Black Luck (Prof Croft Book 5)

by Brad Magnarella

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “I almost died just now,” I said, my voice trembling with rage. “Multiple times. I’m on my third cycle of black luck. If this one doesn’t kill me, the next one will.”

  Statistically speaking, I heard Jing saying.

  “All right,” Gretchen sighed, wiping her hands on the front of her dress and snapping the burners to low. “Let’s have a look at you.” She came around the kitchen counter and squinted me over. She muttered a few times before shaking her head in a way that said, Well, I’ll be damned.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Everson. Wow. I had no idea it would take off like that. You’re right. You’ve got a raging case of black luck. One of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Brilliant. Can you take it off me now?”

  She blew out her breath, hitting me in the face with a wave of onions and garlic. “It’s not that easy.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not that easy’? You put it on me, you’re taking it off.”

  “Oh crap!” she cried and hustled back into the kitchen. She opened the oven, releasing a cloud of smoke. Using an oven mitt, she pulled out a burnt soufflé of some kind, frowned over it, and then wedged it, still smoking, into the crowded sink. “So much for that,” she muttered.

  I clapped my hands sharply. “Hey!”

  “Right, right, the black luck,” she said, coming back. “Well, here’s the thing. Once it’s in your system, it’s in your system. I’m talking down to your individual cells. I could try to muck it out, sure, but I wouldn’t be able to get it all. And if I can’t, there’s really no point. You either have black luck or you don’t. It’s like the plague. You don’t have a touch of the plague.”

  “So, what, I’m stuck with this?”

  “Well, there are a couple ways we can go about this. The first is that I prepare a bathtub full of stasis potion, and we immerse you in it.”

  “And that will cure me?”

  “No, but it will keep anything from happening to you until the black luck runs its course.”

  “And how long will that take?”

  She shrugged. “A month? Maybe two?”

  I stared at her. “I’d have to—to lie in my bathtub for two months because of your screw up?” I was so angry, I could hardly get the words out. Definitely a good thing I’d lost Jing’s baseball bat in the storm drains.

  “I said that was one option.”

  “Forget it. What’s the other one?”

  “Well, animate forces need energy to sustain themselves, right? Black luck is no different. You starve it, boom, it dies.” I opened my mouth, but she beat me to the question. “What does it feed off of? Well, what is black luck? It’s the worst of all outcomes in a given moment. Notice I didn’t say every moment.” She muttered as though making an aside, “Though it does come to fill more and more of them until you really can’t do anything else but die.” She shook her head quickly. “The point is that outcomes are subjective. Have you ever heard the saying ‘One person’s shit is another person’s Shinola’?”

  “I think you’re mixing up sayings.”

  “Subjective,” Gretchen repeated. “So in order to choose the worst outcome, the black luck has to know what you consider to be bad. And where does the black luck get that information?”

  “The internet.”

  She slapped my forehead. “Your unconscious doubts and uncertainties.”

  “Oh great. Let me just call my psychotherapist. He has the perfect couch.”

  “You’re right to be a smartass. That would take years, and you’d definitely be dead by then.”

  “I’m glad you keep reminding me. So a bath for two months or therapy until a piano falls on my head. Are those really the two options you’re giving me?” I held up a hand before she could answer. “Forget it. I’m calling the Order. You never should have been assigned to me, you have no idea what you’re doing, you’ve been a disaster from the moment you got here, and now this.” I gave an incredulous laugh. “It’s like someone needing heart surgery and being sent a mortician. Lich was a better trainer than you.”

  “They won’t recall me,” Gretchen said.

  “Wanna bet?” I strode toward the phone.

  “Anyway, none of the others command fae magic. They can’t cure you.”

  I was about to tell her what she could do with her fae magic when my shoe caught the folded corner of the rug. I fell face first against the phone, then landed on the floor. The phone tumbled over me with a clang. As I thrashed to get up, I became entangled in the phone cable such that one of the loops wrapped my throat and threatened to cut off my air. Gretchen looked on thoughtfully.

  By the time I managed to get the phone to my ear, there was no dial tone.

  “You pulled the entire apparatus out of the wall,” Gretchen observed.

  I slammed the phone down as hard as my entangled arm would allow.

  “Hold still,” she said, waving a hand. A force that could just as easily have strangled me removed the coils of cord from around my body, set the phone back on the counter, and placed me on my feet.

  “I’ll fix your phone so you can call the Order, but at least let me finish what I was saying.”

  I looked at the fractured phone jack and wires spilling from the wall and sighed. I started to nod for her to continue, then stopped, afraid that even that bit of head motion could trigger another catastrophe.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You could try to address your doubts and uncertainties, but there’s a short cut.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Closing the loops.”

  “All right. How do I do that?”

  “It confuses the black luck, shorts it out.”

  “How the hell do I do that?” I shouted.

  “Sheesh. Someone needs a nap. Are there any open obligations hanging over you? You know, things you were asked to do or that you should have taken care of that you haven’t.”

  “Besides wrapping up the case?”

  “Yes, but that’s out of your hands now. Anything else?”

  I looked to make sure she was being serious before thinking back. “Well, there was this woman up in Harlem who summoned some nether creatures. I destroyed four of them, was planning to go back and banish the fifth, but now the Order says they’re harmless. So I guess that wouldn’t count. Well, except that I lied and told her the others got out and that I’d try to find them—”

  Gretchen, who had been squinting at me, snapped her fingers suddenly. “Yes, that’s an open loop!”

  “Huh? Are you saying that if I go back and level with her, I’ll be cured of the black luck?”

  “Don’t be stupid, that’s just one loop. There are…” She squinted at me some more. “Three,” she said finally. “Yes, three that need closing.”

  “What are the other two?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’m not playing that game again.”

  She shrugged. “Your choice. But you should probably think it over on your way to Harlem. The third cycle of black luck is winding down, and you’ll want to close the loops before the fourth arrives.”

  “You mean the one that kills me?”

  “You might make it to a fifth,” she said doubtfully. “But don’t open any more loops, whatever you do.”

  “Why three loops?”

  “It’s one of those crazy fae things.” Gretchen snorted a laugh. “Don’t you just love them?”

  “No,” I growled.

  25

  Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the back of a cab bound for Harlem, my head on a swivel. At every intersection, I expected a city bus to run a red light and plow into us. I hadn’t even risked changing clothes back at the apartment for fear I’d choke on my shirt collar or trip and break a hip. The polyester was starting to itch.

  The driver watched me nervous
ly in the rearview mirror as my eyes darted around and I scratched inside my coat like a junkie.

  It wasn’t until we crossed into the one hundreds that I started to relax a little. It seemed Gretchen was right. The third cycle of black luck was going back out like the tide. But though I’d escaped it in one piece, it had been worse than the first two. I hoped to hell I wouldn’t have to deal with a fourth.

  At Mae’s apartment, I took the stairs to be safe and arrived in front of her battered door. I took a deep breath—I was not looking forward to this—and knocked loudly enough for her to hear. As I waited, it seemed impossible that I’d only been here a couple of days earlier. So much had happened since: demonic attacks, a new wizard in town, Gretchen’s arrival, the Ark, getting kicked off the case, and now black luck and loops that needed closing.

  “You said you wanted a challenge,” I muttered.

  In fairness, I’d wanted to test myself, to see how far I’d come in the past year. And, yeah, to start becoming the mage my father had been. I’d fallen short, but I wasn’t out of the game. Not entirely. While Pierce and Vega tracked down Quinton, I would work on ridding myself of the black luck so I could go back to Jing-Sheng and find out whether my hunch about Damien was in the ballpark.

  The knob turned, and Mae’s glasses flashed in the cracked-open door. “Oh,” she said. “You.”

  “Can I come in and talk?”

  “You didn’t find them, did you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “That’s sort of what I wanted to talk about.”

  She grunted and opened the door wide enough for me to enter. As I crossed the threshold, she backed up her walker, then turned and made her way down the hallway toward her kitchen. Buster, who had been hanging back in the shadows, let out a little screech and waved his claws at me. He scuttled backwards, just behind Mae’s slippered feet.

  In the kitchen, Mae gestured for me to take a seat at the table as she shuffled over to her coffee maker. When Buster climbed the back of her house dress and perched on her shoulder, she hardly seemed to notice. I recognized her silence and general lethargy as depression.

  She missed her babies.

  “You don’t need to make me coffee,” I told her.

  She let the paper filter fall to the floor as she turned back toward me.

  “Mae, listen. I came here to apologize. When I was here the other day, I wasn’t entirely truthful with you.”

  She took the seat opposite me and gave me a tired look that said, Let’s hear it.

  “Since becoming a wizard, my main job has been to track down creatures that don’t belong here. Creatures from other dimensions. It’s complicated, but small holes can lead to big holes, and the bigger the hole, the bigger the creature that can squeeze through. You’ve heard of demons. Well, that’s how they gain entrance—through breaches. I came to your apartment on Friday because my alarm detected a breach. I didn’t know the situation, didn’t realize you were keeping them as pets. Like good pets, they tried to protect you.”

  “So they didn’t escape?”

  “No,” I confessed. “They stayed inside, and I … well, I banished them.”

  I expected her to break down or to go for the rolling pin, or both, but instead, a strange light came over her face. And then she did begin to tear up, but not from sadness. Her lips broke into a smile.

  “What?” I said.

  “If you banished them, they’re back where they came from, right? I can just call them up again.”

  “I incinerated your spell book.”

  Her smile fractured. “You did what?”

  “That’s the other part of my job: keeping powerful spell books out of the hands of, well, amateurs. You said it yourself—the conjuring spell was supposed to call up a god, right? Instead, you ended up with critters like Buster.”

  The clawdad wriggled his tendrils and chattered as though sensing he’d just been insulted.

  “So that’s it, then,” Mae said hollowly. “I can’t cast anymore.”

  “On the positive side, I talked to my Order. They said you can keep Buster.” Claudius hadn’t actually said that, but if they’d been all right with Pierce canceling the alarm, I didn’t see the harm.

  She scratched Buster’s head absently, then folded her hands on the table.

  “I should have leveled with you from the get go, Mae. I’m sorry. If I can do—”

  “You can,” she said, looking up at me.

  “Sure, anything. Well, within reason.”

  “Next time you’re called to something, take me with you.”

  “Come again?”

  “When you were last here, we talked about being partners. Well, I want to take you up on that.”

  “You talked about being partners, actually.”

  “I’m good with these critters. I can help you.”

  “There’s no way I’m putting you in that kind of danger.”

  “Everson, listen to me and listen good. I’m an old lady in poor health. I’ve got maybe a year left, two if I’m lucky. Everything I held dear is gone. Well, except for this little guy. I’d rather meet my maker helping people than wasting away in this crappy rent control. I don’t care about the danger.”

  “Mae, I’m sorry, but—”

  She rose part way from her chair, the fat on her arms trembling. “You owe me, Croft. And I’m not going to let it go until you say yes.”

  I remembered what Gretchen had said about not opening any more loops. Would denying Mae fall into that category? I couldn’t afford to take any chances, and Mae sort of had a point. I showed her my hands.

  “All right. But it will be an assignment of my choosing.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “You’ll use that as an excuse to never bring me along.”

  Crap, she had me. “All right … the next one.”

  As I said it, I felt something change, as though a weight I hadn’t known I’d been carrying had lifted.

  Loop closed?

  I stood up before I could do anything to open the loop again. Mae stood with me and gave me a big hug. “God bless you, Everson Croft. I won’t let you down. I promise.” Sensing I was an ally now, Buster inched across her shoulders to my side and gave my head a shy pat.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I assured Mae.

  Only this time I had to mean it.

  26

  It was early evening when I left Mae’s apartment and emerged onto the street. I looked around as though I might spot the two remaining loops. Obligations hanging over me? There had been Vega’s and my talk at dinner the other night about needing to prove my commitment to the relationship. But that felt too big, not something I could close this evening, especially with her working.

  I wondered if they’d captured Quinton yet. I checked my pager, but there were no alerts. I walked until I found a payphone and called my voicemail. The one message began with a throat-clearing, followed by, “Ah, yes, I’m trying to get in touch with Everson Croft. This is Winston Snodgrass.”

  Professor Snodgrass?

  “I’m the chairman of his department at Midtown College,” the message continued. Apparently he didn’t realize I lived alone. “He was supposed to contact me this weekend about something we’d discussed on Friday, and I haven’t heard from him. I would like him to call me at his earliest convenience. It’s, um, well it’s become more urgent.”

  He left his number, made a sound like he was going to say something more, and then hung up.

  I’d blown Snodgrass off so completely on Friday that I had actually forgotten about our conversation. Something about a cable problem upsetting his wife’s schedule. An energy expert had attributed the problem to an imbalance of ley energy—which did sound like utter horse crap—and Snodgrass’s wife had wanted me to take a look to see if my special skills could fix it.

  Snodgrass had even offered to pay me two hundred bucks.

  I’d laughed then, but I wasn’t laughing now. Because the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to meet the r
equirements of another open loop: something I’d been asked to do or that I should have taken care of that I hadn’t. More than that, it resonated on a gut level. I nodded to myself as I dropped some more change into the phone and punched his number.

  “Yes, hello?” he answered.

  “Snodgrass, it’s Everson. I got your mess—”

  “Can you come over?” he asked before I’d even finished.

  “That’s what I’m calling about. Yeah, I should have some time this evening.”

  “How about now, then? You can, ah, join us for dinner.”

  “Okay…” I said, still not used to this side of him.

  “Great, let me give you the address.” Once I’d jotted it down, he said, “Be here in twenty minutes. No later.”

  I hung up feeling a little disoriented.

  Who was this man?

  The Snodgrasses lived at the end of a row of large townhouses in the one affluent—and highly guarded—neighborhood in the Bronx. As I got out of the cab I could see the halo of Yankee Stadium several blocks away. The main thoroughfares had been crowded with game-night traffic.

  I was reaching for the handle of an iron gate when a buzz sounded and the lock clicked open. I passed the gate, walked along a manicured garden, and climbed the steps. Snodgrass met me at the door. He was dressed in a formal blue suit with a crest on the pocket. Throw in his short stature and wet, parted hair, and he looked like a boy being sent off to an English boarding school.

  “You made it,” he said, a little out of breath. “Here let me take your coat.”

  “I’ll be more comfortable with it on, actually,” I said, trying to keep my bellbottoms out of view.

  “Is that him?” a loud voice called from farther back in the house.

  “Yes, Miriam,” Snodgrass called back, his voice meek in comparison.

  Was that his wife?

  “Well, show him in.”

  “Here, this way.” Snodgrass walked quickly ahead of me.