The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 19

  I hustled down the stairs, already putting my discovery in perspective. St. Martin’s was involved in various outreach programs for the homeless; the conjurer had likely picked up the Bible at a shelter or soup kitchen. Or maybe a parishioner had seen him on the street and handed it to him.

  But call it wizard’s intuition, something about the finding nagged me.

  I filed the discovery away as my shoes hit the sidewalk and the hunting spell tugged my cane south. I assumed the conjurer hadn’t gotten far, given the loaded trunk he was lugging. But blocks later, where the East Village became the Lower East Side, I began to wonder.

  My cane pulled me into the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. I suddenly found myself dodging through a shantytown that spread from the bridge’s massive concrete pylons onto the sidewalk and half the street. Soot-faced residents watched from sagging boxes and tents made from sheets of industrial plastic. The intelligence in their eyes scared the hell out of me. These were the ones who had held jobs and leases but now lacked the means to even leave the city. The ones the Crash had absolutely plowed under.

  As I cleared the underpass, I barely avoided bowling over a man who might have been my high school principal. There was no time to check. At an abandoned police precinct, the spell jerked me hard west. I was practically running to keep up now. The conjurer was close.

  I saw the trunk first, dirty blue with aluminum binding, then the back of the stringy-haired man dragging it. He was almost two blocks ahead of me and looked to be heading for Roosevelt Park.

  “Hey!” I shouted, breaking into a sprint.

  He turned his head enough for me to catch the edge of a thick lens, but he didn’t slow. The light changed at the next intersection, and I pulled up, craning my neck to keep him in view through the traffic. The surrounding businesses told me I was where Chinatown was growing into the Lower East Side.

  “C’mon, dammit,” I whispered, looking for a break in the cars.

  I was too focused on the conjurer to pay much attention to the group of teenagers stepping from a corner store. They were dressed in loose white suits, wife beaters for shirts, their ink black hair slick with something.

  “It’s him,” I heard one of them whisper. “That’s the man.”

  Shoes scuffed. I wheeled in time to see a collapse of bodies. What the…? An incoming fist opened my lower lip. A second blow rammed my temple, icing half my face. The sidewalk slammed into me next. I got my forearms up as stomps joined the descending fists.

  The young men, who remained savagely silent, were enforcers for the White Hand. The suits told me that much. But what in the hell had I done to them? When the toe of a shoe nicked the family jewels, I decided I didn’t care.

  “Vigore!” I thundered.

  The explosion from my cane threw the attackers in all directions. I gained my feet and rotated, sword and staff in hands. A thug who had eaten a light pole crawled in a crippled circle, blood from his face stippling the sidewalk. But the other four jumped up quickly.

  “Stay back,” I warned, summoning a light shield.

  Pedestrians gave us a wide berth, eyes averted. As a general rule, the less you saw on the streets, the better. It was why I hadn’t taken a lot of pains to hide my cane after the police sketch went public. Is that what this is about? I wondered now. I hadn’t seen anything in the paper about a money reward.

  Beretta pistols appeared from waistbands. With subtle jerks of their heads, the thugs tried to encircle me. Naturally, I’d left my own gun at home. The black bores of their weapons eyed my face. Whatever their motive, the thugs had left the street at my back open. Hearing the traffic slow and then idle for a red light, I snorted.

  Amateurs.

  I was two steps into my retreat when a head blow reduced my world to a ringing fog. I plummeted like a bag of bottles into someone’s arms, which hefted me through the side door of a van.

  The enforcers had transport, evidently, and a driver I hadn’t seen.

  I landed on the floor of the van. The thugs piled in after me. A foot forced my face against the gritty metal while sharp knees pinned the length of my body. Not that I had any fight left. I was in Woozyville. As the side door rammed closed and the van jounced from the curb, I found my thoughts fluttering around the conjurer—the key to the demonic summonings—as he drifted farther and farther away.

  28

  I didn’t lose consciousness but would have preferred it to the jack-hammering in my head. Whoever was driving the van wasn’t helping. He made several nauseating turns and hard brakes before rearing to a final stop.

  The thugs lifted me under the arms and dragged me through a dark garage. In an adjoining basement room, they stripped my jacket and dropped me into a scary-looking chair. A thick leather strap went over my lap and one apiece around my chest and throat, the last cinching until I could hardly swallow.

  Instead of struggling, I fumbled for my casting prism. It wasn’t there. Brain too bruised.

  My wrists and ankles received similar restraining treatment as my torso, the fingers of both hands forced into a pair of metal contraptions attached to the armrests. That couldn’t be good. A muscled thug—the driver, I guessed—twisted a series of knobs until my finger joints were pressed straight. His next twists brought them to the verge of bending backwards. Something told me he’d done this before.

  “Hey,” I mumbled as the first throbs started up, “think you could back off a hair?”

  The driver lumbered to a shadowy wall to my right.

  Guess not.

  I eyed my splayed hands, wondering how long I’d be able to hold out. I’d never been tortured before and didn’t think I was going to be very good at it. But who was torturing me, exactly—and why?

  “Chin Lau Ping.”

  I squinted at where the voice had come from. Its strained quality sounded like that of a girl on the verge of a tantrum. But the figure looming from the shadows ahead of me was too hulking to be a girl.

  “Chin Lau Ping,” the high voice repeated. “Why?”

  Thick gold rings entered the light first—hands holding the lapels of a velvet smoking jacket. Underneath, a white silk shirt swelled over a loose paunch and the beginnings of man breasts. The emerging head was basketball round, anchored by a double chin and capped with an adolescent spike cut. As the man squinted at me, I wondered if he knew how stupid he looked.

  But wait, what was he asking?

  “Chin Lau Ping,” he screeched.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “And is the screaming really necess—”

  “Mr. Ping was my courier, and you murdered him. Why?”

  Courier…? Murdered…? Then it clicked. Chin Lau Ping was the Chinatown conjurer. And this man asking after him was his boss: Wang “Bashi” Gang, head of the Chinatown crime syndicate.

  I’d found an in with the White Hand after all, but not the one I probably wanted.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I tried to raise a hand before remembering they were both bolted down. “I didn’t murder anyone, least of all your courier. There’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “Misunderstanding?”

  I really wished he’d stopped screeching. It was hell on my concussion. But at the moment, I was more concerned with the glossy black-and-white photo he was shoving in front of me.

  “These were taken by the security camera at Hunan’s Restaurant.”

  The photo was actually a split shot, the first showing me about to enter the alley beside Chin’s apartment, the second, me leaving at a run—both with date/time stamps. If you looked hard enough, you could just make out the blob-like shadow of the golem in pursuit, but I didn’t think that would impress Bashi.

  Two of his thugs stepped from the wall, holding up my coat and cane as though presenting evidence in a court of law. I had to admit, the artifacts looked a lot like those in the photos.

  I decided there was no point in lying about being there.

  “Yeah, that’s me.” I gave an emba
rrassed laugh. “I’d knocked off a couple beers earlier. When nature called and I spotted the Dumpster in the alley… Look, it’s not my proudest moment.”

  “Start with the pinky,” Bashi said.

  The driver stepped forward and twisted a knob over my right hand. My fifth-digit blossomed with fresh pain.

  “Wait! You didn’t let me get to the part where I was planning to clean it up.”

  “The day after Chin’s murder, you went to Mr. Han’s Apothecary and asked if he knew him.”

  My mind raced. He was right. I had done that. But had Mr. Han informed on me? Though the owner could be hard to read, I got that he genuinely liked me. No, there had to be another explanation.

  Then I remembered the shadow beyond the doorway to his living quarters. Mr. Han hadn’t been the informer, but his no-good son. He was also an enforcer for the White Hand and probably the thug who had spotted me on the street.

  I hoped he was the one I’d rammed face-first into a light pole.

  “Right, right,” I said, as though remembering. “I’d heard about the murder and was just asking—”

  “That was before it was in the paper,” Bashi screeched over me.

  Right again.

  The driver gave the knob a final hard twist. For an instant my pinky felt like the cord beneath a tight-rope walker at its midpoint. And then the finger snapped. A marrow-deep pain speared my senses. I thought I was going to pass out. Instead, I made a sound like nothing that had ever come out of my mouth: part grunt, part shout, part plea—all in the same breath.

  “Should we take care of your ring finger next?” Bashi asked, a small smile pursing his lips. My agony was having a cheering effect on him, apparently. Maladjusted much?

  “No, no,” I panted, sweat breaking over my body. “Give me a minute.”

  His lips straightened. “Did the Morettis hire you? The Brusilovs?”

  He was popping off major names in the city’s Italian and Russian crime families—White Hand’s competition. I remembered what Caroline had said about Bashi’s bloody campaign of revenge. That I had murdered Chin was already established in his mind. He wanted my patron. Problem was, claiming to have no patron would get me my remaining fingers broken, additional tortures I didn’t want to think about, and a bullet in my concussed head. A false confession would probably only get me the bullet. Either option sucked.

  That left the truth. “I don’t work for anyone.”

  Bashi nodded at the driver, who began twisting the fourth knob.

  “I’m a wizard,” I shouted, forcing the words out as quickly as I could. “I save amateur conjurers from their spells. Chin was preparing a summoning. My alarm picked it up, but I reached his apartment too late. The demonic creature had already arrived. It cleaned out his organs—it’s how they gain strength—and it escaped. That’s why Chin’s window was blown out.”

  I’d squeezed my eyes closed as I babbled and was afraid now to open them. Some New Yorkers accepted magic and supernatural creatures with a shrug. Others decried such notions as batshit insane. I didn’t know where on that spectrum Bashi’s belief system fell, but the still-mounting pressure against my ring finger wasn’t a good sign. “There was another summoning in Hamilton Heights,” I added through gritted teeth. “Same night, same result.”

  My center joint was verging on failure when the squeaking knob went silent.

  “Where did Chin get the spell?” Bashi asked.

  I exhaled an unspoken thank God and opened my eyes to find Bashi showing a staying hand to the driver. One more twist and my finger would have joined its neighbor in the very-crooked club.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I said. “When I visited Mr. Han, it was to see if he knew anything about Chin’s casting background. He didn’t, but I’m on the trail of someone who was given the same spell.”

  “Who?”

  I let out a forlorn laugh. “Good question. The man was two blocks away when your boy band jumped me.”

  Bashi narrowed his eyes. I was sure the “boy band” remark had doomed me, damned pain endorphins. Bashi gestured to the driver, who began working the knobs again. But he was twisting them the other direction. The pressure across my joints eased until I could draw my fingers free. My right pinky was already halfway to ballpark frank proportions, but I flexed and extended the others.

  “When you find out who’s behind the spells,” Bashi said, “you will report back to me.”

  I stared at him in confusion before understanding took hold. In his megalomania, Bashi believed the spell to have been a personal attack on his sovereignty. I was careful not to disabuse him of the notion. “You have my word,” I said solemnly.

  His thugs began removing the belts.

  “And you have until tomorrow,” Bashi replied.

  “Wait, tomorrow?”

  He flicked a card with a phone number onto my lap, then turned and disappeared through a doorway.

  Another deadline. Super.

  29

  A letter from Midtown College stood among a clutch of bills in my mailbox when I returned to my apartment building later that afternoon. I tore the envelope open with my teeth and shook open the folded letter. It was a formal notice from the board for Monday morning’s hearing, eleven a.m.

  Well, good for Snodgrass.

  I stuffed it into a jacket pocket, too exhausted and hurt to care, and made the four-story climb to my unit.

  After Bashi’s men had thrown me back onto the same street corner they’d abducted me from, I had tried to pick up the conjurer’s trail. No dice. The hunting spell was spent, and I lacked the focus to return to the conjurer’s cleared-out apartment to create a new one. Instead, I wandered Roosevelt Park and the Bowery, squinting around and mumbling inquiries at the few people who would let me approach. No one had seen a bedraggled man lugging a trunk.

  I’d lost him.

  I closed and locked my apartment door, then leaned against it to get my mental bearings. In my still-concussed state, the shrieker and cathedral murder cases were starting to blur badly—and the next twenty-four hours were going to be crucial to both. I needed to concentra…

  I came to in a sitting position. The loft was dark. Between my splayed-out legs, a pair of luminous green eyes stared back at me. “I thought you were dead,” Tabitha said. Though she spoke with indifference, I picked up an undercurrent of concern. Whether for my wellbeing or her own, I couldn’t tell.

  “How long was I out?” I tried to make out the hands on my watch face.

  “A few hours.”

  “Hours?”

  I gained my feet delicately, a force pounding from my brow to the back of my head. When the room steadied, I flipped the switch for the flood lights. My purpling pinky finger looked and felt like a string had been knotted around its base and left on for several days. I hung my coat on the rack, gathered the spilled mail, and shuffled toward the kitchen. Tabitha followed on my heels.

  “You all right, darling?”

  I couldn’t remember the last time Tabitha had asked after my health. I must have looked like hell.

  “Nothing a little magic can’t fix.” I poured myself a glass of water and chugged it. I hadn’t had anything to drink since that morning. Or eat, I realized. “But first, let me get some dinner going.”

  Tabitha made a sound of annoyance as she leapt onto the counter. “You’re more likely to pan sear your hand. Just get everything out of the fridge and then go take care of yourself. I’ll handle dinner.”

  I blinked. “You’re going to cook?”

  It was less that Tabitha had non-grasping paws than she was offering to do, well, anything. Her slitted look told me to back off. Shrugging, I pulled out a couple of New York strips, shredded onion, and some sides. I started to season the pan, but Tabitha swatted my hand and shooed me out.

  I would have given anything to stay and watch, but my cat was right. I needed to put myself back together. I started in the bathroom with my pinky finger. Holding a snapped-in-h
alf Emory board to its underside, I straightened my finger, then secured it to the splint with a yard of sports tape.

  The next step was to reconstitute my prism. As sizzling sounded from the kitchen, I leaned against the sink and repeated a centering mantra. It took a good fifteen minutes for the prism to emerge from the pink fog and become something solid. The nap must have helped.

  With the prism restored, I touched the cane to the back of my head and my pinky, uttering healing incantations. Energy coursed into both, taming the throbbing, knitting bone and tissue back together. It would take time, but I already felt better, clearer.

  Good, because I had work to do.

  After a dinner that was—I had to hand it to Tabitha—pretty stellar, I climbed the ladder to my library and lab.

  The hologram in the corner was dim, which disturbed me. I’d already decided that whoever had supplied the conjurers the shrieker spell was up to something big. What, exactly, I didn’t know. But for him or her to stop now?

  No, I didn’t like it at all.

  Best case, the Order had addressed the matter. But apart from disciplining their own, the Order almost never acted with that kind of speed. Even if they had, they wouldn’t necessarily tell me. Which left me on the hook with Bashi. No matter how I squinted at the situation, I was going to have to track down the East Village conjurer and find out who supplied the spell.

  Right now, though, the cathedral case was the more pressing. There was my job at the college, sure, and needing to get the promised info to Detective Vega by tomorrow. But there was also Father Vick. The more I thought about what Vega had told me outside the cathedral, the more certain I became that the investigative noose was drawing around his neck. If I didn’t deliver a more compelling suspect, Father Vick was going to get strung up for something he hadn’t done. And given the nature of the crime, capital punishment was not out of the question.

  My best lead—all right, my only lead—was the druid cult in Central Park, who might or might not call themselves Black Earth and might or might not have any connection to Father Richard’s murder.