The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  I didn’t go far, veering off path to scrabble over an eruption of boulders. Inside, I discovered a small dirt-packed clearing. As any druid would tell you, mineral-rich stones made good energy containers. I kicked aside some soiled clothing, drug needles, and what might have been a human femur and looked around. It smelled like a Porta-Potty, but the space would do for my spell.

  Using the tip of my sword, I drew a man-hole sized circle in the dirt and inscribed my family symbol inside: two squares, one offset at forty-five degrees to look like a diamond. I connected the corners with four diagonal lines and scratched a sigil at each end. From inside my coat, I pulled out a tall vial of copper filings and sprinkled them along the furrows. To connect the circle to the spell target, I removed three keys from my jangling chain—one gold, one silver, one bronze—to correspond with the three locks on my door. I arranged them near the edges of the casting circle in a triangular pattern and stood back.

  The spell would require energy, and lots of it. That was where I had to be extra careful. I couldn’t afford to let Thelonious through the door. Not tonight, and definitely not out here, where night hags were rumored to wander. Thelonious had chased skirts more putrid, believe me.

  “All right,” I said, shaking my arms loose.

  I was about to attempt a projection spell, one that would manifest a walking, talking likeness of me at the target. Besides requiring a healthy dose of energy, they were tough as hell to get right, especially over long distances. Even then, they were ephemeral. Though I’d practiced the spell countless times, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d put it into actual practice.

  Let’s just say the results had been a mixed bag.

  I stepped into the center of the circle and, feet together, began to chant an ancient Word that translated into home. As the sound vibrated in my core, I pictured the inside of my door as vividly as I could: the molding, the glass peephole, the brass knob. I imagined the feel of the shag rug under my feet, the cavernous space of the loft at my back.

  With every chant, ley energy surged voltage-like through my mental prism, down my body, and into the casting circle. There it coursed along the lines of my symbol, glowing whiter, gaining strength.

  Within minutes, it became a self-sustaining force.

  “Oikos,” I repeated.

  A high resonance began to ring from the door keys. A moment later, the inside of my door wavered into being, a ghost image over the blacked-out park. I was taking shape in my apartment. I channeled more energy, imagining away my bulky attire, replacing it with the cottony feel of pajamas and the loose grip of tube socks.

  “Oikos.”

  I was putting the finishing touches on my bed-headed coif when a knock sounded.

  “Mr. Croft?”

  I’d managed to beat the police officers, but only just. I waited the requisite ten seconds for them to imagine me waking up, climbing out of bed, crossing the room…

  A harder bout of pounding. “Mr. Croft, it’s the police.”

  “Coming,” I called, my voice strange-sounding, as though I were hearing myself from the opposite end of a tunnel.

  I extended a pajama-clad arm forward and twisted the bolts, the hard feel of them also seeming to arrive from a hollow distance. The two officers I’d been hiding from only a short time before appeared in the opening doorway. I blinked between them blearily.

  “Mr. Croft?” the larger one asked from a lumpy boxer’s face.

  “Last time I checked…” I read his name tag. “Officer Dempsey.”

  The two officers took a moment to examine me, no doubt lining up my features with the stats and mug shot on their dashboard computer. The other one’s name was Dipinski, which also seemed to fit him. Something in their stares told me I wasn’t dealing with the department’s sharpest tacks. From experience, I knew that could cut either way.

  “Help you with something?” I asked.

  Dipinski, whose eight-point police hat barely reached the height of my chin, stepped forward. “Have you been home all night?”

  “I have, in fact.” I stifled a fake yawn and gestured vaguely behind me. “Was grading papers till about ten and then conked out.”

  Their eyes darted past me as though eager to find something amiss. I turned with them, mostly out of curiosity. The apartment, superimposed over the park’s boulders, was as neat as I’d left it, Tabitha curled up on her divan, dead to the world. That was one less worry, anyway.

  “Well, consider this a random audit,” Dempsey said.

  His partner aimed a finger up at me. “We come after eight at night and you’re not in, you’re in violation of your probation, bud. And then guess what? We’re going to take a little ride.”

  Yeah, and had I goosed you with my cane back there, dipshit, you’d be duck-walking in those little polyester pants.

  “Got it,” I said.

  Dipinski glared at me as though trying to decide whether my curt response was meant as an insult. While it was true I held him in roughly the same regard as a peanut, I just needed these guys gone.

  At last he lowered his finger and began to back off. That was when the image wavered.

  Spent energy was leaving the spell, dammit, and I was in no position to resume incanting. Though I managed to steady the projection by force of will, Dipinski had caught the disruption. His small, freckled face pinched into a squint. Once more, the spell tried to tremble away.

  “I don’t believe it!” his partner exclaimed, seeming to choke on his own breath.

  I drew back before realizing he wasn’t looking at me. Following his floating finger, I found Tabitha stretching and rising to her haunches.

  “Is that a … cat?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, struggling to hold the spell together. “Name’s Tabitha.”

  “Good gawd!” The fit of laughter that seized Dempsey sounded like dry heaving.

  Dipinski gave a mean smirk. “You’ve got a real chubber there, Croft.” Apparently, my plus-sized cat trumped a man flickering in and out of existence. As noted, not the sharpest tacks.

  “Chubber?” Dempsey said, coming up for air. “That’s the biggest fucking cat I’ve ever seen!”

  That got Dipinski giggling.

  Tabitha dropped from the divan, ears pinned.

  “Hey, look, fellas,” I whispered, trying to close the door enough to block her from their view and vice versa. “The cat gets a little weird around … you know … people she doesn’t know.”

  Dipinski wiped an eye with a finger. “Bet that’d change if I showed up with a Christmas ham.”

  Their laughter verged on hysterical now.

  “You’d better bring the whole damn pig!” his large partner wheezed.

  “You’ll do nicely,” Tabitha hissed from right behind me.

  “All right, thanks for stopping by.” With what energy remained in my failing projection, I slammed and locked the door on the officers before Tabitha could sink her claws into them.

  The image buckled and broke apart. I fell from the circle and landed seat-down in the dirt, blinking around at the sudden darkness. The scent of burnt copper hung in the cool air.

  I sat a moment, waiting to see whether Thelonious would be paying our world a visit. But though the creamy light moved briefly around the edges of my thoughts, I had retained enough power to prevent him from breaking through. And expended just enough to keep my ass out of the clink.

  I rose shakily, collected my singed keys, and swept the bottom of a shoe over the smoking circle. Some night. Two dead conjurers, two escaped shriekers. And I had a bad feeling that no matter what those two buffoons reported to Detective Vega, that image of me fleeing was going to remain stuck in her head. I wasn’t sure what the implications would be. Certainly nothing good. If I’d had poorer outings as a wizard, none came to mind.

  I returned to the street in a sulk, too slow to hail the on-duty cab motoring past. A moment later, the light over the metro entrance turned off. Sighing, I aimed myself south a
nd started for home.

  17

  “I am so sorry,” I said as I slipped into the seat opposite Caroline Reid at the small deli table.

  She was sitting arrow straight, which was her peeved posture. I seemed to make her do that a lot. In my defense, I trudged sixty blocks last night before finally snagging a cab. Back home, I had to calm Tabitha, who had been deep into scheming Dempsey’s and Dipinski’s murders, update the Order on the shrieker situation, and then shower and treat my injuries.

  By the time I crawled into bed, it was almost four a.m.

  “I don’t get it, Everson,” Caroline said. “You arranged this meeting.”

  “I know, I know, but—”

  “You needed my help.”

  “Right, and I—”

  “And yet where would you be if I hadn’t called?”

  The correct answer was still in bed. It wasn’t my alarm, but the brassy ring of the telephone that had awakened me, Caroline wanting to know where in God’s name I was. That had been an hour ago.

  “Look …” I took a breath. “I know this is no excuse, but I had a rough night.”

  “You seem to have a lot of those. And while you were out doing … whatever it is you do, I was home working on this.” She hefted up a thick manila folder and gave it a shake. “For you.”

  “And I appreciate that. I really do.”

  Lips compressed, she dropped the folder in front of me and stood.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “I have office hours in fifteen minutes.” She fixed her purse strap over a shoulder. “Some of us take our responsibilities seriously.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “No, in fact. And you lied to me.”

  “Lied?” I was honestly at a loss. “About what?”

  “Your meeting with Snodgrass. I know about the hearing.”

  Oh. Which meant she also knew about my probationary status.

  When I didn’t say anything, she shook her head and turned to leave.

  “Wait.” I caught her slender wrist. It was a bold move given the hole I was already in, but she stopped. When she faced me, the hardness in her blue-green eyes told me I had roughly ten seconds to make my appeal.

  “Okay. I was arrested last summer,” I said, releasing her carefully. “Wrong place, wrong time. Throw in a stressed public safety system, and I got two years probation on no evidence. I kept it from the college, probably the wrong move, but Snodgrass found out. As things stand, I’m in a tough spot, true. But,” I tapped the folder, “if I can point the NYPD in the direction of the cathedral murderer, my remaining probation gets halved. And with that, I can at least make a case to the board. I think they’d look favorably on a professor using the tools of his profession to help solve a crime. Good recruiting pitch, too.”

  Carolina snorted dryly. But in her softening stance, I could see that if she didn’t believe me, she really wanted to. That was a start. She let me guide her back to the table and scoot her chair under her.

  “What are we going to do with you?” she asked tiredly.

  “Well, this will definitely help.” I indicated the folder as I sat.

  “Not that.” She reached forward and brushed my sleeve. “Your coat’s inside out.”

  I looked down. Damn.

  “And what’s with the bandages?”

  A waiter came over, sparing me from having to explain my injuries. I fixed my coat and ordered a coffee. Caroline asked for a refill of hers.

  “Shall we?” she asked, clearing her throat and opening the folder of what she’d compiled. “I have about five minutes before I’ll be late.” When she scooted nearer, her clean scent washed around me. “I came up with two names. First, Arnaud Thorne, CEO of Chillington.”

  The groan in my thoughts must have seeped out because Caroline looked up. “Know him?”

  “By reputation,” I replied, which was mostly true. Arnaud Thorne epitomized the worst of investment banking. Cold, soulless, rapacious—the standard tags. His was one of a cabal of firms that had secured a nice pre-Crash profit betting against New York municipal bonds, undermining the city’s ability to pay its mounting debts. In the Crash’s smoking aftermath, the same firms swooped down on City Hall. Headed by Arnaud, they offered to manage the very debt they’d rendered worthless—but at crippling interest rates. They now had their teeth fixed firmly in New York’s jugular, ensuring themselves a steady stream of tax dollars for the next fifty years. New York, in turn, had become their mindless slave.

  All very fitting considering the same investment bankers were vampires.

  “Why Arnaud?” I asked.

  “Because St. Martin’s Cathedral sits on prime real estate,” Caroline replied, turning some pages over. “Here are the lawsuits Chillington Capital filed to have the cathedral’s downtown block converted to commercial. The church and a collective of preservation groups fought back. When the lawsuits failed, Arnaud shifted his sights to the rector. I have it on reliable authority the two met last month. Arnaud offered Father Richard a small fortune to convince the diocese to abandon the downtown location. Richard said no.”

  “And yesterday morning he’s found beaten to death,” I finished.

  Holding a knuckle to my lips, I leafed through the evidence. Vampires valued material assets but mostly as a means of self-preservation and control. Arnaud’s interest in the property probably had more to do with the fount of ley energy it sat on—energy he could tap. I doubted Arnaud had committed the murder himself, though. He would have lost his powers at the threshold, if not been incinerated. Vampires didn’t fare well in holy spaces. And St. Martin’s was about as holy as they came. Of course, he could always have hired a thug to do the job.

  Still, I needed a connection between Arnaud and the message on the rector’s back. With last night’s hoopla, I hadn’t had time to research Black Earth or what it might mean.

  “Who’s the other one?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  “Wang Gang.”

  “Wang Gang?”

  “He also goes by Bashi. He took over the Chinatown crime syndicate two months ago.”

  Something squeezed my stomach. “The White Hand?”

  She nodded. “The former boss died in July.”

  “I did hear about that. Natural causes, right?” I’d read about it, actually, an image of the man’s crinkly face and wispy white hair appearing beside the article. It hardly seemed fair that someone responsible for so much fear and death should be allowed to drift peacefully from his mortal coil.

  Caroline continued. “Following a bloody struggle, the youngest son emerged on top. But where his father kept a kind of order, Bashi has spent his first weeks as boss sowing chaos, exacting revenge for every perceived slight.”

  “And one of his beefs was with the church?”

  “St. Martin’s took in ten girls last year who escaped a White Hand brothel. The young women had seen their handlers paying uniformed police officers and so feared going to the law. St. Martin’s gave them sanctuary until they could be spirited from the city. Let’s just say Bashi took it as a personal affront when he found out. Before becoming boss, he was in charge of the prostitution rings.”

  “And the church didn’t stay quiet,” I said, recalling another news item I’d read.

  “No,” Caroline affirmed. “The church took the lead in trying to end the exploitation. Father Richard organized a community task force, offered money to informants, put pressure on the police department to crack down.”

  I nodded grimly. The story fit with murder as revenge. And because the White Hand was a mortal organization, the threshold wouldn’t have been an obstacle. What didn’t fit, however, was the message. When the White Hand left their mark on a crime scene, it wasn’t in early Latin.

  I flipped through photo-copied articles on Wang Gang and the White Hand until I arrived at the back of the folder. “So these two?”

  “In New York, every office comes with a dozen or more spokes of conflict, but fr
om what I was able to find, Arnaud and Bashi look the most damning.”

  Or damned, in the first case, I thought.

  “What about within the church?” I asked. I was thinking about what Detective Vega had said about everyone inside being a suspect.

  “St. Martin’s wasn’t afflicted with the political or liturgical conflicts you sometimes see in powerful religious institutions. At least not openly. Fathers Richard and Victor worked well together as rector and vicar.” Not realizing Father Vick had been promoted to vicar, I made a sound of interest. Vick the Vicar. “Father Richard was well-regarded within the church hierarchy and larger inter-faith community, popular with his parishioners…”

  I must have been watching Caroline with a little too much admiration because her cheeks began to color. She checked her watch, as though to give her eyes something to do.

  “Now I really do have to get going,” she said.

  Shoot, I thought. “Just one more question. Have you ever heard of ‘Black Earth’? Maybe the name of a fraternal organization, an underground society, something like that?”

  If it existed, there was a good chance Caroline would know. She maintained an eclectic network of contacts throughout the city. Whether her contacts were cultivated for research purposes or something more, I wasn’t sure and had never asked. Sometimes the best way to safeguard one’s own secrets was to allow your friends theirs.

  But a comma-shaped wrinkle was forming between Caroline’s brows. “Not ringing a bell. I can ask around.”

  “No, no, please don’t.” The last thing I wanted was for her to draw the attention of a dangerous group, especially if it had a supernatural bent. “More of a tangential question, really.” I forced a chuckle. “Not related to this here.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

  I stood up as she did, dropping a few bills on the table and tucking the thick folder under my arm. It suddenly occurred to me neither of us had eaten. Geez, and here I’d offered to treat her. “Oh, hey, can I get you a salad or sandwich from the cooler to take back with you?”