Death Mage (Prof Croft Book 4) Page 2

  “Yes, yes, we’ll get to that,” Chicory replied irritably. “More important now is outfitting you.”

  I returned to the dining room, where my mentor was frowning over the cane parts, his bushy gray eyebrows nearly touching in the center. Did he know how to reassemble it? I pulled out a chair and sat.

  “Do you mind going over what that will entail?” I asked.

  “Outfitting you?” He lifted the tail of his corduroy sports jacket and hopped onto the chair across from me. I didn’t have to look to know his feet weren’t touching the floor. “Well, the first step is establishing a link to Marlow’s hideout and getting you inside. No sense teaching you magic you won’t be in a position to use. To that end, I’ve been tinkering with your blood.”

  “My blood?”

  He took another loud slurp of coffee. We’d only been living together for a week, and already his habits were starting to annoy me. Besides the slurping, there was his singing in a loud baritone in the bathroom as well as his tendency to leave dirty dishes everywhere. A small plate with a half-eaten slice of toast and curdled eggs from two days before sat precariously on a window sill. Were it not for the magic surrounding the old house, flies would be everywhere.

  “I drew a small sample from your neck the other night while you were asleep,” Chicory said. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Not at all,” I replied thinly.

  “Now, if Marlow is your father, about half of your magic came from him. The other half from your mother, of course. Fortunately, the qualities of the two are different enough that I’ve been able to set up a process that will distill out your mother’s portion. Once that process is complete, I’ll add an enhancer and re-infuse the blood back into you. For a time, your magical aura will be a dead ringer for Marlow’s.”

  “He won’t be able to sense me?” I asked, thinking about the hunting spell I’d cast a couple of weeks before. A hunting spell Marlow had detected and counterspelled, possessing Tabitha in the process. With three fingers, I traced the healed claw marks along my right cheek.

  “No,” Chicory confirmed. “You’ll be able to penetrate whatever defenses he’s employed and enter his domain unscathed.” He hesitated for a beat. “Again, assuming he’s your father.”

  “And once I’m inside?”

  “Well, ah…” He coughed into his fist. “We’ll have a plan, of course.”

  “Which is?”

  Chicory grumbled for a moment before his eyes seemed to sparkle with an idea. “You said you wanted to get on with your training? Advance to something a little more challenging?”

  “Yeah…” I answered carefully.

  “Well, I think I have just the thing.”

  He bustled away from the table and returned a moment later with a badly refolded map. He spread it over the table, knocking some of the cane parts onto the floor. My molars ground together as I stood and came around. The map showed a grid of Manhattan, circa 1930.

  “A bit outdated,” I remarked.

  “Here,” he said, tapping a brown square just north of Central Park.

  I read the label. “Grace Cathedral?”

  “They have a robe on exhibit believed to have been worn by John the Baptist. In fact, it belonged to a Franciscan monk who came along some centuries later, but the point here is that the robe is special. You see, this monk was a descendant of Saint Michael’s, but never told. An oversight by the Order, no doubt. In any case, he was an ascetic who took a vow of silence early in his career. For more than half a century, he walked softly and said not a word. It got to the point that his fellow monks were barely even aware he existed.”

  “And those qualities became instilled in the robe,” I said, guessing the rest.

  “Exactly, and can be bestowed upon the wearer.” He looked pointedly at me.

  “Wait, you’re asking me to steal the robe from the church?”

  “Borrow it,” Chicory countered. “We’ll put a duplicate in its place so as not to alarm anyone. When you complete your mission, we’ll return the original.”

  “If I complete my mission. But what happened to all of your highbrow talk about following the rules? Acting responsibly? Not taking stupid risks? Doesn’t this sort of fly in the face of that?”

  “Acting responsibly as a wizard,” Chicory said. “You’re not being asked to summon or perform dark magic. To the contrary, you’re obtaining an item in the service of opposing such magic. An item that belongs just as much to the Order as to the Church, after all.”

  I considered that for a moment. “And if I’m caught?”

  “Well, that’s sort of the point of the exercise, isn’t it? To not let that happen.”

  I sighed. I had just gotten back into the good graces of the city and press, not to mention Detective Vega. And now Chicory was suggesting I return to Manhattan and commit grand larceny. “Do I even need the robe?” I asked. “Why can’t I just mix a stealth potion?”

  Chicory’s eyebrows seemed to bristle as he glared up at me. “Because stealth potions wear off, and then mentors have to get involved.” I remembered him rescuing me from the band of angry druids in north Central Park the year before. “Not true for magical artifacts,” he finished.

  “I don’t have my sword and staff.” I looked dismally at the scattered parts.

  “I’ll give you a wand that’s ready for use. Less obtrusive and it won’t set off the metal detectors.”

  The wand was among several magical items that had come into the vampire Arnaud’s possession. Following the vampire’s demise, I acquired the items from the NYPD and gave them to Chicory for cleaning and redistributing. I still hadn’t mentioned Arnaud’s story about Grandpa stealing artifacts from fellow magic-users during the war against the Inquisition. I didn’t fully believe the story and wanted to check it out for myself—assuming the Death Mage didn’t kill me first. My more immediate concern, though, was staying out of jail.

  “Well, what about the church threshold?” I said lamely. “It’s not going to care for my, you know, companion.”

  “Who?”

  “Thelonious, my incubus.”

  “Hmm, then you better get an invite,” Chicory replied, refolding the map. The ungainly way he went about the job, ripping several of the seams, didn’t give me much hope for my cane.

  “How?” I asked.

  “That’s for you to figure out. Again, part of the point of the exercise.”

  “Great,” I muttered.

  3

  When Detective Vega raised her eyes from the scatter of files across her desk, the sharp concentration lines that converged in the center of her brow let out slightly. “Croft,” she said. “What’s up?”

  I showed her a plain cup of coffee I’d bought from a street vendor and placed it on the corner of her desk. “Gourmet roast.”

  She smiled wryly. “Thanks.”

  “Am I catching you at a bad time?”

  “Other than between a stabbing in Spanish Harlem and a double murder in Chelsea?” Fatigue weighed on her face when she shrugged. “At least we know it’s not ghouls. Do you have something for me besides coffee?”

  I noticed that several files on the right side of her desk were for the Lady Bastet murder investigation. Officially, the mystic’s murder remained an open case. I had promised to keep Vega in the loop on my end of things, which was the least I could do after the help she’d given me that summer. At some point she and I had stopped being adversaries and become allies. She had even introduced me to her son the last time I’d seen her.

  “Well, sort of part update, part request,” I said.

  She frowned as she smoothed back her black hair and refastened her ponytail. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”

  “Which do you want first?” I asked, closing the door to the din of the rest of the Homicide unit. I took a seat in one of the folding metal chairs that faced her desk.

  “Update,” she said.

  “The suspect’s name is Marlow Sto
kes.”

  Vega jotted it down. “Contact info?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  She raised her eyes, pen poised above the file.

  “He’s not exactly … in this world,” I said.

  “I’m listening.”

  I took a deep breath, reminding myself that Vega’s openness to the supernatural had come a long way in the last year. “Are you familiar with the Greenbrier Bunker?” I asked.

  “That place in West Virginia? Yeah, it was a relocation center for the U.S. Congress when we thought the nukes were gonna fly. The reps would survive while the rest of us got radiated.”

  “Look at you,” I said. “Miss U.S. History. Well, once upon a time, the magical order to which I belong faced a similar existential threat. They also built a bunker, but in a parallel world—a thought pocket.”

  “A thought what?”

  “An imagined place made real, if that makes any sense. The thought pocket was called the Refuge. From the way my mentor describes it, the Refuge was modeled on a Grecian palace. Elevated, fortified, easy to defend. Anyway, the Order got through the crisis, but the Refuge sort of hung out in this parallel space.”

  “And that’s where Marlow is?”

  I nodded. “He accessed the Refuge decades ago and turned its powerful defenses to his own purposes. The Elders—the ones who created the thought pocket—can’t even access it.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Vega said. “So he’s beyond our reach?”

  “Maybe not. I told you that he murdered my mother, right? What I didn’t know at the time was that he might also be my father.”

  Vega’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, as if I needed a Freudian complex on top of everything else,” I muttered. “To make a long story short, because of my similarity to Marlow’s makeup, I might be able to slip inside the Refuge.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, I’m going to try to destroy an arcane book from which he gets his power. Once that’s done, he’ll be defenseless. My order will apprehend him and put him to death.” I nodded at the file for Lady Bastet. “If it helps you close the case, I’ll be willing to testify on the match between the residue found at the murder scene and Marlow’s brand of magic.”

  “You don’t sound very hopeful,” she said.

  “No? After the vampire situation, the DA’s office seems a lot more open to—”

  “Not about the case,” Vega interrupted. “The whole thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She set her pen down. “I’m getting to know you, Croft. When you believe in something, you get this intense, almost manic, look in your eyes. And when you don’t, your eyes just sort of go dead.”

  I wasn’t aware of that about myself, but now that she mentioned it, I felt a weight in the backs of my eyes, like they were trying to retreat into my skull. “Just a lot of unknowns right now, I guess. Whether or not he’s my father, Marlow is a powerful mage. And I’m, well, a wizard with about a decade of practice under my belt—pre-puberty in magical terms.”

  “Isn’t your order helping you?”

  “There is someone training me, yeah,” I said, picturing Chicory frowning down at the hopeless mess of my cane across the table. “But that sort of brings me to the request part.”

  “You mean the part I’m not going to like?”

  “Probably not.”

  She sighed and circled a hand for me to continue.

  “All right, in the off chance I’m arrested tonight…” I rubbed the back of my neck. “…can I count on you to intervene?”

  She lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “Arrested for what?”

  I told her about the magical robe and how it could offer me extra protection inside the Refuge. “It’ll only be for a few days,” I assured her. “And there will be a replica up in the meantime.”

  “Stealing is stealing, Croft. But stealing from a church?”

  “Believe me, I know how sketchy that sounds. Especially since it’s my denomination. But with Marlow trying to call forth an evil being, I don’t think the Church would disapprove. I mean, one of the reasons churches came into being was to act as a bastion against this very thing.”

  “Then why not just ask them for the robe?”

  “I do have an in with the Bishop of New York,” I said, thinking about the official I’d rescued from the demon Sathanus the year before, “but the request would still have to go up the chain. We’re talking weeks or months, and with no guarantee they’d agree to the request.”

  “And you don’t have weeks or months.” Vega lifted the coffee from the corner of her desk, cracked the plastic tab from the lid, and took a sip. She grimaced and set the cup back down. “All right.”

  I blinked. “Really?”

  But I didn’t need to ask. I could tell by her expression that my reasoning had gotten through. Though the law remained important to Vega, she had seen enough to know the law had to be weighed against larger threats—ones the mundane world wouldn’t necessarily understand.

  I smiled in appreciation.

  “Just do me a favor,” she said.

  “Sure. Anything.”

  “Don’t get caught.”

  4

  I stood on the edge of a knot of tourists, several of them snapping photos of Grace Cathedral’s hand-carved front doors. “…modeled on the doors from its sister cathedral in Florence,” our guide was saying. I had signed up for the final church tour of the day, a one-hour in and out, though I wasn’t planning on coming out. Not with this group, anyway.

  I made a small adjustment to my fake beard—a precaution so no one would recognize me as the “star” of the mayor’s recent eradication campaign—and listened as the guide finished her explanation of the doors.

  “Now, if you’ll follow me, we’re going to go inside and look at the famous mural above the doorway.”

  I followed the group as far as the threshold. A curtain of energy hummed and pushed against me. I felt Thelonious shift uncomfortably, a dark spirit shying from the divine light.

  “Are you coming?” the guide asked impatiently.

  She was standing just beyond the threshold, the tour group filing through a metal detector behind her.

  “Oh, can I come in?” I asked.

  “You paid for the tour, right?”

  I showed her my wrist band. “So that means I can…?” I gestured toward the door.

  Her eyes widened as though to ask, What are you, some kind of idiot?

  Just give me a goddamned invite, lady, I thought.

  “Yes?” I prompted, gesturing at the door again.

  “Um, yeah.”

  That was all it took. With the personal invitation, the threshold relented. Though the ley energy here wasn’t as powerful as at St. Martin’s, I felt a portion of my wizarding power fall away as I stepped through the doorway and into the church’s cool interior. Fortunately, I was only planning on casting a few minor invocations.

  “All right,” the guide said when we had reassembled beyond security. “If you’ll look straight overhead, you’ll see…”

  I tuned her out as I got my bearings. We were standing at one end of the massive nave. At the other end, past a series of statues, stained-glass windows, and iron gates that led onto side chapels, was the main altar. According to Chicory, the robe was on display near the altar, in the baptistery.

  It took almost the full hour to arrive at the baptistery, a small, circular room with a child-sized baptism pool on a raised dais at its center. The water gurgled quietly as we moved past the stone basin.

  “If you’ll direct your attention up here,” the guide said, “we have a very special piece on exhibit.”

  I stopped looking for a pump in the basin and raised my eyes to the far wall. About halfway up, between a pair of colorful saints images and encased in glass, was a tattered brown cassock, sleeves spread.

  “The robe belonged to John the Baptist and was worn during his late
r years,” the guide continued. “For centuries, it was believed to bestow divine protection on the wearer.”

  Let’s hope you’re right about that second bit, I thought.

  As the tourists moved in to snap photos, I peered around. The security appeared basic. Iron gate over the entranceway, one security camera, probably an alarm on the glass case. I imagined that a guard or two patrolled at night, but the acoustics of the cathedral would make them easy to keep track of. Underneath my shirt, tucked into the back of my pants, was the ringer.

  The tour ended back in the nave with an invitation for us to look around on our own for the final few minutes. Stepping into a shadowy archway, I pulled the wand from my inside coat pocket and whispered, “Oscurare.” Even though the church threshold had sheared off a chunk of my power, the wand had no trouble absorbing the immediate light, deepening the shadows around me.

  I proceeded through the archway and into an empty corridor.

  Before long, I found an unlocked office that looked as though it was being used for storage. I slipped inside, hunkered into a corner behind a stack of chairs, and waited for nightfall.

  From my hiding place, I listened to the cathedral being secured, the echoes of doors closing, locks snapping home. I waited another hour for a wandering set of footsteps to taper off before I emerged with one of the chairs. The patrolling guard had taken up a post beside the front door. Music with an electronic beat issued from a phone whose screen outlined his face in white light.

  Thank God for youth culture, I thought.

  I eased across the nave and into the entrance to the baptistery, beyond the guard’s view. A padlock secured the iron gate. One of these days I was going to have to learn how to pick these things. I inserted the wand into the padlock’s shackle and whispered, “Vigore.”

  The expansion of energy was enough to crack a shaft. I waited to ensure the guard hadn’t been alerted to the sound before removing the lock and opening the well-oiled gate. Beyond a short entranceway stood the stone pool, the robe mounted on the wall beyond. I expanded my wizard’s aura until something crackled inside the security camera above me. Then, calling light to the wand, I rounded the pool and placed the chair beneath the mounted robe.