Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  We were slowing past a police cordon and into a mayhem of squad cars that fronted St. Martin’s. Detective Vega knifed into a too-small space and twisted to look me full in the face.

  “If whatever information you provide leads to an arrest,” she said, “I’ll consider upping it to six.”

  I understood some wizards could peer into souls. It wasn’t a gift I possessed—or even desired, for that matter—but I had developed a decent ability to read people. And what I saw beyond the façade of Detective Vega’s hard eyes was the bone-weary fatigue of a detective whose resources were being stripped at the same time murders in the city were soaring. She needed all the breaks she could get.

  “A year,” I tried again.

  “Six months.”

  I glimpsed something else, but before it took on contours, Vega turned and banged her door into the squad car beside ours. Conversation over.

  After edging out, she paced toward an approaching officer who looked to be managing the outdoor scene. When she pointed back in my direction, I squeezed out too, though with less property damage. I stood with my cane, peering at the cathedral’s stately bronze doors, then up the soaring Gothic spire shimmering with ley energy. Back down, to the right, tombstones stood in the gated churchyard I used to play in. I had attended St. Martin’s as a boy, when my family still lived in the city.

  “Hey!” Detective Vega had finished signing in with the officer and was waving for me to follow.

  I eyed the wrought doors of the cathedral again, sweat breaking across my upper back. I mentioned my phobia of being underground? Places of worship were almost as anxiety-causing. In this case, though, it wasn’t that such places repulsed me, but that I seemed to repulse them.

  “Croft!” she snapped.

  I watched her watching me, one hand bracing the strong curve of her cocked hip. Her NYPD shield glinted at her belt, and I could see the bulge of a sidearm holstered beside it, beneath her jacket. Six months was no guarantee of salvation, but it was half my remaining sentence.

  I took a deep breath and made my head nod.

  “Coming.”

  9

  My legs seemed to be hauling large iron balls as I ascended the three steps leading to the set of bronze doors. Detective Vega powered right between them, but I had to stop.

  In addition to being places of worship, religious houses had a long history of providing sanctuary against evil. The longer-standing the house, the stronger the protection—especially if the house stood on a fount of ley energy. The protection was felt most palpably at thresholds, and St. Martin’s threshold was all but thrusting me back into the street.

  It wasn’t that I was evil, but I had that little Thelonious problem. He wasn’t demonic, per se, but as an incubus, he gave off a similar vibe. And thresholds weren’t in the business of splitting hairs.

  I peered past the doorway into the vaulted interior. Detective Vega was already passing through a propped-open set of glass doors to the deep pew-lined nave, where police personnel consulted and a few robed church officials drifted in monastic sorrow. Realizing I wasn’t behind her, Vega turned and gestured sharply.

  “Croft,” she whispered.

  At the sound of my name, one of the church officials raised his head and moved toward me. He wore a white tunic over a long black cassock. What looked like a grieving stole, heavy and dark, draped his neck. When his face swam from the gloom, I recognized him.

  “Is that Everson Croft?” he asked, stopping a few feet from me. His parted red hair was going white, I saw. And he sported a trim beard now, denser around his lips, like an unintended goatee. But his eyes were the same seashell blue I remembered from childhood.

  “Father Victor,” I said, smiling.

  He had been in charge of the youth programs when I attended, and I remembered him as good-humored and kind, a natural with kids. He had risen in the church ranks since, and word on the supernatural street was that he performed shadow exorcisms. My kind of guy.

  “Please, I still go by Vick,” he said. “How long has it been? Fifteen years?”

  “Closer to twenty.” I caught myself stubbing a toe against the concrete. Even though Father Vick’s tone wasn’t the least bit insinuating, my long absenteeism still stirred up a cloud of guilt. I struggled to meet his eyes. “Listen,” I said, “I’m really sorry about your rector.”

  I hadn’t known the man. The rector from my time had retired, his replacement coming from another diocese.

  Father Vick nodded. “Yes. A terrible thing.”

  “I’m actually here to help with the investigation, as a consultant.”

  I peeked past him to where Detective Vega appeared on her last nerve.

  Father Vick stepped to one side and made a humble gesture with his arm. “Please, do come in.”

  At those words, the threshold relented. Invitations to enter calmed them. A clammy wave of nausea rippled through me as I stepped inside, but it was better than being burned like a square of toast. Even so, I felt a good chunk of my wizarding powers fall away.

  That was something else thresholds could do.

  Father Vick placed a comforting hand on my upper back and guided me into the nave. Something about his touch, which hummed with the supernatural power of faith, and the fact he was two inches taller than me, evoked memories of being a young parishioner here.

  “Thank you,” I said, the sanctity of the cathedral reducing my voice to a whisper.

  “I know you have work to do,” he said, “but I hope we’ll have the opportunity to catch up soon.”

  He slipped a card into my hand as he left me with Detective Vega.

  “Old friend?” she asked when he was out of earshot.

  “Something like that.” I tucked his card into my pocket.

  “Well, don’t get too cozy. At this point everyone in here’s a suspect.”

  I snorted. “Reminds me of another case.”

  She shot me a dark look. We both knew the NYPD hadn’t had sufficient cause to try me. But in their nigh-impossible campaign to clear cases, all sorts of protocols were being skirted, if not sledge-hammered. Though I hadn’t been charged with murder, getting the obstruction charge to stick had no doubt been sufficient to toss the case into the “good enough” basket.

  “Here,” she said, clipping a plastic card to my coat lapel, the big NYPD letters stamped in yellow.

  “Am I being deputized?”

  She frowned. “This way.”

  I followed her down the cathedral’s center aisle. To either side, muted light fell through steep Gothic windows. Ahead of us, a majestic stained-glass window glowed softly. During services, I used to study its depiction of hallowed saints and angels, one of them my forebear, Michael. The sections of colored glass seemed to endow them with magic. With that pleasant memory came others: the smells of starched suits and faint perfumes, the warmth of the cushioned pew beside my Nana, her hand absently stroking my hair.

  Grandpa had never joined us, for reasons I wouldn’t understand until much later.

  We climbed the wooden steps to the chancel, ducked under a ribbon of police tape, and rounded a cloth-draped altar. A pair of policemen stood guard at a door on the left. A table beside them held a set of cardboard cartons.

  “The body’s still inside, but it’s covered,” Vega told me. “We’re waiting on forensics, so you’ll need to put these on.”

  She had been yanking disposable gloves and shoe covers from the cartons and now shoved a pair of each into my hands. She had everything on before I’d even figured out the gloves. I had just pulled on the second shoe cover when a hairnet snapped over my ears. Detective Vega, in a blue hairnet of her own, stuffed my stray strands beneath the elastic with a studious frown that might have been endearing if she weren’t going about the job so roughly.

  She stood back and looked me over. “I hope I don’t have to tell you that anything you see or hear is strictly confidential. You tell so much as your cat, and the deal’s off. Got it?”


  “Got it,” I said.

  I was pretty sure Detective Vega wasn’t aware I owned a cat—much less one that talked.

  “At least we know blood doesn’t bother you,” she muttered.

  She was referring to the fact I’d been stained in it when she arrested me. Good one, Detective. Without waiting for a response, she stepped past the policemen and into the sacristy.

  10

  I was only aware I’d begun to submit to the calming power of the cathedral when the room into which I followed Detective Vega blew the gathering quiet from my cells. I leaned against my cane, faint and breathless. Something must have come over my face as well.

  “You all right?” Vega asked. “Need a mask?”

  I shook my head. The smell of death was bitter, but it wasn’t that. I blinked and moved my gaze over the small room a second time.

  The white sacristy, where the holy services were prepared, was blood-smeared and ransacked. Cabinets had been opened, drawers ripped from their slots, candles, chalices, and vestments spilled. To my right, old ritual books had been removed from a vault and torn asunder, the brittle pages scattered. On the other side of the room lay the murdered rector.

  I had seen bodies before—I didn’t always get to amateur conjurers in time—but this wasn’t a case of a nether creature feeding to sustain its form. No, the scene spoke to fury, and something far more troubling. Glee.

  My ears picked up the police chatter outside, apparently filling in a newcomer:

  “…gold chalice…” “…face beaten to a jelly…” “…don’t hardly look like a person.”

  The white sheet covering the rector’s body featured a spreading red-brown stain over a misshapen mound of head. At the end closer to me, the dusty soles of formal shoes were splayed downward.

  Though I cleared my throat, my next words came out as scratches. “Where’s the writing?”

  Detective Vega stepped toward the body, the first time I’d seen her do anything gingerly, and lifted the sheet. I tilted my head. Having something to analyze helped. The words had been drawn vertically on his white-robed back, left and right sides. The ink of choice appeared to have been the rector’s blood.

  “Aren’t there any photos?” I asked.

  “They’re being rendered,” she snapped. “Mean anything to you?”

  “Well, your people were right. It is ancient. A precursor to Latin, in fact.”

  “What’s it say?”

  I pulled a flip-top notepad from a coat pocket and slid a short green pencil from its metal spiraling. “The language isn’t one of my fluencies, unfortunately.” I wrote down the message, letter for letter. “It’s going to take a bit of research.”

  Vega’s eyebrows did the collapsing-down thing again.

  I shrugged a sorry.

  “You done?” she asked from her stooped-over position.

  I looked over the writing once more and made a couple more notes. Despite the chilling medium, the penmanship had a certain elegance. Farther up the tent Detective Vega had made of the sheet, I glimpsed what looked like a sticky flap of scalp. I looked away and nodded quickly.

  Outside the room, we dropped our bits of protective covering into a trash bag.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “To figure out the message?” I made a puttering sound with my lips. “A couple of days? It’s a rare language,” I explained before she could voice the protest gathering on her face.

  She sighed harshly. “Any idea who else in the city would know it?”

  “I’ll add that to my honey-do list.”

  She fixed me with another warning look as she reached inside a jacket pocket. “I’m taking you at your word.” Her first two fingers returned with a business card, which she held an inch from my face. “A ‘couple of days’ is Saturday. I’ll expect a phone call by then. You don’t want me to come looking for you.”

  “I can think of worse things.” I flashed a grin.

  The juvenile comment kept her chocolate-brown eyes on mine, which enabled me to accept the card with one hand while unclasping and hiding away the NYPD tag with the other. Classic misdirection.

  Detective Vega didn’t notice. After telling me I could find my own way home, she left me for her investigative team. I looked around for Father Vick as I descended the steps of the chancel, but the nave was empty now of church officials. Maybe they were being questioned.

  At the bronze doors of the cathedral, another uncomfortable wave rippled through me, but my powers were back. Which got me thinking. The murder probably hadn’t been the work of a supernatural entity. Even if one had managed to get itself invited into the sanctuary, the threshold would have stripped its powers. It wouldn’t have been able to maintain its form inside.

  So we were dealing with a human. And given the excessive violence of the act, likely someone with a vendetta against the rector. But then what did the message mean?

  I pulled out my notepad as I started toward the Wall and re-read my translation:

  Black Earth

  Yeah, I’d held back on Detective Vega. But to get those six months wiped, I needed to not only interpret the message but point her in the direction of an arrest. And that second part was going to take time. Fortunately, I had a resource in mind. I’d get that ball rolling while I worked on how and why a shrieker had been summoned the night before. Which reminded me, I would need to alert the Order.

  I peeked back at the receding Cathedral of St. Martin, a beautiful, if haunting, anomaly amid the towering edifices of mammon, and sighed. Something told me it was going to be a long next few days.

  Thank God for Colombian dark roast.

  11

  I performed a quick check of my warding spells—all intact—before fishing out my keychain. Home was a walk-up apartment on West Tenth Street, its top floor small and square, like the top tier of a wedding cake, making it invisible from street level. Naturally, it was the floor I lived on.

  I turned the three bolts, gold, silver, and bronze, stepped over my threshold, and immediately felt better. There was no greater contentment for a wizard than returning to his sheltered domicile—especially when the twelve hours I had been away felt like twelve days.

  Contrary to other dimensions of my life, I took obsessive-compulsive pride in the order of my loft space. And thanks to New York’s current vacancy glut, the rent was ridiculously reasonable, even for someone on my pay grade.

  Of course, that could change come Monday.

  For now, though, the industrial-chic apartment was home. I took in the space: high-ceilings with exposed beams, arched, double-story windows, and large throw rugs over stained concrete floors. A plush couch and chairs huddled around a flagstone fireplace, which I kept stoked from October to April. Beyond the kitchen, a ladder climbed to a second-story library and laboratory. There was plenty of open air for magic to move about. And in those rare instances when magic escaped my hold (hey, practice before mastery), the crooked West Village grid broke up the energy before it could do any real damage.

  That gas explosion on Bleeker Street last month? Wasn’t me.

  As I hung my cane on the coat rack, a rattling snort sounded. On the divan beneath the west-facing window, a large mound of orange hair stirred. Ochre-green eyes slitted open followed by a yawning mouth of sharp teeth.

  Damn, I’d woken the cat.

  Her tail end heaved up before shifting ponderously and settling back down. I stood still and waited for her eyes to close again—they did that sometimes—but they stayed watching me.

  “You smell like crap,” she said.

  “And it’s nice to see you, too,” I replied.

  “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Hey! What did I say about the language?” It really was something I’d been trying to train out of her—without much success, obviously. Tabitha was, well, Tabitha: a succubus spirit who had been called up by an amateur and would have devoured both our loins had I not channeled her into a stray cat. Unable to decapitate the cat, p
er succubus-destroying protocol, I took her in. A questionable move, I’ll admit. But that was five years ago, and I still had all my parts. The Order had been none too happy, but what else was new?

  Anyway, since then Tabitha had become less seductress and more harpy—and at forty pounds, a lot more harpy.

  “Well?” she pressed.

  “Well, things became a little more involved than anticipated.” I walked over to the kitchen, set the paper bag from the corner grocery store onto the counter, and began unloading it. “That summoning I set out for last night? It ended up being demonic. The fight left me drained, meaning Thelonious time. Ha. I’m sure you can imagine. That made me late for class, then late for a meeting with my probation officer. Well, the second was Snodgrass’s fault. The jerk.” I set the canister of coffee down harder than I meant to. “Oh, and get this—if I can’t help solve a murder by the end of the weekend, there’s a great chance I’m out of a job.”

  I caught myself verging on full drama-queen. I looked at Tabitha for some sign of support, but her head had settled back onto her paws, eyes closed. At forty pounds, she was also becoming narcoleptic.

  “Did you at least remember my milk?” she asked languidly.

  I held up a bottle of raw goat’s milk—twenty bucks a pop—and gave it a bitter shake. Tabitha’s tastes weren’t cheap. Between that and the brandy-sautéed tuna steaks, she ate better than I did.

  “And warmer this time,” she said, turning away.

  “Not before you report on your tours.”

  “All’s quiet,” she murmured.

  In exchange for room, board, and her life, Tabitha was supposed to tour the broad ledge of the level below every two hours and report anything unusual on the street. To say her compliance was spotty was putting it nicely.

  “How about that Thai restaurant going in across the way?” I asked. “Gaudy sign, huh?”

  “Hideous.”

  “There is no Thai restaurant.”

  “It was raining. I couldn’t see very well.”