her cloak and raised it overhead. The tip was aimed at the center of Angelus’s back. He remained on the street. One of his hands crawled to her ankle and gripped it weakly. Beneath the faltering light in her eyes, tears streamed down the sides of her face.

Unable to purge the demon through the bond, she was left with an enchanted blade.

A moan-scream sounded, and I looked over to find Arnaud staggering from the bus. With Caroline’s energies spent, her enchantments had fallen from him. The vampire-demon thrust his bound hands toward Caroline and Angelus, while his jaundiced eyes implored me with the urgency of whatever he was trying to say.

Listen to his words.

I flicked an invocation off my sword, and Arnaud’s muzzle released and fell to the street. He was already shouting in a strained voice, but with the surrounding commotion, I couldn’t hear the message.

I labored to read the shape of his lips.

Not him! he was saying. The demon isn’t him!

I looked from Caroline to Angelus. Was Arnaud trying to spare Malphas’s demon, or was Caroline about to make the biggest mistake of her life? Off to my right, the fae were recovering from the cantrips. They leapt to their feet and began repelling the druids with bolts of fae light. The twins recovered their blades from the street, and the air whistled as they sliced at the retreating druids.

Aiming my sword, I shouted, “Vigore!”

The force invocation slammed into Caroline’s hand and knocked the dagger from her grip. As it went clattering away, I hoped I hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of my life. Pulling her hand to her chest, Caroline’s shocked face snapped toward me. Though I felt my mind tugging at the question, I refused to revisit it.

It’s not her.

But if the demon wasn’t Caroline or Angelus, who did that leave? I looked at Arnaud, but he was scanning the action from the steps of the bus. To be safe, I cast an invocation that bound him to the door.

The druids were holding their own against the weakened fae. But the stalemate wasn’t going to last, not with the fae’s magic returning. And the twins were no longer engaging the druids. They’d disappeared. As I searched for their pale-blue faces, I reflected on their likenesses to Angelus.

Half-siblings, I thought suddenly.

If their other halves were human, they would have been vulnerable to the demon that Malphas planted in Faerie—and I’d heard of a single demon possessing twins. A shadow demon. In the pixies’ song, Pip and Twerk referred to the one claimed as “they”—not gender neutral, but truly plural. The fae twins would have been capable of influencing Angelus through their common bloodline.

As I looked around anxiously for the twins, I imagined their early meetings with Angelus. Malphas’s goal would have been to undermine Angelus’s trust in Caroline, to convince him that she had been compromised. Everything the twins advised him to do would have been with the purported goal of restoring his wife. And Angelus would have responded out of his love and devotion to her, when, in fact, the goal was to prevent anyone from disturbing the 1776 St. Martin’s site.

The twins had been too late to stop Osgood from sending us the first time, so they took measures to ensure I couldn’t go back. They murdered Crusspatch in the Fae Wilds, but failed to find Caroline