Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9)

York City landfill? Why had the wards misinterpreted its energy? And most importantly, who had been using it? I may not have recognized its magic, but I’d felt its potential.
“Found it?” Bree-yark asked, wiping off his arms as he arrived beside me.
“Yeah.” I placed the salt bag in a coat pocket, glanced over, and did a double take. “Whoa, hold still,” I said, reaching for his head.
“What?” he barked, leaning away.
I pulled a hypodermic needle from his temple and showed it to him.
“Oh.” He rubbed the spot.
Fortunately, goblins were immune to just about every disease known to man, including hepatitis. I tossed the needle aside and eyed our return route across the landfill. I’d lost my handkerchief, but I was more bothered by the item I’d found. Though it intrigued me, too many questions surrounded it.
Questions for a more experienced magic-user, I decided. Questions for the Order.

2
“Hold yer noses, everyone!” Bree-yark called as we entered my loft apartment.
Leaning my cane against the coat rack, I set a plastic shopping bag with my potions and spell implements beside it, hoping I hadn’t left something in a coat pocket. I’d swapped my clothes for a spare set I kept in my interplanar cubbyhole and dropped my trench coat off at the cleaners. Bree-yark was wearing the shirt he’d stripped off, and he’d ditched his shoes, but his jeans and my hair still reeked of landfill.
“Morning, Tabitha,” I said.
On the window-side divan, a pair of green eyes narrowed from a mound of orange hair.
“Hey, how’s my second favorite lady doing?” Bree-yark called cheerfully. The two had worked together on a case the year before that had taken us through Epic Con, and they’d actually gotten along.
“This is not the week to ask me that,” Tabitha replied testily.
She’d gotten used to me schlepping off to Brooklyn and having the loft mostly to herself. Now, not only was I back full time, but she was having to share what she’d come to consider her place with an additional two humans she could barely tolerate. She was about to say more, when our smell reached her. Her nose wrinkled savagely from her bared teeth, and she buried her head in her paws.
“Fucking hell,” she exclaimed.
“Language,” I reminded her. “We have an eight-year-old in the house.”
“And a baby on the way,” a woman’s voice added. “Morning, Bree-yark.”
Ricki Serrano Vega Croft appeared from the back bedroom, guiding a very squinty-eyed and bed-headed Tony out in front of her. She was wearing NYPD blues, the swollen belly above her tactical belt almost eight months along.
“Whoa,” she said, bringing the back of a hand to her nose. “Tabitha has a point.”
“And may I remind you that a feline’s nose is forty times more sensitive than a dullard human’s,” Tabitha said. It was the closest to agreement I’d heard between my wife and cat all week.
Tony, who was still in his Avengers pajamas, seemed not to notice our stink. He managed a sleepy “Morning, Dad, morning, Bree-yark” and climbed onto a chair at the dining room table, head propped in his hands.
We returned the greeting, and I nodded toward the bathroom. “Why don’t you go ahead,” I told Bree-yark. “Fresh soap and towels are in the closet. Oh, and here.” I brought around the hanger of clothes I’d picked up from the cleaners and tossed him a pair of slacks. “The waist should be about your size.”
“Thanks, buddy,” he said, catching them and padding away.
Vega blew me a kiss. “I’ll save the real thing for after your shower.”
“Can’t blame you,” I chuckled. “Mind if Bree-yark joins us for breakfast?”
“Of course not. How’d the hunt go?” she asked, opening a window.
“Oh, it was an adventure. I’ll tell you all about it after I drop something off in the lab.”
I climbed the ladder to my library/lab, fished the salt-packed metal box from my pocket, and placed it inside a containing circle. As I pushed energy into it, the circle glowed amber. When the containment became self-sustaining, I looked over the box a final time, really curious to hear what the Order would have to say.
Back downstairs, I told Vega about the landfill and animation. By the time I finished, Tony was staring up at me, wide awake.
“You fought a pile of living garbage?” he asked. “Sweet!”
“It was a lot less sweet than it sounds,” I said. “In fact, it stunk.”
To his credit, Tony smirked at the dad joke. Vega tousled her son’s hair and placed a bowl of raisin bran in front of him. She’d prepared three more bowls, and I carried mine to the far end of the table. Coffee and juice were usually my job, but she signaled for me to stay put while she took care of those as well.
In the bathroom, Bree-yark was crooning above the sound of the shower going full blast.
“I’m guessing he’ll be a while,” I said when Vega returned. “We can go ahead and start.”
She took a seat at the opposite head of the table. “So, all of that magic came out of a little box?”
“Yeah, one with engravings, about this size.” I showed her with my hands. “Not sure where it came from, though.” I chewed slowly, revisiting the angular glyphs, the green glow, the strange currents of magic …
“All right, I know that look,” Vega said.
I emerged from my thoughts to find her making the let’s-hear-it gesture. I glanced over at Tony, but he was engrossed in a puzzle on the back of the cereal box, his dripping spoonful suspended halfway to his mouth.
“It’s just that it’s magic I’ve never felt,” I said in a lowered voice. “Powerful magic that the wards interpreted as having nether qualities, but I didn’t sense that up close. It was completely foreign.”
“Dangerous?” she asked, her eyebrows drawing together.
I understood her concern. The mystery box was now in an enclosed space with her son and our future little girl. That had been one of the main discussions about our living arrangements. I would be casting magic and