Black Luck (Prof Croft Book 5) Read online

  Black Luck

  Prof Croft Book 5

  Brad Magnarella

  © 2018

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved.

  Cover by Damonza.com

  Table of Contents

  The Prof Croft Series

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Available Now

  Prof Croft Mailing List

  Books in the Strangeverse

  Acknowledgments

  The Prof Croft Series

  BOOK OF SOULS

  DEMON MOON

  BLOOD DEAL

  PURGE CITY

  DEATH MAGE

  BLACK LUCK

  *MORE TO COME*

  Be sure to sign up to the Prof Croft mailing list to be the very first to learn about new releases:

  http://bit.ly/profcrofters

  1

  The bolt that hit Quinton Weeks in the low back felt like a cattle prod. Swearing, he clamped the cramping muscle. His snow shovel, loaded with trash and debris, fell short of his cart in a plume of dust. He leaned against the cart and panted beneath the searing sun.

  This is for the effing birds, he thought.

  Quinton wasn’t a stranger to work, but this was hard labor. His wasted muscles weren’t used to it. By the time he pushed himself straight, the sweat from his face had fogged up his goggles again. He swore, shoved the goggles onto his forehead, and pulled down his respirator.

  While he waited for the pain in his back to ease, he peered around the ruined landscape, inhaling its grit. On all sides, workers in helmets and orange vests were shoveling, welding, jack-hammering, and climbing in and out of big trucks. He felt like he was on another planet. But he was in Lower Manhattan, a couple of months after the war down here.

  A war over what? Hell if Quinton knew. There had been all sorts of rumors. The wildest being that it had involved werewolves and vampires. The mayor had even claimed a wizard played a role.

  Quinton snorted. Anything to get reelected. New York was weird, but not quite that weird. He’d seen some wild stuff, sure. Big, lumbering mutants in the East Village. And only a couple months earlier, the city had rioted en masse. Over what? Again, he had no idea. He’d been too stoned.

  But he needed money now. Badly. He’d gone on a massive substance binge that summer, and by the time he emerged he was out of food, two months behind on rent, and one day shy of turning thirty. Somewhere in there, his girlfriend had dumped him. He had to get it together.

  The cleanup gig guaranteed him six months of work, but now he wasn’t sure he was going to last. It wasn’t just the back pain or the withdrawal, it was the culture of the place.

  A Styrofoam cup nailed the side of his helmet, splashing coffee over him.

  “Hey, sissy!” someone shouted. “No one’s paying you to play pocket pool!”

  Case in point.

  Quinton turned to see a thick worker leaning out of the passenger window of an idling truck. The driver grinned past him. He’d run into these two before, a pair of junior site managers who got their kicks shoving around debris collectors like him. He’d learned to stay off their radar, to look busy whenever they came by, but the place was so damned noisy, he hadn’t heard them roll up.

  “Sthorry,” Quinton said, replacing his goggles and respirator.

  He’d tried to bite back the lisp, but he’d been born with a cleft pallet, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. The two workers climbed out of the idling truck and swaggered toward him.

  Quinton kept his eyes on his shovel.

  “Oh, you’re sthorry?” the passenger said. “Where’d they find you? Broadway and Forty-Second?”

  The two of them laughed. Quinton squinted over at them, grinning as if he was in on the joke, even though he’d heard it most of his life. Their eyes glinted cruelly. Quinton shifted his gaze. A couple of blocks to the north, workers were dismantling the massive wall that had separated Lower Manhattan from the rest of the city. A crane lifted out a huge vertical section.

  “What are you staring at?” the driver demanded.

  Quinton returned to his work, shoveling up more debris. His back protested as he lifted the load toward the cart. But before it got there, the driver planted a large work boot against the cart’s side and gave it a shove. The cart tipped over, spilling the couple hundred pounds of debris Quinton had spent the last half hour loading.

  The passenger snorted a laugh. “Oops.”

  The driver leaned toward Quinton, his mouth set in a dangerous scowl. “You don’t have that shit picked up in the next five, and you’re off the job. I don’t know how your pansy ass got signed in the first place. You don’t belong.”

  Quinton had heard that last part most of his life too.

  “All right,” he said evenly, even though his bladder was on the verge of letting go. His back screamed as he righted the large yellow cart and began to refill it quickly. The two watched for a minute or so before getting bored and swaggering back to their truck.

  “Five minutes,” the driver reminded him.

  The truck rumbled off, the two in search of someone else to dominate. Quinton relaxed slightly, but on the next shovelful, his back gave out and he collapsed to his knees. He stayed there for the next minute, forehead to the debris-covered street. Screw the job, screw the money—hell, screw living. He didn’t need any of it anymore. It added up to one big nothing.

  “Oh, I agree,” a voice said.

  Afraid the two assholes had returned, Quinton lurched upright. But when he looked around, he was alone. Anyway, the voice had sounded older, more refined—and strangely sympathetic.

  “This is far beneath someone like you,” the voice continued. “Someone of your … importance.”

  With the last word, a chilly current ran over Quinton like hundreds of fingertips. His back stopped throbbing. He looked around some more, the broken glass that covered the ruined landscape sparkling sharply in the sun. Still no one. The voice was too clear for him to be imagining it. He paused. Was he losing his mind? He’d done some hard stuff that summer, like—

  “What do you want for yourself?” the voice interrupted.

  “Who are you?” Quinton demanded. “Why can’t I see you?”

  “I’m a friend,” the voice replied smoothly. “Look beneath your left hand.”

  Quinton jerked the hand away from the pile. If there was a face down there, he was going to scream. At first he saw only dusty rubble and garbage, but something glinted up at him. He pulled his glove off, pinched the glinting object between a finger and thumb, and drew it out.

  It was a silver necklace.

  “You didn’t happen upon me by accident. You are a Chosen One. Wear it, and I will open you to your true potential. I’ll fulfill your wishes. You’ll possess power you never dreamed possible.”

  A Chosen One? That sounded like New Age bullshit, but Quinton was still trying to
get his head around the idea that a necklace appeared to be talking to him. He held it at arm’s length.

  “Would you rather stay here and scoop filth for the next six months?” the voice asked. “Be harassed by ogres?”

  No, Quinton decided. No, he wouldn’t. And what did he have to lose? Either his brain was damaged and he was hearing voices, in which case nothing would happen when he wore the necklace, and he would resume his miserable life. Or something might actually happen.

  A hope Quinton hadn’t felt in years kicked inside him. Tugging off the other glove, he fastened the necklace at his grimy nape. When the voice spoke again, it felt like someone talking into both of his ears at the same time.

  “There,” the voice said. “Doesn’t that feel better?”

  As Quinton stood, cold energy pulsed from the silver. Something was happening, but he couldn’t tell what. All he knew was that the hopelessness that had being crushing down on his soul like a trash compactor seemed to have backed off. He felt scared and excited at the same time.

  “It does,” he admitted. “But who are you?”

  “I am called Damien, and I have work for you.”

  The pulses deepened until they vibrated through Quinton’s body. He felt larger, stronger, his worries of just minutes before a million miles away. A few drugs had made him feel that way in the past, but over time the effects had become fragile and fleeting. Gone too soon.

  But this felt like a permanent state. It was as if something that already belonged to him was waking up from a long sleep, coming back to life. He loved Damien for arousing it. But he feared, too, that Damien could squelch it just as quickly, dropping him back into the gutter.

  “Yes, anything,” Quinton said anxiously.

  “Gather your four most trusted friends.”

  Quinton considered that. Did he even have four friends he trusted?

  “You did not happen on me by accident,” Damien said. “And neither did you happen on them. Your whole life has been building toward this moment. You, Quinton, are central to the Plan.” He said the word as though it were capitalized. That was the way Quinton heard it anyway.

  He nodded. “When should I gather them?”

  He felt Damien’s lips break into a grin. For some reason, the thought of pleasing Damien filled Quinton with a wild joy.

  “Why not now?” Damien said. “You’re going to build an Ark.”

  “Yes,” Quinton said, not knowing what Damien meant but at the same time sensing its importance.

  He peered around. The array of burly workers suddenly looked puny and stupid. He felt an urge to crush them all beneath his boot. Instead, he used his boot to snap his leaning shovel in half. He then chucked away his safety equipment and strode from his trash cart. Two blocks later, he was kicking past the cordon.

  “Hey, where do you think you’re going?” one of the site managers called.

  “Thith is for the fucking birds,” Quinton called back, grinning too hard to notice his lisp.

  “Yes,” Damien agreed in his head. “For the birds.”

  2

  Ten months later

  I banged on the apartment door again, louder.

  “Hello?” I shouted. “Anyone home?”

  I looked at my cane, which had tugged me to Harlem and then up to the tenth-floor unit at 8:40 on a Friday morning. The hologram back at my apartment had started flashing about twenty-five minutes earlier. For the distance, I had arrived here in good time—assuming I was standing at the right address. It had only been two months since I’d burst into a wrong apartment, invoking a shield in time to spare myself a shotgun blast to the face.

  Now my cane jerked and knocked against the door twice as if to say, Yes, Everson—nether creature ahead!

  “All right, all right. Just wanted to be sure.”

  I dispelled the hunting spell and whispered, “Protezione.”

  My cane relaxed and then stiffened with new energy. An orb of light swelled from the cane’s opal and grew to encompass me. With another Word, I shaped the light until it conformed to my figure. I’d been working on that last skill for the past several months and grinned now at being able to maintain the shield’s form with only minimal concentration.

  I tried the doorknob while gathering a force invocation. Surprisingly, the knob turned in my grasp. The battered door creaked open about a foot before stopping cold. Something was blocking it. Swelling my light out, I beheld a dim hallway. Loaded boxes were stacked floor to ceiling. By their dusty condition, they weren’t going to be unpacked anytime soon.

  Great, I thought, a hoarder.

  The only thing I hated worse than going underground was being in confined spaces. Especially with nether creatures afoot. Grunting, I put my shoulder into the door and forced it open another few inches until I could squeeze inside. I checked all around before fixing my gaze ahead.

  “Hello?” I called again.

  I drew my sword from the cane as I advanced sideways between the towering heaps of boxes. The runes my father had inscribed in the blade’s steel and silver pulsed with power.

  “Anyone home?”

  Though I’d answered hundreds of calls over the years, I never knew what I was walking into. Sure, the MO was predictable enough. Amateur conjurer comes into the possession of a spell book or enchanted item, decides to call up something—either for kicks or from the mistaken notion that benevolent, wish-granting beings actually exist—and then performs enough of the ritualistic steps correctly to summon … something.

  The something was always the question mark. Best case, a shallow nether creature that scurried or flapped around for a few minutes before evaporating back to its realm, the energy that called it forth too weak to sustain it. Worst case, something from deeper down that was much more adept at survival—usually by devouring the summoner’s blood and/or vital organs before widening its search.

  In the last year, with the Order still laboring to repair the tears left behind by the Whisperer, I’d been encountering more of the second.

  I sniffed. It would have taken a werewolf’s nose to discern anything amid the riot of odors, but I did manage to pick up the tangy scent of a recent conjuring. I eyed the open doorways off the corridor. Beyond the final door on the right, something was throwing shadows. Something big. The play of shadows was accompanied by scuffing, and soon muttering.

  The conjurer?

  “Hello?” I called.

  A box near the bathroom fell to the floor behind me. I spun as more boxes toppled over. A creature the size of a pool noodle had emerged from hiding and was now racing along the wall on centipede legs. Where its head should have been, a pincer mouth opened and closed amid a mass of writhing tendrils.

  “A scrabbler,” I muttered.

  Fortunately, they weren’t particularly smart. I shrank back to give it the impression I was cowering. When the scrabbler was almost to me, it twisted, front legs peeling from the wall, and lunged. I met the mouth with the thrust of my sword. The blade disappeared down its throat. The scrabbler’s tendrils grasped at my hand before jerking back, surprised by my crackling shield.

  “Disfare!” I shouted.

  Energy coursed down my blade, and the creature exploded in giant gobs of phlegm.

  One and done, I thought, but I was bothered. A scrabbler didn’t grow to that size without feeding.

  I turned back toward the far room, where something continued to mutter and scuff around. I stole forward. As I passed the first bedroom off the hallway, I braced for the sight of a half-eaten conjurer. Instead, I found a space so packed with junk that roaches would have had a hard time navigating.

  I pulled the door closed and sealed it with a locking spell. It was rare an amateur conjurer managed to call up more than one or two creatures at a go, but I didn’t want any surprises.

  Inside the next bedroom, a narrow path led to a queen-sized mattress and cluttered nightstand. Densely packed racks of women’s clothes ringed the room. The bed was empty except for a scatter o
f spells books. My gaze locked on the title of one of them: an English translation of the Khafji Scrolls. That’s where the spell had come from. I was in the process of foot-shoving an armoire back to close and seal the door when a row of dresses on the far wall began to shudder.

  “Please be a cat.”

  But the three creatures that emerged were neither furry nor feline. They raced out on finger-like legs. Razor-sharp tails whipped back and forth, one of them making tatters of a purple dress.

  Riddlers.

  Guided by my heat aura, they launched at my face. With a jab of my staff and an uttered Word, I snagged them in mid air with a light orb. They scurried over one another, tails lashing. I shrank the orb until the riddlers were jammed together, the fleshy mouths on the undersides of their bodies snapping at their confinement. My brow tensed as I pushed more energy into the orb. The energy that sustained the three creatures pushed back, but I overpowered it as one by one the horrid creatures bulged and then popped out of existence.

  I exhaled and deposited the phlegmy residue in a wastebasket beside the bed. Sealing the door as I left, I turned toward the final room.

  Now for the Big Daddy.

  Because there was no way now that the conjurer was still alive.

  As I sidled up to the doorway, I wracked my brain for a class of creature on par with scrabblers and riddlers that could be so large. Either the thing had been conjured without triggering the Order’s detecting wards, giving it time to grow, or it was from even farther down than the others.

  Either way, a part of me anticipated the challenge.

  The Order had promised to continue my training as soon as a teacher became available, but a full year had gone by without that happening. That hadn’t stopped me from getting a head start, though. I was proud of the progress I’d made since we’d repelled Dhuul, the Whisperer. Creatures I’d once struggled to put down—such as scrabblers and riddlers—now barely made me sweat. I’d suffered no major injuries, and I wasn’t having to depend on my luck quotient. All right, I wasn’t having to depend on my luck quotient as much. With more training and experience, I hoped it would become a dim memory.