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

by Brad Magnarella

“Everson … verson … son.”

  2

  A pair of ochre-green eyes stared at me through the dark. I snort-gasped and tried to flail back. Tendrils were wrapping my arms, my torso. I heaved with my legs. The top of my head hit something solid.

  A snort sounded. “Nice to see you, too.”

  “Tabitha?” I shook my arms from the sheets and slid a hand between the headboard and my aching crown. I fought to get my bearings. I’d been in a dream, Marlow about to remove his gold mask. My cat calling my name must have awakened me. I looked around. Except for a crescent moon high in the window, the room was dark. “What time is it?”

  Her eyes blinked slowly. “Apparently, time for you to moan in your sleep again.”

  I set my legs over the side of the bed and sat up, the horror of the dream still prickling through me. “Sorry about that.”

  “I told you to lay off the magic before bed.”

  “Oh, should I have eaten my weight in rib eye instead?”

  Tabitha narrowed her eyes at me, then thudded down from the end table and sauntered back to her ottoman beneath the window. It wasn’t as comfortable as her divan at home—a fact she reminded me of daily—but we weren’t at home. The week before, Chicory had loaded us into his Volkswagen Rabbit and driven us to a safe house in New Jersey, an unassuming blue affair across the Hudson River. “To train you for your mission,” he’d explained. Though all he’d done so far was fuss inside his lab, shooing me away anytime I asked what he was up to. Even now, I could hear his muttering voice down the hallway.

  “I’m not the one having nightmares,” Tabitha said as she arranged herself into a large mound. “The fifth in five nights?”

  “Yeah … except this one was different.” I coughed to clear my sleep-clogged throat. “I was lost in a forest again, calling for my mother. She found me, but this time she didn’t have any answers. Couldn’t tell me how to get out. She just told me to run and hide.”

  “Run from what?” Tabitha asked.

  “From whom,” I said, remembering the way the flames had danced in the gold mask. “The Death Mage.”

  “He is all you’ve been talking about for the last week. No wonder you’re having nightmares.” She yawned and smacked her lips. “Waking everyone up,” she added in a mutter, eyelids sliding closed.

  “Everyone meaning you?” I asked testily. “Look, I don’t know if it’s occurred to you, but I’m shipping out soon, and there’s a chance—hell, maybe a good chance—I won’t be coming back.”

  The thought lanced through me. As punishment for willingly giving my blood to Lady Bastet, which was then stolen by Marlow, the Order was mandating that I infiltrate Marlow’s hideout and destroy Lich’s book. It was a daunting mission. Magic-users more powerful than me had tried and failed, my mother among them. Hence Marlow’s title as Death Mage.

  “I will miss you darling,” Tabitha said sleepily.

  “Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “But you’ll come back.”

  I looked at my cat, her words catching me by surprise. As a succubus, Tabitha had no divine powers, but hope flickered inside me anyway. “Oh yeah?” I asked cautiously.

  “You always do.”

  She had a point. Whether it was facing demon lords or ancient vampires, I had a knack for pulling something out of my hat at the last moment. Part of that went with being a magic-user. We carried a “luck quotient,” as Chicory called it. More accurately, we lived in a symbiotic relationship with magic, a force keen on being moved and manipulated. That relationship often led to sudden insights and synchronicities, especially in times of acute stress.

  But this challenge felt different—probably because I would be going up against another wizard, one much more powerful than I was. Not only would his luck quotient cancel mine, it would likely exceed it.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  Instead of answering, Tabitha began to snore. Shaking my head, I stood and paced the crowded guest bedroom. While Chicory had spent the last week shut up in his lab, I’d been devoting my time to reading from a selection of books he’d picked out as well as performing exercises to enable me to channel more energy. I did feel stronger, more focused, but would it be enough?

  I stopped at the window and released a shaky breath. The dream, my mother’s warning to run…

  The Order wouldn’t be sending you if they thought you would fail, I reminded myself. Granted, they were a mysterious, often confounding, organization whose directives didn’t make a ton of sense sometimes—all right, most times—and yet they had been around for several millennia, suggesting they possessed more than an inkling of what they were doing.

  You’re going to have to trust their judgment.

  I looked toward the door as a burst of expletives sounded from down the hallway.

  I would also have to trust that Chicory knew what the hell he was doing.

  I emerged from my room the next morning and shouted in alarm. Across the dining room table, my cane was in a state of complete disassembly. I ran up to examine the carnage. The blade was without a hilt. The white opal stone, usually embedded in the staff, sat on the table’s very edge. And a set of copper metal bands I hadn’t even known belonged to the cane were scattered everywhere.

  “My sword and staff!”

  “Crotchety old thing,” Chicory said, as though in agreement. My round little mentor appeared from the kitchen, blowing the steam from the mouth of a coffee mug. His mop of gray hair looked messier than usual, telling me he probably hadn’t slept. Is this what he’d been doing all night?

  “It—it’s in pieces,” I said, still not believing what I was seeing. Thin wood shavings covered the round table in what appeared to have been a failed attempt to inscribe runes into the staff. The result was chicken scratch.

  Chicory took a loud slurp of coffee as he arrived beside me. “I’ve been trying to give her a needed upgrade, but she’s not having it. Had to get a little rough with her, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re going to put it back together, right?”

  “Eventually,” he replied, scratching his stubbly chin. “I’ll let her sit like this for another day, see if that doesn’t temper her spirits. Rest assured, once I complete the upgrade, she’ll be better than new. And you’ll be better prepared. I never intentionally send a wizard to his death. Well, unless so ordered.”

  “I appreciate that,” I muttered, my gaze drifting over the scattered parts again. After ten years, the sword and staff had become extensions of me. I couldn’t imagine life without them.

  “There’s extra coffee, if you’d like some,” my mentor said.

  Dragging a hand through my bed head, I gave a begrudging nod and shuffled into the kitchen. “Speaking of preparations,” I called as I poured myself a mug of the strong-smelling brew. “When are we going to get into serious training? I mean, I appreciate the exercises and extra reading, but it’s not the same as having spells slung at you. Blood spells, in particular.”

  The coffee shook slightly in the mug as I lifted it to my lips. The blood Marlow had stolen could be used to cast any number of things, including a death spell. Though such spells did take time to prepare, that time was getting shorter.

  “Yes, yes, we’ll get to that,” Chicory replied irritably. “More important now is outfitting you.”

  I returned to the dining room, where my mentor was frowning over the cane parts, his bushy gray eyebrows nearly touching in the center. Did he know how to reassemble it? I pulled out a chair and sat.

  “Do you mind going over what that will entail?” I asked.

  “Outfitting you?” He lifted the tail of his corduroy sports jacket and hopped onto the chair across from me. I didn’t have to look to know his feet weren’t touching the floor. “Well, the first step is establishing a link to Marlow’s hideout and getting you inside. No sense teaching you magic you won’t be in a position to use. To that end, I’ve been tinkering with your blood.”

  “My blood?”

/>   He took another loud slurp of coffee. We’d only been living together for a week, and already his habits were starting to annoy me. Besides the slurping, there was his singing in a loud baritone in the bathroom as well as his tendency to leave dirty dishes everywhere. A small plate with a half-eaten slice of toast and curdled eggs from two days before sat precariously on a window sill. Were it not for the magic surrounding the old house, the place would have been thick with flies.

  “I drew a small sample from your neck the other night while you were asleep,” Chicory said. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Not at all,” I replied thinly.

  “Now, if Marlow is your father, about half of your magic came from him. The other half from your mother, of course. Fortunately, the qualities of the two are different enough that I’ve been able to set up a process that will distill out your mother’s portion. Once that process is complete, I’ll add an enhancer and re-infuse the blood back into you. For a time, your magical aura will be a dead ringer for Marlow’s.”

  “He won’t be able to sense me?” I asked, thinking about the hunting spell I’d cast a couple of weeks before. A hunting spell Marlow had detected and counterspelled, possessing Tabitha in the process. With three fingers, I traced the healed claw marks along my right cheek.

  “No,” Chicory confirmed. “You’ll be able to penetrate whatever defenses he’s employed and enter his domain unscathed.” He hesitated for a beat. “Again, assuming he’s your father.”

  “And once I’m inside?”

  “Well, ah…” He coughed into his fist. “We’ll have a plan, of course.”

  “Which is?”

  Chicory grumbled for a moment before his eyes seemed to sparkle with an idea. “You said you wanted to get on with your training? Advance to something a little more challenging?”

  “Yeah…” I answered carefully.

  “Well, I think I have just the thing.”

  He bustled away from the table and returned a moment later with a badly refolded map. He spread it over the table, knocking some of the cane parts onto the floor. My molars ground together as I stood and came around. The map showed a grid of Manhattan, circa 1930.

  “A bit outdated,” I remarked.

  “Here,” he said, tapping a brown square just north of Central Park.

  I read the label. “Grace Cathedral?”

  “They have a robe on exhibit believed to have been worn by John the Baptist. In fact, it belonged to a Franciscan monk who came along some centuries later, but the point here is that the robe is special. You see, this monk was a descendant of Saint Michael’s, but never told. An oversight by the Order, no doubt. In any case, he was an ascetic who took a vow of silence early in his career. For more than half a century, he walked softly and said not a word. It got to the point that his fellow monks were barely even aware he existed.”

  “And those qualities became instilled in the robe,” I said, guessing the rest.

  “Exactly, and can be bestowed upon the wearer.” He looked pointedly at me.

  “Wait, you’re asking me to steal the robe from the church?”

  “Borrow it,” Chicory countered. “We’ll put a duplicate in its place so as not to alarm anyone. When you complete your mission, we’ll return the original.”

  “If I complete my mission. But what happened to all of your highbrow talk about following the rules? Acting responsibly? Not taking stupid risks? Doesn’t this sort of fly in the face of that?”

  “Acting responsibly as a wizard,” Chicory said. “You’re not being asked to summon or perform dark magic. To the contrary, you’re obtaining an item in the service of opposing such magic. An item that belongs just as much to the Order as to the Church, after all.”

  I considered that for a moment. “And if I’m caught?”

  “Well, that’s sort of the point of the exercise, isn’t it? To not let that happen.”

  I sighed. I had just gotten back into the good graces of the city and press, not to mention Detective Vega. And now Chicory was suggesting I return to Manhattan and commit grand larceny. “Do I even need the robe?” I asked. “Why can’t I just mix a stealth potion?”

  Chicory’s eyebrows seemed to bristle as he glared up at me. “Because stealth potions wear off, and then mentors have to get involved.” I remembered him rescuing me from the band of angry druids in north Central Park the year before. “Not true for magical artifacts,” he finished.

  “I don’t have my sword and staff.” I looked dismally at the scattered parts.

  “I’ll give you a wand that’s ready for use. Less obtrusive and it won’t set off the metal detectors.”

  The wand was among several magical items that had come into the vampire Arnaud’s possession. Following the vampire’s demise, I acquired the items from the NYPD and gave them to Chicory for cleaning and redistributing. I still hadn’t mentioned Arnaud’s story about Grandpa stealing artifacts from fellow magic-users during the war against the Inquisition. I didn’t fully believe the story and wanted to check it out for myself—assuming the Death Mage didn’t kill me first. My more immediate concern, though, was staying out of jail.

  “Well, what about the church threshold?” I said lamely. “It’s not going to care for my, you know, companion.”

  “Who?”

  “Thelonious, my incubus.”

  “Hmm, then you better get an invite,” Chicory replied, refolding the map. The ungainly way he went about the job, ripping several of the seams, didn’t give me much hope for my cane.

  “How?” I asked.

  “That’s for you to figure out. Again, part of the point of the exercise.”

  “Great,” I muttered.

  3

  When Detective Vega raised her eyes from the scatter of files across her desk, the sharp concentration lines that converged in the center of her brow let out slightly. “Croft,” she said. “What’s up?”

  I showed her a plain cup of coffee I’d bought from a street vendor and placed it on the corner of her desk. “Gourmet roast.”

  She smiled wryly. “Thanks.”

  “Am I catching you at a bad time?”

  “Other than between a stabbing in Spanish Harlem and a double murder in Chelsea?” Fatigue weighed on her face when she shrugged. “At least we know it’s not ghouls. Do you have something for me besides coffee?”

  I noticed that several files on the right side of her desk were for the Lady Bastet murder investigation. Officially, the mystic’s murder remained an open case. I had promised to keep Vega in the loop on my end of things, which was the least I could do after the help she’d given me that summer. At some point she and I had stopped being adversaries and become allies. She had even introduced me to her son the last time I’d seen her.

  “Well, sort of part update, part request,” I said.

  She frowned as she smoothed back her black hair and refastened her ponytail. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”

  “Which do you want first?” I asked, closing the door to the din of the Homicide unit. I took a seat in one of the folding metal chairs that faced her desk.

  “Update,” she said.

  “The suspect’s name is Marlow Stokes.”

  Vega jotted it down. “Contact info?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  She raised her eyes, pen poised above the file.

  “He’s not exactly … in this world,” I said.

  “I’m listening.”

  I took a deep breath, reminding myself that Vega’s openness to the supernatural had come a long way in the last year. “Are you familiar with the Greenbrier Bunker?” I asked.

  “That place in West Virginia? Yeah, it was a relocation center for the U.S. Congress when we thought the nukes were gonna fly. The reps would survive while the rest of us got radiated.”

  “Look at you,” I said. “Miss U.S. History. Well, once upon a time, the magical order to which I belong faced a similar existential threat. They also built
a bunker, but in a parallel world—a thought pocket.”

  “A thought what?”

  “An imagined place made real, if that makes any sense. The thought pocket was called the Refuge. From the way my mentor describes it, the Refuge was modeled on a Grecian palace. Elevated, fortified, easy to defend. Anyway, the Order got through the crisis, but the Refuge sort of hung out in this parallel space.”

  “And that’s where Marlow is?”

  I nodded. “He accessed the Refuge decades ago and turned its powerful defenses to his own purposes. The Elders—the ones who created the thought pocket—can’t even access it.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Vega said. “So he’s beyond our reach?”

  “Maybe not. I told you that he murdered my mother, right? What I didn’t know at the time was that he might also be my father.”

  Vega’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, as if I needed a Freudian complex on top of everything else,” I muttered. “To make a long story short, because of my similarity to Marlow’s makeup, I might be able to slip inside the Refuge.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, I’m going to try to destroy an arcane book from which he gets his power. Once that’s done, he’ll be defenseless. My order will apprehend him and put him to death.” I nodded at the file for Lady Bastet. “If it helps you close the case, I’ll be willing to testify on the match between the residue found at the murder scene and Marlow’s brand of magic.”

  “You don’t sound very hopeful,” she said.

  “No? After the vampire situation, the DA’s office seems a lot more open to—”

  “Not about the case,” Vega interrupted. “The whole thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She set her pen down. “I’m getting to know you, Croft. When you believe in something, you get this intense, almost maniacal, look in your eyes. And when you don’t, your eyes just sort of go dead.”

  I wasn’t aware of that about myself, but now that she mentioned it, the backs of my eyes felt heavy, like they were trying to retreat into my skull. “Just a lot of unknowns right now, I guess. Whether or not he’s my father, Marlow is a powerful mage. And I’m, well, a wizard with about a decade of practice under my belt—pre-puberty in magical terms.”