The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 13

  I would need to find out why.

  “All right, if she shows up again, try to pick out a defining feature or two.” I slid home the last book. “Better yet, let me know right away.” I turned and found Tabitha fast asleep.

  I shook my head, but maybe it was time for me to do the same. After the day I’d had, I could use a solid twelve. Back at my desk, I grabbed my empty coffee pot and mug. The downstairs lights were glowing warmly up the unit’s tall windows. Somewhere on the Hudson, a ship’s horn sounded.

  No, wait…

  I spun to face the city hologram, and nearly choked.

  Not a ship’s horn, my alarm. The hologram was glowing that hellfire red again.

  This time in two places.

  13

  The narrow streets of Chinatown were deserted when the cabbie dropped me off forty minutes later. I tipped him the requisite one hundred percent for the after-dark run—the “danger premium,” New Yorkers called it.

  Aptly named, I thought as the cab motored off. Of course most New Yorkers didn’t know what horrors truly lurked in the dark, lured by the city’s vortices of ley energy and, more recently, a muddy fog of despair.

  I took a moment to get my bearings. The street that bustled with commerce by day was now an aisle of rolled-down steel doors, business names painted across the top in red Chinese characters. Some were accompanied by Oriental signs against evil. Above, lights glowed in solitary apartment windows.

  As I began walking, I noted that the sidewalks were infinitely cleaner than those in the East Village, thanks to the crime syndicate that ran the neighborhood. Besides dealing in the usual vices, the White Hand profited by taxing local businesses and residents for “protection and services,” which evidently included trash pickup. Of course, failure to pay meant your head would be in the next day’s pile.

  The White Hand didn’t care for outsiders, either, especially after dark. I would need to tread carefully.

  I was on the block where the ward had been triggered. The hunting spell I cooked up had been necessarily hasty—and I’d had to make two of them, the second for the alarm up in the One Forties—but with no rain in the forecast, it had a good chance of holding together.

  At that thought, a fish-like force wiggled my cane, tugging me northward. I obliged at a run.

  Half a block later, the force twisted me into an alleyway stretching between two restaurants and ending at a Dumpster. Chunks of pavement were piled up against the Dumpster’s brown metal side, as though someone had jack-hammered down to a water main and left the mess for somebody else to clean up. I slowed and sniffed the air. The demon stink from the night before remained a stale after-scent in my sinuses, but it seemed I was picking up a fresh wave.

  Not as powerful as the night before, but…

  Ahead and to my left was a green door, pieces of glass glinting over its stoop. Beside it lay a twisted window cage. I raised my eyes to the dark socket of a window two floors up. From the jagged outline of broken glass, the same blood-red haze I’d seen the night before was leaking out.

  I drew my cane into sword and staff and peered around, heart thumping rabbit-hard in my chest. The alley was still, but whatever had been summoned was loose in the city, dammit.

  I blew open the locked green door, entered a narrow stairwell, and ascended quickly. At the second floor, I opened a door off the landing and held out my lit staff.

  “Good God,” I muttered.

  Inside the apartment’s one room, I assessed the grisly scene at a glance: the spell circles, done in salt this time, the familiar ingredients, the burned parchment, the gunky trail leading beneath the kitchen sink and eventually to the window, where the shrieker had flapped to freedom.

  I went to the fallen conjurer.

  His mouth was agape, his dark eyes rolled upward, as though trying to see something atop his head. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to watch what was happening down below. His ribs shone pale white around the hollowed-out bowl of his torso. The shrieker had consumed everything.

  With gloved hands, I searched through his pockets for identification. Nothing there, but in a wallet on a back table I found a driver’s license. The face was a match.

  “What did you get yourself into, Chin Lau Ping?” I muttered as I copied his name into my notepad.

  By his other IDs, I gathered he’d driven an intercity bus. I took a final look at the photo before returning the wallet to the table. The trim-haired man couldn’t have been more different than the East Village vagrant, and yet the two had somehow gotten their hands on the same spell. Despite needing to get to the other summoning, like an hour ago, I made a quick circuit of the apartment.

  Something had to link the two.

  I stopped at a bamboo bookcase with a mirror on top and shone my light over the titles. But it was the standard amateur fare: religious texts, lay spell books, an encyclopedia of channeling and divination. Nothing that would contain the dark secrets of demon summoning. And why shriekers?

  At the window, I peered past the broken frame into the night. I listened for bloody screams but heard only distant car horns and sirens. With any luck, the creature had gone into a second gestation.

  I would need to alert the Order of the development, but first I had to get uptown.

  I returned to the alley at a run, shoes crunching over the broken window glass. I sensed movement an instant before my vision exploded in stars. The blow only registered as I was landing on my face.

  Something solid had struck the back of my head.

  14

  I twisted and blinked up at my attacker. The looming figure was hard to make sense of. It was as though someone had taken the chunks of pavement beside the Dumpster, assembled them into the proportions of a large human, and endowed them with life. I peeked past the figure. Sure enough, the pavement pile was gone.

  Wonderful. I was dealing with a golem.

  With a low moan, the golem raised a giant fist. I might or might not have screamed as I threw myself from its trajectory. Pavement exploded behind me. I gained my feet and staggered backwards, sword out. The blow had turned my legs to noodles, but my mental prism remained intact.

  “Vigore,” I cried.

  The force from my sword destroyed the golem’s right arm, which went knocking down the alleyway. But though the golem rocked back, its legs held fast. It lumbered forward and swung its remaining arm. I got my light shield up in time, but the concussion from the backhand sent me into a brick wall, dealing my head another lovely smack. The alley tilted one way and the other before I could stare it straight again.

  “Forza dura!” I shouted.

  With my prism wavering, the force wasn’t up to the task of a charging golem. Though chunks blew from its torso, the creature hardly slowed. I wheeled and staggered toward the mouth of the alleyway. I needed some kind of backup, but from whom? The city was sprinkled with magic users, but I had no idea who did and didn’t belong to the Order—which was just how the Elders seemed to want it.

  As I cleared the alley, an idea struck me: Canal Street, just north of here. A branch of the defunct Broadway line ran beneath it.

  I veered right. Seconds later, the golem’s smashing footfalls fell in behind me.

  Pumping my cane like a relay baton, I remembered an account of a dark sorcerer using golems to protect his spell-casting sanctum. That had to be it. Someone knew last night’s shrieker summoning had been thwarted. Looking to avoid a repeat, he had not only arranged for tonight’s twin summonings at opposite ends of the city, but placed a golem at the closer one, perhaps as a component of the shrieker spell, for any wizards who might come sniffing around. My stepping over the conjurer’s threshold had probably triggered the animation.

  But how had the person known I was closer to Chinatown than to Harlem? Unless he knew where I lived. I thought of the brunette woman Tabitha had seen watching my building.

  Did the woman play a role in this? Was she the sorcerer?

  I snuck a peek over my shoulder and re
gretted it. The thing was less than a half block away and gaining, its clunky strides literally eating up concrete. But I’d reached Canal Street. I took a hard right and began squinting ahead for…

  There!

  I aimed my sword toward the subway vent that took up half the sidewalk. With a shouted Word, I blew it from its foundation. Tight-roping the ledge between the sudden hole and a storefront, I gathered more energy to my prism, hoping to hell the golem would play follow-the-leader.

  When I turned, it was. Sort of.

  Instead of veering around the hole, the golem had chosen to stretch a clunky leg across. I aimed my sword at its front foot.

  “Vigore!”

  As foot touched sidewalk, the golem’s leg erupted at the shin. With a surprised moan, the rest of the golem plummeted from view—only for stony fingers to reappear and seize the ledge. But a second Word demolished its hand, and I watched the golem crash-bang down into the foul-smelling void.

  Head still ringing, I stooped over to catch my breath. Then I replaced the steel grating over the hole and hemmed the mess in with some nearby construction barricades that littered the city. Far below, the retching, rumbling battle was already underway. Ghouls versus golem.

  With any luck, my new friend would land a few solid shots before being torn apart. In any case, it was on its own.

  I had a ride uptown to catch.

  15

  As it turned out, I hadn’t needed a hunting spell to locate the site of the second summoning. The small army of police cruisers did the job for me.

  “This you, buddy?” the cabbie muttered as he pulled over. “Christ.”

  He hadn’t been too happy about the address. Following the Crash, Hamilton Heights had fallen as hard as any neighborhood and was neck-and-neck with the South Bronx for most homicidal.

  “You mind waiting?” I asked. “I won’t be long.”

  The man’s pouchy eyes jerked from building to building as though bullets were going to fly from them at any second. “Sorry, pal,” he said, shaking his head at the extra twenty I held out. “I’m as hard up as anyone but not that hard up.”

  As the cab U-turned and took off back south, I hurried toward the crime scene, an unadorned brick apartment building, twenty-odd stories high. Several residents had gathered out front as police appeared and disappeared through the building’s entrance. I eased up to the edge of the crowd and stood behind an older couple, both in thick night robes.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Flash got himself killed,” the man said without turning.

  “Murder?”

  “Big old messy one,” the woman said.

  “Someone tore into Flash good,” the man took up again. “Super found him after we complained of some ungodly screaming from his unit.”

  I imagined a similar scene to the one in Chinatown.

  “Did they catch the guy?” I asked.

  “Nun-uh.” The man cocked his head up. “Broke out through the window, must’ve went down the fire escape.”

  “Either that or had wings,” the woman put in, “cause the man live twelve stories up.”

  Yeah, nastiest wings you ever saw, lady. Which meant we had two shriekers on the loose.

  “What sort of work did Flash do?” I needed to find some sort of connection between the conjurers, a common cause. That the couple seemed to know the latest victim was to my good fortune—not something I fell into very often.

  But instead of popping off another response, they turned around for the first time. Beyond their glasses, I watched squinting suspicions take hold. So long, fortune. Not only was I foreign to the neighborhood, but my face was freshly banged up. I followed the man’s gaze to my gloves, both bloodstained from patting down the Chinatown conjurer.

  “O-officer!” the man called over a shoulder as he backed his wife away. “Officer!”

  “Now wait a minute,” I said, showing a palm.

  Bad move. Now the woman could see the blood. She responded with a piercing scream.

  That would get someone’s attention. Lowering my head into the shadow of my hunched-up collar, I wheeled and strolled south, Mr. Nonchalant himself. I kept an ear trained on the excitement of voices behind me. When I picked out “white man” and “killer,” I decided to speed my pace.

  To an all out sprint.

  “Stop!” a woman’s voice called.

  Sorry, Officer, but being nabbed for a probation violation is bad enough. Being nabbed with the blood of another stiff on my hands, and without a good explanation of how it got there? Yeah, not gonna happen.

  I rounded the corner of the building as a pair of cracks sounded behind me.

  Of course, you could just shoot me dead.

  For the second time that night, I was in full flight mode. I narrowed my sights on a south-facing entrance to the same apartment building. But instead of ducking inside, I pressed my back to the ninety-degree angle the jutting entrance made with the building’s brick siding.

  Holding my cane at chin level, I whispered a Word: “Oscurare.”

  As the police officer slapped around the corner into view, the white opal in my cane absorbed the immediate light. The shadow I stood inside turned darker, more obscuring.

  Slowing, the officer snapped on a flashlight and held it level with her firearm. The beam swept side to side, then shot under a pair of stripped cars leaning curbside. Ninety-nine percent of the current force would have said, “The hell with it,” backed away, lived to police another day. Hamilton Heights at night was no place for a cop to be caught alone. But it seemed my pursuer belonged to that hallowed one percent who still believed in Serving and Protecting.

  Lucky me.

  At that thought, the beam glared across my face. The officer began running my way.

  Not officer, though—detective. As in Vega.

  I felt explanations bunching up in the back of my throat, none worth a spit. To Detective Vega, I was just another degenerate in a city running over with them—not someone trying to help clean up the mess. Nothing I said would change that. Even in the dark, I could see her glossy black eyebrows creasing sharply down.

  But she wasn’t hitting me with the light anymore. The beam was trained on the entrance I was hidden beside. She hurried past my spot and disappeared. I listened to a large door shake but remain locked. Detective Vega huffed out a sigh. The beam swung around, this time into the street.

  My knees buckled in relief—until a pair of male officers came running up, their own flashlight beams wavering dangerously close. I stiffened straight, wondering how long I could hold the spell.

  “Find him?” the larger officer asked.

  “I think he went in,” Vega said from just out of sight. “Locked the door behind him.”

  “Want us to do a top-to-bottom,” the other one asked, clearly uncomfortable with his own suggestion. Beside his partner, he looked like a twelve-year-old. They had chosen a spot five feet in front of me to hold their end of the meeting. If I reached out with my cane, I could have goosed either one.

  “No.” Vega joined the meeting in profile. “I want you to check on one of our probationers, make sure he’s home.”

  You cannot be serious.

  “What’s the name?”

  I closed my eyes. Please, not—

  “Everson Croft,” Vega said. “The address is in the system. West Tenth, I think.”

  “We’re on it.”

  As the officers took off, Detective Vega gave the street another pass with her light. I’d tried to keep my cane concealed while fleeing, but I hadn’t been careful enough, it seemed. She must have seen it. At least my cane was doing a better job of concealing me at the moment.

  Detective Vega lowered her light. Something in the disappointment, if not defeat, of the gesture poked me right in the sympathy center. My own night wasn’t going much better. Under different circumstances, I might have pulled her into a hug. Then again, Vega didn’t strike me as a cuddler.

  Gun in hand, she
stomped back toward the front of the building, a muttered threat trailing behind her.

  “And if you’re not home, Croft…”

  All right, sympathy time over. If I didn’t want to learn the second part of Vega’s threat, I needed to figure out how to race a speeding police cruiser one-hundred thirty blocks south.

  And win.

  16

  I ran south for several blocks before cutting west.

  I’d already eliminated the subway as an option. Too unreliable. My plan was to flag a cab, empty my wallet onto his lap, and have him turn the West Side Highway into his personal Autobahn. The police cruiser had taken off down Fredrick Douglass Boulevard a minute before, bottoming out at an intersection. I was gambling they’d hold that course, hopefully hit a traffic snag or twelve from Midtown south.

  But for my plan to work, I needed a taxi. I pulled up wheezing at the edge of St. Nicholas Park, where the danger factor lessened slightly, and peered down the street to the glowing entrance of a metro stop.

  Not a single cab.

  “Oh, c’mon,” I shouted in frustration, “it’s not even a full moon!”

  Our wooded parks had a bit of a werewolf—or blood-thirsty feral dog—problem, depending on who you talked to.

  I sized up the few cars parked along the curb. Even if I could’ve hotwired one, I wouldn’t have known how to drive it. (Hey, I grew up in the city). That left hijacking the next vehicle that happened to pass. Or acting like a wizard.

  Ducking tree branches, I hurried up a cement staircase into the park. The path it led to was little more than a crumbling line of pavement, quickly swallowed by a decade’s worth of overgrowth. Joggers, bikers, and strollers—not to mention the Department of Parks and Rec—had long since abandoned St. Nicholas to its new denizens: an assortment of shadow creatures and the occasional junky desperate enough to shoot up back here.