“Isn’t your order helping you?”
“There is someone training me, yeah,” I said, picturing Chicory frowning down at the hopeless mess of my cane across the table. “But that sort of brings me to the request part.”
“You mean the part I’m not going to like?”
“Probably not.”
She sighed and circled a hand for me to continue.
“All right, on the off chance I’m arrested tonight…” I rubbed the back of my neck. “…can I count on you to intervene?”
She lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “Arrested for what?”
I told her about the magical robe and how it could offer me extra protection inside the Refuge. “It’ll only be for a few days,” I assured her. “And there will be a replica up in the meantime.”
“Stealing is stealing, Croft. But stealing from a church?”
“Believe me, I know how sketchy that sounds. Especially since it’s my denomination. But with Marlow trying to call forth an evil being, I don’t think the Church would disapprove. I mean, one of the reasons churches came into being was to act as a bastion against this very thing.”
“Then why not just ask them for the robe?”
“I do have an in with the Bishop of New York,” I said, thinking about the official I’d rescued from the demon Sathanus the year before, “but the request would still have to go up the chain. We’re talking weeks or months, and with no guarantee they’d agree to the request.”
“And you don’t have weeks or months.” Vega lifted the coffee from the corner of her desk, cracked the plastic tab from the lid, and took a sip. She grimaced and set the cup back down. “All right.”
I blinked. “Really?”
But I didn’t need to ask. I could tell by her expression that my reasoning had gotten through. Though the law remained important to Vega, she had seen enough to know the law had to be weighed against larger threats—ones the mundane world wouldn’t necessarily understand.
I smiled in appreciation.
“Just do me a favor,” she said.
“Sure. Anything.”
“Don’t get caught.”
4
I stood on the edge of a knot of tourists, several of them snapping photos of Grace Cathedral’s hand-carved front doors. “…modeled on the doors from its sister cathedral in Florence,” our guide was saying. I had signed up for the final church tour of the day, a one-hour in and out, though I wasn’t planning on coming out. Not with this group, anyway.
I made a small adjustment to my fake beard—a precaution so no one would recognize me as the “star” of the mayor’s recent eradication campaign—and listened as the guide finished her explanation of the doors.
“Now, if you’ll follow me, we’re going to go inside and look at the famous mural above the doorway.”
I followed the group as far as the threshold. A curtain of energy hummed and pushed against me. I felt Thelonious shift uncomfortably, a dark spirit shying from the divine light.
“Are you coming?” the guide asked impatiently.
She was standing just beyond the threshold, the tour group filing through a metal detector behind her.
“Oh, can I come in?” I asked.
“You paid for the tour, right?”
I showed her my wrist band. “So that means I can…?” I gestured toward the door.
Her eyes widened as though to ask, What are you, some kind of idiot?
Just give me a goddamned invite, lady, I thought.
“Yes?” I prompted, gesturing at the door again.
“Um, yeah.”
That was all it took. With the personal invitation, the threshold relented. Though the ley energy here wasn’t as powerful as at St. Martin’s, I felt a portion of my wizarding power fall away as I stepped through the doorway and into the church’s cool interior. Fortunately, I was only planning on casting a few minor invocations.
“All right,” the guide said when we had reassembled beyond security. “If you’ll look straight overhead, you’ll see…”
I tuned her out as I got my bearings. We were standing at one end of the massive nave. At the other end, past a series of statues, stained-glass windows, and iron gates that led onto side chapels, was the main altar. According to Chicory, the robe was on display near the altar, in the baptistery.
It took almost the full hour for the tour to arrive at the baptistery, a small, circular room with a child-sized baptism pool on a raised dais at its center. The water gurgled quietly as we moved past the stone basin.
“If you’ll direct your attention up here,” the guide said, “we have a very special piece on exhibit.”
I stopped looking for a pump in the basin and raised my eyes to the far wall. About halfway up, between a pair of colorful saints images and encased in glass, was a tattered brown cassock, sleeves spread.
“The robe belonged to John the Baptist and was worn during his later years,” the guide continued. “For centuries, it was believed to bestow divine protection on the wearer.”
Let’s hope you’re right about that second bit, I thought.
As the tourists moved in to snap photos, I peered around. The security appeared basic. Iron gate over the entranceway, one security camera, probably an alarm on the glass case. I imagined that a guard or two patrolled at night, but the acoustics of the cathedral would make them easy to keep track of. Underneath my shirt, tucked into the back of my pants, was the ringer.
The tour ended back in the nave with an invitation for us to look around on our own for the final few minutes. Stepping into a shadowy archway, I pulled the wand from my inside coat pocket and whispered, “Oscurare.” Even though the church threshold had sheared off a chunk of my power, the wand had no trouble absorbing the immediate light, deepening the shadows around me.
I proceeded through the archway and into an empty corridor.
Before long, I found an unlocked office that looked as though it was being used for storage. I slipped inside, hunkered into a corner behind a stack of chairs, and waited for nightfall.
From my hiding place, I listened to the cathedral being secured, the echoes of doors closing, locks snapping home. I waited another hour for a wandering set of footsteps to taper off before I emerged with one of the chairs. The patrolling guard had taken up a post beside the front door. Music with an electronic beat issued from a phone whose screen outlined his face in white light.
Thank God for youth culture, I thought.
I eased across the nave and into the entrance to the baptistery, beyond the guard’s view. A padlock secured the iron gate. One of these days I was going to have to learn how to pick these things. I inserted the wand into the padlock’s shackle and whispered, “Vigore.”
The expansion of energy was enough to crack a shaft. I waited to ensure the guard hadn’t been alerted to the sound before removing the lock and opening the well-oiled gate.
Beyond a short entranceway stood the stone pool, the robe mounted on the wall beyond. I expanded my wizard’s aura until something crackled inside the security camera above me. Then, calling light to the wand, I rounded the pool and placed the chair beneath the mounted robe.
“Still can’t believe Chicory is having me do this,” I muttered.
As I climbed onto the chair, a series of bubbles glugged from the pool behind me. I looked back, causing the chair to teeter. Nothing there. Swearing, I retrained my focus on the glass box.
A simple plunger lock with a lever arm held the box closed. Yeah, definitely alarmed. I swelled out my wizard’s aura again. Behind the backing against which the robe was mounted, something popped and sent up a drift of smoke. I just had to hope it was the final piece of security. I had already worked out an escape plan for if things went sideways. And if sideways veered south, Vega was monitoring a police scanner, ready to intervene.
But Chicory was right. If I was going to have a chance against Marlow, I needed the robe.
Aiming the wand at the plunger lock, I whispered a fo
rce invocation. With a scrape, the lever slid out and the door opened. A hay-like odor of old fabric seeped out.
Easy enough.
I listened to ensure no one was coming before pulling out a series of slender pins that mounted the robe to the backing. How long would it take for someone to notice the camera was out of commission and come to investigate? I didn’t know, nor did I intend to find out.
A minute later I slung the robe over a shoulder and began pinning up the ringer. It was my bathrobe, actually. Chicory had cast a powerful veiling spell over it to mimic the robe of John the Baptist, down to the frayed threads. As long as no one touched it, the ringer would pass muster.
I was leaning back to examine my work, when something tapped my right shoulder. I jerked my head around, but there was no one there. Another tap, this one on my left shoulder. Then on the crown of my head. When I touched the spot, my fingers came away moist.
What the…?
Droplets pattered the floor around me. I craned my neck back and nearly shouted in alarm. Wavering above me was a giant snake’s head, saliva dripping from its jaw. No, not saliva—baptism water. The entire creature was composed of it, its slender neck ending at the pool from which it had quietly risen.
A water elemental? I thought dumbly. In a church?
I dropped from the chair. With a sputtering hiss, the elemental drew back its head to strike.
I aimed the wand at it and whispered, “Vigore!”
The creature curled deftly around the brunt of the blast and dove down. Seizing the chair, I heaved it up like a shield. The impact of the elemental’s head cracked the chair’s wooden seat and knocked me to the ground. Water sprayed everywhere.
I scrambled to my feet, slipping and sliding toward the pool’s other side. The elemental curled around and headed me off. It undulated from side to side in a menacing dance.
With my wand poised at ear level, I held out the fractured chair like a lion tamer and backed from the elemental. The moisture on the floor was already compromising my magic. If the elemental got a hold of me and dragged me into the pool, I was a dead man.
Even so, the analytical part of my mind was still trying to determine what it was doing here. Elementals made excellent guards, sure, and this one was taking its duties as seriously as cancer, but they also required powerful magic to manifest. I highly doubted the church kept a wizard on staff, given the institution’s suspicious stance toward the arcane.
The elemental started into another sputtering hiss.
“Vigore!” I whispered harshly, this time directing my wand at the pool.
The force dove into the water, erupting in a massive spout that pulled the elemental with it. When the water collided into the ornate dome high above, the snake burst apart and rained down in a sudden cloudburst. I hoisted the chair overhead like an umbrella, sparing myself a drenching.
An elemental separated from its source was a doomed elemental, and this one was no exception—regardless of how it had come to be. I splashed through the water and retrieved the robe of John the Baptist from the floor. I then climbed onto the broken chair and closed the glass box. Channeling a force strong enough to swing the lever arm closed took more time, thanks to the moisture, but within moments, it was done. Exhaling, I stepped off the chair.
Wasn’t pretty, I thought, but mission accomplished.
My gaze dropped to my feet. In the second it took me to realize the floor was no longer soaked, the elemental coiled around my upper body, crushing my arms to my sides and the air from my lungs. Magic had reconstituted the damned thing. The elemental made two more swift passes around me and jerked me into the air, its face hissing inches from mine.
“Respingere!” I grunted, not caring who heard me now.
Energy sputtered through my mental prism but expired before it could manifest from the wand I held in a death grip.
Shit.
The elemental upended me. I kicked my legs as the room swooped. In the next moment, I was being plunged headfirst into the pool. I tried to twist and break free, but the elemental held me fast, the top of my head grinding against stone.
Think, think, think!
If the elemental hadn’t come from the church, what did that leave? The robe of John the Baptist possessed magical properties, but the origin story—a monk and a vow of silence—didn’t jibe with a guardian creature. Not as Chicory had told it, anyway, though my mentor’s disorganized nature hardly inspired confidence.
I remembered looking skeptically at the wand he’d given me that morning, despite his insistence that he’d wiped it of any lingering magic. “As much of it as I could, anyway,” he’d added before tossing it to me. Hadn’t he said it once belonged to a seafaring wizard? A light went off in my head.
Oh, I don’t frigging believe this.
I tightened my right fist to make sure the wand was still in my grip. I then worked my left hand over and grasped the casting end. As black spots began to crowd the edges of my vision, I bowed the wand away from my body. I grunted with the effort, forearms trembling—
Snap!
My inverted body dropped, and I fell from the pool. I landed on the floor of the baptistery on my back with a hard splash. I remained there for several moments, gasping and stunned. The culprit came to a rest in two pieces beside my head: the damned wand. Its nearness to water and a magical item, in this case the robe, had triggered the wand to call up a guardian elemental, something the seafaring wizard had no doubt trained it to do.
“Wiped it of any lingering magic, my ass,” I muttered, pushing myself to my feet.
Chicory was going to get an earful when I got back. Right now, though, footsteps were approaching from the nave. I retrieved the pieces of wand, jammed them into my back pocket, and lifted the dripping robe. A beam of light swam around the entranceway. A moment later the guard appeared, and he directed his flashlight across the room.
I stiffened, having just pulled the robe on, hoping to hell it was as good as advertised.
I watched the guard unclasp the holster holding his firearm. He lifted his walkie-talkie to his mouth. “I need everyone down here,” he said. “Something’s going on in the baptistery.”
Well, wonderful.
But when the guard’s light reached me, it kept moving, hesitating on the pool before flashing back to the toppled chair. “The lock on the gate’s busted,” he went on, “and there’s a chair in here.”
“Security cam’s out, too,” a voice squawked back. “Exhibit still there?”
The guard’s light illuminated the ringer. “Still here,” he confirmed.
“All right, we’re calling the NYPD. Let them handle it.”
“Fine by me,” the guard said.
He gave the baptistery a final pass with his flashlight, the beam hitting me once more, before leaving. I trailed him to the front of the church. The guard hadn’t the faintest idea I was on his heels. When he opened the door ten minutes later to let the police in—Officers Dempsey and Dipinski, it turned out—I slipped out behind them and pattered down the cathedral steps to the street.
I waited until I was a few blocks from the cathedral before I removed the robe and stuffed it into the back of my pants under my shirt. The heist had been a success, but my confidence was in the crapper. A mission that should have been a cinch had nearly gotten me killed.
With a wave and sharp whistle, I flagged down a cab.
Time to give Chicory that earful.
5
“How did it go?” Chicory called as I slammed the front door behind me.
Around the corner from the entranceway, I found my mentor in the living room in a plush chair, stocking feet poking out from beneath Tabitha’s bulk. He was stroking my cat’s purring head while taking contented puffs from his pipe. An orange-tinted liqueur sat in a snifter on the end table. The thought that he had been relaxing while I was being dunked in a baptistery pool by a water serpent raised my hackles even more.
“How did it go?” I asked. “Other than
nearly drowning?”
“Drowning?” Chicory’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about?”
I pulled the wand from my pocket and tossed the two pieces onto the coffee table. “This thing that you assured me was ready for use had enough frigging magic in it to call up a water elemental.”
He frowned down at the broken instrument. “But you retrieved the robe?”
Sighing, I pulled it from the back of my pants and dropped it beside the wand pieces.
His face brightened. “Well, there you go! All’s well that ends well, as I like to say.”
“No, Chicory, you’re not hearing me. You gave me a magical item that nearly killed me.”
“And you said you wanted a test.”
I glared at him. “Are you telling me you did that intentionally?”
He took another puff from his pipe, seeming to consider the question. “Well, no, actually,” he said after a moment. “I must have missed some enchantment or other—but that’s beside the point. The point is I can’t prepare you for every eventuality. If you’re to have any chance, you’ll need to improvise on the fly. Tonight was good practice. You encountered an unexpected challenge and you overcame it. Well done. Though I do wish you wouldn’t have snapped it in half. Wands of that caliber are incredibly hard to come by.”
“Look,” I said, deciding to let the wand comment go, “it’s one thing for the unexpected to come from your opponent, but it’s a hell of another for it to come from your own corner man.”
“I’m not following, I’m afraid.”
I pressed my lips together. “Any day now I’m going to be sent to the Refuge. Up until tonight I was afraid that I wouldn’t be prepared, that it would be a one-way trip. But now I’m terrified the preparations are going to kill me before the Death Mage ever gets a crack. I mean, you send me off with a cursed wand, my staff and sword are in pieces, and the blood you’re distilling … I’m seriously starting to wonder if I should let you inject me with it.”
The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 78