Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1) Read online

  Demon Moon

  Prof Croft Book 1

  Brad Magnarella

  © 2016

  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

  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

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

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  Books by Brad Magnarella

  The Prof Croft Series

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  1

  I blew out a curse as the first cold droplets of rain pelted my face and punched through my magic. As if I wasn’t already running late.

  Making an umbrella of my coat collar, I stooped into a run, skirting bags of garbage that swelled from the fronts of row houses like pustules, but it was no use. The downpour that blackened the sidewalk and drove rats from the festering piles also broke apart my hunting spell.

  And it had been one of my better ones.

  I took refuge on a crumbling porch and shook out my coat. I was in the pit of the East Village, and it stunk. Except for a flicker of street light, the block was midnight dark, the building across the way a brick shell, hollowed out by arson. Not the domicile of the conjurer I needed to stop. Or more likely save.

  Assuming I could find him now.

  “Seguire,” I said in a low, thrumming voice.

  Most hunting spells worked like a dowsing rod, pulling the user toward the source of something. In this case, taboo magic. But reliable hunting spells, such as those needed to navigate New York’s convoluted streets, required time to prepare. And even then they were delicate.

  “Seguire,” I repeated, louder.

  Though the storm was already sweeping off, the spell refused to take shape again. I swore under my breath. Magic and moving water made poor bedfellows. And here I’d dropped a fat hundred on the booster: ground narwhale tusk. Sunk cost, I thought bitterly as I hustled back to the sidewalk. There were a lot of those in wizardry, my svelte wallet the proof.

  Splashing in the direction I’d been pulled before the cloudburst, I gave up on the hunting spell and resorted to twenty-twenty vision, scanning passing buildings for signs of life.

  As the sidewalks thickened with larger mounds of garbage, the rats became more territorial. I knocked aside several with my walking cane. The soul eaters that hunkered like shadows in the below-ground stairwells weren’t quite so bold. They watched with hollow eyes before shrinking from the protective power of my necklace, in search of weaker, drug-addled prey. Luckily for them, post-Crash New York was a boomtown for chemical addiction.

  Unfortunately for me, the financial crash had also made a growth stock of amateur conjurers.

  They tended to be men and women seeking lost money or means—or simply some meaning where their prior faith, whether spiritual or material, seemed to have failed them. Understandable, certainly, but as far as my work went, a royal pain in the ass. Most mortals could only access the nether realms, and shallowly at that. In their fat-fingered efforts, they called up grubby creatures better left undisturbed. Ones more inclined to make a sopping meal of a conjurer’s heart than grant his material wishes.

  Trust me, it wasn’t pretty.

  Neither was the job of casting the charming beings back to their realms, but it was the job I’d been decreed. I had some nice acid burns and a missing right ear lobe to prove it. A business card might have read:

  Everson Croft

  Wizard Garbage Collector

  Nice, huh? But unlike the city’s striking sanitation workers, I couldn’t just walk off the job.

  Small messes became big messes, and in magical terms, that was a recipe for ruin. The apocalyptic kind. Better to scoop up the filth, drop it down the hatch, and batten down the lid. Plenty of ancient evils lurked in the Deep Down, their unfathomable senses attuned to the smallest openings to our world. Human history was dotted with near misses, thanks in part to the vigilance of my lineage.

  The thought of being the one to screw up that streak was hell on a good night’s sleep, let me tell you.

  At Avenue C, I rounded a small mountain of plowed trash and shuffled to a stop. A new scent was skewering the vaporous reek, hooking like a talon in my throat. A sickly-sweet scent, like crushed cockroach or…

  Fear spread through me as I raised my eyes toward the source: a steep apartment building with a pair of lights burning near the top floor. Dark magic dissipated above the building in a blood-red haze.

  I was too late. And whatever the conjurer had summoned was no cockroach.

  “Crap,” I spat, and launched into a run.

  The smell was distinctly demonic.

  2

  I stumbled into a blacked-out lobby, raised my ironwood cane, and uttered, “Illuminare.”

  White light swelled from an opal inset in the cane’s end to reveal an upended concierge’s desk and graffiti-smeared walls. The single elevator door opposite me was open. I moved toward it, noting the message sprayed over the burned-out elevator lights: “STEP RIGHT IN,” an arrow inviting riders into a carless shaft. I peeked down the two-story plunge to a subbasement, where I could hear something large thump-dragging around.

  No thanks.

  I hit the stairwell and took the steps two at a time. The cloying smell from the street sharpened in my sinuses, making my eyes water. I had smelled demon before, but in Eastern Europe, years ago—the near-death experience had marked my passage into wizardhood, in a way.

  But no, never here. Not in New York.

  Which meant a seriously evil conjurer had slipped under the Order’s watchful gaze. I considered sending up a message, but that would take energy I couldn’t afford at the moment—not to mention time. The Oracular Order of Magi and Magical Beings was an esteemed and ancient body. Accordingly, they made decisions at a pace on par with the Mendenhall glacier.

  That, and I was still on their iffy list for what had happened ten years earlier, during the aforementioned demonic encounter. Never mind that my actions (which, okay, had involved summoning an incubus spirit) saved my life, or that I was only twenty-two at the time.

  So yeah, the less contact with the Order, the better, I’d since learned.

  Between the third and fourth floors, the stairwell began to vibrate. At the fifth floor—the one on which I’d observed the lights from outside—the vibrating became a hammering. I pulled the stairwell door open onto a stink of hard diesel and understood the commotion’s source: a gas-powere
d generator. At the hallway’s end, light outlined a door.

  I was halfway to the door when a woman’s scream pierced the tumult. Jerking my cane into two parts, I gripped a staff in my left hand and a steel sword in my right. A shadow grew around the door a second before it banged open.

  The man was six foot ten, easy. Blades of black tattooing scaled his pin-pierced face, giving over to an all-out ink fight on his shaved scalp. Leather and spiked studs stretched over powerful arms holding what looked like a pump-action shotgun.

  The sorcerer’s bodyguard?

  He inclined forward, squinting into the dim hallway. The screaming behind him continued, accompanied now by angry beats and the wail of a guitar. I exhaled and sheathed my sword.

  Punks. The literal kind.

  “Hey!” Tattoo Face boomed as I retreated back toward the stairwell. “You’re missing a kickass set. Blade’s only on till two.” Then as a further inducement: “Half cover, since you got here late.”

  I sniffed the air, but the generator’s fumes were still clouding over the demon smell. I couldn’t fix on a direction. I returned to Tattoo Face, shouting to be heard. “Do you live here?”

  He shrugged as he lowered the shotgun. “Live. Squat.”

  “Seen anyone strange in the building?” I peered past him into the hazy room of head-bangers, the pink-haired singer/screamer—Blade, I presumed—standing on the hearth of a bricked-over fireplace. I decided to rephrase the question. “Anyone who looks like they don’t belong?”

  Behind all of his ink, the punk’s face was surprisingly soft, almost boyish, but it hardened as I stepped more fully into the generator-powered light. I followed his gaze down to where my tweed jacket and dark knit tie peeked from the parting flaps of my trench coat. Beneath his own jacket, he was wearing a bandolier of shotgun shells.

  “You a narc or something?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Just looking for someone.”

  His eyes fell further to my walking cane, which, not to polish my own brass, was at definite odds with someone six feet tall and in his apparent prime. My hairline had receded slightly, but still… Tattoo Face frowned studiously, as though still undecided if he could trust me.

  “I help people,” I added.

  After another moment, he nodded. “Strange guy showed up a couple of weeks ago. Hauled a big trunk upstairs.” He raised his eyes. “Unit right above ours. Talks to himself. Same things, over and over.”

  I sprinted back to the stairwell, not bothering with the usual pretense of a trick knee to explain the cane.

  Tattoo Face seemed not to notice. “Blade’s on till two!” he shouted after me.

  I raised a hand in thanks for the reminder, but I was still mulling the talks to himself part. The over and over sounded like chanting.

  Add them up and I’d found my conjurer.

  3

  On the sixth floor, the demon stink was back. And gut-rottingly potent. I called more light to my cane and advanced on the door at hallway’s end, weathered floorboards creaking underfoot.

  The knob turned in my grasp, but one or more bolts were engaged. Crouching, I sniffed near the dark door space and immediately regretted the decision. “Holy hell,” I whispered against my coat sleeve. The sickly-sweet scent burned all the way up to my brain, like ammonia.

  Drawing the sword from my cane, I pointed it at the door and uttered, “Vigore.”

  A force shot down the length of the blade and snapped the bolts. The door blew inward. With another incantation, the light from my staff slid into a curved shield. I crouched, ready for anything, but except for the vibrating coming from one floor down, the space beyond the door was still and silent.

  I tested the threshold with the tip of my sword. It broke the plane cleanly, which meant no warding spells.

  Odd…

  I entered, sword and glowing staff held forward. The unit was a restored tenement that, like many in the East Village, had been written off in the Crash’s rumbling wake and left to die. Shadows climbed and fell over a newspaper-littered living room. I crept past sticks of curb-side furniture and a spill of canned goods before ducking beneath a line of hanging boxer briefs, still damp.

  Hardly the evil-sorcerer sanctum I’d imagined.

  I stuck my light into one of the doorless bedrooms, the silence tense against my eardrums. A thin roll-up mattress lay slipshod on a metal bed frame, dirty sheets puddled around its legs. A cracked window framed the bombed-out ruin of a neighboring building. When a pipe coughed, I wheeled, my gaze falling to a crowded plank-and-cinderblock bookcase.

  In the light of my staff, I scanned book spines that might as well have read “Amateur Conjurer.” Abrahamic texts, including a Bible, gave way to dime-store spell books and darker tomes, but without organization. Spaghetti shots in the dark. Someone looking for power or answers.

  So where had the demon come from? More crucially, where had it gone?

  In the neighboring bedroom, I flinched as my gaze met my own hazel eyes in a mirror on the near wall. Gonna give myself a fricking heart attack. Opposite the mirror, an oblong table held a scatter of spell-cooking implements. A Bunsen burner stood on one end, its line snaking to a tipped-over propane tank. Beside the tank, a pair of legs protruded.

  I rounded the table and knelt beside the fallen conjurer. Parting a spill of dark, greasy hair, I took in a middle-aged male face with Coke-bottle glasses that had fallen askew, magnifying his whiskered right cheek. I recognized some of the conjurers in the city—or thought I did—and I’d never seen this guy. I straightened his glasses and patted his cheek firmly.

  “Hey,” I whispered.

  The man choked on a snort, then fell back into his mind-shattered slumber. He was alive, anyway.

  I raised my light to the protective circle the man had chalked on the floorboards and no doubt stood inside while casting his summoning spell. A common mistake. Chalk made fragile circles. And a circle only protected spell casters capable of instilling them with power. That excluded most mortals, who weren’t designed to channel, much less direct, the ley energies of this world.

  They can damn sure act as gateways to other worlds, though.

  My gaze shifted to a second circle near the table’s far end, this one with a crude pentagram drawn inside. From a toppled pile of ash and animal entrails, a glistening residue slid into an adjacent bathroom.

  Crap.

  I felt quickly beneath the man’s army surplus jacket and exhaled as my hand came back dry. The only reason he wasn’t dead or mortally wounded was the recentness of the spell. Demonic creatures summoned from deeper down underwent a period of gestation, usually in a dark, damp space, to fortify their strength. They emerged half blind, drawn by the scent of the conjurer’s vital organs, from which they derived even more potency.

  That I’d arrived before that had happened was to my advantage. I hoped.

  Rising, I crept toward the bathroom.

  4

  The trail turned dark red over the bathroom’s dingy tiles, gobbets of black matter glistening in its wake. By now I was more or less desensitized to the smell, thank God. Through the half-open door, my light shone over a dripping faucet. The end of a free-standing tub glowed beyond.

  With a foot, I edged the door wider.

  The trail climbed the side of the tub, spread into a foul puddle, then climbed again. This time into a torn-out section of tiling between the shower head and the hot and cold spigots down below.

  I adjusted my slick grip on the sword handle. The creature was inside the wall.

  My sword hummed as I channeled currents of ley energy. With a “Vigore!” I thrust the sword toward the hole.

  Tile and plaster exploded over my light shield in a dusty wave. A keening cry went up. In the exposed wall, wedged behind oozing pipes, I saw it. The creature had enfolded its body with a pair of membranous black wings. From a skull-sharp head of bristling hair, a pair of albino-white eyes stared blindly. Before I could push the attack, the creature screamed a
gain.

  The jagged sound became a weapon. Waves as sharp as the creature’s barbed teeth pierced my thoughts and fractured my casting prism. I was dealing with a shrieker. A lower demonic being but ridiculously deadly—even to wizards.

  My light shield wavered in front of me, then burst in a shower of sparks. The energetic release thrust me backwards as the room fell dark, my right heel catching the threshold. A squelch sounded, followed by the shallow splash of the thing dropping into the tub.

  I flailed for balance but went down. My right elbow slammed into the floor, sending a numbing bolt up and down my arm. When metal clanged off behind me, I realized I’d lost my sword.

  Beyond my outstretched legs, claws scrabbled over porcelain.

  I kick-scooted away, sweeping an arm back for my weapon.

  Wings slapped the air, the wet sound swallowed by the shrieker’s next cry. Abandoning my search, I thrust my staff into the darkness above my face. The end struck something soft. A claw hooked behind my right orbital bone before tearing away, missing my eyeball by a breath.

  I felt the shrieker flap past me, still clumsy in its just-summoned state. No doubt going for the conjurer. But if I was going to stop it, I had to do something about the damned screaming.

  Blood dribbled down the side of my face as I sat up. Praying the shrieker wasn’t rounding back on me, I jammed a finger into each ear. With the screaming muted, I repeated a centering mantra. Within seconds, the mental prism through which I converted ley energy into force and light reconstituted. A white orb swelled from the end of my staff, illuminating the apartment once more. I quickly touched the staff to each ear, uttering Words of Power. Shields of light energy covered them like muffs, blocking out the shrieker’s cries.

  I scooped up my sword and raised both sword and staff, expecting to find the shrieker hunched over the splayed-out conjurer. But the conjurer was alone, the shrieker nowhere in sight. The animal entrails were missing from the summoning circle, though, meaning it had fed.

  Not good.

  I raised my light toward the windows to ensure they were still intact. Remembering the blown-open front door, I hurried to the main room, terrified the creature had gotten out and into the city’s six-million-person buffet. I ducked beneath the clothesline and felt the newspapers at my feet gusting up. I spun to find the abomination flapping at my face.