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

by Brad Magnarella

  I thought of the violence at the crime scene. “Were his views well known?”

  “Well, he didn’t seem to think the city was doing enough about the ‘occult problem,’ as he called it.” When Father Vick turned from the window to face me again, it was with a look of apology. He sensed my magic. “He had been preparing to meet with city commissioners and police officials. He wanted them to start cracking down on the ‘openly-practicing’—another one of his terms.”

  I doubted this was something Father Vick had shared with the investigators. If the druid cult had gotten wind of the rector’s campaign, maybe they had decided to preempt it. “Have you ever heard of a group called Black Earth?” I asked.

  Father Vick frowned steeply in thought. “I’m aware that esoteric groups exist in the city, but my work takes me into the lives of individuals. Those who have lapsed beyond doubt into darkness, aligned with the shadows that dwell there. I’ve never believed the church’s role should be castigation, Everson. We should offer sanctuary and, when possible, healing. Like that young boy in my Sunday school class, I don’t like to see people hurt.”

  He hadn’t answered my question, but before I could try again, a sharp pain stole my breath away. Father Vick had raised two fingers, and a force was stabbing through me.

  I stared back at him. What in the hell…?

  But he wasn’t causing the pain, I realized, not directly.

  Thelonious had been caught off guard and was now burrowing into my energy like a giant tick. Father Vick’s powers of exorcism were strong, but not strong enough to dislodge a determined incubus. I raised a hand to show him I was okay. The force and pain relented.

  I searched for words to paper over the awkward moment, but Father Vick’s pale eyes were gazing past me. I turned and jumped a little to discover someone standing just outside the cracked-open door—a young woman in a white robe, from the segment I could see.

  “Come in, Malachi,” Father Vick said.

  Malachi? The door opened wider, and I saw the person was, in fact, a dude. Though he must have been twenty or so, his nervous, narrow face remained in smooth adolescence. His hair had also thrown me, brown hair long enough to have been gathered into a ponytail in back.

  “Malachi is our resident acolyte,” Father Vick informed me as way of introduction. “He’s interested in St. Martin’s history and has been going through our vast archives. Some fascinating items in there.”

  I stood and shook the boy’s pliant hand. “Everson Croft.”

  The young man mumbled something that was barely audible, his smallish eyes flitting around my gaze.

  “Did you have something to tell me?” Father Vick asked him.

  “Um, the police are here. They want to see you again.”

  I knew there was a chance of that happening, but crap.

  “Have them wait for me in the nave. We shouldn’t be more than another minute.”

  As the door closed behind Malachi, Father Vick gave me an ironic smile. “It looks like your colleagues have more questions.” He shrugged as he stood. “Given the circumstances, who can blame them? By all appearances, the murder was committed by someone inside these old walls.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Besides no one having any grievances against Brother Richard? Cyrus is too old to have carried out so violent an attack, and Malachi too gentle. There is no malice in either of them.”

  Father Vick did have that perceptual ability, but I noticed he’d left himself out.

  “I have to ask,” I said, already wincing inwardly at what I was about to say. “Did the two of you have any conflicts? I mean, you seem to have been divided on the issue of magic.”

  “A fair question,” he replied, holding my gaze. “And yes, we did argue about the matter. But you don’t have to see eye to eye on every issue to be close.” Grief clouded his face. “If you had siblings, you would understand.”

  I nodded and lowered my gaze. Congratulations, Everson, you’ve just leveled up in shittiness.

  Father Vick placed his hands warmly on my shoulders. “It has been good to see you, Everson. And I meant what I said. You’re welcome at St. Martin’s anytime. You’re not the exile you seem to believe yourself to be.”

  “Good to see you too, Father.”

  With a final smile, he stepped past me. “Well, I suppose I need to get to another meeting. And if I read your earlier reaction correctly, you need a back door to depart through.”

  “I guess investigators have their own conflicts,” I said sheepishly.

  “Say no more. You can leave through the graveyard.” He led me out to the covered walk that ran around the courtyard. I noticed he took care to lock the door behind him. “I’ll have Cyrus let you out.”

  I glimpsed something dark and shining in his ear.

  “Father, you’re bleeding.” I pointed to my right ear.

  He touched his hair-thatched canal, then inspected the blood on the tip of his finger. “Yes, that happens sometimes.” He reached out and washed his finger beneath a string of water falling from the eave of the courtyard. “We are mortals channeling forces far beyond us, after all.”

  25

  I saw what Father Vick meant about Cyrus. The stooped and palsied groundskeeper could hardly heft his ring of keys, much less bring a chalice down on a man’s head with enough force to smite him. And I sensed no magic around him.

  I followed Cyrus out a back door and along a path beaten in the grass. We were in an older part of the graveyard behind the church. Dark, weathered tombstones rose like crooked teeth. Raised sarcophagi leaned here and there, a particularly mossy one in a solitary corner, beneath a knotted willow. Though the rain had passed, the chill air was stippled with moisture. A good day for a blazing fire.

  Cyrus unlocked a door in the iron gate that ran along Washington Street. I thanked him and stepped through the curtain of energy that protected the sanctuary. Definitely weaker, I noted.

  My plan was to get home and prepare some spells for a trip to Central Park that night. Yeah, yeah, magic verboten. But I’d already worked it out—I was going to play the dumb card: Ohhh, I thought you meant no magic in relation to the shrieker case. Cue smacking of forehead.

  Would the Order buy it? Who knew, but this was bigger than saving my job. I was thinking about Father Vick now, a man whose paternal concern was still palpable twenty years later. And the way he’d looked when I made him talk about the rector’s death and even suggested he might have had a motive in his slaying?

  So yeah, screw the Order. I’d deal with the fallout later. The more immediate challenge was going to be putting Detective Vega off for another day. At least until I could—

  “Croft!”

  —point her in the right direction.

  I wheeled to find the one-woman Homicide squad striding up behind me, a black umbrella glistening above her stretched-back hair. She was wearing the same style of suit she seemed to favor, black jacket and pants, blouse opened at the neck. It was a good look for her, and if it ain’t broke…

  “What in the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “Besides enjoying the weather?”

  “Were you just inside the church?” When she arrived in front of me, the challenge in her dark eyes told me she already knew the answer.

  “Well, I wasn’t not in the church, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I don’t have time for this, Croft. Yes or no.”

  “Si.”

  “You have no business being in there.”

  “Look,” I said, holding up my hands in a no-harm, no-foul gesture, “my grandmother and I attended St. Martin’s when I was growing up. Father Vick was my youth minister. Thursday was the first time I’d seen him in almost twenty years. He invited me to come back and visit him.” All technically true. “I had some time this morning, so…”

  “Father Victor is a suspect in a homicide investigation—one you’re consulting on, I should remind you. You’re not to frater
nize with him until we’ve wrapped up. I thought I made that clear.”

  I was starting to get a little sick of being told what I could and couldn’t do.

  “Oh, c’mon, it’s not like—”

  “I’m dead serious, Croft.”

  “You don’t honestly believe Father Vick had anything to do with the murder. Or are you just aiming for ‘good enough’ again?”

  When her eyes glowered, I realized I’d gone too far. “For your information,” she hissed, drawing up until her umbrella was dripping water in front of my face, “his trace evidence is all over the crime scene.”

  “Yeah, and maybe that’s because he lives and works there.”

  “So you’re an investigator now?”

  “Just…” I took a deep breath and let it out. “Father Vick is a good man. He helps people. Just make sure you talk to those who know him before jumping to any conclusions.” I wasn’t sure whether I was trying to convince Detective Vega or myself. After all these years, how well did I really know him?

  “The message,” Vega said abruptly. “It’s been two days. What do you have?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “I was actually going to call you about that. I’m going to, ah, need another day.”

  “That wasn’t the deal.”

  “Right, but I put out a professional inquiry. I’m expecting an answer tonight.”

  Vega looked at me a long moment, sharp suspicion in her stare, then sighed through her nose. “Tomorrow morning, but that’s it. No more extensions or the deal’s off. We clear?”

  I shifted my cane to my left hand and offered to shake on it.

  But Vega’s gaze remained on my cane, the suspicion back in her eyes. “Ever been to Hamilton Heights, Croft?”

  “I try not to.”

  “Where were you two nights ago?”

  Other than running down a street, being shot at by you? “Home, slogging through student papers. In fact, I received a visit from a couple of your associates. Dempsey and Dipinski?”

  She studied my eyes.

  “Know them?” I asked.

  After another moment, she gave a reluctant nod. “They liked your cat.”

  I laughed. “I’m pretty sure the feeling wasn’t mutual.”

  Vega’s lips pulled to one side, but only slightly. I bet she had a killer smile. “Watch yourself, Croft,” she said as she turned to leave. “I’d hate to have to arrest you again.”

  That makes two of us, I thought as I watched her pace back toward the cathedral.

  26

  I caught a bus up Broadway, disembarking at the heart of Greenwich Village.

  The plan, of course, was to return to my apartment, light a fire, and spend the day indoors, cooking spells. All of that lay west. And yet I felt an urgent pull toward the garbagy, graffiti-bruised East Village and the amateur conjurer who would be rising and shining about now.

  “Better think about this, Everson,” I muttered, leaning against the cornice of a building on West Third. I might get away with playing dumb on the magic ban, I thought as I observed the funeral flow of foot and car traffic, but the “cease pursuit of the matter” part had been pretty plain.

  Still, I’d received no assurance the Order intended to do anything about the “matter” other than call me off it. More likely, whatever they were planning would grow moss before it made it out of committee, by which time our sole lead to the spell supplier could be long gone.

  Anyway, the Order didn’t have eyes on me twenty-four seven. The perks of being a bottom-runger. Their wards would pick up any magic I cast, sure. So I wouldn’t cast any magic. Problem solved.

  But there was still that whole violation-of-decree thing.

  I peered down Third Street, into a wind stinking of trash and diesel. Then I looked west, toward home.

  “Oh, fuck it,” I said, and began kicking my way east.

  Some neighborhoods looked less menacing in the light of day. The East Village wasn’t one of them. Not only were the blackened buildings and trash piles more vivid, but locals were now on the roam, most of them burned out and trashed, too. Beginning at Avenue A, I passed men and women in tatters, yellow skin stretched taut over sharp facial bones, teeth rotten to their roots. A woman with flaking patches of scalp beseeched me for money in a voice that was hardly human. The rest stared from vacant eyes, tagging them as junkies, the soul-eaten, or both.

  I chanted to reinforce the strength of my coin pendant.

  At Avenue C, I spotted a familiar mountain of garbage and, across the street, the conjurer’s apartment building—one of two on the block still standing. Entering the lobby, I hit the stairwell at a jog.

  On the top floor, at the end of the hallway, I readied my cane and threw open the conjurer’s door.

  The room was empty. Against the far wall, the cheap furniture had been piled up, as though someone meant to collect it later, but the line of laundry and spill of canned goods—the signs of habitation—were gone. My one hope was that the conjurer had been robbed while he slept, but he wasn’t in his bedroom. Only the spring metal frame and a scatter of books remained.

  Balls.

  I checked the other rooms to confirm his absence. The table in his makeshift laboratory remained, as well as the mirror, which lay shattered on the floor, but the spell items were missing, probably packed into his trunk and hauled away. I returned to the main room and paced the newspaper-strewn floor in thought.

  Had the conjurer left of his own initiative, or been taken? If the second, there was a good chance the mysterious spell supplier had been involved. Finding the conjurer could mean finding the supplier. There were ways to track the conjurer, but they all involved magic, dammit.

  At that thought, a low humming shook through the floor and into my shoes. The sensation was followed by the muted cry of guitars.

  Maybe someone had witnessed his departure.

  It took a minute for the guitars to die down and shouted voices to decide someone was knocking at the door. The generator idled down next until I could hear a series of bolts being worked. When the door cracked open, a shotgun barrel appeared beneath a squinting eye. The eye widened in surprise.

  “Mr. Wednesday Night!” Tattoo Face exclaimed. The door opened until his giant frame was standing over me. “We were wondering if you’d come back!” He leaned his pump-action shotgun against the doorframe and clapped my shoulder with enough enthusiasm to send me into a sideways stagger. “Got another gig tonight, and everyone wants you there.”

  I braced myself against the wall. “Really?”

  “Talk about a show stealer,” Blade said, coming up beside him, a rail in comparison. She looked me up and down, her neon-pink smirk reminding me what she’d said the other morning about a strip tease.

  Thanks, Thelonious.

  “Much as I’d, ah, love to come,” I stammered, my face warming like a furnace, “I’ve got a load of work. I was actually stopping by to ask if you knew anything about your upstairs neighbor.”

  “What about him?” Tattoo Face said.

  “Well, it looks like he cleared out. Probably in the last day or so. Know where he might’ve gone?”

  Blade shrugged. “People come and go all the time. Sort of the character of the neighborhood.”

  “Did he have any recent visitors?’

  Tattoo Face worked his lips in thought. “None that I know of.”

  “Guy with stringy hair and thick glasses?” someone asked.

  Blade and Tattoo Face parted so that I could see the young black man with green hair and skin-tight leathers. He was sitting on a couch, fiddling with the tuning knobs on a battered electric guitar, fingers buried in a spray of wires.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s the guy,” I said.

  “Bumped into him on my way in this morning. He was hauling a trunk out into the street.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Far as I could tell.”

  “Did you see which way he was headed?”

  “Not really.” Green
Hair remained fixated on his tuning project. “Screamed when he saw me. Something about the End Times. Then he dragged his trunk to the other side of the street and stared till I’d gone inside. Dude was on something. ’Course, so are most the freaks around here.”

  So the conjurer had left solo.

  “All right, guys,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Sure we can’t talk you into making a cameo tonight?” Tattoo Face clasped his meaty hands to his chest in a fervent plea.

  Blade smirked again. “We can probably arrange to have a dancing pole brought up.”

  “In that case…” I said. “Not a chance in hell.”

  I duly weighed the stupidity of what I was about to do before returning to the conjurer’s apartment. Hair made a good target item, and I found several strands in the conjurer’s former bedroom. I placed them in the center of a circle of copper filings. Feather of homing pigeon or, better yet, tusk of narwhale made great catalysts, but I was fresh out.

  Yeah. I was planning to cast a hunting spell right under the Order’s nose.

  I took a breath before aiming the tip of my cane toward the tangle of hair. The incantation was basic. White light swelled from the cane, absorbing essence from the smoldering hair. A few minutes later, after the hair had popped into foul-smelling flames, it was done. I’d get a direction by the time I reached the street.

  If an agent of the Order didn’t swoop down on me before then.

  As I was about to leave the bedroom, a book among the scattered pile of them caught my eye. I lifted the Bible by its pebbly black spine and flopped it open to its back page. Sure enough, stamped in the top left corner in black ink:

  St. Martin’s Cathedral: New York, NY 10006

  Now that was interesting…

  27