Purge City (Prof Croft Book 3) Read online

  Purge City

  Prof Croft Book 3

  Brad Magnarella

  © 2017

  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.

  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

  Mailing List

  Books by Brad Magnarella

  The Prof Croft Series

  BOOK OF SOULS

  DEMON MOON

  BLOOD DEAL

  PURGE CITY

  *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

  “Svelare.” The word vibrated from my mouth, dispelling the magical veil over my floor-to-ceiling bookcase.

  I paced the length of the shelves as encyclopedias and academic texts rippled and became magical tomes and grimoires. At a flaking, leather-bound tome, I stopped and pulled it from its slot. A book of Final Passage. I flipped it open to a marked page and set the book on a stand on my iron table. My gaze roamed across the ornate script to an old and sacred ritual that ensured swift passage for the deceased by calling forth a gatekeeper.

  I took a resolute breath and nodded. I was going for it.

  For the past week I’d studied the ritual, weighing the pros and cons of actually enacting it. But it wasn’t like the Order had left me a choice. After several inquiries into my mother’s death, the first sent four months ago, I hadn’t received a single response. Not even a boilerplate: “We appreciate your correspondence. Please be patient as we look into the matter.”

  So, yeah, the Order could bite me.

  I consulted the book and some notes I’d jotted into the margins as I pulled spell items from my storage bins. Before long, the table top was arrayed with candles, an urn of graveyard dirt, a funeral veil soaked with a copal resin, a bloodstone, and a manhole-sized standing mirror. On the table’s far end was the porcelain hair brush that had belonged to my mother when she was a girl, two strands of her light-brown hair caught in its bristles.

  Two chances to get this right, I thought.

  I walked in a circle, sprinkling the graveyard dirt into a symbol of the dead. I then placed five candles around the circle’s perimeter and, chanting, lit them in a star-shaped sequence. As the flames rose and thinned, the room seemed to dim and cool by several degrees.

  At the center of the circle, I propped the mirror on its stand and then placed the bloodstone and a strand of hair drawn from my mother’s brush before it, covering both with the funeral veil.

  “And now for my insurance…”

  Focusing on the coin pendant that hung from a chain around my neck, I incanted softly, lips, tongue, and tone imbuing the family symbol with energy. The coin began to hum over my sternum. I switched chants, encasing the coin in a small shield. If I calculated correctly, the energy building up in the coin would overwhelm the shield spell in about five minutes.

  A time bomb for if things went sideways.

  “Gatekeeper,” I whispered in an ancient tongue as I stood from the circle and drew my sword from my cane. “You who grant passage to the dead and the dying, who safeguard the In Between. I beseech you to carry our beloved to the world beyond, to spirit her soul with all haste.” Wincing, I drew the sword’s blade across my palm. I held the wounded hand forward, allowing the blood to drip over the artifacts in the center of the circle.

  “Take her,” I said.

  The charcoal smell of the copal thickened, and the room dimmed further. A sound like distant thunder rumbled in. Black clouds filled the mirror, twisting slowly into a vortex.

  “She is ready to pass, and time is short,” I said, the spell elements amplifying the power of my mother’s hair, wrapping it in a potent aura of fresh death. “Take her!” I repeated, fog issuing from my breath now.

  The rumbling deepened and a powerful entity, more shadow than form, emerged into the circle and drifted over the blood-spattered objects. Aiming my staff at the circle, I cried, “Cerrare!”

  The portal behind the mirror slammed shut. The gatekeeper jerked up and then circled several times, as though sensing its confined state. When the entity stopped, empty sockets, impossibly deep, stared back at me. A whispering voice spoke, raking me with chills.

  “She is already claimed.”

  I went mute as I studied the being as ancient as humankind. Left to its work, a gatekeeper was harmless. When tricked and trapped, not so much. But I needed to know what had happened to my mother, and a gatekeeper could tell me.

  “Yes, I know,” I responded between grunts. Though I’d closed the portal, I could feel a force beyond, like a riptide, pulling back toward the In Between. Even at my full strength, I wouldn’t be able to withstand the pull for long. Beings from that plane didn’t belong here.

  “I need to know how she died,” I said.

  The room rattled around me. “Release me, mortal.”

  “I will once you tell me.”

  “Release me or I will claim you.”

  I planted my feet and leaned away from the riptide until I was nearly sitting, but the force only strengthened. My right foot stuttered through the graveyard dirt. The containment broken, a frigid hand emerged from the circle and seized my ankle. The cold bit into me like blades slicing into bone. I let out a ragged cry, but I was determined to get an answer.

  “Tell me … what happened … to my mother!”

  A second hand seized my knee and pulled me toward the portal. This wasn’t going to work. I had to abort the summoning.

  “Liberare!” I shouted.

  The portal blew open like an emergency hatch on an airplane. The gatekeeper disappeared into the mirror, sucked back to its realm. But its ice-cold hands hadn’t released me. I fell and twisted onto my stomach, dropping my sword and staff. They tumbled off behind me as though reality had rotated on a ninety-degree axis. My fingers scrabbled over the floor for purchase. When coldness enveloped my lower half, I realized I had entered the mirror.

  I gripped the mirror’s metal frame and struggled to kick my way back out. The numbness climbed like water to my chest, my chin. In the next moment, my head went under.

  Stunned, I stared around a luminescent darkness of shifting shapes and roaring energies. I was in the realm between life and death. The In Between. Fingers slipping, I peeked between my legs. The gatekeeper’s face stared back from the shadows like a grim reaper’s.

  I peered at the backside of the mirror, the image of my apartment beyond undulating into dimness. I could make out my hologram of the city, my lab table, my collection of esoteric books. A deep loneliness yawned inside me as I considered what I was holding onto: a life spent chasing nether creatures for an organization that barely tolerated, much less acknowledged, me—not even to tell me what had happened to my mother. Fallen to ill
ness, as my grandmother had claimed? Or murdered, as insinuated by the vampire Arnaud?

  At least in the afterlife I would know.

  Yeah, but you’ll be powerless to do anything with that knowledge, I countered, a defiant anger growing inside me.

  I gathered my strength to shout a Word, but the strange ether that constituted the In Between gushed into my mouth like sea water, and no sound would emerge. The fingers of my right hand lost their grip on the mirror, and my arm fell into the cold. I could feel nothing below my chest now.

  Just need to hold on for a few more…

  The shield around my coin pendant fractured. For an instant, all the light drew inward, as though toward a collapsing star, before the coin’s energy blew out in a detonating flash. The gatekeeper released my leg in a fading moan, and I vaulted up into my library/lab.

  I landed back first into a bookcase. My head banged against the floor as tomes spilled around me. Dazed, I sat up and peered at the smoking ruins of the casting circle and fragments of shattered mirror.

  “Nice timing,” I mumbled, tucking the coin back into my shirt.

  My mother’s hair was gone, though, taken by the gatekeeper. Meaning only one strand remained to cast from.

  Maybe it was time to consult an expert.

  2

  Lady Bastet held the strand of hair on either end, her deep green eyes seeming to stare inside it. She hadn’t moved for the last minute, the flatness of her dark face speaking to mild entrancement.

  I gazed around the room in the back of her basement-level rug business. Beyond the tendrils of incense, a dozen or so cats stared back from shelves that held assortments of Egyptian charms and spell items. Lady Bastet had helped Detective Vega and me with a case in the spring in which her powers of divination had played a critical role. I was counting on her being able to duplicate that success.

  “Yes,” the mystic said suddenly. “The potential for magic once moved through these cells.”

  “What do you mean potential?”

  “You did not tell me your mother’s hair was from when she was a girl,” she replied, setting it flat on the stone table in front of her. “She inherited magic from at least one of her parents, yes, but whether or not she ever developed that magic, I cannot tell you from a simple reading.”

  I noted her emphasis on the word simple. “You need to go deeper?”

  She pushed up the band holding her thick hair from her kohl-lined eyes. “Yes, far deeper.”

  “Your price?”

  “Your blood,” she replied.

  I had given her a vial’s worth the last time, about which I’d been none too comfortable. Wizard’s blood could be used in powerful magic, and if that magic turned black, well … I would be in just as much trouble as the practitioner. “Can I ask what you did with the last sample?”

  “I put it to good use,” she replied enigmatically.

  That the Order hadn’t been in touch told me the blood had probably been used for benign purposes. Lady Bastet specialized in potion mixing, from anti-aging elixirs to male enhancement brews. Better not to think about it, I decided, rolling up my left shirt sleeve to my elbow. Even though I had undergone the procedure before, the sensation of her wooden needle sucking the blood from my bulging vessel was no less skin-crawling.

  Lady Bastet returned the wooden needle to her hair, healed the puncture, and set the clay tube with my blood into her wooden box. When she returned to the table and drew away the veil that covered her scrying globe, I leaned forward, my stomach twisting into anxious knots.

  She smiled apologetically. “I should have told you, Everson. For the kind of reading you’re asking, I am going to need time.”

  “How much?”

  “Until dusk,” she said. “This hair belongs to a young girl. It represents her life to that point, beyond which lies a tangle of possible futures. I will need to comb them out, to align myself with the path she ultimately traveled—up to and including her death.”

  “Also, anything you can learn about my father…”

  I knew even less about him than about my mother. According to Nana, my mother and father had met at a hippie commune upstate. Their relationship lasted just long enough for me to form a bump in my mother’s belly before my father—whose name Nana couldn’t remember—decided it was time to move on. Heartbroken, my mother returned home.

  That had been the official story, anyway. But like with my mother’s death, it now lacked a certain ring of truth.

  Lady Bastet nodded. “I will tell you all I come to see.”

  I glanced down at the strand of hair, the final cellular link to my mother, the final link to the truth, maybe.

  “I really need you to get this right,” I said, raising my eyes to Lady Bastet’s, but she gave no sign she’d heard. She leaned nearer, as though trying to read something beyond my face. I felt movement through my mind like fingers over a stringed instrument. Minor notes played fast, speeding my pulse. When Lady Bastet spoke, her voice was husky and distant.

  “Trust in the one your heart trusts least.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said, the words catching in my short breaths.

  She sat back, eyes returning to the here and now. She gazed at my mother’s hair again. “With enough time, the reading will be the right one,” she said in response to my earlier question, as though she hadn’t just spaced out or spoken. “But are you certain this is what you want?”

  My heart and breaths wound down again. Why do you need to know? she seemed to be asking. Out of simple curiosity or from that age-old lust that has twisted many a man’s heart into darkness: revenge?

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s what I want.”

  Lady Bastet nodded once. “Then it will be done.”

  I squinted into a liquid heat that rose from the West Village sidewalks and wobbled the buildings up and down the block. The mercury was forecast to climb over one hundred again today.

  I checked my watch. The time, which had slowed way down in Lady Bastet’s, seemed to have sped back up to the present and then some. If I didn’t hurry, I was going to be late for my summer term class. Cane pinned under an arm, I hustled toward the nearest bus stop.

  Within a block, sweat was streaming from my armpits and soaking through the back of my shirt. But I was more bothered by the knowledge someone was keeping pace with me. I peeked over a shoulder to find a young man in a tailored suit gliding around newsstands and oncoming pedestrians. His effortless speed, coupled with his bone-dry face, told me he was an undead.

  One of Arnaud’s, no doubt, I thought with a groan.

  Up ahead, the city bus slowed toward the stop. I broke into a full run, arriving behind a small knot of people. When I looked back, I could no longer see the blood slave. I’d lucked out. He must’ve been on a different errand. When I straightened, the son of a bitch was in front of me.

  “Go ahead,” he was telling the driver of the crowded bus. “We’ll catch the next one.”

  “Wait!” I cried, trying to cut past him. The blood slave moved deftly, blocking my attempts until the driver closed the door. With a loud chuff, the bus pulled from the stop and motored away.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I said.

  Like all of Arnaud’s blood slaves, this one was young, his face smooth and handsome. Chilly blue eyes regarded me from beneath waxy eyebrows and a professional cut of brown hair.

  “Arnaud Thorne would like you to see something,” he answered.

  “Well, tell him too fucking bad. I have a class to teach.”

  I hadn’t heard from the vampire Arnaud since he’d held Detective Vega’s son hostage in a game whose ultimate intent was to pit me against City Hall. He had cost me my friendship with Vega not to mention my contract with the NYPD. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted me to see, or more likely get involved in, and I didn’t care. I was done with Arnaud.

  I spotted an on-duty taxi coming up Sixth Avenue and waved.

  The blood slave gripped my arm and forced it down
. “My CEO insists,” he said.

  The cab zoomed past.

  Okay, that’s it.

  Stepping back, I yanked my cane into sword and staff. I angled the blade so sunlight glinted off a line of bright metal. “You see that? It’s a little something called silver, a modification I made to better deal with your kind. Touch me again, and you’re going to lose an arm.”

  The blood slave’s lips broke upwards as his eyes sharpened. “Oh, come now, Mr. Croft,” he said in a familiar, taunting voice. “Don’t shoot the messenger. Or amputate him, as the case may be. I rather prefer him with all limbs intact.” Arnaud had taken possession of his minion.

  “What do you want?” I demanded.

  “Like my associate said, for you to see something. We needn’t go far. Why, that little establishment across the way should do.”

  I glanced over at the hole in the wall whose vertical sign read BAR. “Not interested.”

  “Oh, but I think you will be, Mr. Croft. I think you’ll be very interested.”

  Something in the certainty with which Arnaud spoke made me hesitate. Or was that the vampire’s power insinuating its way into my thoughts. I steeled my mind and cocked my sword arm.

  “If you’re not out of my face in the next second, I’ll skip the amputation and go straight to execution.”

  “My associate is perfectly within his rights to occupy this public piece of sidewalk, Mr. Croft. And you should know that I will continue to badger you until you acquiesce to my request. Ten minutes of your time is all I ask. I will even pay your cab fare following. You’ll arrive at the college before the bus you’ve just missed.”

  I squinted at him. “And you’ll leave me alone?”

  “You have my assurances, Mr. Croft.”

  Unlike agreements between mortals, a vampire’s word held an innate binding power. Once made, especially by a vampire of Arnaud’s stature, they were hard to break. What in the hell was he up to?

  “Leave me alone, as in never seek me out again?” I asked, to be certain we were on the same page.

  “Indeed. Should we meet again, it will be because you have come to me.”