The goblin jumped into action. “Oh, ah, I’ll go with you. Make sure you get home safe.”
Mae giggled as he took Buster’s carrier and helped her to her feet. “And I thought chivalry was dead.”
I met them at the door, where I gave Mae a hug and we exchanged cheek kisses. “Thank you so much for your help,” I told her. “Buster too.” Mention of his name sent Buster scrambling around the carrier.
“I may have to sit out the next few,” Mae said. “But don’t forget about this old woman.”
“I definitely won’t. How about you, Bree-Yark? I can always use your tactical knowledge and muscle. And you’ve been solid company.”
He looked from me to Mae and back. “Count this goblin in.”
I gave him a thumb’s up and then a wink after Mae had turned away. As they made their way down the corridor, Mae said something about searching for those guillotine clippers back at her apartment, if Bree-Yark still wanted them.
“I do,” Bree-Yark said. “For my talons.”
Such a player.
I was about to check on Vega when she passed the two coming from the other direction. She removed her SWAT helmet wearily, walked straight into my open arms, and nestled against me. I held her for several moments.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
“Just an accident out front. Police officer lost control of his vehicle, but everyone’s fine.”
We entered the room and moved to the far end so as not to disturb Claudius. The efreet remained statue still at the end of the couch where Brian continued his marathon sobbing session. Still unable to believe we were sharing space with an ancient fire elemental, I caught myself staring at her. I expected to find Vega doing the same, but she was looking at the floor, her gaze cloudy with concern.
“Is there something else?” I asked.
“Oh, one of the officers at the scene seemed to think he’d picked up a communication about my son. But when I called home, everything was fine. False alarm that I’m still coming down from.” She patted her chest and forced a smile.
Something about that troubled me, though I couldn’t say why. All the more reason to get her and Tony spots in the safehouse. I was about to tell Vega what I’d discussed with Malachi when Claudius exclaimed from the desk. We turned to find him standing, fingers pinched above the phylactery as he drew away what I guessed was the final binding knot. He pulled slowly, slowly, then gave a final tug.
“Done!” he announced.
The phylactery glowed, then went permanently dull.
All of our gazes turned to the efreet. The being’s dark form shimmered with fire as the quotient bonded to the phylactery flowed back into her. I had believed that upon being freed, she would disappear back to her realm in an instant, that there would be nothing more to hold her here. But she didn’t appear in a hurry to go anywhere.
She looked around at the three of us and Tabitha, then peered down at Brian, her final master. I tried to read her face. What could a being like that be thinking? I didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to wait until she had incinerated him to find out.
I cleared my throat. “We’ll see that he’s punished.”
More likely he would be sent back into psychiatric care, but regardless, I didn’t want the efreet exacting justice here. She had no doubt slain masters before. She turned toward me. Where she had appeared mannequin-like just moments ago, her face was now aflame with something resembling passion. She strode forward.
I moved Vega behind me, cast a shield around us, and readied my sword. But thanks to the cathedral’s threshold, I was hurting for power. In my peripheral vision, I could see Claudius poised to open another portal.
“Do not fear me,” the efreet said, her voice deep and strangely harmonic.
Just in case the situation wasn’t clear to her, I said, “You’re free now.”
She stopped in front of us and looked down at me for an uncomfortably long moment. Though I couldn’t see the white flames in her eyes from earlier, I could feel them penetrating me, exploring my entire being.
“Hand me your blade,” she said at last.
I glanced over at Claudius, who nodded in an ardent way that said, Don’t piss her off.
I extended my father’s sword, handle out. Fire shimmered along the beveled blade as the efreet accepted it and looked it up and down. Why did she want it? I feared now that she would take it with her or reduce it to slag. While the sword would be meaningless to a being like her, it was everything to me.
But she held the sword up in front of her almost ceremonially and caressed the second rune, the one just below the banishment enchantment. Fire burst along the symbol’s grooves. A moment later, the blade glowed orange in her grip, and flames licked along the edges, but I was no longer worried for it.
She waited for the flames and glow to recede before handing the sword back.
The handle I gripped was cool, but I felt new power coursing along the blade. She had activated the second rune, I realized, one that held a fire enchantment. I would no longer need to carry dragon sand. Was this a payment for saving her from demon possession? For helping free her from bondage? Or was it a gift?
I bowed slightly. “Thank you.”
“More will come,” she said in her strange voice, and I understood she meant the demons. “Prepare yourself, Everson Croft.” Was she seeing what Malachi had when he’d referred to a demon apocalypse?
“Are you saying—?” I started to ask.
But the efreet’s eyes flashed white, and she was gone. Not even a wisp of smoke remained.
“Well,” Claudius said, dusting off his hands and tucking his curtains of hair behind his ears. “Guess I should get back to the phones. Ah, the Order will want these too.” He picked up the phylactery and gauntlet. He was already starting to incant for a portal when I motioned for him to hold on.
“Doesn’t what the efreet said concern you?” I asked.
“I didn’t catch it all, actually. My hearing’s starting to go. Think you can write something up and send it?”
I could have told him right there, but odds were he’d forget.
“Yeah, sure,” I said wearily. “And, hey, thanks for coming.”
He chuckled. “I actually enjoyed that. Reminded me of the good old days.” Claudius opened a portal beside the desk, told me we would talk soon, and disappeared.
Vega looked around the room. It was just the two of us and Tabitha, who had slept through everything.
“So, is that it?” she asked.
We had thwarted a major dragon summoning, denied the demons a weapon of mass destruction, and returned the efreet to her realm. But after what the efreet had said, it all felt like the opening salvo in a much larger war. I didn’t mention that, though. Instead, I took the Upholders card from my pocket and held it up.
“There’s just one more thing.”
38
The next evening
The induction into the Upholders took most of the day. It was held in their townhouse basement and involved oaths and strategy and going over what the four had already mapped out, using Malachi’s visions and their collective intel. The level of organization impressed me.
Despite our bad start two nights earlier, the four struck me as good people—or beings, anyway. Seay the Fae and Gorgantha the mermaid treated me civilly. And Jordan, who had been the most pissed about me jumping in line for sanctuary, had made a point of shaking my hand. His forceful personality all but ensured we would butt heads, but at least I understood where his passion came from. That understanding would help.
Plus, we have matching tattoos now, I thought dryly.
As I walked down East Fourteenth, headlights flashing past, I pulled my right hand from my coat pocket and studied the white sigil that had appeared following last night’s invocation. The sigil sat below the webbing between my thumb and first finger on the outside of my hand. A cool little design, actually. I just didn’t like the idea of it.
The aversion ca
me in part from what Vega had alluded to the day before—me not being comfortable yet working with others—even despite yesterday’s success. And part of it was the feeling I’d been branded.
But getting sanctuary for Vega and Tony had been worth it, I thought as I returned the hand to my pocket. There was an interfaith house in Brooklyn we planned to check out in the morning. A place they could stay for as long as they needed.
They could come and go, too. The enchanted objects I’d given them would absorb the power of the safe house, providing them extra protection when they were out. Demons would steer clear of them, and that included vampire-demons.
Vega still had mixed feelings about the arrangement, part of it coming from the guilt of receiving special treatment when so many would be left vulnerable. But her relief last night in the cathedral room had been apparent when I’d revealed my decision.
My decision, I emphasized. Arnaud was after me, and I would be damned if I was going to leave the two closest to my heart exposed. Not only that, but knowing they were safe would allow me to be more aggressive in my hunt for Arnaud. That street ran both ways.
Vega remained by my side as I spoke the invocation and took on the bonding.
Who knows? I’d caught myself thinking. Maybe Carlos will back off a little.
Yeah, and maybe pigs would fly.
When I reached the East Village apartment building, I ducked through the boarded-over doorway and hurried up the steps. I hadn’t been in touch with the vampire hunters that day, and I needed to update them. Arnaud was more demon now than vampire, and his zombie feat at the quarry meant he was even more powerful somehow than he’d been the other night at Container City. I wanted the hunters to keep their eyes on the streets, but to back off the hunt.
I couldn’t ask them to engage him now, not even for thirty thousand.
As I neared their floor, I listened for the rumbling of a generator and the sounds of screaming guitars and vocals, but all was silent in the condemned building. The second I stepped onto the corridor, my stomach clenched from the unmistakable scent of blood. My gaze followed a line of rust-colored footprints backwards to the apartment at the corridor’s end, where the vampire hunters’ door stood ajar.
A minute later, I was on my reserve flip phone.
“Who’s this?” a gruff voice answered.
“Hoffman, it’s Everson Croft.”
“What’s up?” the detective asked. “You okay?”
My mouth was so dry, I could barely form the words.
“Triple homicide,” I said faintly, then fought to swallow.
“And Hoffman … It’s bad.”
An hour later, Hoffman emerged from the apartment in one of his polyester suits. He peeled off a pair of latex gloves and joined me at the other end of the corridor, where I’d remained rooted. Behind him, officers and techs continued to work the inhuman scene where I’d discovered the bodies of Blade, Bullet, and Dr. Z.
Or what remained of them.
Hoffman released a heavy sigh and dragged a hand around his wreath of curls. “You weren’t kidding. That might be the worst I’ve ever seen, and in this city, that’s saying a lot.” He gestured to the line of footprints he’d been careful to step around. “You were right about those, too. The vic pulled from the East River yesterday morning was wearing the same size and brand when he left the house.”
“What did you find inside?” I asked, my throat still raw.
“The perp tossed the place pretty good. He was looking for something, but not valuables. There was a wad of cash on one of the beds he didn’t touch.” Probably my first payment to them, I thought. “Some other things. No telling if he found what he was looking for.”
But I knew he had. The way he’d displayed the bodies spoke to a man—or creature—celebrating. Given the hunters’ work, the object of his pursuit could have been something that had belonged to a vampire or vampire spawn. Something that would further his cause. What that was, though, I could only guess.
“You think it’s this Arnaud Thorne, huh?” Hoffman said.
On that question, I didn’t have to guess. “I know it’s him.”
“That why you called me and not Vega?”
I nodded. There was no way I could have let her walk in on that with her knowing the same creature had held her son captive. “If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d like to be the one to tell her.”
“Then you better get a move on. Once the reports start going out, she’s gonna know.”
Vega had spent the day making sure Brian and Cameo were processed while helping the department sort out exactly what had happened at Epic Con and the quarry, not to mention the Hudson power station and the surrounding neighborhoods.
I looked from the bloody footprints to the portly detective. We’d had our battles, but ever since teaming up at Yankee Stadium, we’d developed a grudging acceptance of the other.
“Thanks, Hoffman,” I said.
He grunted and slapped my shoulder. “Sorry about your friends.”
Without waiting for a response, he returned to the crime scene.
When I called Vega, I asked that we speak in the corridor, where Tony couldn’t overhear us. I arrived to find her waiting outside her door in a pair of faded jeans and one of her thick white turtlenecks.
“What is it?” she asked, the corridor amplifying her whispered voice.
I took a moment to gather myself. “The vampire hunters are dead. Happened sometime last night.”
“Arnaud?” she asked.
I nodded. Vega clasped my hands tightly in hers and waited for me to explain. I didn’t describe what I’d seen when I pushed open their apartment door, what Arnaud had reduced the three of them to—I couldn’t. Only that it had been brutal.
Unimaginably brutal.
“What we need to understand,” I went on, “is that Arnaud is a different creature than the one I sent down. His time in the Pits … It changed him. Not that he wasn’t already a monster, but the scene he left at the apartment … Whether he intended it or not, it was a message. If he ever gets his hands on us, he won’t play the kinds of games he did as a vampire. He’s going to do much, much worse.”
Vega absorbed the information solemnly.
“And I think Arnaud found something at their place.”
“What?” she asked, her voice gone husky.
“I’m not sure, maybe something that protects him. The detectives found gray salt in the apartment, which can be used for storing enchanted objects. I didn’t pick up anything like that inside, though.”
I’d forced myself to return to the crime scene before coming here, to do my part.
Vega released one of my hands to touch the ring hanging from her neck. I doubted she was even aware she was doing it. She rotated the ring back and forth a few times through her turtleneck. When she tried to return it to me last night, I refused to take it. And I damned sure wasn’t going to take it now.
But a sinister whisper took up in the back of my mind: What if he’s protected against the Brasov Pact? What if the coin pendant and ring do nothing now? Was that my magic talking, or my own fears?
“I have some news too,” Vega said, breaking up the thought.
I lifted my gaze from the ring. “Oh yeah? What is it?”
Her eyes turned moist as she tried to smile.
“I think I’m pregnant.”
Available Now
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The Croftverse Catalogue
PROF CROFT
Book of Souls
Demon Moon
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*More to come*
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Acknowledgments
One of the many pleasures of returning to Prof Croft’s world is the team I get to work with.
It starts with the designers at Damonza.com, who are the true wizards, in my opinion, always seeming to come up with the perfect cover and graphics for the latest installment.
As publication draws nearer, the beta and advanced readers come on board, providing valuable corrections and feedback. This time, that crew included Linda Ash, Danny Barron, and Mark Denman. Huge thanks, guys!
The proofreaders step in last for final polishing and shining. Much appreciation to Donna Rich and Sharlene Magnarella for doing an exceptional job. Naturally, any errors that remain are this author’s alone.
Power Game Page 29