Death Mage (Prof Croft Book 4) Read online

  I thought about Arnaud’s claim that Grandpa had stolen and stashed magical artifacts during the war. Connell’s version of events seemed to fit that, but suspecting Whisperer magic, I pushed the thought away.

  “His daughter eventually took over that role. Your mother.”

  “I don’t want to hear anymore,” I said, standing. His account was filling in too many gaps, and doing it too neatly. I could feel my mind beginning to bend to the logic, the magic.

  “Are you sure?” Connell asked.

  Two automatons entered the room, carrying the clothes I’d arrived in as well as towels and a basin of clean water. They set everything on the foot of my bed and departed silently.

  “Tell me this,” I said in challenge. “Since you know so much, how did I end up here?”

  I stepped into my boxers and tossed away the gown.

  “To answer that, I have to go back to your beginnings. You were born here, beyond Lich’s and Dhuul’s sight. Lich killed your mother without knowing who she was; your grandfather had seen to it that she never joined the Order. You were placed in your grandparents’ care, and through veiling spells, they ensured Lich remained ignorant of your existence.”

  I pulled on my shirt. “I thought you said he was a god.”

  “A demigod,” Connell corrected me. “And a distractible one, thankfully. Obsession with power does that to a mage. When you turned thirteen, you entered your grandfather’s locked study.”

  I turned and looked at him. How did he know that?

  “Asmus told us,” he said, reading my expression. “And it concerned him greatly.”

  I remembered how Grandpa had pulled me from the closet that night and sliced my finger with the cane sword. I remembered the grave look that had come over his face when I told him how I’d entered, by uttering a Word of Power.

  “In order to keep you from Lich’s sight,” Connell continued, “your grandfather suppressed your power with plans to train you in adulthood. That never happened, of course. When he died, there was nothing to hold back your power. It awakened and began to manifest once more. And it manifested of all places in Romania, in the domain of a Third Order magic-user.”

  Lazlo, I thought.

  “He would have communicated with what he thought was the Order. From there, Lich would have probed your magic and determined who you were—not just the grandson of the late Asmus Croft, but the son of Eve and Marlow. It became his plan to turn you against Marlow, since you would have access to him. But he had to wait until you were powerful enough. The vampire Arnaud sped up that plan by telling you about his encounter with your grandfather regarding your mother.”

  They killed her, he’d claimed Grandpa had said. Had Grandpa been talking about Lich and Dhuul? No, I thought firmly. He meant the members of the Front. Stop listening to this man.

  I sat to tie my shoes.

  “You began looking into your mother’s death, sending inquiries to the Order. Lich became concerned when you attempted to contact a gatekeeper. He would have followed you to the mystic, Lady Bastet, and then killed her to keep you from discovering a truth he couldn’t manipulate. He then arranged the scene in a way that would compel you to investigate, to believe Marlow was responsible. By taking the vial of blood you’d given the mystic, Lich indebted you to the Order.” Connell air-quoted the word with his fingers. “He set you up for a punishment that would mean being sent here. Are you beginning to understand how the regime of warnings and threats work? The residue he left on the cats—”

  “Led me to Marlow,” I cut in defiantly.

  “—led you to wherever Lich wanted you to go,” he finished. “It was Lich who spoke through your cat, pretending to be Marlow. Only when you arrived here did he have the spell actually lead you to Marlow.”

  How in the hell did Connell know so many details? Had he drawn them from me during the five days I’d been out? Was he in my head now?

  “We know these things because of your demon,” he said.

  “Thelonious?” I blurted out.

  “No, he’s not with you enough. I was referring to your cat.”

  I shook my head. “There’s no way Tabitha is working for you.”

  “Of course not,” Connell said with a chuckle, as though he knew her as well as I did. “Not willingly, anyway. Tabitha inhabits a cat’s body, but she also resides in a shallow demonic plane. A plane we’ve been able to tap into. Most of what she sees and hears in your presence, we can access and decipher.”

  “Then how come you didn’t know I was coming?” I challenged.

  “The energy around the safe house had a scrambling effect. We could no longer interpret what we were picking up on Tabitha’s plane. We didn’t know you were being sent so soon.”

  I found another hole in Connell’s account. “If I was so important to Lich’s plan, why has he allowed me to take on such dangerous work?”

  “Did he allow it?” Connell asked. “Consider the times you were ordered to stand down or that someone intervened directly on your behalf.”

  I thought about Chicory showing up to save me from the druids in Central Park. It was the same night he’d ordered me off the demon cases.

  “The rest of the time,” Connell said, preempting my next challenge, “you were aided by Whisperer magic. Coming up with a solution, often a life saving one, at just the right moment.”

  “That’s called a luck quotient. All wizard’s have it.”

  “Is that what you were told?” Connell asked, the genuineness in his tone rankling me.

  I rounded on him. “You’re telling me there’s no Order and that’s why no one’s come. That’s the argument you’re going with, right? Fine. I can use it too. There’s no Lich. Want to know how I know? Because I destroyed your book, and look…” I peered over both shoulders. “…no Lich.”

  I crossed my arms smugly. Checkmate.

  “He already came,” Connell said calmly.

  “When I was out?”

  “No, before.”

  “Before?”

  “Everson,” he said, looking at me gravely, “Chicory is Lich. It’s one of his guises.”

  I uncrossed my arms, unsure now what to do with them. For a disorienting moment I was sitting beside Chicory in his car after the druid encounter. The Order can seem like an abstraction sometimes, he was saying, but when it comes to their mandates, they’re rather black and white. Trust me. I’ve had to take care of two wayward wizards this month already.

  I remembered how dark and mercenary my mentor’s eyes had looked.

  “Forget it,” I said, shaking off the memory. “You’re never going to convince me of that.”

  “My job isn’t to convince you,” Connell said. “It’s to give you enough information so you can investigate the claims for yourself. You need to decide whether what I’m telling you is true.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “You saw what he wanted you to see.”

  I was barely aware of my fingers massaging the spot where Chicory had mashed his thumb. I felt a ghost of the pressure that had manifested behind my eyes and deep in my ears.

  “If this crap you’re telling me is true, why the hard sell?” I asked. “You killed him.”

  “Destroyed his form,” he corrected me. “And only because he’d activated the powerful enchantment inside your blade. No, the being that is Lich can only be killed by destroying the glass pendant in which he stores his claimed souls. Naturally, he keeps the pendant hidden. His new body is forming beside it as we speak, coalescing from the magic within. He will be back soon.”

  An involuntary shudder passed through me. “Are you done?” I asked quietly.

  “For now, yes.”

  11

  I followed Connell and Arianna down the steep steps of the palace to where the rocky hill flattened to the plain. Arianna had returned everything to me, including my sword and staff, claiming to have purified them of Whisperer magic. I carried both in my hands and kept a charge of energy around my pris
m. Neither of my escorts seemed to mind, which bothered me.

  When we arrived on the plain, Connell whistled and one of the mastiffs hustled over, tongue lolling. I looked the dog over carefully as it sniffed me and then trotted beside us, escorting us toward the forest. It wasn’t acting like a warg, but that could be illusory too, I reminded myself.

  “To avoid additional holes in our realm,” Connell said, “we’re sending you back the way you came through.”

  Or are you taking me into the forest to sacrifice me? I thought.

  But they’d already had plenty of opportunities, and that bothered me, too.

  Soon, the trees took us in. Not the dark, fungus-riddled trees I’d arrived through, but a healthy growth of what looked like oak and spruce. After several more minutes we arrived at a small clearing.

  “Here,” Connell said, stopping.

  As I arrived at the center of the clearing, he and Arianna stepped back.

  “Do you have any more questions?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m sure you’ve been wondering about your father,” Arianna said. “He visited your bedside while you slept. He is anxious to meet you and for you to meet him, but only when that is what you desire.”

  I had been wondering about him, of course, but I didn’t let it show on my face. The man had killed my mother. I’d seen it, experienced it. The horror stuck like barbs around my heart. Even so, Connell had done his job. He’d managed to plant enough doubt in my head that I had no choice but to investigate his claims. Try to figure out what in the hell was going on.

  “Are we going to get this party on, or what?” I asked impatiently.

  “There is one more thing,” Connell said. “Once Lich reconstitutes himself, he’s going to come after you. Whether to seduce you anew or end you, I can’t say. He got what he wanted by sending you here. The Elder book contained powerful magic to keep Dhuul from the world. Its destruction did not weaken our stronghold here so much as increase Dhuul’s, and thus Lich’s, power. Knowing you have spent time with us, Lich will see you as a threat.”

  “You have four days,” Arianna said, “no more.”

  “And then, let me guess, I have to come back here, right?”

  “If you want to live,” Connell said bluntly. “You’ll have no defenses against his magic out there.”

  “Why do you care?”

  He looked at me for a moment. “Because you’re one of us.”

  “So are all magic-users, if what you’re saying is true. Why aren’t you helping them?”

  “We have no way to reach them,” he said. “When Lich discovered us, he sealed us in. Though your arrival came with a cost, it also presents a new opportunity. We can’t come and go, but you can.”

  Is that why they kept me alive? To use me as an agent against the Order?

  “Just be open to whatever you find out there,” Arianna said. “When you’re ready, return to the portal on your side and we’ll help transport you back here. Just remember. Four days.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” I muttered.

  She presented a small glass vial with a clear liquid inside. “Take this,” she said. “The same magic that purged you is concentrated within. Should you find yourself beset, use it.”

  Sure, lady, I thought, but accepted it.

  “Are you ready?” Connell asked me.

  I gave a nod, and he and Arianna began an incantation. The mastiff, who had been sniffing around, dropped onto his haunches between them and gave a single, friendly bark.

  A moment later, I was staring at complete blackness.

  “Illuminare,” I called in a panic.

  The opal in my staff flickered and then cast an orb of white light. A dirt floor and empty space stretched out around me. Shadows shifted in the rafters overhead. I was back in the basement, standing in the casting circle Chicory had drawn days before. The Front had actually released me.

  I stepped from the circle and found the staircase at the far end of the basement. Mounds of earth, where my mentor had manifested elementals during my training, stood on either side of me. I looked back, half expecting to see Chicory, but a hollowness in my gut told me I was alone. I ascended the stairs quickly, emerging through the door beneath the staircase to the attic.

  “Hello?” I called. “Chicory? Tabitha?”

  The inside of the house creaked and clicked in the stifling heat of high noon. I made a tour of all the rooms, starting in the kitchen. Everything appeared as I’d left it, down to the dirty plates Chicory had deposited around the house, only now black flies picked over them. With Chicory’s death, the protective energies that once shielded the house were gone.

  “Tabitha,” I called again.

  “In here…”

  The weak voice had come from under the sink. When I opened the cabinet doors, a pair of green eyes squinted at me from behind pipes whose rusty joints glistened with moisture.

  “Tabitha? What are you doing in there?” I reached a hand inside and, curling it beneath her stomach, hefted her out. She had lost a few pounds. I set her on the kitchen table and examined her.

  “I thought you left me,” she said in her hurt voice. She plopped onto her side as though her legs were too weak to support her.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”

  “I couldn’t get into the fridge and had to live off the spoiled crud Chicory left out. And then the water stopped running. After lapping up everything in the toilet, the only place I could find any water was on those disgusting pipes.” She grimaced and smacked her mouth as though trying to rid it of the taste. “Where were you?”

  I sat in a chair facing her. “Things didn’t go exactly as planned.”

  She raised her head enough to look over a shoulder. “And Chicory?”

  Chicory is Lich, I heard Connell telling me. “The night he went through the portal, did he say anything?” I asked.

  “Oh, not now, darling. I’m starving and wretched.”

  “Please, just answer the question.”

  “He said he’d be back. Typical man.”

  “This is serious, Tabitha. I need you to think back. What were his exact words?”

  “What do I look like, a stenographer?” My eyes must have looked as frighteningly intense as they felt because her own eyes cut to one side as though searching her memory. “He said you were in trouble and that he was going in to help. That he would come back with you soon.”

  “Anything else?”

  “What happened down there, darling?”

  “You and Chicory are close,” I pressed. “Did anything about him ever strike you as, I don’t know, funny?”

  “Besides his green shoes?”

  “No, anything he said? Anything he did?”

  “Well, his sudden interest in you struck me as odd. I tried to tell him you were hopeless.”

  I thought about that. Aside from the brief visits here and there, usually to issue a warning, Chicory was absent for months, sometimes years. And all of a sudden he’s committed to training me? That did seem odd.

  And it had all begun the day I’d brought my mother’s hair to Lady Bastet to divine from. In fact, it was only hours after the mystic’s murder that I’d come home to find Chicory sitting in my apartment. All consistent with what Connell had told me. Chicory claimed to have been sent by the Order with information about my mother, but he’d damned sure been interested in the gatekeeper I’d summoned to learn about my mother’s death.

  And what did the gatekeeper say? he’d wanted to know.

  But that wasn’t evidence of anything. If the Order had sent Chicory, the timing could have been incidental. And he would have been interested in any summoning, given that it was forbidden.

  I looked back at Tabitha. Through her, the Front had access to my words, my actions.

  “Here,” I said, getting up quickly and opening the fridge. I pulled out a bottle of milk and some leftover food, fixed a meal for Tabitha, and set the plates and bowl on the floor. She hop
ped down from the table, wasting no time plunging her face into the fat and protein she’d been unable to get to.

  While she ate, I returned to the bedroom Chicory had been using as a laboratory. On one side, a table held different-sized beakers with dirty distillation tubes running between them. A disorganization of spell implements and spiral-bound notebooks lay in scattered piles. Inside the notebooks, I found scribblings on various spells, all of them benign as far as I could tell. Nothing to suggest Chicory was anything other than who he’d appeared to be.

  I didn’t sense any active magic either, but I spoke a reveal invocation anyway. Nothing new appeared. I glanced over a pile of newspaper clippings on the table, the topmost one about the robe of John the Baptist being on exhibit at Grace Cathedral. Chicory had once remarked that, in addition to his mentoring duties, he kept track of magical artifacts. The clippings two and three down, on similar exhibits around the country, seemed to confirm that.

  I moved a chair—over the back of which he had draped a row of wool stockings—and picked up a pair of manila folders that must have slid off the seat and landed under the table.

  On one of the folder’s tabs, I read my name.

  Heart thumping, I retrieved the files and opened mine. Was this where I would discover the truth? Inside was a thin stack of pages secured by a pair of metal brads. I read through the pages, which contained notes on Chicory’s handful of visits, including the warnings he’d issued. A line at the bottom of his final entry read, “Shows significant promise but requires more guidance to get there.”