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

by Brad Magnarella

  He’d also had Father Vick leak the murder to the press later.

  Sathanas’s breaths gurgled in Father Vick’s throat. Was the struggle beginning?

  “I can only imagine your horror,” I said. “But you fought, Father. You named a demon who didn’t want to be named. And as long as there’s any will left in there, you have to fight again.”

  “Go away,” the figure garbled in an inhuman voice.

  Sathanas? Father Vick? I couldn’t tell.

  “Father, listen to me—”

  With a final eruption of words, something appeared above his head. A dagger. He was going to finish the spell by driving it into the bishop’s heart, releasing the last of her energy. I dropped everything and scrambled forward. With bones rolling underfoot, it felt as though I was running in a dream. But the space separating us collapsed, and my lowered shoulder struck his ribs in the back. His incantation broke off in a wet roar that shook the grotto.

  I wrapped my aching arms around his waist and continued to drive with my legs. He was larger than Malachi, more solidly built, but I managed to topple him. We crashed down into the bones that edged the casting circle.

  When he rotated his head, I delivered a bone-crunching right to his jaw.

  He fell limp, the dagger tumbling from his outstretched hands. I turned quickly to the bishop. She’d fallen into quiet repose, but I couldn’t tell whether she was breathing or not. In either case, I could no longer sense the warping energies of the spell. What that meant, I wasn’t sure.

  “Father Vick,” I whispered, shaking his shoulder.

  He stirred, and I helped him onto his back. When his face rotated into the candlelight, I recoiled in horror. In addition to his ears and nose, blood had been pouring from his eyes. He hadn’t just been fighting to maintain the faith of the cathedral these past days. Father Vick had been fighting to maintain himself. How he’d lasted this long, I had no idea.

  “Everson?” he mumbled. He blinked, then stared in a way that told me he couldn’t see through the red skein that coated his eyeballs and gummed up lashes.

  “It’s me, Father,” I said. “But we have work to do.” I left him to retrieve the holy items I’d dropped. When I returned, I arranged them quickly beside him. Remembering I’d loosened the cap to the holy water, I pulled the bottle from my jacket pocket, relieved to find only a little of the water had dribbled out.

  Father Vick pawed for me. “Are you still here?”

  “Yes.” I clasped the back of his hand and squeezed it. “You’re under the possession of a demon lord, Father. We need to exorcise him. I have all the implements here. Tell me what to do, what to read. Quickly.”

  His eyes winced in agony, then seemed to fix on mine. “I’m so sorry, Everson,” he whispered. “I wasn’t deceiving you when we spoke. I just … I didn’t know the things I was doing…”

  “Sathanas was doing,” I corrected him. “But you’re back now, and I have your Bible. We can drive him out.”

  After another wince, he nodded heavily. “Yes, yes … all right.” Father Vick sounded ripped up inside, but more like himself, the awful garbling gone from his voice. “Begin with the prayer.”

  I flipped open the Latin Bible to the section he indicated and began to read. “Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis…”

  As I moved the silver cross over Father Vick’s chest, a part of me felt like a fraud. I wasn’t ordained. I hadn’t even attended a Mass in ten years—during which time I managed to contract an incubus spirit and challenge a core belief on which St. Martin’s was based. But I shut that all away and focused on the power of the words, driving them into Father Vick. I concluded the opening prayer, making the sign of the cross twice more.

  Father Vick’s next wince turned into a grunting cry. His head whiplashed back, bloody teeth bared. But for the first time, hope stirred inside me. It wasn’t pretty, but the exorcism seemed to be working.

  “C’mon, Father,” I whispered as I checked the next steps. “Hang in there.”

  I opened the bottle of holy water and wet the first two fingers of my right hand. I touched the moist pads to his right ear and then his left, saying, “Ephpheta, quod est, Adaperire.”

  Steam hissed up, and Father Vick released another cry. I was reaching for his lips when my hand hesitated. Had he just cried … or laughed? The sound hardened and took on a cruel rhythm, until there was no longer any doubt. I backed onto my haunches, ice water breaking through me.

  “Father Vick?” I asked.

  His grinning face shot up like a Jack-in-the-box, but it was no longer his. The smile was too large, too mocking. His irises had blackened and spread, taking on fierce glints of red. And the skin between his brows was fissuring, as though someone had laid into it with an axe.

  “Fight him, Father,” I urged, splashing him with holy water. “Fight, dammit!”

  The wet laughter became riotous as, with blood streaming down his face, the demon rose to his full height. I stumbled backwards, the holy items falling from me. Though I couldn’t see it, I could hear the water glugging from the tipped-over bottle. I imagined it seeping through layers of bones, lost.

  “Stupid wizard,” Sathanas taunted in that awful voice. “You cannot banish a demon lord.”

  I watched as his robe began to shift and jut out in places, as though something were emerging from Father Vick’s body. Something was, I realized in horror: the massive form of the demon. The fissure growing along his forehead broke through his nose in a crackling burst and then split his grinning lips. Oh God, Father. His ears sloughed off next. When horns erupted through his red-bearded cheeks, the little strength in my legs gave out, and I collapsed to the floor.

  47

  The last vestiges of Father Vick dropped away, and a demon lord crouched inside the grotto, horrid wings scraping the walls. Horns studded his face, including two black blades that erupted from his temples like a Brahma bull’s. A clawed hand tore away the remains of the robe, revealing a grotesque fusion of muscles and exoskeleton. At the demon’s back, a barbed tail raked the bones.

  I struggled to see the being analytically, even as I began shoving myself away. Demon lords were elementals, expressions of our darkest emotions and urges. No pure embodiments of the elemental virtues remained to oppose them—only the lineage of Saint Michael. Me, in other words. And right now I was about as dangerous to this thing as a chewed-up sock.

  Sathanas’s laughter died off. “Alone,” he rumbled. ‘The poor wizard is all alone.”

  I eyed the bishop, who had begun to stir. Had the demon pulled enough power from her to break the cathedral’s threshold? The million dollar question. If I managed to escape with the bishop while the demon remained entrapped, I could alert the Order, bring in Elder-level magic.

  Assuming they listen, I thought.

  Sathanas’s fiery red eyes tracked mine. Bones crunched under his hoofed foot as he stepped over the bishop, separating us.

  “Alone,” he repeated. “All alone. How does that make you feel, wizard?”

  His words penetrated my mind, cracking like flint against my resentment toward the Order. Dark sparks kicked up inside me.

  “Yes, angry,” Sathanas said, hungrily. “And rightfully so. You have been threatened, dragged over jagged stones, abandoned like a pathetic pup. And by the same ones you have so dutifully served.”

  I struggled to suppress my crackling rage.

  “And what about those who prattle of cultivating knowledge, delivering justice, and yet who gleefully deny you both?”

  He was speaking of Midtown College now, the NYPD. Despite my efforts, the sparks inside me swelled and broke into flames. I watched them climb the administration wing of the college, the walls of One Police Plaza. And as the flames blackened the institutions and pulled them down, an ecstatic energy beat in time with my heart. I was becoming the powerful wizard I knew myself to be. Before I could recoil from the dark fantasy, Sathanas spoke again.

  �
��And this holy place,” he sneered. “You know what they did to your forebears. Rounding them up like animals. Beheading them. Burning them at the stake while they screamed for mercy.”

  Fresh images of the Inquisition slashed through my mind’s eye, too horrible to watch, too horrible to look away. I witnessed a woman I knew to be a direct ancestor pursued and hacked to death, her head paraded on a pike. Fury roared through me, searing my injuries closed, shaking hot tears from my eyes.

  “Make no mistake, they hate you, wizard. Hate you. They will come for you again.” I didn’t recoil as Sathanas extended a grotesque hand toward me, horned wings looming above. “I feel your power,” he said as he pulled me to my feet. “But it can be so much more, wizard, if you would only claim it.”

  Ugly or not, Sathanas was speaking to emotions that had been swirling inside me like combustible fuel. I was sick and tired of being marginalized and threatened. Take the Order, a bureaucracy with a God complex. Everything I had learned since my earliest training had come from my own initiative, not the Order. They hadn’t assigned me a mentor in Chicory, but a goddamned warden. Now the Order was threatening me with death, and for what? Being a wizard? Why should I feel any allegiance to them? Why shouldn’t I seek power elsewhere? To defend myself—and, if it came to it one day, to overthrow the Elders?

  “Yes,” Sathanas hissed, “you know it to be true.”

  Whoa, Skywalker, I thought from a distance. This is a demon talking, a master manipulator. And you’re letting him inside your head.

  I took a step back, but Sathanas quickly closed the space, his nightmare face bowing low. “There is no sin in passion,” he insisted, his eyes like stoked coals. “No sin in righteous anger. I will teach you to cultivate it, bring it to its glorious expression. You have no idea the power, wizard. All who once stepped on you will come to cower at your feet.”

  Over the years, I had resorted to wisecracks and self-deprecating humor to deflect my anger. But the anger felt so much richer. So much more … redemptive. I ached now to punish those who had wronged me, even if it meant destroying them. I burned for them to know my terrifying power. A malicious smile broke across my face. Yes, that was true redemption.

  And yet…

  “What do you get from the deal?”

  “What do you mean, wizard?” Sathanas demanded.

  The flames inside me began to thin, as though reason were pulling oxygen from them. “A demon does not give selflessly,” I said, my voice strengthening. “There’s something you want.”

  Huge black knuckles cracked inside the clenching fist he held out. “Like you, wizard,” he boomed, “I wish to exist according to my nature.” Fire breathed inside him. His body turned an incandescent red, and smoke plumed from his horrid wings. “I wish to be free.”

  That’s all? I thought dryly, the anger guttering lower, the fire it had stoked leaving me. Mortal pains broke throughout my body, and I staggered against my cane.

  But why is Sathanas appealing to me?

  My gaze slid from the demon to the bishop, who remained down. Her faith, twisted from her, had given the demon form. But because I had ended the ceremony prematurely, he must not have acquired the power to break his confinement. He needed fresh fuel. He was trying to stoke my wrath into a force he could command. He would use it to free himself, then he would destroy me.

  Unless I used that wrath to destroy him first.

  I met his blistering gaze.

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  48

  I listened as Sathanas stormed above me, recounting the times I had been slighted, shoved aside, stepped on. I opened myself to the dark, manipulative fingers writhing through my mind, twisting my thoughts. I nodded at the rush of charges and insinuations he leveled—some against those I loved. I allowed the flames of indignation to rear up again, to roar through my compassion, my reason.

  And with the frothing wrath came power. God, the power. It didn’t require a mental prism to channel. It was already raging inside me. The demon Sathanas hadn’t lied about that.

  But amid the exhilaration, I clung like sin to a single mantra:

  He’ll use you and then kill you. He’ll use you and then kill you. He’ll use—

  “Drink in the power, wizard,” he said. “Let it become you.”

  At the potent suggestion, something withered to ash inside me. The last of my will. Flames gushed into the space, and I lost the mantra. A beautiful weightlessness overcame me. I was levitating, phantom fire roaring around my flapping coat. I’d read of magic users becoming demigods, but holy hell. Why would someone not elect this power, already latent inside him?

  Sathanas cackled in delight as he poked a single talon against my shoulder, rotating me until I was facing away from the grotto. “Now, train your vengeance on those who wronged you.”

  Their faces flashed through my mind’s eye—Professor Snodgrass, Detective Vega, Chicory, others from my past—and yes, I hated them all. I drew my sword and staff apart. The steel blade glowed red hot, orange flames licking up and down its length. I would break from the cathedral, climb into the red-lit night like a glorious archangel, and rain hellfire on my enemies.

  But there was something I was supposed to remember.

  “Go now,” Sathanas said. “Break the hold of this wicked, wretched place.”

  I flew forward several feet, then wheeled with a thundering “FUOCO!”

  The forces that roared down my sword and staff were more concentrated than anything I’d ever commanded. Like jet fuel, they merged into a single column of fire that broke against Sathanas’s chest. In blissful release, I watched him blast across the grotto. Flames plumed as Sathanas’s form drove into the rear wall, bones and skulls erupting around him.

  When the catacombs fell still again, Sathanas was buried, save for a black flap of wing and his serpentine tail, which lay limp beside the bishop. My wrath spent, I fell to the grotto floor, weary smoke rising from me. But I couldn’t rest. I sheathed my sword and crawled to the bishop’s side.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “Can you walk?”

  She looked from the demon’s tail back to me, her face creased with fear. “I believe so.”

  I helped her up, wrapping an arm around her waist, even though I wasn’t in much better shape. Her first few steps were uncertain, but by the time we reached the grotto entrance, she was walking under her own power. By some miracle, the candle in the skull’s socket had remained lit, and I removed it and handed it to her.

  “You lead,” I said. “I’ll watch our rear.”

  I followed her from the grotto. As we turned the corner, I saw that Sathanas’s impact had jarred the bones from the corridor walls such that we were facing larger drifts than when I’d arrived. With her short stature, the bishop had to crawl over the first pile. I peered nervously over a shoulder.

  “Father Victor brought me down to the basement,” she said in a gravely voice, “allegedly to show me something. Then he pressed a cloth over my nose and mouth. Chloroform, I suspect.”

  “That wasn’t Father Victor,” I said as I helped her over the next drift. “In trying to exorcise a malevolent presence from these grounds, he became possessed. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know what he was facing. The creature back there is an ancient demon lord. He murdered Father Richard and was preparing to do the same to you. Were it not for the will that remained in Father Victor, the demon would have succeeded and escaped. So please, remember him in that way.”

  As had happened with my parting words to Malachi, another layer of my prism seemed to harden. More of my magic-born power returned.

  “And who are you?” the bishop asked.

  I thought for a moment. “Father Vick was a teacher and friend.”

  We were halfway to the staircase when the catacombs began to shake again. A roar erupted from the grotto. Even as I tried to speed our pace, the bishop peered behind us, eyes huge.

  “Wizard,” Sathanas’s voice boomed.

  “
Go,” I told her. “Those stairs lead to the basement. Climb them and get out of the cathedral. Then put all of the faith you have into the sanctity of this place. It will prevent him from escaping.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I drew my cane apart and called light to my staff. “Delay him.”

  A hand, strong and maternal, pressed between my shoulder blades. “I’ve never met you,” she said, “but I recognize you now, Everson. Father Victor spoke of you. He praised your benevolence. He said you would become a powerful ally one day, and he was right.”

  Her warmth and words undermined my fear. For a moment, I glimpsed Father Vick beside us, a white robe swimming around him. When I turned to look, though, the illusion vanished, and there was only a mound of skeletal remains.

  “Stupid wizard,” Sathanas boomed over his growing footfalls.

  The warmth between my shoulder blades swelled with a gentle pressure that lingered even as I heard the bishop climbing away behind me. Cinching my grip on sword and staff, I stepped forward.

  “I hear you, demon,” I said.

  With any luck, my blast had weakened him. I couldn’t destroy him, but with the power I now possessed, I could offer a large enough speed bump for the bishop to escape. The demon would have nothing to draw on following my death. He would remain trapped. What happened next would be up to the Order, but hopefully I’d stirred up enough dust to get their attention.

  When Sathanas rounded the corner, I staggered back. What I’d just said about him being weakened? Forget it. He was larger than ever, his horned and ripped physique radiating fiery power. He stooped into the corridor, bones smoking to black dust around him.