The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 12

  So we were dealing with a human. And given the excessive violence of the act, likely someone with a vendetta against the rector. But then what did the message mean?

  I pulled out my notepad as I started toward the Wall and re-read my translation:

  Black Earth

  Yeah, I’d held back on Detective Vega. But to get those six months wiped, I needed to not only interpret the message but point her in the direction of an arrest. And that second part was going to take time. Fortunately, I had a resource in mind. I’d get that ball rolling while I worked on how and why a shrieker had been summoned the night before. Which reminded me, I would need to alert the Order.

  I peeked back at the receding Cathedral of St. Martin, a beautiful, if haunting, anomaly amid the towering edifices of mammon, and sighed. Something told me it was going to be a long next few days.

  Thank God for Colombian dark roast.

  11

  I performed a quick check of my warding spells—all intact—before fishing out my keychain. Home was a walk-up apartment on West Tenth Street, its top floor small and square, like the top tier of a wedding cake, making it invisible from street level. Naturally, it was the floor I lived on.

  I turned the three bolts, gold, silver, and bronze, stepped over my threshold, and immediately felt better. There was no greater contentment for a wizard than returning to his sheltered domicile—especially when the twelve hours I had been away felt like twelve days.

  Contrary to other dimensions of my life, I took obsessive-compulsive pride in the order of my loft space. And thanks to New York’s current vacancy glut, the rent was ridiculously reasonable, even for someone on my pay grade.

  Of course, that could change come Monday.

  For now, though, the industrial-chic apartment was home. I took in the space: high-ceilings with exposed beams, arched, double-story windows, and large throw rugs over stained concrete floors. A plush couch and chairs huddled around a flagstone fireplace, which I kept stoked from October to April. Beyond the kitchen, a ladder climbed to a second-story library and laboratory. There was plenty of open air for magic to move about. And in those rare instances when magic escaped my hold (hey, practice before mastery), the crooked West Village grid broke up the energy before it could do any real damage.

  That gas explosion on Bleeker Street last month? Wasn’t me.

  As I hung my cane on the coat rack, a rattling snort sounded. On the divan beneath the west-facing window, a large mound of orange hair stirred. Ochre-green eyes slitted open followed by a yawning mouth of sharp teeth.

  Damn, I’d woken the cat.

  Her tail end heaved up before shifting ponderously and settling back down. I stood still and waited for her eyes to close again—they did that sometimes—but they stayed watching me.

  “You smell like crap,” she said.

  “And it’s nice to see you, too,” I replied.

  “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Hey! What did I say about the language?” It really was something I’d been trying to train out of her—without much success, obviously. Tabitha was, well, Tabitha: a succubus spirit who had been called up by an amateur and would have devoured both our loins had I not channeled her into a stray cat. Unable to decapitate the cat, per succubus-destroying protocol, I took her in. A questionable move, I’ll admit. But that was five years ago, and I still had all my parts. The Order had been none too happy, but what else was new?

  Anyway, since then Tabitha had become less seductress and more harpy—and at forty pounds, a lot more harpy.

  “Well?” she pressed.

  “Well, things became a little more involved than anticipated.” I walked over to the kitchen, set the paper bag from the corner grocery store onto the counter, and began unloading it. “That summoning I set out for last night? It ended up being demonic. The fight left me drained, meaning Thelonious time. Ha. I’m sure you can imagine. That made me late for class, then late for a meeting with my probation officer. Well, the second was Snodgrass’s fault. The jerk.” I set the canister of coffee down harder than I meant to. “Oh, and get this—if I can’t help solve a murder by the end of the weekend, there’s a great chance I’m out of a job.”

  I caught myself verging on full drama-queen. I looked at Tabitha for some sign of support, but her head had settled back onto her paws, eyes closed. At forty pounds, she was also becoming narcoleptic.

  “Did you at least remember my milk?” she asked languidly.

  I held up a bottle of raw goat’s milk—twenty bucks a pop—and gave it a bitter shake. Tabitha’s tastes weren’t cheap. Between that and the brandy-sautéed tuna steaks, she ate better than I did.

  “And warmer this time,” she said, turning away.

  “Not before you report on your tours.”

  “All’s quiet,” she murmured.

  In exchange for room, board, and her life, Tabitha was supposed to tour the broad ledge of the level below every two hours and report anything unusual on the street. To say her compliance was spotty was putting it nicely.

  “How about that Thai restaurant going in across the way?” I asked. “Gaudy sign, huh?”

  “Hideous.”

  “There is no Thai restaurant.”

  “It was raining. I couldn’t see very well.”

  She wasn’t even trying to sound convincing.

  “Yeah, last night and for like ten minutes!” I took several calming breaths. Tabitha’s no-craps-given attitude had a way of spiking my blood pressure. “Look, it’s for both of our safety. Not everyone holds me in as high esteem as you do. And anything strong enough to smash through my wards isn’t going to turn gooey at the sight of a house cat. Especially one so … galling.”

  Tabitha yawned.

  I placed the bottle in the fridge and closed the door. Tabitha could get into a lot of things, but not the fridge.

  “No report, no milk,” I announced.

  The cat didn’t stir for a full minute. At last, she sighed heavily.

  “Maybe I won’t come back,” she muttered, dropping from the divan with a graceless thud. At the neighboring window, she shot me a final slitted look before shifting her rump and squeezing through the cat door.

  Tabitha not coming back would do wonders for my savings, but it was only noise. Besides the pull of endless goat lactose, she didn’t have the strength to break through my wards. Not that she’d ever tried. Like a tired married couple, we’d developed a begrudging dependency on the other. She would be as disappointed to never see me again as I would to never see her.

  Of course, you’d have to tear out a few nails to get either one of us to admit it.

  I poured half the milk into a small pot on the stove and lowered the burner to a guttering flame. Then, licking a finger, I decided to take advantage of the cat’s absence to make a call. (Tabitha had an annoying habit of providing background commentary.) I carried the desk phone from the counter to my favorite reading chair and rotary-dialed from memory. For wielders of magic, mechanical telephone switches trumped microchips every time. I’d fried more than my share of the second.

  “Hello?” Caroline’s pleasant voice answered.

  “Working late, Professor Reid?” I teased.

  The voice fell flat. “Hi, Everson. Working, yes, but it’s not even two o’clock yet.”

  “Really?” It felt much later, but I decided that saying so would make me sound like a loafer. Not an impression I wanted to reinforce, especially since I was preparing to ask her for another favor.

  “What did Snodgrass want?” she asked first.

  Though my colleague had lowered her voice to a whisper, her concern came through loud and clear. I felt a stab of guilt for evoking it and decided to play things down.

  “Oh, you know. ‘Your class size is too small. You’re not a real historian. You’re a disgrace to academia.’ Same old refrains.”

  “Are you sure that was all?” she asked skeptically. “He was practically skipping after your meeting.”


  The image made my face burn. “The man probably found a discount on paperclips.”

  Caroline laughed into the phone, a beautiful, effusive sound that always cheered me up. I imagined the backward spill of hair, the point-perfect dimples in her cheeks. She cleared her throat. “So, what’s up?”

  “Well, without being allowed to say too, too much, something happened at St. Martin’s Cathedral last night, and—”

  “You mean the murder?” she asked. “Isn’t that awful?”

  “You know about it?”

  “My dad told me.”

  Of course. Caroline’s father worked as an attorney for the mayor’s office. I’d met him once, a barrel-chested man, iron hair combed back in severe lines, somber face. To hear Caroline tell it, he was the last honest broker in City Hall. That took brass. I wasn’t sure whether to envy the bastard who would one day ask for his daughter’s hand, or fear for the bastard’s life.

  “Right,” I said. “Well, I was consulted for my knowledge of arcane languages—there was some writing at the scene, you see.” Oh, if Detective Vega could hear me now. “But I need some more info.”

  “What kind?”

  “Well, like who might have something against the church or rector.”

  For time’s sake, I’d decided it was going to be easier to narrow down the suspects and see if I could link any to the message, versus starting with the message and performing the equivalent of a city-wide radial search. Caroline understood the city and its web of power brokers as well as anyone.

  “I can think of a few,” she said after a moment, “but let me look into it.”

  “Is lunchtime tomorrow too soon? We could meet at your favorite deli. My treat, of course.”

  “That should be fine.”

  “Hey, ah, I really appreciate you doing this.”

  “Well, it’s nice to see you taking something seriously.”

  She left out the for a change, but it was there, in her tone. Moments like these were when secret wizarding tended to suck the most. There were no explicit rules against my telling people what I did, but the less who knew about my other life, the better—for their sanity as much as for my safety. I didn’t have time to dwell on the question after we hung up. While Caroline was working on her list, I would need to get started on the shrieker case.

  But first things first…

  My cat had been right about one thing, I thought as I shed my coat and shoes and shuffled toward the shower.

  I did smell like crap.

  12

  My first stop upstairs was a table that held a hologram of the city. Purchased from an architect friend of Caroline’s, it was as marvelous to me as any magic. From the great upthrust of downtown to the relative plains of the Villages to the spires of Midtown and the wilds of Central Park, it was all there: every ghostly street and structure, shown to scale.

  And fortunately, all presently dim.

  Through magic, I had bound the hologram to a series of wards placed throughout the city by the Order. If the wards detected so much as a whiff of taboo magic, a red light appeared. The light effect was accompanied by a fog-horn, more psychic than auditory, so I could hear it even when away from home. It was then up to me to hunt down the offender.

  Last night the ruins of the East Village had lit up like hellfire. That should have tipped me off to the magic’s demonic nature.

  I stepped over a silver casting circle and emptied what I’d gathered from the conjurer’s apartment onto an iron table that ran along the railing of the loft space. The spell elements I inspected were common. The power for the spell must have been in the ritual and incantation.

  I turned around to a steep wall of mundane books.

  “Svelare,” I said.

  In a rippling wave, encyclopedias and classical titles became magical tomes and grimoires, the majority of them handwritten in lost languages, centuries old. Some of the very titles I labored to keep out of the hands of amateurs. I scaled the rolling ladder, walked my fingers over binders, and returned with a small stack of reference books dealing with demonology and subterranean beings. I spread the books over my corner desk and spent the next several hours deep inside them, emerging only for swallows of coffee.

  When I closed the final book, I had some answers. Namely confirmation that the amateur conjurer hadn’t acted alone. A shrieker summoning required the power of a magic born or a higher demon. And since there didn’t seem to be any of the second bandying about, I was putting my money on the first.

  I drew a piece of parchment paper from a drawer, dipped a quill in lampblack ink, and began penning my report to the Order.

  To the Esteemed Oracular Order of Magi and Magical Beings,

  Re: Amateur Magic/ Summoning

  Urgency: High

  (They were very particular about how these were to be composed: part Jane Austen, part inter-department memo.)

  I. Practitioner: Apparent AMATEUR. Middle-aged male of minimal means. Name unknown. No identification found. Domicile apparently settled by occupation versus lease or purchase. Due to post-conjuration mental state, AMATEUR could not be immediately interviewed. Healing initiated.

  II. Location: Avenue C, East Village, New York City, United States

  III. Source of Magic: Unknown at this time (see above, I). AMATEUR appears to have conjured from common components, but spell was incinerated, likely to obscure origin. ADVANCED MAGIC USER suspected. Plan to interview AMATEUR following full restoration of senses. Estimated recover time: forty-eight (48) to seventy-two (72) hours.

  IV. Creature summoned: SHRIEKER

  V. Outcome: Banished

  (I decided it better to leave out the specifics, especially the part about Thelonious.)

  Unless otherwise instructed, I plan to pursue the investigation into the origin of the spell and will report further discoveries as I attain them.

  Humbly Submitted,

  Everson Croft

  I reread the report and, satisfied it was sufficiently informative and deferential, folded it into a six-sided disc. At my lab table, I waved the hexagon over a silver cup with a plum-colored flame: my direct line to the Order.

  “Consegnare,” I said.

  The report smoked, then went up in a bright flash.

  The flame in the pot shifted to orange before returning to its plum-colored hue, telling me the message had gone through. The tension in my neck and shoulders let out a little. There would be more work on the case, but I would have the Order’s muscle in my corner—even if it was the slow-twitch variety. And who knew? Maybe this would be my break, the case that would promote me from the wizarding basement, as it were. Ten years was starting to feel like long enough.

  I checked my watch, surprised at the late hour. It was nearly ten.

  “Don’t bother fixing dinner.” Tabitha hopped onto the end of the iron table and collapsed on her side. “I fended for myself.”

  “Fended?” I asked before spotting the tuft of gray feathers stuck to a corner of her mouth. “Pigeon?”

  “What else is a girl threatening to be shoved out the door supposed to do?”

  Translation: See how low you made me go.

  I snorted a laugh. “So it’s gone from ‘Maybe I won’t come back’ to ‘He’s throwing me out’?”

  “Gotta survive somehow,” she went on in her hurt voice, as though she’d been done a terrible injustice. She stopped talking long enough to tongue-probe a back tooth. “I think I cracked a molar.”

  Translation: You made me crack a molar.

  I didn’t need to look to know her molars were fine, but since ninety percent of any relationship was knowing when to argue and when to accede… “I’m sorry,” I said. “Let me see about putting some magic to it.”

  “You’ll just make it worse,” she pouted, turning her head away.

  The other ten percent was knowing when neither one did any good.

  I sighed and began returning the research books to their dusty slots. I could feel her succubus eyes on t
he back of my head. “Aren’t you going to ask for my report?” she asked after a moment.

  “Do you have something?” I said from the ladder, trying to appear more interested in the title of the book I was holding. When her voice took on that dangling quality it meant she did have something.

  “Oh, I might’ve caught someone watching our building.”

  Cold fingers brushed the back of my neck. “Man or woman.”

  “Hmm. You can never tell these days, can you?”

  I turned. “Which did it look like?”

  Tabitha licked a paw and began combing it over an ear. After several passes, she blinked up at me. “Did you say something, darling?”

  “Man-looking or woman-looking?”

  “Couldn’t see much beneath the coat, but given the long hair … woman-looking.”

  I flipped through a mental Rolodex of women who might come calling—or who even knew where I lived. Of course, there were locating spells for the second, assuming the female in question had a magical bent. But I narrowed it down to the mundane: Caroline Reid or Detective Vega, one bearing a gift of info, the other coming to demand it. But why not just walk up? Or call, for that matter?

  “When?” I asked.

  “Couple of hours ago.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Average in every way.”

  I leveled my gaze at her. “If that were any less helpful, it might actually be helpful.”

  Tabitha gave a self-satisfied smirk.

  “Young or old.”

  “Young but older-looking.”

  “Blond-haired or black?”

  “Brunette.”

  I could tell Tabitha was tiring of the game because her eyes had closed and she was giving responses more freely. But I was no closer to who the woman might have been. Based on hair color, Reid and Vega were out. Still, call it wizard’s intuition, whoever it was had been watching for me.