Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9)

by Brad Magnarella

  “What in thunder?” Bree-yark muttered, drawing a blade from his ankle sheath.

  I didn’t like it either. The once-still pond was acting like a meteor had dropped into it. I released my sword from my staff and drew the two apart. At the same moment, something almost as large as the pond thrust to the surface.

  26

  I stared, struggling to make sense of what I was seeing. The creature was brown and horny with multiple staring eyes. A dozen appendages, thick and segmented, writhed from a head that was also its body, churning the pond waters muddy.

  “I’ve been to every corner of Faerie,” Bree-yark said, stepping back, “and I’ve never—argh!”

  An appendage lashed out, quick as a frog’s tongue, and wrapped his leg. Before I could cleave it with my sword, it retracted. One moment Bree-yark was standing beside me, and in the next, he was over the pond, his work boots planted on either side of the creature’s yawning mouth, which bristled with fangs.

  “Everson!” he barked.

  I invoked a shield around myself an instant before another appendage arrived and thumped against it.

  “Hang tight!” I called, digging into a coat pocket.

  But two more of the creature’s tentacles were already wrapping Bree-yark. One immobilized his arms, pinning his blade to his side. The other circled his legs. Bree-yark grunted, straining to keep his feet from being pulled together and into the creature’s mouth. Beyond its fangs, a purple tongue lurched back and forth.

  “Protezione!” I shouted.

  Bree-yark’s legs faltered and his feet came together, but a wall of hardened air now spanned the creature’s mouth. Denied its meal, the creature threw a thrashing tantrum that involved waving Bree-yark around. I clutched a vial of ice crystals, searching for an opening while trying to reassure Bree-yark help was coming.

  There!

  With a pair of Words, I dispersed the creature’s muzzle and shot the vial into its mouth. As the vial slammed the back of its throat, I shouted, “Ghiaccio!”

  The creature let out half a gagging noise before the released magic froze its convulsing throat muscles. The crystals worked quickly, growing frost over the creature’s hide and films of ice over its many eyes. The tentacles went herky-jerky and then turned into rigid statues. I splashed into the pond as the entire creature began to tip. With hacks of my sword, I shattered the tentacles holding Bree-yark.

  “Thank the—gaaawds!” he shouted.

  Falling from the creature’s grip, he broke through the sheet of ice spreading around us. I grabbed the back of his overalls and pulled him, sputtering, from the water. We landed in a flower bed and lay panting.

  “What in the blazes was that?” he managed.

  “No idea. But it could explain Sunita’s disappearance.”

  At that moment, the back door to the house opened, and the missing woman stepped onto the deck in a bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towel. She looked from us to the pond creature as she padded down the steps on bare feet.

  “I am so sorry,” she said.

  Bree-yark glowered at her. “That monstrosity is yours?”

  “An early experiment gone awry,” the bioengineer said. “I didn’t have the heart to destroy him, so I took him home, and he started growing. He’s really protective of the house. I wish you’d told me you were coming.”

  “I tried to call, but you must have been in the shower,” I said. “Sorry about your … experiment.” I gestured toward the frost-covered creature, half capsized in a thick layer of ice.

  Sunita’s story reminded me a lot of Tabitha. I hadn’t been able to destroy her as a little one either. And as much as the full-grown cat got on my nerves, I knew the devastation I’d feel if I ever found her like this. But Sunita surprised me by waving a hand.

  “No worries. His tissue was engineered to survive deep freezes. He’ll be fine once he thaws, though it may take another week for the appendages to grow back.”

  “Great,” Bree-yark muttered.

  “You’re a magic-user?” she said to me.

  “I am,” I admitted. “I’m also the reason you have police protection. Is there someplace we can talk?”

  Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in her living room. Sunita was the one dressed now, while Bree-yark and I wore towel skirts as our clothes tumble-dried in the laundry room. Chilled from my ice attack, Bree-yark clutched a steaming mug of Darjeeling tea in both hands. Tabitha sat on the couch beside him. She was under no-talking orders, and her slitted eyes peered around critically.

  “So you think Bear and Robert were killed because they’re Discovery Society fellows?” Sunita asked after I’d given her the rundown.

  “I do. Someone wanted their organs—for what purpose we don’t know yet. Does the Discovery Society have any rituals, anything that goes back to its beginnings? To do with gods, maybe, or patrons?”

  She shook her head. “If anything we’ve become more scientific as an organization.”

  Remembering Walter Mims’s dry lecture from the night before, I nodded and struck off my theory that a ritual had endowed their organs with special properties.

  “Whoever did this has access to the club,” I continued. “The perp slipped both victims a liquid. Might even have happened in the lounge, where I understand fellows and members mingle? The liquid bound them to alternate versions of themselves. Versions the perpetrator was able to attack with impunity.”

  “Good thing I don’t drink,” Sunita said with a hollow laugh.

  She touched the protective pin on her shirt. I had guessed she was already somewhat versed, or at least accepting, of the esoteric, and that seemed to be bearing out so far. Her expression remained serious.

  “The liquid isn’t in you,” I reassured her. “My hunting spell would have told me. But I want to give you something.” I drew one of the two amulets I’d prepared from my satchel. “Until we catch the perpetrator, I want you to wear this at all times. The gem will glow if you come within fifteen feet of the liquid in question. It will also alert me. Check it before you eat or drink anything, okay?”

  She nodded as she accepted the amulet and fastened it around her neck. Beyond her professional veneer, I caught a glimpse of the grief she must have been feeling over the death of Bear, her former lover. If she was the perp, she was doing a damned good acting job to portray that kind of nuance.

  She recomposed herself as she sat back again. “Do you have any suspects?”

  “I was actually about to ask if you’d noticed anything odd lately,” I said. “About the club, it’s members? Anyone new hanging around?”

  “I hate to name names,” she said, “but I saw you sitting with Ludvig Lassgard at the meeting last night. His ancestry goes back to the club’s founding. As he’s always saying, exploration is in his blood. We’ve felt that should count for something, which is why we’ve kept him on as an associate, even though he can’t really contribute to our mission. That may seem cruel, but it gives him access to the meetings and most of the club. He’s a little strange, you may have noticed. I always considered him a harmless enthusiast, but twice in the last month, I caught him coming out of collection rooms he shouldn’t have been in. He claimed he got turned around, but it was like he was looking for something.”

  “Any idea what?”

  She shook her head. “Our collections are pretty extensive and more maps and artifacts arrive every few months. It could have been innocent,” she hastened to add. “I just thought it unusual at the time, and since you asked…”

  “No, I appreciate it. We’ll follow up. You mentioned artifacts. Has there ever been a box like this in your collection?” I pulled out my phone and showed her the shot I’d taken in the landfill two days earlier.

  She cocked an eyebrow. “A flip phone?”

  “Yeah, it’s the most complicated thing I can manage.”

  “You can say that again,” Tabitha muttered, prompting a warning look from me.

  But Sunita was engrossed now in studying the
image. “It’s pretty, but no,” she said at last.

  Still convinced the Hermes box was connected to the murders somehow, I’d been hoping for a conclusive link to the Discovery Society. But Sunita’s mention of artifacts arriving regularly interested me.

  “Who curates the collection?” I asked.

  “That would be Walter. And he takes it very seriously.”

  I nodded. Walter Mims, our next stop. He’d be able to tell me more about the holdings. Maybe he would recognize the box.

  “Has anything in the collection ever stood out to you?” I asked.

  “Nothing specific, but—this is going to sound really out there,” she interjected self-consciously.

  “More ‘out there’ than that thing in your pond?” Bree-yark asked, peering warily out a window onto the backyard. The creature was still entrapped in ice, but the sun had melted the frost from its hide and several eyes were starting to blink.

  “There’s a basement in the building,” she continued. “It’s where Walter stores newly arrived artifacts. He takes us down there from time to time to show us pieces. I never like going. It always feels as if there’s something shadowing us, something dark. The building is old. It was an orphanage before becoming the Discovery Society’s headquarters.” Remembering my trip to 1800s New York, that didn’t surprise me; the city had been crawling with orphans.

  “The orphanage would lock troubled children in these small isolation chambers in the basement, so I attributed the feeling to trapped memories or lingering spirits. Ever since I was a young girl, I’ve been sensitive to subtle energies. But it wasn’t just me—the right hand of Ganesh would start vibrating when we were down there. God, listen to me,” she laughed, touching the protection pin. “Nobel Prize-winning scientist. But now that you mention it, I suppose the feeling could have come from an artifact. The climate-controlled cases hold a dozen of them at any one time. Walter can show you.”

  “Isn’t that who we’re seeing next?” Bree-yark asked me.

  “Yeah, I have an amulet for him too.”

  Sunita snorted. “Good luck getting him to wear it.”

  After the way he’d reacted to my mythology-and-lore credentials the night before, I’d been afraid of that.

  “Just one more question before we grab our clothes and get out of your hair,” I said. “Did Bear happen to mention anything in the last month about being watched or followed? Or just anything unusual?”

  Sunita’s gaze dropped and she sniffled. “To be honest, we stopped talking about six weeks ago. Some things happened that I won’t get into, but he thought it was for the best. If there was anything unusual, he wouldn’t have mentioned it to me. You might want to ask someone closer to him.”

  She seemed to be confirming the rumor of her and Bear’s affair.

  I was going to leave it there—we needed to get to Walter Mims—but since she’d given me an opening…

  “Did you two meet through the club?”

  “No, at a bioengineering conference.”

  “Huh. Did it have anything to do with his work at Ramsa Inc?”

  “It was one of his passion projects. He’d become interested in a gene called 7Rb, obsessed with it really.” Seeming to catch the fact she was talking to laypeople, she said, “That’s a variant of what’s commonly called the ‘explorer gene.’ It appeared in the human genome roughly twenty-five hundred years ago and shows up in a small percentage of the population. The variant acts as a super driver for exploration and innovation. Bear wanted to patent a therapy that could maximize its expression, give visionaries like him an edge. He was using himself as a test subject, even though his profile for the variant was already in the top thousandth of a percentile. But he confided in me that the trials were making him edgy and aggressive. I urged him to stop. He did, not long after. But he’d become so enamored with bioengineering by that point, he talked me into applying to become a fellow.”

  She opened her hands as though to say, And here I am.

  It sounded as though he’d become enamored with her too, but that wasn’t my business. I stood and straightened my towel skirt. “If you think of anything else that might be relevant, give me a call. And please, stay home. Don’t let anyone in, even if you know them. We’re working on this as fast as we can.”

  The Doideag’s haunting verse came back to me:

  If ye should fail and war should come, if seas should boil and lands should run…

  Sunita’s green eyes peered into mine as if picking up my troubled thoughts.

  “This is bigger than just me and Walter, isn’t it?” she said. “Or Bear and Robert?”

  “I think the perp is using the organs for something that could prove catastrophic,” I said. “If we let it happen.”

  Nodding decisively, she removed her Ganesh pin. “Then you should have this.”

  “No, no, I can’t.” I tried to back away, but the couch stopped me. “It’s a family heirloom.”

  “I’ll expect it back when you’re done,” she said, pinning it to my coat.

  It was a touching gesture—if I could trust her.

  I waited until we were back in Bree-yark’s vehicle before unpinning the protection and burying it in a bag of neutralizing salt.

  27

  “Everson!” a boisterous voice said over the phone. “Long time, buddy.”

  We were just pulling away from Sunita’s house, Walter Mims’s address punched into Bree-yark’s GPS, when my phone rang. I hadn’t recognized the number, but the distinct voice belonged to Mayor Lowder. And it had been a while, about eight months, since we’d worked together. That was when infernal bags were detonating throughout the city, causing mass casualties and culminating in a demon attack at Yankee Stadium during game six of the American League Championship.

  Strangely, that felt like the easier case right now.

  “Hi, Mayor,” I said. “I tried calling you earlier.”

  “It’s Budge to you, and sorry about that. I’ve been in meetings all morning. The murders, first Goldburn and now Strock…” When he blew out his breath, I pictured him wiping his cowlick from his pudgy face. “Tragic, horrible. And it’s really put the city in a tough spot. Our municipal bonds are taking a dump in trading right now. They’re losing faith in us, Everson. I need some good news from you.”

  “Well, we’re closer to understanding what’s happening.”

  “Hold that thought. My secretary’s trying to put Detective Hoffman through. You there, Detective?”

  “Yeah,” came Hoffman’s raw voice.

  “Go ahead, Everson,” Budge said. “Tell us everything.”

  As Bree-yark drove back toward the city, and the smell of Tabitha’s tuna lunch filled the Hummer, I broke down what I knew: how the perp was using the shadow present to attack the victims; and what I suspected: that the perp was targeting them for their organs and their connection to the Discovery Society.

  Hoffman scoffed a couple times, but Budge was all ears. He’d learned a lot during the monster eradication campaign, though it also helped that his late wife had been a werewolf.

  “Interesting,” he remarked when I finished. “What do you think, Detective?”

  “Great story, but our best lead is still Vince Cole, the attorney.”

  “Vince Cole?” I repeated. It was as if Hoffman had had putty in his ears for the last fifteen minutes. But according to Vega, this was a pattern with her partner—favoring a suspect early and then stubbornly holding on, even as evidence mounted suggesting someone else was responsible. Given the immense pressure he was under, that instinct in Hoffman had probably kicked up another notch.

  “Fine,” I said. “What’s his connection to Strock?”

  “He worked with Strock in the past, on a libel case. Could have been a payment dispute.”

  “Cole’s firm specializes in all-star clients,” I said. “He’s worked with just about every big name in the city.”

  “He worked with me once,” Budge offered.

  “Wha
t did you learn from the cell tower data on Cole’s phone?” I asked.

  “What were you even doing poking around the Discovery Society?” Hoffman asked irritably, confirming that the cell data lined up with Vince Cole’s account of dropping Bear off that night. “You were supposed to be hunting Sven Roe and building golems.”

  “The Sup Squad is working on Sven, and the golems became unnecessary when my magic led me to the Discovery Society.”

  I was fudging the timeline a bit, but Hoffman didn’t need to know that. He stammered before shouting, “Well, what do you want us to do? Raid this shadow place and round up all the owners of three-headed dogs?” The only reason he wasn’t swearing was because the mayor was on the call.

  “It’s better than harassing an innocent man,” I shot back.

  “All right, all right,” Budge stepped in. “The detective has a point, Everson. What’s the plan? Where do we go from here?”

  “What’re you asking him for?” Hoffman growled. “I’m lead on this.”

  “And Everson’s our special consultant,” Budge said. “I want to hear what he has to say.”

  I pictured Hoffman’s face growing redder around his grinding teeth.

  “Well, the remaining fellows are under police watch,” I said. “And I just delivered a special amulet to Sunita Sharma, one that will detect the potion the perp is using to bind his victims. I’m on my way to Walter Mims’s to do the same. If the perp makes a move on either one, I’ll get an alert. I also have an associate looking into how the perp might be using the organs. While she’s doing that, I’d like to talk to Vince Cole.”

  “Why?” Hoffman barked.

  “Because he was Goldburn’s friend, and they were together the night of his murder. I have some questions.”

  “One, no one talks to him but me,” Hoffman said. “I have a system. And two, he isn’t talking.”

  “One, you don’t know what to ask him. And two, just because he isn’t talking to you doesn’t mean he isn’t talking.”

  “Oh, you want your shot, Sherlock?” Hoffman laughed. “Well, you go right ahead—he’s in the Yellow Pages—but you’re flying solo. Any lawsuits he slaps you with is on your dime, not the NYPD’s.”