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

by Brad Magnarella

“Home,” Hoffman said after a moment. “Kid’s sick.”

  I remembered the little boy in the photo, and my heart rate kicked up again. I had to think fast, act fast.

  “All right, listen,” I shouted above the shrieking. “This is”—I gave a garbled name. “I’m working homicide in the Bronx. Got a case that’s looking like some of yours down there. Gonna need to run a car by Vega’s place to ask her some questions. She’s over in Queens, right?” It was a shot in the dark, but I needed to get to her before another pair of shriekers did.

  “Wrong borough,” Hoffman said smugly. “And I’m not giving you an address. You gotta call personnel for that.”

  “Listen to me—”

  “No, you listen to me,” he shouted back. “I don’t give a ratshit if you’re the pope and the four horsemen are charging down Broadway. There’s a protocol for getting info on our detectives. How do I know you’re not some scumbag wanting to settle a score?”

  As a breed, New York cops were hard to cow. Despite my initial read on the man, Hoffman was no exception. “Can I get her cell at least?” I asked, the authority deflating from my voice.

  “Personnel,” Hoffman repeated, and hung up.

  Shit. I eyed Vega’s business card. I could cast a spell to locate her, but that was going to take too much time—not only in the casting, but the tracking. No, I needed an address.

  I had one more card to play. Literally.

  I swapped Vega’s card for the one Bashi had flicked onto my lap before having me hauled off. I peeked over at Meredith, who was sitting on the side of the tub, hands still over her ears, and dialed the number.

  “Yes,” a voice answered evenly.

  “This is Everson Croft.” I shouted to be heard. “I need to speak to Mr. Gang.”

  “Then speak.”

  “Is this him?”

  “Speak,” he said shrilly.

  That I’d been given a direct line to the boss himself told me how badly Bashi wanted to nail whomever had arranged for a shrieker to be conjured in his neighborhood. I needed to use that to my advantage.

  “I know where the spell came from,” I said.

  “Tell me.”

  I checked my reasoning before answering. “St. Martin’s Cathedral.”

  Bashi repeated the name, his voice dripping with venom. Telling him the truth was a risk, but a conservative one, I concluded. The officials were missing and the church itself was crawling with NYPD. There was no one there for him to exact revenge on. Not tonight, anyway.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said quickly. “We’re dealing with a supernatural being. A powerful one. Bullets won’t do anything. A job like this is going to require serious magic.”

  The use of we and job was intentional. I needed to get him thinking collaboratively.

  “You said you were a wizard,” he screamed.

  “I am, but my magic’s not cheap.”

  “Maybe I’ll just have you killed. How about that?”

  “Wow.” I’d been expecting a money offer, but either way… “Or how about payment in information,” I countered. “An address and phone number, that’s all, but I need them up front.”

  “Whose?”

  “Detective Vega in Homicide.”

  Any of the major crime syndicates in New York would have that kind of information—for levying bribes, threats, or to eliminate a troublesome investigator—but I only had access to Bashi. Who had gone silent.

  Outside, I could hear the shriekers continuing their assault on my threshold. I only hoped the reverend had perceived me as the greater threat and cast my spell before Vega’s.

  “Fine,” Bashi said at last. “But the job gets done tonight.”

  Like I had a choice. Demon moon … hello?

  “You have my word,” I assured him.

  “Or I have your head.”

  Fair enough, I guessed.

  I was put on hold. Two minutes later, another voice came on and gave me Vega’s number and address. I jotted them down in my notepad. The address was in Brooklyn, not far over the East River. Good, because from there I would need to hightail it to St. Martin’s before the moon neared its zenith—which would mean getting past the Wall again.

  But first I had a bigger challenge, I thought as I eyed Vega’s cell number. Convincing the good detective she was in mortal danger.

  40

  “Croft?” Vega said, not nicely.

  “Detective,” I called into the cupped mouthpiece, “I need you to listen—”

  “Where in the hell did you get my number? Were you the one who just called my office?”

  Crap. The second that jerk Hoffman had hung up on me he must have called and alerted Vega. Fortunately, she was too irate to let me answer.

  “And what’s that racket?” she went on. “Are you at home?”

  “Yes, but listen—”

  “No, you listen,” she shouted. “The analysis came back on the pencil. The marks are yours, Croft. I gave you a chance to come clean. Remember that. Dempsey and Dipinski are on the way. Try to run, and I’ll up your case to felony fugitive so fast it’ll make your ass hurt.”

  “You’re in danger,” I yelled into the brief space she allowed me. “You need to get your son someplace safe and then—”

  “Are you threatening my family, you piece of…” The rest was lost to the noise outside.

  “I’m trying to help you,” I shouted.

  Detective Vega fell silent. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said at last, coldly. “In your cell.”

  The line clicked off.

  I hung up too, my heart pounding with anger and futility. There was no sense calling back. I would have had to go to her either way, but I’d hoped to convince her to usher her son someplace safe in the meantime. Vega wouldn’t be able to hide herself. With the binding nature of the hunting spell, the shriekers would draw a bead on her, not where she lived. The only positive to glean from our chat was that the creatures had yet to arrive. I still had time.

  But first I had to face the nightmare version of the Bobbsey Twins and then get out before Dempsey and Dipinski arrived.

  I squeezed Meredith’s arm until she opened her sealed eyelids. “I want you to lock the door after I step out and then stay here until well after the alarm stops. Do you understand?”

  “Can’t I just leave?” she asked, tears threatening her mascara.

  “The alarm probably went off for a reason. You’ll be okay as long as you stay in here.”

  She didn’t need to see her professor battling a pair of creatures from the pits of hell, I decided. I only prayed that if I failed, those same creatures would bugle a mission accomplished and sail home, sparing Meredith and the others in the building a messy fate.

  I gave my student a nod of reassurance, then slipped from the bathroom and closed the door. I waited for the knob to jiggle, indicating she had locked it, before replacing my ear shields. In the ringing of the sudden quiet, I took a steadying breath. Then I rounded the kitchen counter until the front door came into view.

  At the sight of me, the shriekers went spazoid, scrabbling up the field with taloned feet, swiping it with gnarly hands, beating it with black-veined wings. The wards held, knocking the creatures against the far wall of the corridor, which was faring far worse. Blown-out plaster and sections of wainscoting littered the floor. Thankfully, no one from the building had come up to investigate. No bloody remains among the detritus, anyway. In post-Crash New York there was a name for those who had learned to keep their heads down: survivors.

  Not an option for this New Yorker.

  I strode forward until I was ten feet from the door, then drew my cane into sword and staff. Under most circumstances, I would be no match for these guys. I’d barely handled their kid brother. But wards and years of cumulative energy? There was my ticket.

  “Soglia,” I whispered, aligning my energy with the defenses over my threshold. My plan was to release the pent-up power into the shriekers. A daisy bomb of magical energy.
If that didn’t destroy them, it would weaken the creatures enough for me to finish them off.

  I fixed my feet in a swordsman’s stance as I watched the shriekers, waiting for them to hit the threshold at the same…

  “Liberare!” I boomed.

  For a moment all of the energy seemed to be sucked from the room. I leaned back, the force pressing my coattail flat to my calves and flapping the sides toward the warping threshold. Hanging pictures rocked on their nails. Something shattered in the kitchen. The furniture began to slide toward the exit en masse. My leg muscles screamed as my planted soles stuttered.

  An instant before I could topple forward—and conclude that this had been the worst idea ever—the doorway flashed like an exploding star. Mostly away from me, thank God.

  I staggered from the violent release, blinking at the bursting afterimage. Then I righted myself and powered into a run. Through the dust of demolition, I could see the doorframe hanging from the wall. Beyond the threshold, a hulking shadow twitched on the floor.

  Down, but not out, dammit.

  I tossed my sword up to switch to an overhand grip. Arriving above the shrieker, I plunged the blade between the spot where its wings erupted from a back just human enough to be grotesque. A mewling cry sounded as black fluid bubbled over the striated muscles. Its wings flapped crookedly, the left one twisting around to get a hooked horn into me.

  I leaned away and shouted, “Disfare!”

  With a final mewl, the shrieker exploded in a torrent of black phlegm.

  A gusher caught me in the face, the demonic scent blasting up my nose. Pawing for a clean section of coat to wipe away the mess, I could hear the remaining gobs pelting the length of the corridor.

  I’d pushed more energy into the shrieker than necessary, but with the amount of adrenaline pumping, who could blame me? Plus, I needed to make sure it did the job. I just hoped I’d kept enough in the tank. There was still one shrieker to go, and it was clawing its way to its feet.

  Sponging the remaining gunk from my eye sockets, I backed from where the shrieker had landed, down the corridor. I could hear it stumbling from wall to wall, its wings like the slapping of canvas sails, the beginnings of a wail from its nightmarish mouth an approaching squall.

  I thrust my sword toward it and shouted, “Vigore!”

  The middling force was sufficient to send the shrieker clattering back. I staggered over my threshold into the apartment to allow the last of the gunk to evaporate from my eyes. I had just blinked my sight clear when the shrieker appeared in the doorway, clawed hands gripping the blown-out frame. Its eyes, milky and goat-like, fixed on mine. There were no wards to keep it out. With a fresh scream, it shot forward.

  I slid right and slashed my sword through one of its unfurling wings, tearing sinew and vessels before notching a black horn. The impact of metal on exoskeleton rang to my elbow. I grunted and spun away as the shrieker snapped its jaw of hooked teeth at my head.

  Through the ear shields, I made out Meredith’s straining voice. “Is it okay to come out now?”

  “Not yet!” I called back.

  The shrieker went for me again, its talons scrabbling over the slick of its spilled fluids like someone trying on a pair of roller skates for the first time. Under different circumstances, the sight might have been comical. I skipped to one side and, with a hacking slash, cleaved the other wing. The shrieker fell past me into a crouch, ruined wings hugged to its body.

  “All right,” I panted, drawing the tip of the blade to my hip. “Let’s call it a night, shall we?”

  I focused on a spot between its wings—and slipped on a spatter of gunk. The cement floor rammed into my side, angering my injured shoulder. From my new vantage, I watched as the tears in the creature’s wings began to fuse, black tissue knotting along the repair lines.

  The damage from the wards was running its course. The shrieker was healing itself.

  We rose at the same time and faced off. I didn’t wait for it to make the first move. Too many precious seconds had already ticked away.

  Lowering my head behind the shield that crackled from my staff, I charged. If I could get my sword through the shrieker’s core, I would hit it with a dispersive force powerful enough to get Thelonious licking his lips but not quite diving in. The still-weakened shrieker wouldn’t be able to hold itself together.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  In a rapid one-two, the shrieker seized my thrusting blade and brought its head down. My good shoulder exploded in white-hot pain. The creature’s teeth sunk in deeper as the horns on its wings collapsed toward me.

  “Respingere!” I cried.

  Energy from my shield shoved the shrieker off and into a wall, a bloody flap of my coat, and probably skin, jiggling from its mouth. As the shrieker righted itself, a segmented tongue emerged to grab the scraps and pull them into its gullet.

  I didn’t need to see that, I thought, pressing my staff hand to my torn-open shoulder—a shoulder the wormy appendage had just touched.

  But more worrying than its tongue was the creature’s regenerative powers. I wasn’t sure any level of blast, short of one that would invoke my incubus spirit, was going to do the job now.

  And if Thelonious did escape my containment, I would be done for the night. Detective Vega? Her son? Father Vick? All dead. And if the possessed reverend succeeded in escaping the church threshold, who knew how many others would die with them? Through it all, Thelonious would drink and dance the night away, happy as a clam. And I’d awaken tomorrow to the mother of all hangovers in a city that would make the current version seem like Paradise.

  Never mind whose bed I’d shared.

  The shrieker flew at me. Claws raked over my shield. The impact knocked me to the floor. Flapping above me, the shrieker scrabbled its taloned feet against the shield, its foul air buffeting me in great gusts. Ignoring the pain in my shoulder, I drove my sword at its torso.

  Without my legs beneath me, though, the thrust was weak, the contact glancing. I brought my sword back in time to block the horned wing diving for my neck. I had the shrieker where I wanted it, close enough to run through. But with the direction things were headed, it was going to run me through first.

  Need to get the son of a bitch off me, I thought. Regroup.

  I hit it with a force blast, which was barely up to the task. The shrieker rose, flapping, and circled the high-ceilinged room twice before I realized what it was doing: sniffing out sustenance.

  I aimed my staff at the locked bathroom door. “Protezione!” I called.

  The shrieker crashed into a shield of light energy. With another blast from my sword I could ill afford, I knocked the shrieker away from Meredith’s sanctuary. It lifted off again, coming to a flapping perch on the rail that ran along my library/lab. It stretched its wings until they were gripping ceiling and wall, like some grotesque parody of the crucifixion.

  As the creature stared down with evil, unblinking eyes, I could all but feel it reconstituting the last of its lost strength. Me? I could barely keep my sword and staff aloft.

  The shrieker was above my hologram, though. If I could detonate the energy inside it, as I had with the wards, I might be back in business. After all, the hologram was bound to the city-wide wards set up by the Order.

  The thought deflated like a sputtering balloon. Had been bound to the wards set up by the Order—who had duly unplugged me from their grid when they sidelined me. A quick check confirmed this.

  Damn.

  The shrieker’s next scream shook my ear shields. I backpedaled as the shrieker tore a wing from the ceiling, sifting plaster down. It was unhooking its other wing, preparing to dive, when a hairy pumpkin landed on the back of its neck.

  Tabitha!

  She must have been crouched on the top of the bookcase, because now she was sinking a mouthful of teeth into the shrieker’s tarry flesh. It reared back with a cry, flailing to get one of the horns on its wings into her. Tabitha flattened her head and sank in deepe
r.

  She wasn’t just wounding its physical form, I realized. Being a succubus, Tabitha was draining the creature’s essence, weakening it.

  The shrieker’s talons scraped over the iron railing, lost its grip, and fell. With wings still writhing to dislodge Tabitha, its torso was an open book. Seizing my chance, I scrambled underneath it. Right shoulder screaming, I thrust up my sword. The blade passed cleanly through the heart of the shrieker—so cleanly, the creature’s plummeting weight flattened me.

  We hit the floor together, my head cracking cement. The sensation of warm tar oozing over my hands pulled me from a daze, and I realized in horror the shrieker and I were cheek to cheek. Tabitha’s green eyes appeared from behind its neck. What the fuck are you waiting for? they asked.

  I drew air into my shocked lungs and shouted the Word for dispersion. “Disfare!”

  The shrieker jiggled against me for several seconds, then erupted into phlegm. Tabitha went airborne in a yowling series of somersaults. She hooked her claws into a set of drapes, bringing the whole apparatus crashing down behind her divan. A string of choice words told me she was all right.

  Panting, I rolled in a small pond of black gunk onto my side. As the tail end of the geyser spattered down, a creamy white light fluttered around my vision. I’d come really close to my limits with that invocation, but I’d know in a few seconds just how close. I could all but hear Thelonious’s smooth, jiving voice, anticipating his night of carousing.

  “Not now,” I begged as his light washed in like the surf. “I’ll let you out another time. I promise.”

  I’d begged before, but it never did any good. Thelonious was a force beyond sympathy, beyond reason. But whether it was for the urgency of my plea, or that I had just enough fumes in my tank to forestall him, the creamy white light began to withdraw. At last, it fluttered out entirely.

  Thank God.

  I pushed myself up, groaning. But did that mean I would have to let him out another night? I wiped my sword against a pant leg and sheathed it in the staff. I’d worry about whatever bargain I might or might not have struck with Thelonious another time. Right now, I had to get to Detective Vega and her kid and then to the cathedral.