The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 15

  “No worries. I packed a backup lunch.”

  “Backup…?”

  When she patted my unshaven cheek, it was as though to say, I know you by now.

  “Okay, well, I owe you,” I said lamely.

  She gave a smile that could have been interpreted any number of ways and made her way toward the front of the deli. The afternoon light through the windows, though muted, enveloped her in a lovely aura, capturing my feelings for her in that moment. I opened my mouth, not knowing what I was going to say. But when it came to me and Caroline, there were only three words.

  “Sorry!” I called. “Thanks again!”

  18

  An hour later, having decided to begin with the vampire Arnaud, I was on a subway pulling into the heart of the Financial District.

  I exited with a bevy of men and women in professional attire. Past the turnstiles, steel barriers herded us toward a checkpoint. We were inside the Wall. I watched those ahead of me showing their passport-like IDs. At a table beyond, an armed guard was rifling a man’s briefcase while a second guard performed a rough pat down of a harrowed-looking woman.

  I swallowed and fingered the police ID I had, ahem, forgotten to return to Detective Vega. I was still debating whether or not to use it when my turn came up.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” a guard grunted, holding out a hand. He wasn’t your typical paunchy retired cop. With his walnut-knotted frame and shaved head, the man looked like a special ops agent. They all did. And why not? The titans of finance could afford the most lethal.

  Almost reflexively, I jerked the NYPD card from my pocket. The guard snapped it from me and held it in front of his shield sunglasses—worn underground as well, apparently. Through the window of a booth to his left, I could see someone inspecting an X-ray scan of my body.

  “What’s your business?”

  “The, uh, St. Martin’s case.”

  “This doesn’t say who you are,” he growled.

  I fumbled for my wallet. “Everson Croft, Special Consultant to the NYPD.” I finally managed to free my Midtown College ID, which I held up as well.

  The guard wasn’t interested. He slapped the NYPD card against my chest, hard enough to alter my heart rhythm, and shoved me toward the inspection station. I stumbled against the metal table, where I was rudely deprived of my cane. I watched the guard inspect either end and then try to pull it apart. Good luck, buddy. A family charm held it closed. More worrisome, though, were the hands prodding my personal areas and digging into my pockets.

  “What’s all this?” the guard asked when he’d finished.

  I looked at the items lined up across the table and cleared my throat. “Well, that’s for hydration, of course.” I indicated the Evian bottle of holy water. “This is a mineral supplement,” I said of the vial of copper filings. “Supposed to be good for circulation. My notepad’s there. And that…” My eyes shifted to the small bag of rice. “Well, after I finish up here, I’m going to try to make it to a wedding. You know, shower the happy couple when it’s over.” I gave a small eye roll to suggest I thought the practice as silly as they probably did.

  Neither guard cracked a grin. For several troubling seconds, their shielded gazes remained fixed on my face. Then, as though coming to some sort of psychic agreement, they gave a simultaneous nod.

  “Get your shit and get out of here,” the nearer one grunted.

  I obliged and was soon hurrying up the steps, just as thankful to be past the checkpoint as I was to be above ground. On street level, giant skyscrapers funneled powerful winds down Broadway. My coat flapped like wings. Tilting my head back, I spotted the landmark building that housed Arnaud’s offices. He owned the entire tower, as well as several others in the Financial District.

  Five minutes later, a pair of young men in brass-button suits were opening the building’s front doors for me. Vampires didn’t mess with wards. They kept blood slaves instead—as much for a food supply as security. I nodded at their ageless faces and stepped from the batting winds.

  The deep lobby felt like a tomb. The young woman at the crescent-shaped reception desk smiled a little too earnestly as the doors closed behind me, sealing out the sun and inducing a bone-deep chill.

  “Welcome,” she called in a lilting southern accent. “How may I help you?”

  “Good afternoon.” I walked up and stood the NYPD card on her marble desk. “I’d like to have a word with Arnaud, if I may.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “For police business?”

  “All meetings require an appointment, sir, official or otherwise.”

  I knew Arnaud had leverage in this city, but wow. “All right, let’s make one for say … fifteen minutes from now?”

  She tilted her head in a show of forbearing. White-blond hair that had been brushed to a sheen fell over the shoulder of a pale scoop-neck blouse. She was beautiful in a way that wasn’t quite right. Too porcelain. I suspected I had only to remove her stylish choker to discover the puckered cause.

  “Appointments can only be made by phone,” she said, “and require three to five days for approval.”

  “Three to five days?”

  I didn’t have three to five days. I had exactly one. I studied the receptionist in thought. It wasn’t hard to imagine the young debutante she had been, stepping from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, suitcase in hand, dizzying dreams of theater in her head. Fury at Arnaud and his fellow parasites burned in my blood. If I’d had the power to restore that young woman, believe me, I would have.

  Though the receptionist continued to show her perfect teeth, her smile seemed less inviting now, more menacing. In my peripheral vision, I noticed several young men I hadn’t seen upon entering. They drew nearer, making it so my only move would be toward the door I had entered by.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the receptionist said, her voice developing a not-so-subtle edge, “but you’re going to have to leave.”

  She seemed to become taller, the bones of her jaw sharper.

  I glanced around, tightening my grip on my cane. The young men, who could have been interns with their shiny side-parted hair and Brooks Brothers suits, drew nearer still. I felt Arnaud’s cold eyes watching me from theirs, inducing a weakness in my core. I forced myself to straighten.

  I had one more ace.

  Splaying my right hand on the desk, I said, “My name is Everson Croft, grandson of Asmus Croft, Grand Mage of the Society of the Dragon. I demand the right to an audience with Arnaud Thorne.”

  As the powerful words shook from me and resounded around the marble room, the men stopped. The receptionist’s eyes fell to my ring finger. The winged serpent embossed in thick silver appeared ready to lunge up at her. Inching back, she lifted a phone to her ear.

  I’d thought that might get things rolling.

  “Um, there’s an Everson Croft to see you, sir.” She listened, her large eyes never leaving my ring, but the phone call was for show. Arnaud had seen and heard all that she had.

  After a moment, she hung up and shifted her gaze past me. “Show him up,” she said, no longer smiling.

  Without touching me, the group of men enveloped me and fell into a silent lockstep. I moved with them, as though carried by a cold, hypnotic force. As blood slaves, the men weren’t vampires, but vessels for Arnaud. A brood mentality, along with superhuman speed and strength, were just a few of the perks that came with the position. Perhaps a modest stipend.

  We boarded an elevator that lifted off with smooth, stomach-dipping speed. The slaves, who probably had been finance majors at one time, fixed their gazes straight ahead. In the brushed steel doors, I studied their faces, their dead eyes. I’d heard that vestiges of humanity remained inside them, clawing the walls of their bodily confinement, screaming for release or death. All very much to the head vampire’s delight, I imagined.

  I looked away, not wanting my compassion toward them to soften my guard. At Arnaud’s word, the same poor souls would be clambering over one
another to rip out my throat. I was a little surprised they hadn’t tried yet.

  At the top floor, we exited and proceeded down a hall of what appeared executive-level offices. Ahead loomed a stately set of doors, the wood oiled and dark. Outside the doors, ice-cold hands plied my cane away and stripped off my coat. They lifted away my necklace holding my charmed coin. Though I knew better than to resist, my heart pumped into full panic. All of the defenses I’d been counting on left with the departing men.

  The blood slave who remained behind suppressed a smile. His face was youthful but his almond-shaped eyes were beginning to jaundice at the edges, betraying advanced age. His hair spoke to another era, the short black bangs combed straight down, like a monk’s. You can take the boy out of the Middle Ages, I thought, but you can’t take the Middle Ages out of the boy.

  He bowed and opened one of the two doors.

  Every instinct in me was demanding I leave, and yet…

  The dim room beyond the doorway released a smell of leather and musk. At the other end of what appeared either a large office or small library, a huge brown-tinted window cut a tall man’s silhouette. For a vertiginous moment, the regal figure seemed to take his measure of me.

  “Everson Croft,” a silken voice said. “Please, do come in.”

  I was dimly aware of stepping over the threshold and onto soft carpet.

  “You are either the most audacious human to request an audience,” the voice said, with a hint of tragic humor, “or, my poor boy, you have simply given up on life.” I only realized the figure had been standing with his back to me when he wheeled and a pair of predatory eyes flashed into view.

  Behind me, the door slammed closed.

  19

  I watched Arnaud watching me. He wasn’t as tall as he had first appeared. Neither was he wearing the long-tailed black suit I thought I’d glimpsed when he turned. His suit was light colored and contemporary, the pale oxford underneath open to a criss-crossing of thin chains. Mane-length waves of white hair fell from a center part, brushing a silky red scarf that draped his shoulders.

  The newspapers called him fashionable and rakish. I found vampiric far more fitting. The black eyes that stared into mine held no humanity—and hadn’t for hundreds of years.

  “So, which one is it?” he asked.

  My voice stuck in my dry throat. “I-I’m sorry?”

  “Audacity or lost hope?”

  Though Arnaud remained preternaturally still, I could sense a coiling in his muscles, as though he were poising to strike. I felt, too, that he wanted me to sense this. I stiffened in apprehension.

  “Boldness or gloom? Because, you see, my boy, I have the cure for either.”

  I searched my peripheral vision for anything I might put between us, but the bookshelf-lined room seemed to have stretched out, the corporate desk and plush leather chairs suddenly far away. I felt naked without my confiscated items.

  Arnaud gave a knowing laugh. “Rest assured, Mr. Croft, your accoutrements are quite safe.”

  Vampires weren’t psychic, per se, but they could detect the chemicals humans emitted as a byproduct of fear. They also enjoyed inciting them, the hormonal aerosol being almost as nutritive for a vampire as blood. I could all but feel Arnaud’s smooth tongue lapping up mine.

  Gross.

  “Security precaution, you understand,” he was saying. “With so much nastiness and loathing out there, one can never be too prudent. But between us, a bag of rice could hardly be considered harmful, now could it?” When he laughed again it was with a hint of derision. “Or helpful, for that matter. As though spilled grains would drive one to such distraction he would fail to finish what he’d set out to do.”

  Okay, so I’d gone with an untested myth on that one. Holy water, however—

  “But back to the question at hand.” Arnaud took his first precise steps toward me, pupils gleaming. “Was it daring or despair that brought you? Or perhaps something of both? I am a granter of wishes, you know.”

  His velvet voice took on a low flutter of hunger as he crossed the office cleanly, effortlessly. In the next moment, he was too close. An oppressive atmosphere enveloped me. It was the enticing smell I’d picked up outside, but grown more penetrating and foul, as though it were covering up a stink of decomposition. I struggled to breathe, to think clearly.

  “Oh, yes, wonderful wishes,” he purred.

  He was at my back now, circling. The atmosphere was the vampire’s making, emanating from his pores like a toxic opiate. An intense drowsiness pulled at my mind with the promise of the warmest, most luxurious sleep.

  “You are a little older than the boys I like to take in, but I would make an exception.” Something walked over my scalp like spider’s legs—his fingers, I realized. “Yes, I smell power in your blood, Mr. Croft. Pledge it to me, and I will grant you wealth, eternal life. You’ll never want again.”

  I staggered to remain standing.

  “One has only to … submit,” he whispered, the final word like a down pillow under my head. “There, you see?”

  His fingers massaged my scalp in small circles. When a chilling breath brushed my throat, I realized in horror that I was offering it to him. Through thick eyelids, I watched his lips retract from an impossibly large jaw, the emerging fangs bunched together like a great white’s. His fingers sank in, bracing my head, while his lower face disappeared beneath my chin.

  The Pact, I tried to murmur.

  I could feel the skin near my Adam’s apple dimpling beneath needle-sharp points.

  “The Pact,” I managed.

  Arnaud hesitated.

  “You and the … the Society of the Dragon,” I forged on. “You made a pact with one another… to stop warring and join forces … against … the Inquisition.”

  I had discovered the story during my time in Romania, connecting it to the ring I’d found among Grandpa’s possessions. A ring that had been inert for as long as I’d possessed it, but now pulsed around my finger.

  Arnaud chuckled softly. “I’m afraid the Brasov Pact does not apply to descendants. Only to those who had an immediate interest in keeping the Church from lopping our heads from our bodies. Besides, that was more than four centuries ago. I trust there’s a statute of limitation.”

  I’d been struggling my right arm up until my fist was level with his heart.

  A strange Word swelled in the back of my throat: “Balaur!”

  It emerged like a cannon ball, as though the ring had spoken it. An angry force exploded from my right fist, and Arnaud went flying. His body cracked into the far wall of polarized glass, head whiplashing back. But when Arnaud landed, it was on fingertips and the toes of his loafers. He growled at me through shanks of white hair.

  “How dare you,” he seethed, pain twisting the words.

  Flaps of skin dangled from his face, as though it had been raked by a dragon’s talons. I had to remind myself that the gleaming blood wasn’t his. He hissed again as smoke rose from beneath the collar of his shirt.

  “You burned me!”

  “The ring burned you,” I corrected him. I was in full possession of my language and limbs again, the torpor gone from my thoughts. “Punishment for violating the Pact. So, in essence, you burned yourself.”

  When Arnaud reared to spring, I brought my right fist up. His eyes shifted to the ring, and I watched the first shard of uncertainty take hold. The enchanted ring was no longer pulsing—I may have exhausted its charge with the blast—but Arnaud didn’t need to know that.

  He sniffed the air for the least apprehension, but I gave him none. “Can we talk now?” I asked with an attitude of impatience.

  Arnaud scowled but relaxed and slowly rose. The smoke dissipated into a haze around his head. He straightened his jacket with indignant tugs, then fixed the scarf over his shoulders. When the smoke cleared, his face was intact again, the skin restored to its waxy state.

  He paced over to a small bar, his back to me. On the other side of him, glass clinked and
liquid splashed. I expected him to order me out, but when he turned, he was holding two poured drinks—scotch on the rocks, from the looks of them. He set one drink down on an end table beside a chair of oxblood leather and took the chair across from it: an invitation to join him.

  I did so, going over and lowering myself to the edge of the soft cushion.

  Arnaud took a sip of his drink, then gave his hair a toss as he sat back, the rakish billionaire once more. He opened a hand of slender fingers toward me. “Now,” he said, as though we’d arrived at some understanding, “if you’ve come to talk, then get on with it. I’m a very busy man.”

  Not knowing how long his respect for the ring would hold, I decided to shoot to the point. “There was a murder at St. Martin’s Cathedral,” I said, “sometime Wednesday night.”

  “Ah, yes. Father Richard.” He made a soft tsking sound. “A tragedy.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Indeed. We had an opportunity to talk last month.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mr. Croft,” he said with an edge of reproach, “if you insist on carrying on in this manner, with your surprised faces and little ‘oh’s, I am certain I can find a more productive use of my time. You know our history. You know my interest in the church property. Even now you’re searching for an eye tick, some tell, to determine whether I was involved in his murder. Why the artifice? Certainly a man of your bloodline can come straight to it and ask.”

  “Did you have him killed?”

  As he studied his drink, a smile touched the corners of his thin lips. I had played my hand clumsily, handing him back control, dammit. “There,” he said, “doesn’t that feel better?”

  “Well?” I pressed.

  “Why the sudden interest? The Church showed far less concern for your forebears, after all. Poisonings. Public burnings. Beheadings.” Arnaud made the tsking sound again. “Nasty, nasty business.”

  “Is that why you want St. Martin’s out of the Financial District?”

  The Church had come down just as hard, if not harder, on Arnaud and his contemporaries. Had magic users and vampires not aligned, both would have been cleansed from Europe. Instead, they fought back, defeating the regional enforcers of the Inquisition. Arnaud and Grandpa went their separate ways, only to eventually wash up on the same Manhattan shoreline.