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

by Brad Magnarella

  I peeked back through the reeds. In the faint moonlight, I could see the rustling trees that marked the bugbear’s progress. I took several crouching steps backwards before the sounds of gunfire and goblin chatter stopped me. Escaping the bugbear meant fleeing into the heart of combat. Without my protection, I wouldn’t make it ten yards before an arrow or bullet found me.

  But I had to locate Vega. Had to get everyone out of the park.

  Red eyes appeared above the reeds. They shifted from side to side before narrowing in on me. A low growl rumbled across the water. I readied my sword, but I wasn’t dealing with a fire-soaked ghoul. This creature was at full strength and had all of his senses. I would get one thrust or swing. Anything short of a lethal result, and I was looking at an express train to the afterlife.

  Yeah, screw that.

  I turned and ran. I’d take my chances in the combat zone—and take Harry here with me. The bugbear crashed into the water at my back. With any luck, he would eat bullets before I ate arrows. Right now, I was eating a whipping series of tree branches, and they were slowing me down. I panted out a Word of protection, but no shield would take shape.

  Something whistled near my head. An arrow.

  “Vega!” I called, more from desperation now than anything.

  “Croft,” she shouted back.

  My heart jerked, and I veered toward her voice. She was alive! My new route took me around and down the hillock I’d been ascending. I scrambled and slid past massive boulders.

  “Vega,” I repeated.

  “Over here,” she said.

  I found her in a protected pocket where three boulders came together. She was sitting against the far boulder, aiming an automatic rifle toward the opening. Her helmet was off, and I caught a shine of blood along her hairline. I glanced over my shoulder before crouching beside her.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She winced. “Got clubbed in the head.”

  “By big, bad, and hairy?”

  “I emptied my pistol at it. Not sure whether I hit it or just scared it off. What in the hell was it?”

  “A bugbear,” I said, looking back again. “And you’re lucky. Not many live to tell the tale.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not feeling very lucky.” She rubbed her right knee, the leg straight out in front of her. “Twisted something when I went down. I can’t put any weight on it.”

  “Where’s your helmet?” I asked, searching around. “I need you to contact the others, clear them out.”

  “The blow cracked it in half. Communication’s shot.”

  “Crap,” I muttered. “How are you fixed for ammo?”

  From feet away, a scream sounded. Terror threw me in a half spin. The bugbear’s silhouette filled the opening to our sanctuary, red eyes pulsing. He screamed again and pumped his club overhead. I raised my sword in a sad effort to parry the inevitable blow.

  A deafening burst of gunfire resounded through our space. The bugbear danced like a giant epileptic and fell backwards. He crashed to the ground with a solid whoomp.

  “Holy crap,” I whispered, watching the creature’s chest deflate.

  “Fully loaded until just then,” Vega said, answering my earlier question.

  I lowered my sword. “Nice shooting.”

  “Thanks, but we’ve got bigger problems.”

  “Yeah, I know. The goblin horde.”

  “Worse.”

  “Worse?” Something gave my gut a hard twist. “What could be worse?”

  “Command and control was ordering our evacuation when I lost communication. Cole—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “He ordered your evacuation?” Even as I asked, I realized the only gunfire I was picking up now was sporadic and distant.

  Thank God for that.

  “He’s ordering a napalm strike,” Vega finished.

  I choked on a fresh fit of panic. “A strike? When?”

  But I could already hear the distinctive bat-bat-bat of rotary blades. Attack choppers were incoming.

  20

  I now understood why Captain Cole had tried to stop me from leaving the command-and-control tent. He had just ordered his helicopter division to drop a few hundred pounds of liquid hell. It didn’t change anything, though. I still would have seen that Vega made it out of the park.

  “If I support you, do you think you can stand?” I asked her.

  “Not like I have a choice.” Gripping the automatic rifle in her left hand, Vega let me underneath her right side and grasped my neck. I wrapped an arm around her upper back, and we stood together.

  “The shortest way out is the way I came in,” I said.

  Vega drew a sharp breath between her teeth as she took her first hopping step. With me stooping and her limping, we made our way down the hillock. With each step, I braced for the sting of an arrow, but none came. I listened for goblins, searched the surrounding trees for their movement. Vega seemed to be doing the same, the rifle aimed from her abdomen. I guessed the thundering of the approaching helicopters had driven them back into hiding.

  Vega and I were squelching through the mud around the pond when something heavy crashed away to the west. Another bugbear? The explosion that followed told me no. Fiery light broke through the trees, accompanied seconds later by an intense, oily-smelling heat. Crap, they were dropping the napalm.

  “Path is just over there,” I panted. “We’ll take the stairs out.”

  The next explosion was closer, the heat like raw blisters over my skin.

  Vega grunted as we burst onto the crumbling path. We were paces from the staircase when she staggered. I squeezed her perspiring body to my side to keep her from falling.

  She swore. “My good leg’s giving out.”

  “Muscle fatigue,” I said, sweat pouring from my own body. I peeked back and beheld an apocalyptic scene. A large swath of park was in black-red flames. The helicopter’s first pass had targeted the park’s lower west side, but I could hear them circling, coming in from the east. They would drop their remaining tanks in the vicinity of where we were standing.

  “Go for it,” Vega said, already knowing what I was planning.

  I stooped and placed my shoulder against her stomach. She folded over my back until I could get an arm around her thighs and lift her fireman style. I trudged forward, gaining speed, and hit the staircase at a jog.

  “Shit!” she cried.

  I thought the jostling motion had hurt her leg until I realized arrows were clattering against the steps around us.

  Shit is right, I thought.

  I glanced back to see the short, stooped silhouettes of two goblins at the bottom of the steps. I high-stepped as an arrow tore a chunk of fabric off my pant leg. I felt Vega moving her rifle around into a shooting position. I paused at a landing midway up the staircase so she could aim. At the same moment gunfire burst from my back, something knifed into my right calf. I went straight down with a holler. Vega tumbled from my shoulder.

  “Nailed them both,” she shouted above the roar of the choppers.

  “And one of them nailed me.” I turned my leg over until I could see the dark shaft of the arrow. It was in there good.

  “We’ll take care of that once we’re out,” she said, crawling toward the final flight of steps.

  When she looked back to make sure I was following, the fire reflected in her eyes showed her fear—not for herself, but for her son. The idea of him growing up motherless. I nodded and crawled after her, remembering the fear and sadness my own mother had felt in her final moments.

  Fresh detonations shook the earth. A chopper swept low. More napalm tanks crashed and tumbled into the woods behind us. Too close. We weren’t going to survive their explosions.

  I said a quick prayer and shouted, “Protezione!”

  Light sputtered around my staff’s orb, then, breaking from its water-logged lethargy, came brilliantly to life. The light wrapped us in a spherical shield as fire roared from the woods and engulfed us.

&n
bsp; “Respingere!” I cried, channeling the force toward the landing downstairs from us.

  In a whoosh of flames, the counterforce launched us into a weightless parabola. We cleared the park and were soon plummeting toward the street. On impact, the sphere shattered into sparks. We rolled over asphalt, my sword and staff clattering away in different directions.

  Vega and I came to a rest near the far side of the street. I looked up, road-rashed and reeling. Beyond my splayed legs, fire consumed the lower park and presumably the remaining goblins and bugbears.

  I let my head fall back again. “Holy hell.”

  Thelonious’s creamy white light lapped around the edges of my consciousness, my incubus sensing weakness. I had expended all of my energy with those final invocations. I looked over to where Vega was scooting past me. Using her arms, she lifted herself onto the curb. She sat there without speaking, in shock, firelight glistening over the skin of her face.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “I owe you, Croft,” she said, her voice distant.

  For a moment, I thought she said I love you. A conflicting brew of emotions swam through me, casting up strange vapors, until the words resolved into what she’d actually said.

  “Let’s just call it even,” I replied.

  “No. I mistrusted you … one of the few good guys in the city.”

  From the direction of Grand Army Plaza, footsteps pounded up the street. I turned my head to find Captain Cole flanked by two NYPD officers. A block beyond them, more officers were working to keep the press in their cordoned-off zone. Half of the cameras were aimed at the inferno, the other half at me.

  Cole arrived in front of us, his expression either one of concern or anger, I couldn’t tell. Everything was going hazy. His gaze fell to the arrow in my leg.

  “Ambulances are on the way,” he said.

  “How many did we lose?” I asked, not wanting to know, but needing to.

  “You don’t have to worry about that right now,” he replied.

  “How many?” I repeated.

  “Thirty-six men.”

  Thirty-six. The number echoed numbly in my skull.

  I had buried myself in the Central Park operation. I had poured in everything—my resources as an academic, as a wizard—to assess the monster threat, to determine the safest, most effective way to combat it. But I’d been kidding myself. With specters of revenge whispering around me, I’d missed things that should have been obvious. The goblins’ tunnel networks under Paris were storied. Why couldn’t their race have done the same under Central Park? And now, as a result of those oversights, more than a third of the Hundred were dead. Men with wives and children…

  “I’ve already spoken to the mayor,” Cole said. “He’s meeting with advisors to determine the next step.”

  The first ambulances rounded the corner and slowed toward us. Beneath the strobing lights, rear doors opened. Attendants in blue coveralls emerged. Thelonious’s growing presence made me waver as I pushed myself to my feet. I couldn’t even feel the arrow in my calf anymore.

  “Her first,” I slurred, nodding at Vega.

  The attendants wrapped her in a foil blanket and, squinting from the heat, helped her into the closer ambulance. Her eyes lingered on mine until the doors closed. I bent to retrieve my sword and staff, slotting them back together. When two more attendants approached me, I turned away in a limping half circle, the creamy waves really storming in now.

  I didn’t fight it.

  “Croft,” Cole barked. “Where are you going?”

  “To catch a cab,” I said faintly.

  21

  Foul smoke laced the air outside my apartment the next morning. Hungover and sore, I limped up the street alongside a truck delivering morning editions of the Gazette. That the delivery was late told me printing had been delayed to carry the news of last night’s operation. I didn’t know how the mayor had spun the bungled job and didn’t want to. Adjusting my sunglasses above my fake beard, I looked away so as not to catch any headlines.

  I did the same on the bus ride to Midtown, averting my eyes from the spread-open papers. I didn’t even want to glimpse the expressions of the commuters reading them. Smoke from Central Park drifted past the windows. North of Twenty-third Street, it became so thick that I started to see pedestrians in surgical masks.

  I entered Midtown College through a back door and removed my disguise. I had nearly canceled my morning class, but it was almost finals week, and I’d already canceled last week’s classes to work on the operation. The college was one bridge I couldn’t afford to burn.

  My right calf throbbed with magic as I climbed the empty stairwell. I’d awoken before dawn in a doorway in Times Square, a flat bourbon bottle between my legs and quarters everywhere. I did the post-Thelonious check, patting my pockets for wallet and keys. Both there. Clothing, cane, and necklace intact as well. I then craned my body around to read a flashing sign overhead. Thelonious had ended up at a peep show, which explained the quarters. His visit this time had been short and tame. Maybe he was tiring of using me as a vessel. For once, though, I hadn’t minded the oblivion.

  Upon returning home and treating the arrow wound, I had a sober hour to reflect on the horror of last night’s operation. Of what I had allowed to happen. Thirty-six dead. Men who would still be living if I’d been thinking clearly instead of about what the mage had done to my mother, what he could still do to me.

  I had decided then and there that I was no good to anyone until I hunted him down and destroyed him.

  That would be my priority.

  In that vein, if there were any potential positives to come from last night’s operation, it would be my removal from the program. Budge’s first act to save face. He didn’t need a wizard now, anyway. He could simply napalm the rest of Central Park. He wouldn’t get his cookout, no—at least not the kind he wanted—but neither would he suffer the fallout from further casualties. And he’d have dump trucks full of charred creatures to show for his effort.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said as I stepped into my classroom.

  Two students stared back at me: Denise and Brie. I checked my watch as I unshouldered my satchel and dropped it onto my desk. I wasn’t that late.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “We didn’t think you’d come,” Denise said.

  I squinted at the young woman before realizing there must have been something in the paper about my injuries. “Oh, that. No, no, I’m fine.” I flexed my right knee a couple of times to show her.

  “Is it true?” Brie asked.

  The words seemed to tremble past her lips. I set my leg back down and studied her again. Was I missing something? The two young women were among my more enthusiastic students—both added after the ghoul operation—but now their faces were taut and pale.

  “Is what true?” I asked.

  Denise took a folded newspaper from her bag and pushed it to the edge of her desk as though it were an explosive device. I broke my rule by looking at it and nearly choked at what I saw.

  Above the side column that featured my headshot was a single-word headline:

  TRAITOR

  I lifted the paper from her desk and unfolded it. For a dizzying moment, I was in my mother’s staggering, bleeding body with that word, that awful word, being hurled at me from all sides.

  NEW YORK - Everson Croft, the wizard consultant to Mayor Lowder’s ambitious eradication program, gave faulty information that led to the slaughter of three dozen NYPD officers, a credible source claimed.

  The men lost their lives in last night’s operation to clear the southern end of Central Park.

  “Croft knew the Hundred would be overwhelmed by creatures,” the source, who asked to remain anonymous, said. “Which was why he underestimated the threat. He wanted the operation to fail, and fail spectacularly.”

  According to Police Commissioner Warren, the operation did not fail, thanks to the decisive actions of Captain Lance Cole. “He made the right c
all, meeting the overwhelming force with attack helicopters and napalm,” Warren said. “Indeed, Cole may be the only reason the Hundred wasn’t reduced to zero.”

  As for Croft’s motive, the anonymous source said the wizard is secretly working for the city’s banking class.

  “With Mayor Lowder close to securing the federal bailout, the city will no longer be in the thrall of the big firms,” the source said. “The firms know this. They’re fighting it. They need the mayor to lose his reelection bid, which means denying him any success. Croft was a plant to that end.”

  Though the large firms, including Chillington Capital, have contributed millions to Lowder’s opponent, the source declined to speculate on whether Abby Azonka knew of the arrangement.

  “But there’s something Azonka should know,” the source said. “She’s accepting money from vampires, and I don’t mean the figurative kind. Let’s just say not all of the city’s creatures hide underground.”

  When asked whether Croft was one such creature, the source said, “No, but he might as well be.”

  The mayor’s office declined to comment on the story, declaring it under investigation.

  In the meantime, the city is planning a dedication for the slain officers today at noon, and…

  I returned the paper to Denise and stepped slowly backwards until I was leaning against my desk. The room revolved around me. “…bad information … wanted the operation to fail … a plant…” My two students looked on worriedly as I choked down a surge of liquor and bile.

  Last night Cole had said the mayor was meeting with advisors to determine the next step. Was this what the fae had come up with? Was this their solution to the bungled operation? To throw me under the bus?