Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9)

I gathered ambient energy and funneled it toward my mental prism. A shrinking enclosure would do the trick, I decided. Nothing fancy.
“Entrapolarle.”
The invocation vibrated down my cane, flashed from the opal end, and manifested as a glimmering sphere around the motion. Newspapers, empty packaging, and yard waste kicked inside the sphere, but I was already upping the power, closing the hardened air around the creature like a fist. In a moment or two, the pressure would pop the thing out of existence and I could go take a shower.
“Hey, Everson?” Bree-yark said.
I recognized the warning in his voice. The debris around us was shifting, and not from the wind.
“What the—?” I managed before the entire hill shot upward, lifting me from my feet.
My sphere burst into sparks, and I landed in a backpedal. Bree-yark caught me, and we craned our necks back, struggling to comprehend what had happened. But as the hillock took shape, so did the situation. What I’d mistaken for a nether creature was, in fact, a piece of something much larger.
“That doesn’t look like a bug,” Bree-yark said.
Above us, the pile was morphing into a massive humanoid shape.
“It’s an animation,” I groaned.
“Made of garbage?”
“Apparently so.”
Another first, but where in the hell was the magic coming from?
I looked quickly around before refocusing on Stinky. The ends of its upper appendages had morphed into a pair of fists packed with discarded appliance parts and glinting with shards of broken glass.
Wonderful.
Moaning, the animation lurched toward us.
“Stay low,” I told Bree-yark, manifesting a shield.
Stinky’s descending fist landed against it, driving us a foot into the debris.
Half in anger, half in desperation, I shouted, “Respingere!”
Light and force pulsed from the shield, sending the animation back several paces and scattering loose bits of garbage from its body.
“What’s the plan for this thing?” Bree-yark asked, climbing from his depression.
I’d managed to keep my handkerchief to my face, and I replied through it now in a muffled voice. “Often it’s just a case of overwhelming the forces holding it together. Like so.”
I thrust my cane forward and summoned a force bolt. It released with a boom and blew a hole through Stinky’s middle. But the animation ignored the assault, garbage climbing up to fill the void again.
We were talking hefty magic.
“Got a plan B?” Bree-yark asked.
I stuffed my hanky into a pocket and drew my cane into sword and staff. As sunlight glinted along the blade’s nine runes, I considered activating the second one, for fire. But while the elemental flames could burn through animating magic, the question was when? I didn’t want to add fire to Stinky’s arsenal before he succumbed. I slotted the blade home and dug inside a coat pocket.
“Plan B is to find whatever’s animating this thing,” I said.
I drew out a premade potion, my charged words igniting tiny gems to activate the potion’s encumbering magic. As Stinky lumbered in for another strike, I hurled the open tube at him. It struck his chest in a burst of steam and spilled the potion down his front. Immediately, his motions turned sluggish.
“Think you can keep him occupied?” I asked.
“With pleasure,” Bree-yark replied, stalking past me, a drawn blade in each fist.
He evaded Stinky’s descending fist and scrambled between his legs. Using the blades like climbing spikes, he scaled the animation’s back. Stinky moaned and rotated in a lumbering circle, arms flailing in slower and slower motion.
“Keep it up,” I called to Bree-yark, who was hacking away now.
Freed from having to fend off the animation, I activated the hunting spell again. The wards hadn’t led me to a creature, I decided, but an object. Stinky was acting as some sort of guardian.
As my cane rattled back to life, I stumbled after its weak pull. After several feet, it aimed straight down at a flattened box of detergent. I kicked the box aside, revealing a section of metal. Swirling energy distorted its dull glow.
Bingo.
I cleared the debris from around it until I was looking at the metallic lid of a box the size of a book. It was dark gray with ornate glyphs running around the border. A light, faint and green, pulsed along the lid’s seam. I angled my head several ways, but I couldn’t make sense of the symbols. Protections for what was inside, most likely. Just as strange was the magic they exuded. Not evil, and definitely not infernal, but something about it disturbed me. Like it didn’t belong here.
I snapped a photo with my flip phone. Then, pulling out a vial of copper filings, I scattered them around the metal box.
“Any time!” Bree-yark shouted.
When I looked over, he was dangling from where Stinky had him by a leg, the animation’s other fist drawn back. Shit. With no time to finish the protective circle, I aimed my cane down at the object.
“Disfare!” I shouted.
The sudden release of magic blew me onto my back. Off to my left, Stinky exploded, sending Bree-yark somersaulting through the air. He landed nearby, but now the tonnage of garbage that had comprised the animation was raining over us. Stunned, and with no time to invoke a shield, I covered my head in my arms until the final pieces pelted down. Fortunately, I was spared anything heavy.
“You all right?” I called, peering between my elbows.
“Never better,” Bree-yark grumbled, shaking a small trash pile from his head.
I checked myself for any magical damage before crawling forward to where I’d last seen the small box. It was still there, the protective energy in the glyphs disorganized from the release. I hovered my cane over the box’s lid, tempted to crack it open for a peek, but not while it was still active.
Instead, I retrieved a bag of gray salt from a pocket and placed the box carefully inside. I eyed the strange symbols again before shifting the bag around, burying the box inside the neutralizing medium.
Though its magic was stifled, the box continued to generate uneasy thoughts. What did it hold? How had it ended up in a New