Death Mage (Prof Croft Book 4) Read online

  “Went to Romania?” He looked at me askance.

  “Here.” I moved my sword to my staff hand, pulled my flight itinerary from my pocket, and handed it to him. “See for yourself.”

  I watched Chicory as he unfolded the piece of paper and moved his gaze down it. At last he nodded and handed it back. “I want you to take another look at this, Everson, and tell me exactly what you see.”

  “I already know what’s on here,” I said, snatching it back. “I’ve been carrying it for the last three—”

  But when I looked down, it wasn’t the printed flight itinerary from the airport. It was my packing list from when I was about to leave my apartment for the safe house a few weeks earlier. I rechecked my pockets before looking at the packing list again. “What did you do to it?” I demanded.

  “Nothing,” Chicory said quietly. “The protective energy around the house is charging up again. It must be clearing your mind.”

  It was a trick. It had to be. I wasn’t crazy.

  I dropped the list, pulled out my wallet, and tossed it to him. “Look inside and you’ll find boarding passes, train tickets. Check out the bills while you’re in there, too. Do you think I just walk around with Romanian currency?” My laugh verged on a mad giggle. I pressed a hand to my sweating upper lip as I watched him.

  “The only thing resembling a boarding pass is this,” he said, holding up my transit card. “And your currency is all in U.S. dollars.”

  “My passport, then,” I said quickly. “It’s in my pack in the front room. It’ll be stamped.” I started to push past Chicory, then stopped cold. Tabitha had just walked into the room.

  “I see we’re a happy household again,” she said dryly.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded. “Why aren’t you at the apartment?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. We’ve been in this pit for almost a month. A month too long, if you ask me.” She parked inside the doorway and combed a licked paw over her right ear.

  “I took you back to the apartment four days ago.”

  She snorted. “Four days ago you were hardly in the land of the living.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” My temples were beginning to pound.

  “Oh, come now, darling. Ever since you got back from that realm, you’ve been practically catatonic. I’ve been doing everything. Fixing our meals, feeding you.” She made a face. “Helping you to the bathroom.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Um, yes,” Tabitha said.

  I opened my mouth, then hesitated. Another thought occurred to me. “Detective Vega and I have been in contact. She even gave me back my pager.” I pawed my front pockets, but the bulky device was nowhere to be felt. Impossible. It had been there not forty minutes earlier when she’d paged me. Had I left it in the cab?

  “Everson,” Chicory said sharply.

  “No,” I backed away from him. “I know what I experienced.”

  “Think for a moment,” Chicory said. “Listen to me. This is exactly what Marlow wants—to bias you against us, to turn you against the Order, to harness your powers to his purposes. He had you down there for several days. He convinced you that what he’d told you could be verified up here, correct? He set you free for you to find out. But not before ensuring that the only journey you took would be in here.” He tapped his temple. “A mind he poisoned with Whisperer magic.”

  “James,” I nearly shouted. “James Wesson!”

  Chicory shook his head. “That means nothing to me.”

  “He’s a—a wizard—a member of the Order. Here in New York City. You left his file out so I’d find him, but not before you told him to expect me so that he could stop me from…”

  From what, exactly?

  “From finding the truth?” Chicory asked, raising a bushy eyebrow. “And if this James failed, and you learned the truth despite his efforts to stop you, the more convincing those truths would appear to you, no?”

  I stammered for a moment, then looked over at Tabitha. She looked back at me as though I was suffering a nervous breakdown and couldn’t decide whether that merited pity or scorn.

  I sat down hard on the one chair in the room and dug a hand into my hair. Chicory was right. There were two versions of reality: the one before the Front had captured me, and the one after. I had been counting on my reason to determine which was the truth. Reason. The very thing Marlow would have corrupted.

  I looked up at my mentor. “I need to talk to Detective Vega. If she says we never spoke, that will settle it. I’ll go along with whatever needs doing, and we’ll get back to the business of Marlow.” That decided, the exhaustion I’d been holding back broke through me, and I slumped in the chair.

  Chicory nodded. “Very good, Everson. Stay here and rest, lie down if you need to.” He waved a hand toward the cluttered bed. “I’ll bring the phone up.”

  When he left the room, Tabitha fell in behind him. My gaze moved from their departure to the flight itinerary—correction, packing list—I’d dropped on the floor. I thought back over my journey to Romania. The flights, the trains, the visit to Lazlo’s farm, my stay with Olga and her father, the bones she had read. It had all felt so damned real!

  I lifted up my shirt to check the place on my stomach where the shadow creature had lashed me. Last night an ugly blue-green mark had run from my left ribcage down to my right hip, complete with bite marks. Right now there was nothing save pale skin, the faintest suggestion of abdominal muscles, and a mole I’d had since birth. Was Whisperer magic really that powerful?

  Apparently so, I thought with a stab of disgrace.

  I patted my pockets again. No pager. I looked through my wallet. Nothing to suggest I’d been in Romania. I stepped out into the hallway. Back in the kitchen, Chicory had stopped to heat up some goat’s milk for Tabitha. I went the other direction. My backpack wasn’t in the foyer where I was sure I’d dropped it. In the bedroom where I’d stayed, I found my clothes, books, and duffel bag, never packed. I could feel the hum of protective energy that encircled the house. Was it helping me to perceive clearly again?

  Or is it poisoning your thoughts once more, the insidious voice whispered. But the voice no longer held the same power.

  I looked down at the bed, where I could see an imprint of my body. I imagined myself lying there in a catatonic state for the past four days, Whisperer lies twisting through my mind like black tentacles.

  I returned to Chicory’s room and walked along the lab table, absently touching the glass tubes and notebooks, telling myself there was no shame in succumbing to a magic that had nearly overwhelmed the Elders. Anyway, I had destroyed Lich’s book, not an Elder book. Meaning no Whisperer magic was flowing into the world. That was a huge relief right there. And as Marlow’s power dwindled, he and the Front would have nowhere to hide. The Elders would take care of them.

  With that knowledge, I no longer cared to see the face behind the gold mask. Marlow was corrupt and evil, a vessel for the Whisperer. He wasn’t my father. He was nothing to—

  At the end of the table, I had arrived at the pile of newspaper clippings and begun poking through them: the article on the robe of John the Baptist as well as those concerning exhibits of other magic-sounding artifacts. But near the bottom of the pile, at a depth I hadn’t ventured to the last time, I arrived at a glossy program for an opera. The program showed a black-robed figure standing center stage.

  He was wearing a gold mask.

  Heart thudding, I pulled the program all the way out.

  The gold mask with its frowning mouth was identical to the one I’d seen on Marlow. I read the caption below:

  “Radical! Violent!”

  In this reimagining of Verdi’s Macbeth, we go not to Scotland, but ancient Greece, where an ambitious young magician murders the King of Athens and embarks on a bloody rule.

  My eyes skipped to the bottom:

  Praise for The Death Mage, recent Opera Award nominee and…

  “
Here we are,” Chicory said.

  I jumped and shoved the program back into the stack. My mentor had returned with the phone, but he wasn’t looking at me. In search of a jack, he was kicking through the clutter along the baseboards. I glanced back at the articles. In his carelessness, Chicory had neglected to conceal the most damning clue: his model for what would become my boogeyman.

  There was no Death Mage. Chicory had invented him.

  I turned from the table and eyed the chair where my cane was leaning. As Chicory continued to root around, I crept toward it.

  “Could’ve sworn there was a place to plug in,” he muttered.

  I reached the chair and slowly grasped the cane’s handle. But when I tried to unsheathe the sword that had slain Lich’s form once before—the doppelganger story was BS too, I now decided—it wouldn’t come free. I rearranged my slick grip and tried again. Normally, it was an unconscious act, a smooth release, but now the wood around the blade seemed to clench.

  As though magic were holding it closed.

  “Ah, there it is,” Chicory said, stooping down to snap the plastic head into the jack. He turned, a pair of fingers hooked under the phone’s switch hook, and was in the act of extending the handset when he stopped and pulled it back. “Why, Everson, you’re as pale as a ghost. Something the matter?”

  “No,” I replied, thinking about what James had said about bluffs and double bluffs. I watched Chicory for a tell. A subtle force wriggled through my mind, and Chicory glanced past me to his lab table.

  And there it is, I thought numbly.

  “Damned Whisperer magic,” he said, setting the phone on the chair and bustling past me. “What’s it making you see now?” He arrived at the stack of articles and began searching through them.

  The odds had finally shifted decisively, away from Marlow as the culprit and toward Lich. If the magic around the house was clearing my mind, I shouldn’t have been able to see the program. Not in a way that implicated Chicory and not in that much detail.

  Praise for The Death Mage…

  There was no time for second-guessing. I would only talk myself back into a fifty-fifty stalemate—or Chicory would do it for me.

  I rushed forward.

  With my cane locked, I wasn’t sure I would be able to cast through it. Rather than risk it, I raised the cane overhead and, using all of my strength, brought it down on the back of Chicory’s head.

  20

  The blow landed at the base of Chicory’s skull with a dull thud, and he collapsed to the floor.

  “Darling! Have you gone fucking mad?”

  I spun to where Tabitha was entering the room, her eyes large with alarm. I stared back down at my mentor, terrified now that I’d been wrong and had killed or severely injured him. I backed from him, the cane limp in my suddenly-cold hands.

  Blood spread through the back of Chicory’s moppy gray hair in a bloom so dark it was nearly black. I imagined Marlow watching through Tabitha’s eyes and congratulating the Front on their successful manipulation of me.

  My gaze jerked to the opera announcement, still on the table, the cover featuring the robed figure in the gold mask. An illusion? But something was releasing in my mind, as though a hand that had been balling up the vessels was letting go. Familiar colors swirled around my vision. I’d last seen them in the Refuge, after I’d watched Chicory fall. They dissipated quickly this time, and I looked around until I spotted my dropped packing list. It was a flight itinerary again. I snatched it up and held it toward Tabitha.

  “Can you read this? Tell me what it says.”

  But Tabitha was backing away, refusing to look.

  I dropped the itinerary and lifted my shirt. The ugly blue-green lash across my stomach was back. “Or how about that? Can you see it?”

  “Um, darling,” she said, nodding past me.

  I turned and almost lost my balance. Chicory was pushing himself up from the floor, but he wasn’t Chicory anymore. He was changing, shifting. A red layered robe replaced his professorial attire while his mop of gray hair shed to reveal a bald, vein-mapped head. When he turned toward me, his eyes glowed the same yellow I’d glimpsed on the night Chicory had appeared in my apartment following Lady Bastet’s murder. Violent power warped the air around him.

  “No more artifice,” he said, his voice deep and strange.

  I was vaguely aware of things fluttering down around me. One landed next to my foot. I glanced down. It was a message from James Wesson, updating the Order on our situation. Other messages were spewing from the column of fire still hidden behind the table, landing around the room. I spotted the one I’d sent from the Refuge. No Order meant all of the messages had gone to the only Elder still alive. Murderer of his siblings. Pawn of Dhuul.

  There was no longer any doubt.

  “Lich,” I said.

  “I know what I penned in the archives,” he said, “but I did not create the fissure to the Whisperer—I merely found it. Dhuul’s coming is inevitable. That is what my brothers and sisters refused to accept. They wanted to expend all of our power and resources to stall Dhuul’s arrival—for that is all we could have done, stalled it—while I proposed we align our purposes to the being’s and become true immortals.”

  “At the expense of the world and every living thing in it,” I said thinly.

  As Lich’s transformation finished, he loomed on the far side of the room, his wasted head nearly touching the ceiling. The gray skin around his starved mouth was so tight and sunken that I could see the outlines of his teeth. His lips peeled back into a gruesome simile of a grin. “The world and every living thing would have been pulled into chaos anyway.”

  “Is that why you’ve been sacrificing magic-users?” I asked, remembering Lazlo’s fungus-riddled corpse.

  “I am not sacrificing them, Everson,” he replied, his teeth continuing to show. “I am taking them with me. When I attain immortality, so too will they.” He stepped toward me. “So too will you.”

  I turned and lunged for the doorway but collided into an energy field. A mind-numbing charge ripped through me, dropping me to the floor. I looked around for Tabitha, but she had already fled.

  “I have little more use for you,” he said. “Your soul is too green to harvest. Ending you would be the most prudent action, but you did destroy the Elder book, and for that you’ve earned a place among the immortals. It’s what you’ve longed for.”

  I had been fascinated by the idea of the Elders, of one day attaining that state, but not like this.

  “You’d only be fighting the inevitable,” Lich reminded me.

  “Inevitable, my ass. You murdered the Elders because you knew they had the power to close the fissure and keep Dhuul from our world. Or maybe I should say Dhuul had you murder the Elders.”

  Lich’s brow bunched together and his yellow eyes flared. He raised a hand of long fingers and stretched them toward me. I felt my mind begin to twist and bend.

  “Vigore!” I shouted, thrusting my cane toward him.

  But instead of a force blast, a torrent of nightmare bats spewed from the end of my cane. I covered my head as they flapped around the room on membranous wings the color of human flesh.

  Beyond them, Lich said, “You are in my world now.”

  I peeked beneath a forearm, and discovered that I was no longer in Chicory’s room, but standing at the edge of a monstrous hole that plunged into the earth. The bats I’d unleashed flapped around its opening, poisonous vapors drifting up from the roaring black depth. I peered over the precipice. A matrix of bile-green energy held the hole open. I understood these were the souls of those Lich had murdered and claimed over the centuries. I sensed they were still living, still conscious. I hurt, Lazlo’s voice rasped in my mind.

  My head pounded with the knowledge he was in that foul-smelling pit.

  Around the pit’s inside was a staircase that spiraled down. Creatures like the ones I’d encountered in Romania, all tentacles and shaggy bodies, trundled up and down in a nightma
re procession. But most disturbing to me was the hole itself, a growing portal to Dhuul.

  I could hear the being’s wet, horrid whispers now, issuing from the depths. The sound pulled and dug at my mind from all sides, like something chewing on rotten meat. Hands clamping my temples, I backed away, squishing through the toadstools that swelled and stretched toward a forest like the one I’d seen in my nightmares. Across the pit stood a forbidding stone fortress, from where I guessed Lich oversaw his excavation project.

  “Are you ready for immortality?” he asked.

  The mage was looming over me, an astral projection—like myself, I realized. Our bodies were still in the safe house. Lich’s long-fingered hand writhed toward my head like tentacles. He began to chant, his voice aligning with the whispers climbing from the pit until they were one.

  I struggled to wrench myself away, but a force pierced my soul like the hooks in the mouths of the shadow creatures I’d faced in Lazlo’s cellar. Only these hurt worse. Much worse. I squirmed, teeth gnashing, half insane from the pain. The hooks began to jerk and pull. I tried to draw back, but they had my soul. I could feel them drawing it out of me.

  “Are you ready to become a god?” he pressed.

  “No…” The word squeezed from my throat, a strangled cry.

  The tugging stopped. I squinted my eyes open to find that Lich was no longer chanting. His head was tilted to one side as though listening. In the next instant, the world seemed to rip open. Wind roared around me as a pair of silver bolts slammed into Lich’s head.

  The hooks released my soul, and I crashed back into Chicory’s bedroom, back into my body. More wind cycloned around as I pushed myself into a sitting position. An entire side of the house had torn away, as if by a storm. The neighbor’s bug lights glowed yellow in the dark. Beside the toppled lab table, Lich was on his knees, clasping his smoking head.

  “C’mon!” someone shouted.

  James was standing in the yard, energy crackling from his wand, waving for me to follow him out. You’ll have no defenses against his magic out there, Connell had said. I found my cane and staggered to my feet. The staff still refused to release the sword, but the shield Lich had erected over the doorway had fallen.