The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 17

  I stopped. Is that what they think I’ve done?

  “Relax, Everson,” I whispered. “Deep breaths.”

  I resumed pacing, respiring in through my nose and out through pursed lips. My heart continued to pound high in my chest. I reread the message. Calling me off the case I could understand. I could even see where the directive was meant to keep me safe. Demonic beings were beyond my present abilities, as my battle with the juvenile shrieker had attested.

  But “discontinue all magic use until further notice”? What the hell?

  Developed beyond a certain point, magic became as integral to a wizard as any vital organ. More so, magic became a lens through which we perceived existence and our place in it. I couldn’t imagine my life without it. But the Order was demanding I do just that.

  I tried to harness some hope to the final three words: “until further notice.” Maybe this was a temporary stay, again for reasons of safety.

  But a harsher truth was rearing up in my mind, and it went back to Thelonious. I’d already mentioned that, as an incubus, he belonged to a similar class of being as demons. It was why the threshold at St. Martin’s wanted nothing to do with me. I was also beginning to suspect it was the reason for the Order’s decision. After all, the spells had to be coming from someone or something with a strong link to the demon world. That didn’t necessarily make me a suspect, but in the minds of the Order, it made me susceptible to manipulation or outright possession. As a wizard with an incubus problem, I was a handicap.

  My heart settled. That had to be it.

  I studied the plum-colored flame. Getting that assurance from the source would have been nice, but the arcane society to which I belonged—though felt more outsider than member—was rigidly hierarchical. A follow-up inquiry would either get me an identically-worded decree or be ignored altogether. Experience told me the second. I had a mentor I might have been able to tap, but I hadn’t seen Chicory in almost a year. Judging by his scattered nature, I wasn’t sure he went much higher up the ladder than I did.

  Fine, I thought, balling up the Order’s message and tossing it into the flame, where it incinerated. I’ll play along.

  In the meantime, there was the matter of my job at the college. To save it, I was going to need to make some serious headway on the cathedral case before I had to report back to Detective Vega sometime tomorrow. The druid cult in Central Park was a possible break, but I needed a motive for the killing. And for that I would need to talk to someone at St. Martin’s. I fished in my pockets for the card Father Vick had handed me.

  “Hello, Father,” I said when he answered. “This is Everson Croft.”

  “Everson, it’s so good to hear you.”

  “How are you doing?” I asked carefully.

  “If I’m being honest, not well.” He gave a forlorn laugh. “My faith is strong, but so too was my closeness to Brother Richard.”

  “I understand.” I waited the appropriate beat before continuing. “I hate to ask at a time like this, Father, but could I stop by this evening to talk? I’m still helping out on the case and was hoping you might shed some light on a few questions.”

  “I’m not sure I can tell you anything more than I’ve already told your detective.”

  Right, I thought, only I don’t have access to Detective Vega’s case file. She would erupt if she even knew I was talking to you.

  “Well,” I hedged, “I’m pursuing a slightly different lead.”

  “In that case, I’ll do whatever I can to assist. However, I’m conducting a special Mass this evening for church officials. Might we meet in the morning?”

  I didn’t like the idea of sitting on the case for the next fourteen hours, but what could I say?

  “Is eight o’clock too early?” I asked.

  “That will be fine, Everson. We can talk in the vicarage here at the cathedral.”

  “One more thing,” I said before he could hang up. “Would you mind, um, meeting me at the front door?”

  23

  I couldn’t sit on the church case that night, it turned out, much less sleep. Following several restless hours of tossing, I dressed, retrieved an antique item from my trunk, and grabbed my cane. Remembering the no-magic decree, I went back for my revolver, tucking it into the front of my pants.

  Outside my apartment building, I peered around to make sure no one was watching. There was no one, period. Barely after midnight, and I had the street to myself. This was a very different New York than the one I’d grown up in. I tightened my coat against the cold and headed east.

  Several blocks later, I slipped into Washington Square Park, its walkways and lawns also deserted. I ran my gaze along the curving lines of empty benches. Even the vagrants knew better than to sleep out in the open anymore. The sane ones, anyway.

  A wet snort jerked my eyes toward a copse of dying sycamores. Not deserted, after all, I thought. When the wind picked up, a scent of sewage blew past. A moment later, a large hominid shadow separated from the trunks, ducking low branches. Crap. I looked around to see whether the ghoul belonged to a pack, but it appeared to have come up alone. Even so, avoidance was usually the best tactic.

  I was backing away when the breeze changed direction, flapping my coat against my calves. The ghoul paused, raised its lump of a nose, and sniffed wetly. A moment later, a pair of yellow eyes fell toward me.

  Wonderful.

  The ghoul’s jaw yawned as it began shambling toward me. My cane was halfway apart before I remembered the decree. Sighing, I swapped the cane for my revolver. I had become so accustomed to channeling and pushing energy that the gun felt cold and alien in my grip.

  I took aim at the ghoul’s head and squeezed. A pair of silver slugs slammed it sideways. The ghoul yowled and kicked through a line of benches. Wooden planks and iron flew up around its hulking body. My backward steps became an awkward jog, jostling my aim. My next shot missed entirely.

  The ghoul loped into a run, anticipating its midnight snack.

  I wasn’t going to outrace it. Stopping, I set my legs in a shooter’s stance and aimed with both hands. I tried to remember what the instructor at the firing range had taught me, oh, six or seven years ago. One of the ghoul’s yellow eyes bobbed in and out of the revolver’s sight, growing larger. I squeezed three times. The final crack sprayed fluid and snapped the ghoul’s head back. Both hands flew to its right eye as the creature fell to the pavement, howling.

  “Go on,” I shouted, stomping my foot. “Get out of here!”

  The ghoul thrashed up and scrambled off. They were survivalists first, man-eaters second. I waited until its pained cries and smacking footfalls faded east before returning the revolver to my pants.

  All right. I let out a tremulous sigh. Back to business.

  Where the park opened out, I climbed into the dry wading pool and approached the central ring from which water used to fount. Washington Square Arch, no longer lit at night, loomed as a massive silhouette to the north. I knelt at the pool’s center, dry leaves crackling beneath me, and wound a small music box. When I released the key, a tinkling melody rose into the night.

  I set the box on the ring and whispered, “Effie.”

  I’d found the music box in an antique shop years before. Curious, I took it to a local diviner. She told me it had belonged to a girl who succumbed to yellow fever in the 1800s and was buried in the city’s pauper grave. Her remains now rested among twenty-thousand others, roughly beneath where I was kneeling. Her spirit, however, was as restless as mine.

  “That you, Everson?” an innocent voice asked, clear as a bell.

  When I turned, the eight-year-old girl was standing behind me, eyes large and inquisitive. Plain brushed hair fell over the shoulders of the gown she’d probably been buried in, light blue with a broad ribbon fastened belt-like above her waist. Her shoes were simple clogs.

  “Hi there, Effie.”

  “You brought me music box,” she exclaimed, moving past me to stoop over her former possession.
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br />   I smiled sadly. Ghosts weren’t souls. They were best described as living echoes, possessing the appearance and personality of the departed, but little in the way of free will. The more malignant ones could drive a person to insanity, true, but Effie’s ghost represented the sweet end of the spectrum. My heart broke a little as I watched her attempt to pick up the box.

  To distract her, I said, “What did you do today, Effie?”

  “I tried making friends with a boy, but ’e wouldn’t talk to me.” When she turned, her lips were bent in an indignant frown. She was no doubt referring to a human boy without Sight.

  “Probably a loser,” I said. “What about the friends you already have?”

  “They’re a’right,” she replied. “But Mary’s gettin’ plumb on me nerves with her tales.”

  “Ugh. Mary and her tales.” I shook my head. “Hey, uh, speaking of your friends, I have a question I’d like you to ask them.”

  “Whut is it?”

  “You know St. Martin’s Cathedral downtown, right?” Fortunately, it was old enough to have been standing during Effie’s time in New York. I watched her nod. “Good. I want you to ask your friends if they’ve seen anything unusual around there in the last month or so.”

  “Like whut?” she asked.

  I was throwing a blind net. Ghosts were drawn to ley energy, and with the intensity around St. Martin’s, I was hoping one or several in Effie’s circle had made their way down there, maybe picked up on something. A shame I hadn’t befriended any of the ghosts at St. Martin’s, but such things took time.

  “Just … anything that might have struck them as odd,” I answered.

  Effie appeared to think about that before nodding her head. “A’right,” she said. She turned back to her old music box and, in a soft, haunting voice, added words to the tinkling lullaby.

  Sweet babe, a golden cradle holds thee

  Soft snow-white fleece enfolds thee

  In airy bower I'll watch thy sleeping

  Where branchy trees in the breeze are sweeping

  Ghosts usually required a full day/night cycle to carry out requests, but I was in no hurry to return to my sheet-tangled bed. Ghouls or not, it was a sleepless night. Too many thoughts knocking around my head: at-large shriekers, no-magic decrees, the cathedral murder, the police sketch, the mystery person watching my apartment, my impending hearing at the college. It made the straightforward existence of the undead seem enviable in contrast.

  I wound the box for Effie several more times. Sometime after three, her apparition faded along with her solemn notes.

  24

  It was half past eight the next morning by the time I made it through the pedestrian checkpoint. My NYPD card had worked its charm a second time, but even so, I was thirty minutes late.

  I hurried south from the Wall, aware I was challenging Arnaud by returning to his district. I pictured the vampire at his top-story window but doubted the drizzly morning offered him much of a view. The head of his building had been hidden by a drift of low clouds since early light, meaning he couldn’t see me. When I peeked up again, my face prickled with current.

  Damn. Something told me he could.

  I dropped my head and cut west to put a few skyscrapers between us. Soon, I was coming up on the steps of St. Martin’s. Beyond the tall bronze doors stood Father Vick, the image of patience.

  “Forgive me,” I said, hustling up to the other side of the threshold and shaking the collection of moisture from my coat. “Should have known to add an extra hour to the commute.”

  “It’s certainly not what it used to be,” he said with a smile. “Please, Everson, come in.”

  The invitation. I peeked past him to make sure no police were inside—or Detective Vega herself—and crossed the threshold. The wave that rippled through me felt thinner than last time. It didn’t induce the same queasiness or deprive me of quite as much power. I wondered whether the shocked and grieving atmosphere of the past two days had something to do with that.

  “I’m back here,” he said.

  I followed his shifting cassock through several doors and across an inner courtyard. The cathedral around us was stone silent. It wasn’t until we had reached his one-room apartment that he spoke again.

  “How have you been, Everson? I was sorry to hear of your grandparents’ passing.”

  He left the door open a crack behind me, allowing a slipstream of fresh air into the monastic space.

  “I’m well,” I replied. “Busy. Teaching at Midtown College and now consulting for the NYPD.” I intentionally left out that I was doing the second to get six months whacked off my probation—all in the hopes of saving the first. I didn’t need to share the wizarding bit, either.

  Father Vick moved a pile of prayer books from the seat of a wooden armchair and gestured for me to sit.

  “So you’re back in the city?” He placed the books on a small desk beneath his lone window and beside what appeared to be a draped handkerchief, then turned his desk chair so he could face me.

  I nodded a little uneasily, sensing the question in his raised eyebrows.

  “Well, I hope you know you’re always welcome back at St. Martin’s,” he said.

  I was pretty sure the threshold would beg to differ, as well as higher-ups in the denomination who hadn’t much cared for my published thesis on the First Saints manuscript.

  “That means a lot,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He studied me for a moment, hand on his cinnamon beard, before breaking into a pleasant chuckle. “I remember when you were in my beginning Sunday school class. You couldn’t have been more than five or six. The biblical stories fascinated you, but you never liked to hear about anyone getting hurt.” He chuckled again. “At the time, I thought, ‘Now here’s someone destined for the ministry.’ I sense, though, that you help people in other ways?”

  “I do my best,” I said noncommittally.

  His pale blue eyes studied me again until I felt my body wanting to shift.

  “Before we get to your questions,” he said, “is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

  As a shadow exorcist, he could perceive a person’s light/dark conflicts—a skill honed through faith and enhanced by the ley energy that coursed up through the cathedral’s foundation. By the subtle shift in his tone, I could tell Father Vick had seen something in me. Whether it had to do with my magical bloodline or my darker Thelonious nature, I couldn’t say.

  “Thank you, Father, but I’m not here for myself.”

  “Very well,” Father Vick said. He set his clasped hands on his lap to signal he was ready to begin.

  “Would you mind going over what happened the, uh—” I fumbled for my pocket notebook. “—the night of Father Richard’s murder, leading up to the discovery of his body the next morning?”

  “Following Wednesday night’s Mass, the four of us who live here—the groundskeeper, an acolyte in residence, Father Richard, and myself—we had a late dinner and then retired to our rooms, around ten. Father Richard must have gotten up at some point to go to the sacristy.”

  “Would that be unusual?” I patted my pockets for something to write with.

  Father Vick handed me a ballpoint pen from his desk. “No, he would often spend time there when he couldn’t sleep. An hour or so organizing the cupboards, polishing the chalices, preparing for the next day’s service.”

  “Did everyone know about this?”

  “Those of us here, yes. Though maybe not the acolyte. Malachi has only been with us for a couple of months. I don’t know if Father Richard’s habit was ever mentioned in his presence. In any case, nothing was heard that night. The next morning, Cyrus, our groundskeeper, found him…” Father Vick frowned severely as though to prevent tears from forming in his eyes. “Found him on the floor. Just as you probably saw him the other day.”

  I gave the moment its solemn due before continuing. “Is the cathedral locked at night?”

  Father Vick composed himself, then nod
ded. “It’s Cyrus’s duty to secure all of the doors and windows, and he’s very regimental about it. Our locks are security grade, reinforced by the power of the church. No one’s ever broken in, and there were no signs anyone had.”

  “Was everything locked the next morning, as well?”

  “Yes. Cyrus checked.”

  I finished writing, then tapped the pen against my chin. That seemed to rule out someone slipping in with the day crowd, hiding until he could take care of the rector, and then stealing back out. But it didn’t rule out lock picking.

  “In the last few weeks, did you notice anyone watching the church, staking it out, anything like that?”

  “I stay so busy, Everson. I can’t say that I did.”

  He seemed to be apologizing for his lapse in vigilance, which sent a fresh wave of guilt through me. Here I was, posing as a police investigator, interrogating my bereaved former youth minister, all so I might keep my day job. Despite what I’d told Father Vick earlier, I was here for myself.

  “Had the rector received any recent threats?”

  “Several from the White Hand in Chinatown. The church’s commitment to human rights had been butting up against their business interests. The police are supposed to be pursuing that angle.”

  I nodded. Maybe I’d leave that one to Detective Vega. I still doubted a Chinatown hit man would have left an obscure message in pre-Latin. Why not the White Hand insignia, meant to inspire fear? I decided to go bolder.

  “How about threats from less … mundane quarters?”

  Father Vick looked at me thoughtfully before gazing out the window. The drizzle had become a steady rain, splashing over the courtyard’s dark-red flagstones.

  “Father Richard came from a more conservative tradition,” he said after a moment, “one that believed all magic was the work of Satan or one of his horde. Even sacred magic could open one up to evil forces, he insisted. I tried to help him see otherwise, but he was very rigid in his mindset.”