Pox You: A Croft and Tabby Short (Croft & Tabby Book 1)

  Pox You

  A Croft & Tabby Short

  Brad Magnarella

  Copyright © 2021 by Brad Magnarella

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by MiblArt

  bradmagnarella.com

  Table of Contents

  Warning!

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  New to the Croftverse?

  Author’s Note

  Croftverse Catalogue

  Join the Strange Brigade

  The Prof Croft Series

  PREQUELS

  Book of Souls

  Siren Call

  MAIN SERIES

  Demon Moon

  Blood Deal

  Purge City

  Death Mage

  Black Luck

  Power Game

  Druid Bond

  Night Rune

  Shadow Duel

  SPIN OFFS

  Croft & Wesson

  Croft & Tabby

  MORE COMING!

  Warning!

  Foul-mouthed cat ahead

  Prof Croft here and, yes, I trapped a murderous succubus in a kitten’s body and made her my pet. The alternative was to behead her, and as wizards go, I’m just not that callous.

  Do you think Tabitha shows any appreciation? Two years old now, her speech has matured along with her sizable girth, and when not insulting me, she’s plotting ways to devour my soul.

  But that’s the least of my problems. An early winter storm has plunged our unheated apartment to near freezing, and I’m too cash-strapped to afford a chimney sweep. So when a strange woman appears, asking me to investigate an attack at an old smallpox hospital, I accept the supernatural case along with her vague offer of compensation.

  And If I can involve Tabitha, who knows? Maybe we’ll finally start bonding.

  Sure, and maybe Hell will host the next Winter Games.

  1

  I came home to find Tabitha washing the dishes. Tabitha, it bears mentioning, is my cat.

  She didn’t hear me above the blasting water. I hung my battered leather satchel on the door-side rack and shrugged out of a snow-dampened coat without moving my eyes from her. The physics alone were amazing. By lodging her considerable gut under the counter she’d managed to bend over the sink from her perch on a high stool. Her ginger arms, soaked to the shoulders, worked fiercely in the basin.

  Unbelievable.

  Even more impressive than the physics was the fact that she was doing any work at all.

  As I set my cane against the rack, it missed and clattered to the floor. Tabitha raised her head, her ochre-green eyes glinting through the steam. With a scowl, she killed the water.

  “Enjoying the show?” she asked in a voice that managed to sound languid and biting at the same time.

  “Can I ask why you’re washing dishes?”

  “Because it’s a fucking icebox in here.”

  “Hey, language,” I reminded her, adding the mail to the growing pile on the dining room table. Today’s haul: three bills, a flyer for some sort of city works program, and an ad for women’s lingerie. I snorted dryly. Instead of Everson Croft, the ad was addressed to someone named Evelyn Croft.

  “I thought the hot water and activity would warm me,” Tabitha continued, “but it’s only put me in a foul mood that has me resenting you even more.”

  “Wow, I didn’t think that was possible. Does your resent-o-meter go to eleven now?”

  Though she tended toward the dramatic, Tabitha was right about the apartment being an icebox. An early front had caught the city by surprise. Older buildings like ours had yet to switch to their heating systems, and according to our owner, it would be a few more days. He’d lent me a portable heater, but the combo of high ceilings, exposed metal beams, and cold brick walls rendered it useless. Gray snow pelted the apartment’s arched, double-story windows, while mist scattered from my breath.

  “And how are the smells in here getting worse?” Tabitha complained.

  As part of the switching-over process, industrial odors had been leaking from the vents all week.

  “Look, come Monday or Tuesday, the smells will be gone, the apartment will be nice and toasty, and you can go back to lounging in comfort.”

  “I’ll be a giant Creamsicle by then.”

  At twenty-five pounds and growing, she wasn’t wrong about the “giant” part. As I joined her in the kitchen, she shook the water from her paws and peered around. I pulled a towel from a drawer handle and tossed it to her. She snagged it with her claws and began drying her matted arms.

  “How was your day otherwise?” I asked.

  “How was my day? I’m a centuries-old succubus trapped in a cat’s body. When I’m not plotting ways to devour your soul, I’m eating, sleeping, and licking my own—”

  “All right,” I said, raising a hand. “I get the picture.”

  She patted her face dry, tossed the towel aside, and thudded gracelessly to the floor on all fours.

  I grabbed a beer from the fridge and followed her into the sitting area that faced a massive flagstone fireplace, presently dark. I’d kept my jacket on and now I resecured my scarf, cinching it tight around my neck.

  “Why can’t you build a fire?” Tabitha pouted.

  “You know why. The chimney’s choking on creosote. It needs to be serviced.”

  “Yes, darling, since April. Can’t you cast one of your spells and blast it clean?”

  “Sounds like a great way to get black lung,” I muttered. “No, it costs money to be done properly, and the past year has been … tight.”

  As an adjunct professor of mythology and lore at Midtown College, I was pulling in just enough to meet our essential needs. And thanks to Tabitha’s expensive tastes, my savings were dwindling in inverse proportion to her swelling girth. She wouldn’t allow anything near her palate that wasn’t goat’s milk or prime cuts of meat.

  She leapt onto her window-side divan, where I’d set a heating pad and fashioned a thick comforter for her to burrow under. Shoving the comforter aside, she arranged her sizable mound in the divan’s growing depression.

  “Be a dear and plug the pad back in,” she murmured.

  “No wonder you’re freezing,” I huffed. As I plugged the limp cord into the wall socket, I inspected the rubber insulation. “Are those bite marks?”

  “I thought I saw it move.”

  “And so you attacked the cord powering your lone heat source?”

  “It was a reflex, darling. You’re the one who put me in this wretched body.”

  “Yeah, after you tried to kill me.”

  “Oh, let’s not rehash ancient history.”

  “Two years ago is ancient history?”

  “I’m serious. I’ve just eaten, and quarreling is only going to upset my stomach. How was your day?”

  The question told me she really was ready to change the subject. Asking after my wellbeing ran a close second to housework on the list of things Tabitha never did. I lowered myself onto my plush reading chair, body heavy with fatigue. Only twenty-nine, I shouldn’t have been this exhausted after a week of teaching. But it wasn’t just the
teaching; it was the wizarding, and the stress of balancing the two.

  “Well, my course sizes are a student away from being too small,” I said, “my last two grant requests went unanswered, and I’m pretty sure Professor Snodgrass has spies on me.”

  “You’re being paranoid.”

  “I’m serious. The one day I was late this week, he just happened to be waiting outside my classroom.” I didn’t know what my chairman liked less—that mythology was being taught in his history department or that the professor in question was a smug upstart who refused to take his crap.

  “Then stop being late,” Tabitha said, all pretense of interest leaving her voice.

  “A little hard when I’m up half the night chasing down a conjuring. But look, it’s Friday,” I said, bracing the beer between my thighs. “I don’t want to talk about Snodgrass or conjurings. I just want to relax and—ow!”

  The serrated edge of the bottle cap had cut my finger. Not a twist-off, I realized. Too tired and annoyed to fetch the opener from the kitchen, I lodged my thumb under the bottle cap and uttered, “Vigore.”

  The pressure in the room dropped as the gathered ley energy funneled through my mental prism, down my arm, and out my thumb in a small burst of force. The cap released with a hiss and clanged from the ceiling, but foam was now shooting up the bottle’s neck. I clamped the opening with my lips and tried to swallow faster than the foam could fill my sinuses. My eyes watered above my puffed-out cheeks. After several seconds, the foam relented, and I released the bottle with a gasp.

  Tabitha smirked. “Relax, you say?”

  I dabbed my eyes with my scarf, hacked twice, and then attempted a more dignified sip. But the beer was hard to enjoy when it was competing with the room as a colder medium. I should have gone with a scotch-laced coffee. Shivering, I retracted my neck deeper into my jacket and stared at the empty fireplace.

  Tabitha followed my gaze. “We could be so cozy right now. Can’t you use your credit card?”

  “Half of New York is in the same boat. Every chimney sweep is going to be booked solid this weekend.”

  “Even if you sweetened it with some cash?”

  “Sure. Let me know if you find any lying around.”

  I set the bottle on the coffee table and rubbed my chilled hands together. Though irritated at Tabitha’s remark, it got me thinking. Ever since the financial crash, cash was king, and it probably wouldn’t take much to convince a chimney sweep to bump us up the list. Having a crackling fire in the hearth would be nice.

  I remembered the flyer in the mail: CASH FOR LABOR. If the city was asking, the labor would be something awful, like mucking out an old septic system, but if I had to choose between a dirty job or staying inside all day bundled up like an Inuit and listening to Tabitha…

  I was pushing myself up to grab the flyer, and the gloves out of my coat pocket, when a knock sounded at the door. Tabitha and I exchanged questioning looks. We didn’t get many visitors.

  “Silence mode,” I reminded her.

  Almost no one in the city knew about my use of magic, and even fewer my talking cat.

  Beyond the peephole, a young woman who couldn’t have been a hair over five feet stared back resolutely. I didn’t recognize her, and the ward over my threshold wasn’t picking up supernatural energy. Probably selling something. Not wanting to rebuff her to her face, I backed away.

  “I saw your shadow through the peephole,” she called.

  Damn. I returned, twisted the three bolts, and opened the door.

  The woman squinted up at me from behind a pair of pink-framed glasses, touches of glittery makeup spangling the skin around her eyes.

  “Can I help you?” I asked at last.

  She relaxed her squint. “It’s you.”

  I looked around. “It’s me, who?”

  “The wizard guy. I need your help.”

  2

  “I’m sorry?” I said, playing dumb. “Wizard guy?”

  “Can I come in?” she asked. “It’s freezing out here.”

  The young woman tugged the sides of a home-knit beanie over her ears and hugged the arms of a thick coat that had been painted with colorful designs. A large hemp bag hung from one shoulder. Long curtains of sun-kissed brown hair completed her bohemian look. Still, I had no idea who she was.

  “Well, it’s freezing in here too,” I said, not moving.

  “You don’t remember me?”

  “No. You must have the wrong apartment.”

  I was slipping into my wizard’s voice, but her eyes—chestnut with a hint of green—sparked something in my memory. More striking was the way they stared, without a hint of self-consciousness. She wasn’t a former student. I may have been an absent-minded professor, but I would have remembered someone looking at me like that for four months, especially given my small class sizes.

  “Waverly Place?” she said, arching an eyebrow. “Two years ago?”

  The power I’d been directing into my voice scattered like smoke. “Wait, you were in that group that called up a nether creature.”

  I had just fed Tabitha, still a kitten, and was sitting down to dinner myself when my alarm sounded. The breach was only a few blocks from my West Village apartment. I’d sprinted there, bursting into the basement-level unit to find a large slug-like creature coalescing over a casting circle. Four young women—girls, really—were cowering, one holding out a crystal shard like a weapon.

  A glance around the unit, with its dangling dream catchers, goddess figurines, and books on nature magic, told me exactly what I’d burst onto: a group of mortals who’d bought into the myth that an unwavering belief in their own magic made it so.

  I trapped the creature in a sphere of hardened air a moment before it started spewing acid and then dispersed it with my sword. A stray gob shot past my protection, burning away much of my right earlobe.

  Crazy with pain, I gave the girls a fiery sermon on the dangers of conjuring and how they didn’t have a chance in hell of controlling anything they managed to call up, certainly not with a damned crystal. In fact, had I arrived a few minutes later, the slug would have been slurping up their soupy remains. Three of the girls, including the crystal wielder, burst into tears, but the fourth stared at me, unflinching.

  This was her.

  “Kayla,” she said in introduction.

  “Everson.” I shook her mittened hand. “Don’t tell me you called up something else.”

  “No, the coven and I learned our lesson. We only work with terrestrial energies now.”

  “We went over this,” I said thinly. “You’re not a witch. You don’t have an ounce of magic in you.”

  “Maybe not the kind you practice, but—”

  “No,” I cut in. “Not the kind anyone practices. If you did, I’d see it in your aura, and there’s nothing there.” I was being harsh, but you couldn’t sugar-coat these things. I didn’t always reach amateur conjurers in time.

  Kayla shrugged. “This isn’t about me, anyway. Can I come in?”

  “How did you find me?” I asked suspiciously.

  “I followed you that night.”

  “You followed me?”

  “I’d read about wizards, but I’d never seen one up close. I was curious. Plus, I thought knowing your address could prove useful if I ever needed magical assistance.” She opened her hands as if to say, And here I am.

  “How did you get into the building?”

  “Someone was leaving. He held the door open without me even having to ask. It was kismet.”

  I regarded the strange woman. Though I still hadn’t entirely forgiven her and her coven for my missing earlobe, something about her impressed me. An event like that night would have reduced most amateurs to a blubbering pile. But not only had Kayla kept her composure, she’d ventured into the post-crash New York night to learn where I lived. That spoke either to bravery or a chemical imbalance.

  “Fine,” I sighed, waving her in.

  She stepped past me, giving off a sc
ent of patchouli. I almost offered to take her coat before remembering her rail-thin physique from two years earlier, hardly an ounce of insulating fat on her. She peered around the cold industrial loft. It was a lot of square footage for a bachelor and his cat, but apartments like these were still renting for a pittance. The downside was that the owner left most of the upkeep to us tenants.

  “Love the space,” she said, stepping from her yellow rubber boots, “but the energy in here is all bleh. And what’s that smell?”

  “The building’s changing over to heat. That’s why it’s so cold.”

  “You can’t build a fire?”

  “Exactly,” Tabitha murmured in a way that could have been mistaken for a low yowl.

  “The chimney needs to be cleaned,” I said sternly, directing my voice more toward my cat than my guest.

  “Aww, a kitty,” Kayla cooed, padding toward her.

  “Uh, why don’t we do this in the kitchen.” I took her arm and steered her from certain mauling. “I’ll make us some coffee.” Glaring back at Tabitha, I tapped a finger to my lips to remind her of the no-talking rule.

  “Do you have any matcha tea?” Kayla asked.

  “No, just Colombian dark roast.”

  “Half a cup, then. Too much caffeine scatters my intuition.”

  “I see.”

  As I prepared the coffee, she hoisted herself onto the counter and peered around, her stockinged feet kicking idly.

  “You said you needed help?” I prompted.

  She blinked as if returning from a daydream. “Do you have any experience with hauntings?”