Death Mage (Prof Croft Book 4) Read online

  “Still can’t believe Chicory is having me do this,” I muttered.

  As I climbed onto the chair, a series of bubbles glugged from the pool behind me. I looked back, causing the chair to teeter. Nothing there. Swearing, I retrained my focus on the glass box.

  A simple plunger lock with a lever arm held the box closed. Yeah, definitely alarmed. I swelled out my wizard’s aura again. Behind the backing against which the robe was mounted, something popped and sent up a drift of smoke. I just had to hope it was the final piece of security. I had already worked out an escape plan for if things went sideways. And if sideways veered south, Vega was monitoring a police scanner, ready to intervene.

  But Chicory was right. If I was to have a chance against Marlow, I needed the robe.

  Aiming the wand at the plunger lock, I whispered a force invocation. With a scrape, the lever slid out and the door opened. A hay-like odor of old fabric seeped out.

  Easy enough.

  I listened to ensure no one was coming before pulling out a series of slender pins that mounted the robe to the backing. How long would it take for someone to notice the camera was out of commission and come to investigate? I didn’t know, nor did I intend to find out.

  A minute later I slung the robe over a shoulder and began pinning up the ringer. It was my bathrobe, actually. Chicory had cast a powerful veiling spell over it to mimic the robe of John the Baptist, down to the frayed threads. As long as no one touched it, the ringer would pass muster.

  I was leaning back to examine my work, when something tapped my right shoulder. I jerked my head around, but there was no one there. Another tap, this one on my left shoulder. Then on the crown of my head. When I touched the spot, my fingers came away moist.

  What the…?

  Droplets pattered the floor around me. I craned my neck back and nearly shouted in alarm. Wavering above me was a giant snake’s head, saliva dripping from its jaw. No, not saliva—baptism water. The entire creature was composed of it, its slender neck ending at the pool from which it had quietly risen.

  A water elemental? I thought dumbly. In a church?

  I dropped from the chair. With a sputtering hiss, the elemental drew back its head to strike.

  I aimed the wand at it and whispered, “Vigore!”

  The creature curled deftly around the brunt of the blast and dove down. Seizing the chair, I heaved it up like a shield. The impact of the elemental’s head cracked the chair’s wooden seat and knocked me to the ground. Water sprayed everywhere.

  I scrambled to my feet, slipping and sliding toward the pool’s other side. The elemental curled around and headed me off. It undulated from side to side in a menacing dance.

  With my wand poised at ear level, I held out the fractured chair like a lion tamer and backed from the elemental. The moisture on the floor was already compromising my magic. If the elemental got a hold of me and dragged me into the pool, I was a dead man.

  Even so, the analytical part of my mind was still trying to determine what it was doing here. Elementals made excellent guards, sure, and this one was taking its duties as seriously as cancer, but they also required powerful magic to manifest. I highly doubted the church kept a wizard on staff, given the institution’s suspicious stance toward the arcane.

  The elemental started into another sputtering hiss.

  “Vigore!” I whispered harshly, this time directing the force at the pool.

  The water erupted in a large spout, pulling the elemental with it. When the water collided into the ornate dome high above, the snake burst apart and rained down in a sudden cloudburst. I hoisted the chair overhead like an umbrella, sparing myself a drenching.

  An elemental separated from its source was a doomed elemental, and this one was no exception—regardless of how it had come to be. I splashed through the water and retrieved the robe of John the Baptist from the floor. I then climbed onto the broken chair and closed the glass box. Channeling a force strong enough to swing the lever arm closed took more time, thanks to the moisture, but within moments, it was done. Exhaling, I stepped off the chair.

  Wasn’t pretty, I thought, but mission accomplished.

  My gaze dropped to my feet. In the second it took me to realize the floor was no longer soaked, the elemental coiled around my upper body, crushing my arms to my sides and the air from my lungs. Magic had reconstituted the damned thing. The elemental made two more swift passes around me and jerked me into the air, its face hissing inches from mine.

  “Respingere!” I grunted, not caring who heard me now.

  Energy sputtered through my mental prism but expired before it could manifest from the wand I held in a death grip.

  Shit.

  The elemental upended me. I kicked my legs as the room swooped. In the next moment, I was being plunged headfirst into the pool. I tried to twist and break free, but the elemental held me fast, the top of my head grinding against stone.

  Think, think, think!

  If the elemental hadn’t come from the church, what did that leave? The robe of John the Baptist possessed magical properties, but the origin story—a monk and a vow of silence—didn’t jibe with a guardian creature. Not as Chicory had told it, anyway, though my mentor’s disorganized nature hardly inspired confidence. I remembered looking skeptically at the wand he’d given me that morning, despite his insistence that he’d wiped it of any lingering magic. “As much of it as I could, anyway,” he’d added before tossing it to me. Hadn’t he said it once belonged to a seafaring wizard? A light went off in my head.

  Oh, I don’t frigging believe this.

  I tightened my right fist to make sure the wand was still in my grip. I then worked my left hand over and grasped the casting end. As black spots began to crowd the edges of my vision, I bowed the wand away from my body. I grunted with the effort, forearms trembling—

  Snap!

  My inverted body dropped, and I fell from the pool. I landed on the floor of the baptistery on my back with a hard splash. I remained there for several moments, gasping and stunned. The culprit came to a rest in two pieces beside my head: the damned wand. Its nearness to water and a magical item, in this case the robe, had triggered the wand to call up a guardian elemental, something the seafaring wizard had no doubt trained it to do.

  “Wiped it of any lingering magic, my ass,” I muttered, pushing myself to my feet.

  Chicory was going to get an earful when I got back. Right now, though, footsteps were approaching from the nave. I retrieved the pieces of wand, jammed them into my back pocket, and lifted the dripping robe. A light swam around the entranceway. A moment later, the guard appeared, his flashlight performing a sweep across the room.

  I stiffened, having just pulled the robe on, hoping to hell it was as good as advertised.

  I watched the guard unclasp the holster holding his firearm. He lifted his walkie-talkie to his mouth. “I need everyone down here,” he said. “Something’s going on in the baptistery.”

  Well, wonderful.

  But when the guard’s light reached me, it kept moving, hesitating on the pool before flashing back to the toppled chair. “The lock on the gate’s busted,” he went on, “and there’s a chair in here.”

  “Security cam’s out, too,” a voice squawked back. “Exhibit still there?”

  The guard’s light illuminated the ringer. “Still here,” he confirmed.

  “All right, we’re calling the NYPD. Let them handle it.”

  “Fine by me,” the guard said.

  He gave the baptistery a final pass with his flashlight, the beam hitting me once more, before leaving. I followed him to the front of the church. The guard hadn’t the faintest idea I was on his heels. When he opened the door ten minutes later to let the police in—Officers Dempsey and Dipinski, it turned out—I slipped out behind them and pattered down the cathedral steps to the street.

  I waited until I was a few blocks from the cathedral before I removed the robe and stuffed it into the back of my pants under my shirt.
The heist had been a success, but my confidence was in the crapper. A mission that should have been a cinch had nearly gotten me killed.

  With a wave and sharp whistle, I flagged down a cab.

  Time to give Chicory that earful.

  5

  “How did it go?” Chicory called as I slammed the front door behind me.

  Around the corner from the entranceway, I found my mentor in the living room in a plush chair, stocking feet poking out from beneath Tabitha’s bulk. He was stroking my cat’s purring head while taking contented puffs from his pipe. An orange-tinted liqueur sat in a snifter on the end table. The thought that he had been relaxing while I was being dunked in a baptistery pool by a water serpent raised my hackles even more.

  “How did it go?” I asked. “Other than nearly drowning?”

  “Drowning?” Chicory’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about?”

  I pulled the wand from my pocket and tossed the two pieces onto the coffee table. “This thing that you assured me was ready for use had enough frigging magic in it to call up a water elemental.”

  He frowned down at the broken instrument. “But you retrieved the robe?”

  Sighing, I pulled it from the back of my pants and dropped it beside the wand pieces.

  His face brightened. “Well, there you go! All’s well that ends well, as I like to say.”

  “No, Chicory, you’re not hearing me. You gave me a magical item that nearly killed me.”

  “And you said you wanted a test.”

  I glared at him. “Are you telling me you did that intentionally?”

  He took another puff from his pipe, seeming to consider the question. “Well, no, actually,” he said after a moment. “I must have missed some enchantment or other—but that’s beside the point. The point is that I can’t prepare you for every eventuality. If you’re to have any chance, you’ll need to improvise on the fly. Tonight was good practice. You encountered an unexpected challenge and you overcame it. Well done. Though I do wish you wouldn’t have snapped it in half. Wands of that caliber are incredibly hard to come by.”

  “Look,” I said, deciding to let the wand comment go, “it’s one thing for the unexpected to come from your opponent, but it’s a hell of another for it to come from your own corner man.”

  “I’m not following, I’m afraid.”

  I pressed my lips together. “Any day now I’m going to be sent to the Refuge. Up until tonight I was afraid that I wouldn’t be prepared, that it would be a one-way trip. But now I’m terrified the preparations are going to kill me before the Death Mage ever gets a crack. I mean, you send me off with a cursed wand, my staff and sword are in pieces, and the blood you’re distilling … I’m seriously starting to wonder if I should let you inject me with it.”

  Chicory chuckled.

  “What the hell’s so funny?”

  He set his pipe down beside the snifter, lifted Tabitha with both hands, resettled her on the ottoman, and stood and waved for me to follow.

  “Where are we going?” I asked in annoyance.

  “Just come along.”

  Muttering, I followed him to a door beneath the staircase to the attic. For the past week, I’d assumed it led onto a closet, but when Chicory opened it, I could see the top of a wooden staircase descending into darkness. The thought of going underground stretched the skin over my chest like a drum and thinned my breaths.

  “I’m not going down there.”

  “Believe me,” he said, “you’ll want to.”

  Chicory waved his wand, manifesting a bobbing orb of white light. Chicory gave the wand another flick, and the orb began to descend the stairwell, illuminating the way. Chicory followed it down. I fell in behind him despite my anger, his words just vague enough to entice me.

  After a steep descent of several sharp turns, the stairwell deposited us onto the dirt floor of a basement. Chicory flicked the wand again, and the orb rose to a set of rafters fifteen feet above us, suffusing the entire basement with light. The space was surprisingly large and must have extended beyond the house to the borders of the property.

  “I believe that belongs to you,” Chicory said.

  I looked at where he nodded. About twenty feet ahead of us lay Grandpa’s cane.

  “It’s in one piece,” I observed.

  “Aye.”

  But does it still work? I thought dubiously.

  I arrived at the cane, almost afraid to touch it. I lifted it from the ground and tested the white opal with a finger. It was re-embedded in the wood, as secure as ever. Runes lined the staff. Not the chicken scratch I’d seen that morning, but ornate letters, each one seeming to hum with power. I drew a breath and pulled the sword from the staff. The blade released easily. I made a few thrusts and cuts, half expecting the blade to feel loose or clunky—or even fall off—but it was as light and sturdy as I remembered, and even seemed to zing.

  “I’ll be damned,” I muttered. “You actually fixed it.”

  And hadn’t he said something about an enhancement?

  “En garde!” Chicory shouted.

  I wheeled just as a fireball ripped from his wand and sped toward my head. With no time to invoke a shield, I threw the staff up into its path. As the fireball collided into it, I squinted my eyes closed to the flames that would inevitably break past it and burn my face. But the fireball just … stopped. It was as though the staff had sucked it right out of the air.

  I was bringing the staff around to examine it when two more fireballs flew from Chicory’s wand. More confident now, I slashed the staff high and low, batting them out of existence.

  When I saw Chicory preparing to cast again, I ran at him. “Protezione,” I called.

  Light swelled from the staff’s opal. Enhanced by the runes, the light crackled into a formidable shield around me. A succession of fireballs broke against it, each one vanishing into harmless wisps of smoke. When I was mere feet from Chicory, he unleashed a firestorm.

  I waited patiently for the flames gushing around me to expire, then touched the tip of my blade to his paunch.

  “Got you,” I said.

  Chicory cocked a bushy eyebrow. “Oh?”

  A low moan sounded behind me. I wheeled to find a pair of earth elementals pushing themselves up from the ground using fists the size of wrecking balls. Powerful magic wavered around them.

  “Oh, c’mon,” I complained.

  “No shields this time,” Chicory said, snatching my staff away.

  “Wha—?” When I turned to reclaim the staff, Chicory was already gone.

  Oh, no he didn’t.

  But he had, and I was on my own. The ground shook as the elementals, fully formed, plodded toward me.

  “Vigore!” I shouted, aiming my sword at the nearer one.

  The force that erupted from the blade broke around the elemental’s protection, barely slowing it. Its partner came around my other side, blocking the stairwell as an escape route. I backed away, sword held out. I considered invoking a stronger force blast, but it would only deplete my power. I feinted right and attempted to dart left, but they herded me into a corner. Next, I tried to split them, but the closer elemental planted a leg in front of me. The other one raised a giant fist.

  “Chicory?” I called shakily. “A little help?”

  This was part of my training, I got it. But without my staff, and these guys encased in powerful defensive magic, I couldn’t do a blasted thing. I expected Chicory to suspend the session, show me what I’d done wrong, and then run it again so I could apply what he’d taught me.

  Instead, the elemental’s arm descended like a falling tree.

  “Whoa!” I shouted, raising my sword in an attempt to parry the heavy blow.

  I felt almost nothing as the blade cleaved the elemental’s arm in two. The magic holding the creature together dispersed with a shudder, its decaying fist raining chunks of earth over me. The rest of its body collapsed into a mound. The other elemental looked at its fallen partner and backed away. />
  “Not so big and moany now, are you?” I said, advancing on it.

  When the elemental turned to run, I launched the sword like a javelin. The blade pierced the center of its back. The elemental fell forward and, under its own momentum, scattered across the floor.

  “Booya!” I shouted.

  I looked around to make sure Chicory wasn’t throwing anything else at me before kneeling to unearth the sword. When I stood again, my mentor was in front of me, handing me back my staff.

  “Do you still doubt me?” he asked.

  I held the sword and staff out at arm’s length and examined them. “What in the hell did you do to these?”

  “To the staff, I added an absorption charm. Like a sponge, it will soak up any offensive magic that hits it.”

  “Any magic?” I asked, examining the runes more closely now.

  “Well, up to a point. But it’s a powerful charm. Those weren’t first-level fire balls I was slinging at you. Even better, the magic it absorbs will bolster the staff’s defensive capabilities.”

  I remembered the strength of my shield and nodded. “What about the sword?”

  “That was easier, actually.” His eyes shifted with mine to the blade. “Your grandfather had imbued it with an enchantment that can cleave through magic. You’d just yet to channel enough of your energy through it to access it. The enchantment is very powerful, and it works just as well on magical defenses as on magical beings. Again, to a point.”

  I moved the sword and staff through the air, my anger at Chicory almost forgotten as I considered their enhanced power. Throw in the robe of John the Baptist, and I was beginning to feel like I had a chance.

  “So if I get close enough to Marlow to strike…” I started.

  “The blade could destroy him, yes,” Chicory said. “But we’d rather you use it to destroy Lich’s book.”

  I slotted the blade back into the staff. “Why?”