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

by Brad Magnarella

  I raised my head. Beyond my outstretched legs, energy hummed over the open doorway and night. No sign of Zarko and the blood slaves. They had either left me for dead, or Arnaud had recalled them to pursue me another day. Either way, he wasn’t going to have them test a cathedral threshold. I only had a little demon-like energy in me; they carried it in spades.

  I remembered the candle flame and turned back to the glass doors. The light was gone now, but I hadn’t imagined it.

  I found my cane and pressed myself to a knee. While I waited for the room to stop spinning, I performed a self check. I was crippled, bleeding, in shock, and stripped of all powers, save the small reserve holding Thelonious at bay. Otherwise, I was fine.

  Standing all the way, I brought my face to the glass door. I could make out the cathedral’s cavernous nave, rows of pews proceeding to the raised chancel. Above, the stained-glass faces of saints were being tinged red by the demon moon, as though possessed themselves.

  The candle-bearer was gone, but I knew who it was. That Father Vick was still trapped inside was a good sign. It meant the demon hadn’t carried out the sacrifice yet. But he’d seen me, I was sure.

  There was no time to lose.

  I tried the doors. Locked. The plate glass didn’t look very thick. I stepped back and brought my heel forward with everything I had. The glass shattered to my knee, taking some more skin with it. Reaching a hand through the opening, I fumbled for the bolt, turned it, and stumbled inside.

  Glass crackled under my soles as I got my footing and looked around. I staggered down the corridor to the interior courtyard, crossed the blood-red flagstones, and pushed open the door to Father Vick’s apartment.

  I flipped the light switch, but the power must have gone out. By the ambient moonlight, I could see he wasn’t here. I took a leather-bound Latin Bible from Father Vick’s desktop and then rifled the drawers of the desk until I found a silver crucifix. Turning to leave, my gaze fell to his white handkerchief. I lifted it from the object it had been draping and stumbled backwards at the sight of a nightmarish face.

  My own, I quickly realized, staring back from the foggy glass of a scrying mirror. But the flame that fluttered up over my shoulder did not belong to me. Neither did the hooded head it illuminated.

  My heart slammed as I spun, but it wasn’t Father Vick I faced.

  “What are you doing here?” Malachi asked.

  45

  “No one’s supposed to be in here,” Malachi said in a cold monotone. The light from the candle swam in his watery gray eyes. His gaze was bolder than it had been that morning. I dropped my own gaze to his other hand, but it was hidden by the sleeve of his robe. A black robe, I noted.

  “Where are they?” I demanded.

  “Who?”

  “Father Vick and the bishop?”

  “Haven’t you heard.” He drew nearer. “They’re missing.”

  His voice held its monotone as his narrow face fluttered in and out of the hood’s shadow. I caught a whiff of sour breath. With the backs of my legs pressed to the desk, I was boxed in.

  “Why didn’t you evacuate with the others?” I asked, looking for his hidden hand again. He wasn’t who I had expected to find, and there was something off about him. He seemed … haunted.

  “I hid,” he said, pressing nearer. “I needed to atone. I think I’m the cause of what happened.”

  “What you found in the archives,” I said.

  He stopped, his eyes seeming to sharpen in surprise.

  “Bartholomew Higham, the fifth rector,” I continued. “The Church believed he’d become demon possessed. They killed him, but didn’t perform an exorcism, or didn’t perform it correctly.”

  “Father Vick didn’t seem to think it had been done right,” Malachi said. “But Father Richard said to leave it alone. They argued terribly. And then—”

  The flesh of Malachi’s other hand hit the glow of the candle. I lunged forward, managing to catch his wrist. Even in my sorry state, I was able to drive Malachi back. We toppled over the corner of the bed and landed hard on the floor. The candle clattered off somewhere and went out.

  “Help!” Malachi cried in the darkness, trying to pry my fingers away.

  Teeth clamped around one of my knuckles, and I stifled a yell. I climbed my fingers to his hand. Empty. I proceeded to pat him down as best I could, which must have felt to the kicking, writhing acolyte like a sloppy grope. Satisfied he wasn’t holding anything dangerous, I used the bed’s footboard to pull myself up. Malachi scooted back before stopping to regard my offered hand.

  “Sorry,” I said, breathing hard. “I thought you had a weapon. And with everything that’s happened…”

  He looked at my hand another moment, his hood fallen away from his long hair, and then let me help him to his feet. As he recovered the candle and relit it, I watched him closely, trying to make sense of his presence. In the light of the new flame, I saw what I had misinterpreted moments before.

  It wasn’t possession written on Malachi’s face, but the dull lines of inebriation.

  The atonement he’d mentioned apparently involved helping himself to the communion wine I smelled on his breath. The kid was one shade shy of blotto. And who could blame him? He believed he’d set in motion a chain of events that had led to Father Richard’s murder and now the disappearances. I guessed that around the time I was crashing through the threshold, he was downing his fourth or fifth chalice of St. Martin’s red. The light I’d seen was him coming to investigate the noise before ducking away. As someone who knew the cathedral better than most, he would have had plenty of hiding places to choose from.

  Which meant he could help me.

  “The place Higham stored the bones,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “The catacombs,” Malachi answered. “But the entrance was closed off after Higham’s execution. The site was decreed a sanctum of evil. I’ve already checked it out. There’s a solid wall over the entrance.”

  “Show me,” I said.

  He picked up the urgency in my voice and nodded quickly. Cupping a hand around the flame, he wheeled toward the door. As I shambled after him and across the courtyard, I was afraid to look up. Afraid the demon moon had reached its zenith. Afraid I had lost Father Vick for good.

  The air seemed to thin as we hurried down a stone stairwell in the corner of the cathedral, but that was my phobia at being underground kicking in. The darkness wasn’t helping. A nauseating blend of heat and cold prickled over my tightening chest. I began to wheeze.

  Malachi turned his head. “Do you need to rest?”

  I shook my head. As long as I could breathe, I had to keep moving. If the demon was the one I feared, we were dealing with a big-time baddie. He could not be allowed to escape, under any circumstances. Underqualified or not, I was assigning myself the task of stopping him.

  Which was infuriating when I thought about it. I’d risked my neck tracking leads, taking shots in the dark, getting shot at—not to mention fire-blasted and finger-cranked—to eventually connect the dots. With the monitoring spell Chicory had thumbed into my head, the Order should have had the same information as me. And yet, where in the hell were they?

  It was the kind of critique I wanted to stuff into the Elders’ flabby ears, but with the interference from the energy surrounding the church, I doubted even my thoughts were getting through.

  I was truly on my own.

  Fresh anxiety snuffed out my anger as the stairwell deposited us into a low-ceilinged basement. Malachi held up the candle. Light swelled through a suspension of dust and over storage trunks and mounds of covered furniture.

  “It’s in the back,” he said.

  I studied the stone floor as we walked. Its powdery surface was marred by prints. Some from the search team, no doubt, but perhaps not all of them. I raised my eyes to the far wall emerging from the darkness. I made out what had been an arched doorway, since filled in by uneven stone bricks and chunky mortar. The former entrance to the catacombs.r />
  Malachi stood to one side. “See what I mean?”

  I pressed both hands against the impeding wall, then tested the individual bricks. A metal ringlet, too dull to determine its age, had been bolted into one of the central bricks. I pushed and pulled on that, too. Nothing budged. I pressed an ear to the wall, but it was too dense to hear through.

  “You think they’re inside?” Malachi asked in alarm, catching on.

  I nodded distractedly and searched my pockets. I still had Father Vick’s card but without my wizarding power, I couldn’t locate him. None of the other spell items were worth a squat, either.

  My gaze roamed the floor in thought, until I noticed something: faint lines.

  I asked for the candle and knelt. The lines were abrasions left by stone. I touched them and noted the grit on my finger. I stood again and moved the candle around the door frame. The texture of the mortar here and there told me what I’d begun to suspect. The bricks were secured to one another, but no longer to the frame of the doorway. Someone had chiseled out the mortar, then hidden his work. I searched around for a handhold, a place to pull.

  “Here,” Malachi said, tapping something.

  Of course. The metal ringlet.

  “There’s some cord over there,” he said, a step ahead of me again. Where panic was making a confusion of my own thoughts, inebriation seemed to have cooled and steadied his.

  Malachi ran to an old piano, its closed lid secured with twine, and began to unknot it. I set down the Bible and cross, standing the candle on the ground beside them. The length of twine Malachi returned with looked sturdy enough, but I doubled it over before threading it through the ring. I passed the folded-over end to Malachi and took the loose strands in my own hands. We backed from the door at an angle until the cord was taut and even.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  He nodded, and we began to pull. Our strength was well short of demonic, but working together, pained grunts bouncing off the basement walls, we managed to walk the door out a few inches. I handed my end of the twine to Malachi and wedged my cane into the narrow space. With him pulling and me prying, we created an opening that looked large enough to edge through.

  I held the candle inside and groaned. Rough-cut stairs spiraled down into more darkness.

  “Want me to carry these?” Malachi asked, stooping for the Bible and cross.

  “Hand them to me once I’m through. You’ve got another candle, right?” I’d encountered one during my pat-down of him. “Good. Use it to see your way back up, then get as far from the cathedral as you can.”

  “But I—”

  “Forget it,” I interrupted. “You have no idea what’s down there.”

  I peeked through the opening once more. If I failed, which felt almost certain, I didn’t want Malachi to be in the path of an emerging demon lord. The apocalypse that followed would likely consume him along with the rest of the city, true, but I was still holding out hope that the Order would get their heads out of their collective asses before that happened.

  “Where should I go?” he asked.

  I fished through my pockets until I found Detective Vega’s card. “Call this number. Someone named Hoffman will probably answer. Tell him you got left here, and he’ll send someone to pick you up.”

  He nodded as he accepted the card, emotion trembling through him for the first time. I slid my cane inside my belt and squeezed through the opening. The effort left me dizzy. Malachi passed me the Bible and silver cross. I took them and then touched the flame from my candle to the wick of his.

  As the light suffused his young face, I saw in his eyes something I recognized. “Listen to me,” I said. “Passion led you to uncover those things in the archives, not sin. You’ve no fault in this.”

  The words seemed to fortify a layer of my prism. Maybe because they were words I would have liked to have been told ten years ago. Instead, the Order black-marked me. I didn’t want Malachi shouldering the same guilt.

  He nodded and wiped his watery eyes with the back of a hand. “Please help them.”

  “I’ll do everything I can. Now go.”

  I turned from his diminishing scuffs and peered down the steps. Better to perish in conviction than live in cowardice, right? I felt too queasy to answer. Drawing a diver’s breath, I started down.

  46

  The spiral staircase ended at a cave-like corridor that diminished into darkness. I struggled to control my gasping breaths so I could listen. Easier said than done. The pressure in my chest wasn’t just my anxiety talking now. The air was heavier than in the basement, from being shut away for so long, no doubt—but an oppressive evil lived here as well.

  Noises began to take shape. Things skittering here and there, and farther away, what sounded like speech, low and garbled.

  It wasn’t human.

  “You wanted to join the big leagues, Everson?” I whispered over a tremulous breath. “Batter up.”

  I raised the candle and proceeded down the corridor. Within several paces, I saw what the corridor really was—an ossuary for the remains Reverend Higham had piled down here. They sloped toward the floor in great drifts: dusty-brown arm and leg bones, tossed-off pelvises, sections of vertebrae. And skulls. Everywhere. No matter where I looked, a host of them stared back with ghastly sockets and withered teeth.

  My heart slammed harder. As decent as these people may have been in life, I wasn’t ready to join their ranks. Especially not when a shiny red centipede slid from one of their ear canals.

  Ahead, the corridor bent around a corner, and the speech I’d heard earlier picked up again. The words were nonsensical, guttural grunts in a language I’d never heard or read. And they warped the atmosphere, twisting up my guts and making my eardrums ache. Though I couldn’t interpret them, it was clear the incanted words were intended to gather power.

  I stopped to make sure I had everything I needed: religious text, silver cross, holy water, cane. Four checks, even though the last wasn’t much good in my weakened state. I would attempt the exorcism alone if I had to, though I was counting on Father Vick’s help. Assuming enough of him remained.

  Where the corridor ended, I peered around the corner. The candle light swelled into a large grotto, revealing the missing church officials.

  The bishop was a woman, I saw. She lay supine on the floor, gray hair piled under her head, back arching in spasmodic thrusts. Her closed eyes suggested she was either unconscious or entranced. The black-robed figure standing over her swayed with his back to me, those awful sounds emanating from his bowed head. He’d been incanting in the dark this whole time, which felt freaky as shit.

  I swallowed hard on a knot of fear and grief. Man, I had wanted so badly to be wrong.

  “Father Vick?” I called into the echoing space.

  If he heard me, he gave no sign. His robe continued to shudder with his guttural chants. Steeling my nerves, I stepped into the grotto. Off to one side were the blue bits of protective clothing Vega and I had donned and the demon had used to guide his shriekers. They would be at the detective’s apartment by now.

  I reached up with a shaking hand and inserted the candle into the eye socket of a dome-gazing skull. The swelling light revealed an elaborate bone pattern over the floor, one I recognized. The grotto had been made into a demonic casting circle, the convulsing bishop at its center.

  The demon was preparing an alchemy spell, taking the potent faith of the bishop and warping it into a black wrath that would empower him and enable his escape from the cathedral’s weakening hold.

  “I know you’re in there, Father,” I said to his back. I reached into my right jacket pocket and loosened the screw-on cap to the bottle of holy water. “I know you can hear me. The night the demon murdered the rector, you wrote the message on Father Richard’s back. You couldn’t name the demon. He wouldn’t let you. So you did the next best thing. You named a druid group, Black Earth, whose beliefs revolve around the imminent return of Sathanas, demon lord of Wrath.” The e
soteric Latin had likely come from an old prayer book. “You were trying to warn us.”

  The garbled incanting rose in pitch and urgency. I could feel Sathanas’s rage now, could feel how badly he wanted to tear me apart. But to turn from the spell would be to sever his connection to the bishop.

  I followed the dark, twisting umbilicus of energy from the demon’s head down to the aging woman’s heart. I would have to be careful. At this stage, any violent disruption—such as driving my sword through the demon or dousing him in holy water—could kill her.

  I needed Father Vick to work against Sathanas. And to do that, I needed to call him forth. Problem was, Father Vick’s hold, which had already begun to fail during the daytime, would be all but absent after dark. Demons ruled the night. And with a demon moon nearing its zenith?

  But Father Vick had wrested back enough control once to leave the “Black Earth” message. I hoped that walking him through what had happened would spur him to rebel again.

  “Yes, you’re possessed, Father,” I said. “The fifth rector of St. Martin’s took in the remains of thousands, to enrich himself, but he succumbed to the demon Sathanas in the process. The Church executed the rector and performed an exorcism. Malachi found the account in the archives and shared it with you and Father Richard. You weren’t convinced the exorcism had been done properly, though. You may even have sensed a shadow around his tomb. When Father Richard forbade you from performing a second exorcism, you attempted the rites at night, in secret.”

  I thought about the robed figure Effie’s ghost friend had seen muttering around Reverend Higham’s tomb. I was sure now that had been Father Vick. And that had been his mistake—attempting the exorcism at night.

  “The demon was more powerful than you anticipated,” I continued. “He overcame you and put you under his control. He had you retrieve Higham’s scrying mirror from the heritage room so he could contact those you sensed dabbled in magic.” It was the same mirror Father Vick had kept covered with the handkerchief. A mirror that would have shown the image of Reverend Higham to those on the receiving end. “Clifford, Chin, Flash, the others,” I said. “Sathanas dictated to them the spells to summon the shriekers. The night the demon contacted Clifford, Father Richard must have seen a light on in your room or overheard you. Not understanding your possessed state, he chastised you for practicing magic. In wrathful response, Sathanas followed Father Richard to the sacristy and murdered him.”