My gaze shifted to a corridor to the left of the bar. “Access to the basement is probably back here,” I said.
James followed me into the bar’s former kitchen. The stairs down were beside a cleaned-out pantry. I took a tremulous breath—why did everything important have to be in basements?—and led the way down.
The basement was a dank, concrete space. Rats skittered from the expanding glow of my wand, taking refuge among heaps of trash and old furniture. James sent a bolt after one and chuckled when it zapped the rat’s hindquarters.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “is this boring you?”
“Hey, just trying to keep my skills honed.”
“Well, how about looking for the vault?” I snapped.
The uneasiness I’d felt outside was still swimming through my system like a harsh stimulant. I was in no mood to play babysitter. I moved from James and began scanning the walls. He took the hint and began doing the same, moving in the other direction. When we met on the far wall, he shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said.
When Arnaud had told me about the vault, I’d pictured it in a wall. Maybe that was the wrong assumption.
“Vigore!” I shouted, sweeping my sword in an arc. James jumped out of the way as the heaps of refuse blew toward the staircase. Clusters of squealing rats spilled out and scattered, chasing down their former refuge. A moment later I spotted the vault door in the floor where one of the piles had been sitting. The door was made of cast iron with a lever handle.
“Looks like someone’s already been in there,” James remarked.
“Blood slaves,” I said, sensing the residue of the old locking spell. “They must have overpowered the spell.” Which had no doubt weakened with Grandpa’s death, I thought. He’d probably saved his most powerful locking enchantments for the items themselves—like the vampires’ Scaig Box that had held a shadow fiend. And hopefully whatever held the Banebrand.
I double-checked the door for traps before gripping the lever and giving it a hard yank. The door clunked loose and opened onto a cylinder with a metal ladder leading down.
“Hold on,” James said. He cast a silver ball of light and, with a small flick, sent it down the cylinder ahead of us. A skill he must have learned during the five years of training I’d never received. About fifteen feet below, the light spread into a room of which I could only see a small section.
I climbed down the ladder first, the skin across my chest stretching tight, breaths thinning, and ducked into a bunker-like room. I turned toward the hovering ball of light, and my heart sank. Against the far wall lay a scatter of metal boxes inside which the magical artifacts had no doubt been stored. The open boxes had been picked through, if not by the blood slaves then by whomever had come after them. Gone were the wands I’d imagined, the amulets and charms and enchanted blades. All I could find among the boxes was a dagger the size of a letter-opener.
“Think that’s the weapon?” James asked.
I turned the rusty dagger around in my hand. I sensed no magic or enchantment in it. The blade’s tip had bent, and the blade was dull. Was that the point? I wondered. For the weapon to appear ordinary to anyone who found it? Was the magic hidden deep inside it? I looked over the dagger once more, made a dubious face, and placed it in the sack.
“Probably not,” I said.
“There’s still this.”
I turned to where James’s ball of light was hovering above a trunk set in a corner. With its black wood and battered metal, I recognized it immediately as the steamer trunk that had once sat in Grandpa’s attic study. I’d always wondered what had become of it. But as I looked at it now, I had no hope it would contain anything. The central lock was busted and both hasps open. James lifted the lid and then jumped back with a sharp holler.
“What is it?” I asked, remembering the sniveling voice I’d heard in the same trunk years earlier. But the bone-white creature that sprang out was no familiar. He perched on the edge of the trunk, bloodshot eyes flicking between us. When his pale lips began to bulge, I saw what we were dealing with.
“Vampire!” I shouted at James.
The creature sprang and rammed face-first into James’s shield. He hissed and scratched at it, a ragged business shirt and slacks covering his emaciated body. And now I recognized him. The vampire was a former CEO of one of the financial firms in downtown Manhattan. I’d sat with him in Arnaud’s conference room, fought alongside him against the wolves.
Grandpa’s ring pulsed around my finger. I aimed it at the vampire and shouted, “Balaur!”
The force from the ring nailed him and, in a burst of fire, slung him into the far wall. The vampire fell to the floor and lay writhing, his face torn as though by dragon talons, smoke billowing from his body.
James and I stood over him. “So this is where you’ve been hiding out,” I said.
“A drop,” the creature groveled. “A single, blessed drop. Please. Your blood is potent, and I am so hungry.”
He gripped my pant leg, but I kicked his hand away. He was one of the two former CEOs who had escaped following the battle against the city and, by the looks of it, had planned to remain in hibernation until the threat passed. He’d probably learned about the vault from Arnaud when the vampire had reclaimed the Scaig Box.
“So hungry,” he moaned.
The thing about hibernation was that the vampire emerged weak. If we had been mortals, no problem. He would have devoured our blood to the last drop and gone back to sleep. Unfortunately for him, he’d awakened to a pair of magic slingers.
“Tell you what,” I said. “You help us, and maybe we’ll help you.”
James shot me a consternated look, but I shook my head, letting him in on the bluff.
“What do you want?” the vampire moaned. The wounds I’d inflicted across his face were puckering grotesquely along the edges. His body was trying to heal them, but he lacked the regenerative power.
“Information,” I said. “You’ve been down here, what, a month? In that time, has anyone else been down here?”
“No, now feed me.”
His hand crawled toward my leg. I stepped on it. “Think harder,” I said, his fingers crunching beneath my shoe. It was cruel, but this creature had done far, far worse in his lifetime.
His scream was thin and piercing.
“One person,” he said when he’d caught his breath.
A charge went through me. “Who?”
“I didn’t see them, I was sleeping. Now let me feed, curse you.”
“But you sensed this person. What did you sense?”
I kept my ring trained on the vampire as his mouth opened and closed, fangs thirsting for blood. “Death and decay,” he panted. “Ruination. Now let me feed!”
James raised his eyebrows. “Lich?”
I’d never told Chicory about this place, but he could have picked it up from my thoughts. Either that or one of the magical items Arnaud had taken—and that I’d subsequently given to Chicory—had left a trail of some kind, one the mage was able to trace back here. Either way, Lich had beaten us to whatever had remained of the magical stash, maybe even found the weapon in question. That would certainly explain his confidence.
“Crap,” I spat.
“You promised you’d help me,” the vampire hissed. “You promised.”
“You’re right,” I said tersely. “Vigore.” The force from my blade lifted the vampire and dropped him back into the trunk. I tossed in some dragon sand after him, shut the lid with another force invocation, bound it with a locking spell, and shouted, “Fuoco!” The vampire unleashed a withering scream as flames burst through the seams in the trunk.
“That’s helping him?” James asked.
“Putting him out of his misery, anyway,” I muttered. “Not to mention his blood slaves.” I imagined the mortals whom the vampire had hollowed out either dying at last or regaining their humanity in the steel shipping container that held them in the city. With the way things were going, t
hough, it felt like pulling them out of a frying pan and into the fire.
James turned from the burning trunk and peered around. “So, that’s it, I guess. No magical weapon.” He paused, head cocked as though trying to sense something. “But there is magic kicking around down here.”
And now I picked it up too, a shallow pulse. We followed the pulse to its source—three symbols on the back wall. The symbols had been drawn in dark red ink, and the faint magic was emanating from their lines. James parked his shades atop his head and leaned in.
“Looks like a sigil,” he said.
“It does, but I don’t think that’s what it is,” I said. “I mean, there’s magic, but it’s not coming from the symbols. It’s maintaining the symbols, making sure they can’t be washed away.”
“Yeah?”
And now I sensed something else. “My grandfather drew them,” I said. “It’s hard to explain, but there’s a familiarity to the magic, something I’ve felt with other items he enchanted.”
“What do the symbols mean?”
“It’s Akkadian cuneiform,” I said as I studied them more closely. “Phonograms.”
“And for us non-PhD types, Prof?”
“Sorry, they’re sounds.”
“What do they mean?”
“That’s the thing, they don’t mean anything. They’re just random syllables. Gug-lugal-i,” I whispered, careful not to push any power through them. “It would be like saying la-de-da in English.”
“I don’t remember anything like that from my training,” James said.
“And I don’t recognize it from my spell books.” Still, something about the symbols resonated. Not on a magical level this time, but from a more intellectual space, as though I should have known what they meant.
“We could always test them,” James said. Before I could stop him, he was repeating the sounds, releasing them as an invocation. I flinched back, hardening my light into a shield.
But after several seconds, nothing happened.
“It was worth a shot,” James said with a shrug.
“What? A shot at getting us both killed?”
“Dude, you need to relax.”
“Relax?” I could feel a vein throbbing in my right temple. “You don’t go around channeling random sounds. You had no idea what might have been stored inside those symbols.”
“Maybe something good,” he said.
“And maybe something that would have cooked us like McCrispy over there,” I said, jerking a thumb at the smoking trunk.
“Let me know when you’re done lecturing.” James wheeled toward the ladder.
“Hey!” I grabbed his shoulder. It was as much my anger at his cavalier attitude as the hopelessness of our mission. When he spun on me, I was surprised by the intensity in his blue eyes.
“Listen, man,” he said, leveling a finger at me. “We didn’t find the weapon, and you know it. Not here, not at the house. The outing’s been a bust. Which means it’s time to start rolling the dice, hoping to hell we get lucky. And if that involves testing out random sounds, then yeah, that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m not gonna sit around, waiting to be eaten by what’s-his-name.”
“Dhuul,” I said.
“Whatever. We done here?”
I stayed glaring at him, but he had a point. “Just give me a head’s up next time, all right?” I said with a sigh.
James dropped his shades over his eyes and climbed the ladder, his orb floating up above him. I turned back toward the small room to glance it over and read the symbols a final time. Why had Grandpa written them? Why would he have wanted them to endure? And where had I seen them before?
Gug-lugal-i.
Repeating the syllables silently, I followed James up the ladder.
25
By the time we reached Brooklyn, the fires had spread. We’d had to detour twice thanks to roving mobs and entire sections of highway in flames. Our argument back in the vault felt petty now, a sentiment James seemed to share. We mostly rode in silence until I mentioned needing to stop at Vega’s to check on her son and sitter. James nodded, and I directed him through the streets of Williamsburg until he was pulling up in front of her apartment building.
I stepped from the car and squinted into the blowing smoke. The street was quiet, but I could hear the chaos mere blocks away. Vega’s son and sitter wouldn’t be safe here much longer.
“C’mon,” I said to James.
He finished casting a shield spell around his car and caught up to me at the building’s front steps. I looked up and down the steel monster of a front door. “Damn, forgot about that,” I muttered.
When James started to raise his wand, I stopped him. “Breaking the lock will get us inside, but it will also make the residents more vulnerable.”
I was considering what to do when I heard the bolts turning. A lucky break. I stepped back as the door opened and a woman wearing a crooked headscarf slipped out. I caught the door before it closed behind her.
“You should go back in,” James said to the woman. “It’s too dangerous out here.”
When the woman turned toward us, I recognized her as Tony’s sitter. “Camilla?” I said. “Where are you going?”
She gestured absently. “I go … I go…”
“Camilla,” I said, taking her by the shoulders. “Where’s Tony?”
“Tony?” Her expression was vacant, her pupils flattening like I’d seen in the eyes of the woman at the gas station. Shit. Camilla was falling under the influence of Whisperer magic.
I pulled her back into the building, shorted the magnetic lock on the glass door inside, and with James following, climbed the steps to Vega’s floor. Camilla complied, occasionally mumbling something in Spanish. I just hoped to hell she hadn’t turned violent yet. When we reached Vega’s apartment, the door was open. I handed Camilla off to James.
“Tony!” I called, making a quick circuit of the apartment. The boy was nowhere in sight. Panic pumped through me. Though I’d only met Tony twice, I felt a responsibility toward him. In part because I’d imperiled him, but largely because he was the most important thing in Vega’s world.
“Tony!” I called again.
From back in the kitchen, I could hear James trying to coax the boy’s whereabouts from Camilla, but her responses weren’t even in Spanish anymore. She was just babbling. Not good.
“Tony, it’s Everson Croft. I’m a friend of your mother’s.”
I heard a spring squeak in Vega’s bedroom and returned to find Tony’s curly head peering from underneath the bed. “Mr. Croft?” he asked. When he squirmed all the way free, I was there to lift him up.
I looked him over to make sure he was all right. “What happened?” I asked.
He cinched my neck with both arms. “She stopped making sense,” Tony whispered. “Started picking at her arms and saying strange things, screaming at nothing.” At that moment, Camilla screamed from the kitchen. Tony flinched and squeezed me tighter. “Like that,” he said.
I held him another moment before setting him on the edge of the bed. “I want you to stay here, okay?”
He nodded uncertainly. “You gonna help her, Mr. Croft?”
“I’m going to try.”
I entered the kitchen to find Camilla sitting in a chair, bound by silver cords of energy. A muzzle of energy covered her mouth, silencing her screams. “She started flipping out,” James said, “scratching herself.”
I looked at the bloody jags down both her arms. Her pupils were nearly flat lines now. I thought of the woman at the gas station again. Her eyes had looked exactly the same, but when that pothead had slung his arm around her, she’d seemed to snap out of it, her pupils dilating again. I hesitated on that image, remembering the smoke drifting from the guy’s long hair and jacket.
I suddenly remembered something James had told me.
“When Chicory last visited you,” I said to him now, “you told me he mashed his thumb between your eyes.”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing I could feel.”
“Do you have any more of that stuff you were smoking earlier?”
“Yeah, but … you really think now’s the time?”
“Go ahead, light it up. You said you were high when Chicory stamped you, right? I think there’s something in cannabis that throws off Whisperer magic. That’s why you were never affected.” James was patting his pockets now, and I gestured for him to hurry. At last he found the half-smoked joint, lit it with his wand, and took a few uncertain puffs.
“Blow it on her,” I said.
James leaned down and released a stream of smoke that broke against Camilla’s muzzled face. We both stood back and watched. After several seconds, her face relaxed, pupils returning to their spheroid shapes. She blinked several times and looked around in confusion.
“Release her,” I said.
James flicked his wand, and the muzzle and bindings dissolved.
“Mr. Croft?” she said, rubbing a wrist. “What are you doing here?”
“What happened, Camilla?” I asked.
“I … I don’t know. I watching T.V. with Tony and then … I must fall asleep. I wake up here.”
“But you feel all right?”
“Sleepy. But yes, I feel all right.”
“Keep an eye on her,” I said to James, and picked up Vega’s phone and dialed her cell.
“Camilla?” she asked when she answered.
“No, it’s Everson,” I said. “I’m at the apartment. Tony’s fine.”
“Thank God,” she breathed. “No one was answering the phone.”
“Listen, I think we’ve found a way to control the mobs.”
“Really? How?”
“Has the Narcotics Division made any marijuana busts lately?”
“Marijuana busts?”
“And I mean big, as in bales of the stuff. You’re going to need as much as you can get your hands on.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen, I only have a few case studies to go on, but I believe there’s something in cannabis that alters brain chemistry, changes it in a way that doesn’t let the bad magic take hold. Makes the insanity go away. If you can get it in the air, light it, and drop it over the city…”
The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 94