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

a moment, but only in my head. I was sitting in the middle of a wide dirt road under a full moon. Stately buildings rose in a procession along one side of the thoroughfare, while the other side was a blackened ruins.

This looked for all the world like 1776 New York. But where was everyone else?

“Hello?” I called, grasping my cane from the ground beside me. “Seay? Gorgantha?” I wobbled to my feet. “Jordan? Malachi?”

There was no bus, no druids or half-fae, no Upholders. A block away, my gaze stopped on a familiar foundation of stone slabs scattered with earth and cinder. The St. Martin’s site. Only I was viewing it from the north side now. It had taken one hell of a journey, but I was finally around the barrier.

And alone.

“Bree-yark?” I shouted, panic growing inside me.

Wiping dirt from the bonding sigil on my hand, I pushed power into it. A moment later, I felt the faintest tug.

Okay, I thought, exhaling, the Upholders are here somewhere.

I pivoted in a circle, shouting their names again. “It’s Everson!”

Still no answer, and the bonding sigil wasn’t giving me a direction. My trench coat rustled as I strode toward the St. Martin’s site and pulled my cane into sword and staff.

Through my wizard’s senses, I watched ley energy gushing from the foundation. In four surrounding locations, dispersed energy was being collected, concentrated, and channeled back at the fount. Two of the locations were buildings on the far side of Broadway. The other two were structures that stood in the blackened field beyond the site, cleverly disguised to look like casualties of the fire. All four held the copper paneling Arnaud had installed, and all were active, creating the cross-like pattern my grandfather had observed.

There were secondary and tertiary locations for energy amplification set farther back, but these four were the main ones. And presumably being operated by Arnaud’s replacement, Malphas’s final demon.

Was he waiting for us? I thought with stinging dread. Did he get to the others?

As I neared the St. Martin’s site, I felt the growing intensity Malachi had described. Raw, concentrated ley. But where was the platform he’d seen? Where were the containers for the essences Malphas had siphoned? Where was the rest of his Night Ruin?

“Everson!” someone cried.

I wheeled to find a lone figure running down Broadway, all ragged hair and tattered clothes. I breathed a silent prayer as Malachi covered the final block, but I checked his aura to be sure. The chaotic pattern was a match to my teammate’s.

“Have you seen the others?” I asked.

“No,” he panted as he arrived in front of me, his Bible clutched to his chest. “I was going to ask you the same, the same.”

“This is it, right? The 1776 site?”

“It looks different than the last time I was here, but yes. It has to be.”

“What about the final demon? Can you sense anything?”

He peered around, then shook his head.

“Where did you end up?”

“Couple blocks over, by New Dutch Church.” He pointed toward the northeast.

“There’s a good chance we’re all scattered, then.” When I noticed Malachi shying from the intensity of the St. Martin’s site, I said, “How about you go look for the others, and I’ll start dismantling the copper panels, cripple the power source. It doesn’t look like Malphas has his Night Ruin up and running.” Until we found the others I was going to be on edge, but the fact we’d arrived here in time was a huge relief.

But Malachi was peering back at me with a meditative face, the burned half shining in the moon’s glow.

“Did you have another idea?” I asked.

“When I was returning with Seay and the others, I had some time to think. And now I’m wondering, I’m wondering…” He rubbed his forehead agitatedly. “Did we just do Malphas’s work for him?”

“What do you mean?”

“The Aristotelean Set, the five elements. He needed a container for the essences, right? What if the containers, the containers were us? Jordan, Seay, Gorgantha, Arnaud, and … and me, I guess?”

As I looked from Malachi to the St. Martin’s site, icy fingers crawled down my back.

“What if that was his plan?” he pressed. “What if that was the reason for manipulating you into coming back the way you did?”

“Manipulating…?” A flash of irritation hit me. “The hell are you talking about? He was trying to block me.”

“Or did he just narrow your choices?” He raised a finger. “To one?”

Though still peeved, I considered the steps the demon Malphas had taken. Removing Osgood as an option for my return, alienating Caroline, and then murdering Crusspatch.

That had left Arnaud—a demon he couldn’t reach, because of my wards and sigils, but that perhaps he still needed? And when I asked Caroline how she knew about the demon lines, she said Osgood had left the information for her to find. But what if one of the demon twins had in fact left it?

“The rest of us were already here,” Malachi went on, “in 1776 New York, but then you captured Arnaud, and the time catches collided. I don’t believe Malphas was expecting that, expecting that. But like a powerful demon, he adapted. When we became separated, he needed someone to find us and bring us here. Someone we trusted.”

I was caring less and less for his suggestion that I’d been an unwitting pawn in Malphas’s plans. But I thought back to how we’d found Gorgantha and Malachi in 1861. Hellcat Maggie had intercepted us, sending us on a mission that led to both teammates. That had seemed a lucky stroke, but what if Malphas’s final demon had pointed the vampire at us?

And upon finding Malachi, we’d effectively acquired a guide. Locating Seay and Jordan would have been impossible, otherwise.

But there was a problem with the theory.

“Then why send his soulless mobs after us?” I asked. “Why try to stop us?”

“No, no, I think he wanted to speed us along,” he said, pumping his elbows in a running motion. “Keep us moving.”

“Because of the instability of