The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 20

  Slam dunk, right?

  I set a portable range on my table and placed a cast-iron pot onto each of the two burners. I split a bottle of green absinthe between the pots and set the burners to medium. Given the kinds of horrors that lurked in the Park—and that the druid group was an unknown quantity—my objective was to get in and out unnoticed and to keep anyone or anything who tried to kill me from doing so.

  That meant potions.

  I didn’t have time to prepare the more elaborate ones I’d been planning, but I had a couple of quick and ready recipes to fall back on. Into the left pot I scattered brown clumps of rabbit’s hair, a heaping spoonful of baking soda, and about half that of chameleon scales. With a wooden spoon engraved with casting symbols, I stirred the ingredients of the stealth potion.

  “Furtiva,” I chanted, directing energy through the spoon.

  The steaming liquid bubbled and thickened to a gray sludge. Satisfied the mixture was on its way to becoming the potion I wanted, I twisted the burner’s knob to low. In an hour or so, it would thin to a liquid I’d be able to drink.

  One down, one to go.

  I turned to the other steaming pot and took a focusing breath. This would be for self defense, and with a just-purchased vial of sloth urine on hand, I decided to go with an encumbering spell. I uncapped the vial and tipped it over the pot. To the absinthe and foul-smelling urine, I added a nugget of tungsten, a large syringe-full of condensed fog, and some Plaster of Paris. Following healthy doses of energy and intention, the mixture began to sludge and bubble, casting up a rancid odor.

  “Christ,” I muttered against my sleeve. At least I wouldn’t have to drink that one. Woe to the unlucky bastard I squirted it at, though.

  With my potions simmering, and an hour to kill, I climbed down from the lab and retrieved the music box and my revolver. It was a longish shot, but maybe Effie would have something for me by now.

  Washington Square Park drifted with the chill mist of recently-fallen rain. I checked to make sure no ghouls were lurking before climbing into the drained wading pool and winding the music box.

  “That you, Everson?”

  “Hey, there.” I twisted to face the entity who would always remain the phantasmal likeness of an eight-year-old girl. Effie’s eyes widened as they moved past me.

  “You brought me music box,” she cried, running toward it.

  It was that whole echo thing. Unless redirected, ghosts tended to repeat themselves from one encounter to the next, and often several times within the same meeting, like video loops or skipping records.

  “Hey, did you get a chance to talk to your friends?”

  “ ’Bout whut?” she asked, focused on the box she couldn’t quite handle.

  “About whether they’d been down to St. Martin’s in the last few weeks and seen anything unusual.”

  “Oh, thas right.” She gave up on the box and started skipping in a circle, her shifting dress and clogs eerily silent over the damp leaves. “Jus’ Mary, but you can’t believe a word she tells ya.”

  I frowned. Just what I needed, an unreliable witness.

  “What kind of manure is she unloading this time?” I asked.

  “Says she was there a fortnight ago, playing hide an’ seek with a feller at night.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Man with a funny robe and hood. Says ’e was in the graveyard, but ’e wouldn’t come from hiding, even when she found him.”

  “Did Mary say where he was hiding?”

  “Behind a crypt ’neath a scary tree.”

  I perked up like an antenna. She was talking about the mossy tomb I’d walked past that morning, in the old part of the graveyard. A fortnight would have been about ten days before the murder. Had the robed man been staking out the cathedral? Plotting his crime?

  “Did Mary notice anything else?” I asked.

  “Jus’ that ’e was easy to find on ’count of his mumbling.”

  Mumbling? “Could she make out any of the words?”

  Either Effie’s ghost was tired of the questions or didn’t think anything from Mary’s mouth was worth exploring, because she didn’t answer. She stopped at her music box, and when she began to sing again, it was as though I was no longer there. I made a few attempts to bring her back to Mary’s story, but the ghost was too absorbed in her solemn lullaby.

  I sat back in thought. Some druids were known to wear hooded robes. Not much of a lead, I admitted, but neither did the ghost’s account rule them out. I checked my watch. The potions would be about ready.

  30

  It was one a.m. by the time I reached Central Park. From the relative safety of West 110th Street, the North Woods looked perfectly forbidding. As my chatty cabbie had been all too enthused to point out (I suspected amphetamine use), the area had become known as “The Bone Yard” because of the gnawed human remains that turned up from time to time.

  “So unless you’re trying to lose a whole lotta weight, guy, I’d steer clear.” His laughter had gone off like machine-gun fire in my face.

  Hilarious.

  I eyed the dense growth as the cab motored away, finding it hard to believe anyone would choose to venture in there, much less call it home—even a powerful cult of druids. But the bits of info I’d assembled pointed to just that.

  “It’s just never easy,” I muttered, pulling a water bottle from inside my jacket and untwisting the cap. The stealth potion coated my throat as I gagged it down, the aftertaste like something you’d drain from an old car engine.

  But as I ducked into the trees, the potion began to work its magic. A tingling force grew over me like a wool glove. An inspection of my body showed that I was blending into the surroundings. My footfalls softened until they made no sound. Though I didn’t have an animal’s sense of smell, I knew my odor was being suppressed as well.

  After cresting a hill, I eased my way down a rocky ravine, where I could hear water flowing. The hidden moon diffused enough pale light through the low cloud ceiling to see by. When I encountered a family of cropping deer, I weaved through them as a test. None of them even raised a head.

  “Yes!” I whispered, causing the deer to bolt.

  Like much of magic, potion-making was unpredictable. A recipe followed the same way ten times could yield ten varying results, depending on the skill of the magic user. My consistency was improving, but it was nowhere close to Elder-level magic. And even though I’d nailed the stealth potion this time, it had its limits. Time, for one. It would probably hold up thirty minutes before petering out.

  Meaning I had to hoof it.

  At the bottom of the ravine, I rock-hopped a stream and came upon an old path winding alongside the waterway. That I’d found the path at all told me it was still in use. By what, I couldn’t tell. Whether it was a trick of shadow, one set of prints looked awfully trollish.

  I followed the path, hoping druids used it, too.

  Druids weren’t wizards, but they were wizard-like. They drew energy from nature essences, ancestral worship, and, in some cases, ancient gods. They were also big into consulting stars for omens. But that was all generalization. Like any class, druids came in different flavors—and if the group I was seeking had bludgeoned the rector, then I was dealing with one of the more homicidal variety. Nigra Terra of Roman times was supposed to have engaged in human sacrifice, even using human skin as parchment for its sacred texts. If we were talking about a descendant group, I hoped they’d at least updated to bond paper.

  The path passed beneath a crumbling stone archway, fallen stones piled to one side, before seeming to end in a small clearing of boulders. The trees bordering the clearing looked impassable. I expended precious potion time searching the area but found no signs of anything. I was preparing to return down the path when it occurred to me to check for a veiling spell.

  “Svelare,” I said, sweeping my glowing cane in a slow circle.

  One by one, boulders loomed from the darkness and receded into shadow. I had almost completed
the circle, when a boulder set back behind some others seemed to ripple.

  Hmm?

  I was moving toward it when a whisper rose on the wind.

  “We see you, fiend.”

  My heart beat into my throat as I killed the light. I looked around but could make out no one and nothing. Just the shadows of boulders. A chill energy swirled through the clearing. Druid magic? As I returned my gaze to the rippling boulder, it straightened into the silhouette of a hooded, scarlet-robed figure.

  I separated my cane into sword and staff. “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “We are death to your kind,” the figure whispered.

  The death part was troubling enough, but we? I ventured a peek around.

  Okay. I was surrounded by robed figures. I must have triggered a spell planted on the trail. Veiled, the druids had waited for me to walk into their midst. Like a dummy, I’d obliged—and lit my staff. With the druids’ attention now focused on me, I could feel the magic I’d pushed into my potion thinning. So much for sneaking in and out. But if dialogue proved more expedient for learning what I’d come to find out…

  “Wait,” I said as the robed figures moved nearer. “I’ve come to warn you.”

  The whisperer, who I took to be the head druid, let out a chilling laugh. “And he will appear unto mortal eyes as saintly, and earnest and righteous will seem his pleas, but do not be ye deceived, for he ariseth from the darkest pits and bringeth death and ruin. So the stars have foretold it.”

  I realized he was quoting from early pagan scripture, an omen that spoke to the return of Sathanas, demon lord of Wrath, the last to be cast from the world by Michael. I’d discovered in my research that the early druid cults defined themselves in part by the stars they consulted. The stars used by one cult in particular pointed to the present age for Sathanas’s return. That cult was Nigra Terra: Black Earth.

  “Whoa, there,” I said. “I’m not the death and ruin guy, I promise. I’m a wizard, a magic user like yourselves—”

  “Who comes bearing the stink of demon.”

  I paused to sniff my shoulder. Damn. Not only was my stealth spell starting to wear off, but the smell from my shrieker encounter three nights before lingered like cheap perfume.

  “I can actually explain that,” I said.

  “Can you explain, oh wizard, why you were seen fleeing a demonic summoning?”

  I hesitated. These guys read the Scream?

  “Since you ask, yes,” I said, “but that’s not why I’ve come. There’s talk among city officials of cracking down on magic users. I’m not sure to what lengths they’re planning to go—mass evictions, arrests, worse—but I’m trying to warn all of the groups I know before it happens. We need to unify.”

  It was a whopper of a tale, but if it gibed with the Black Earth’s reasons for killing the rector—the voice behind the campaign to crack down—maybe they would reveal as much to someone who appeared sympathetic.

  “Yes, we have heard.” My pulse ramped up in anticipation of a confession. I’d finally have something for Detective Vega. “But the city and church are not the threat,” the druid continued. “It is you, fiend.”

  My shoulders sagged. Or not.

  I tried to see the situation from the druids’ perspective. Per their star charts, the return of Sathanas was nigh. Now, in the midst of a spate of shrieker summonings, a man wanted by the police, and smelling like demon, suddenly turned up on their doorstep, claiming to offer help.

  Sketchy as hell. I got it.

  As though picking up my thoughts, the druid said, “Yes, unify us so you may betray those with the power to stop you. We are not so easily fooled.”

  The bloody message on the rector’s robe notwithstanding, I decided this Black Earth wasn’t responsible for his murder. The cult was too obsessed with preventing Sathanas’s return, and compromising the power of the cathedral would only empower a demon lord. “Black Earth” had either been written as a red herring, or it meant something completely different.

  Either way, I wasn’t going to fight these guys.

  “Great,” I said. “Well, think I’ll head on home, then.”

  The robed figures shifted into my path. The head druid spoke at my back, but he was no longer using English. I recognized the language as a variant of Latin, similar to what I used for my own Words of Power.

  Which meant—

  I threw a light shield up just as searing fire broke around me. In the sudden blaze, the remaining druids became illuminated. From the shadows of hoods, tattooed lips peeled from purple gums and fierce teeth. Wands of what looked like burned ash appeared from billowing sleeves.

  Fire casters. And here I’d been hoping for the meadow-prancing type of druid. I aimed my sword at the one blocking my path and shouted, “Vigore!”

  The energy that coursed down the blade slammed the druid from his sandals and into the trees. The rippling wake knocked two more druids onto their backs. An opening! I hit the gap at a run, calling more energy to my staff and shaping it into a protective dome of light.

  I grunted as fresh fire jetted hot against it.

  After the day’s encounter with Bashi and the White Hand, I wasn’t in any shape for an extended battle. Especially not when I was outnumbered by magic users, who, by the force of their casting, must have been calling up power from a god. It also explained how they were able to create a refuge for themselves in Central Park. Trying to match them blow for blow would only bring on Thelonious, which was the last thing I needed tonight.

  “Face your doom, fiend!” the head druid called.

  Nope. I’d made the trail and had no plans of turning around.

  But I’d barely hit my first full stride when a stone from the crumbling arch tumbled into my path. Damned druid magic. I managed to leap that one but a second stone materialized beneath my landing foot. I hit it awkwardly, and pain flared through my folding ankle. I stumbled and went down.

  Robes shuffled up behind me. I rolled onto my back, ready to nail them with another force invocation. But I couldn’t even raise my sword arm. I strained through gritted teeth and tried to assist with my staff arm, but it was like hefting a pair of dead animals. My tongue and lips garbled around a word that hadn’t the power to invoke anything.

  …the hell?

  That was when something warm and wet spread across the front of my pants. Well, craptastic. I had loaded the encumbering potion into a squirt gun, which I’d holstered into my waist band—and apparently just crushed. The contact with my skin was releasing the potion’s magic, not to mention the god-awful stench, transforming me into a smelly, dull-witted slug.

  Fourteen all over again, basically.

  The druids swooped around me, ember-tipped wands aimed at my face. With no Words to resurrect my shield, I was as good as cooked. I released my sword and staff at sloth speed and showed my hands.

  “Whhuuaaiit,” I slurred.

  The lead druid emerged through the others and stood over me. The hood had fallen away to reveal a shiny shaved head and strong face, ebony skin patterned with intricate white lines. Like my mental prism, the tattoos were designed to channel energy. The druid’s eyes, a fierce turquoise in the light of the wands, searched mine. When the druid spoke again, I realized the person wasn’t a man, but a woman—their high priestess.

  “Raise it up,” she ordered.

  It? I thought. Oh right, the demon. I glanced around at the others as they stooped down. Though they remained hooded, I guessed by their movements that they were all women.

  Several of them seized me beneath the shoulders and hoisted me to my feet. I stepped gingerly, and very slowly, on my twisted right ankle. I should have been terrified, but the potion was fogging my fear. When the priestess looked me up and down, I was more concerned that the leaking potion and smell had them all thinking I’d wet my pants.

  The priestess smiled around filed teeth. “A demon is no match for the fire of Brigit.”

  I was pretty sure a demon as powerful as S
athanas could flick the pagan god to which she was referring like a paper football. But even if I’d wanted to point that out, I couldn’t form the words. Plus, she was moving her wand dangerously close to my face, its glowing tip drawing sweat from my pores. I tried to lean away, but it was as though my body were bound in a slow-drying cast. Exactly the effect the Plaster of Paris ingredient had been meant to induce.

  “First,” she said, wand hovering just above my right cheek, “we burn out its eyes.”

  That she was referring to me in third person neutral was chilling enough. But the pain that had begun to build across my cornea and now pierced, searing, to the back of my eye socket was far more troubling. I shut my eyelids to the heat, but she forced them open with a bracing finger and thumb.

  I let out a low moan, which made the priestess show more of her teeth. This was not good. Arnaud and Bashi were dangerous, but at least they possessed some capacity for reason, however warped. This woman had none. It was written in her staring eyes. Her existence had come to revolve so completely around the return of Sathanas that every interlocutor now looked like a demon.

  “That it may no more curse us with its evil sight,” she promised.

  When my vision blurred, I hoped it was from tears and not the melting of my lens. Either way, it wouldn’t be long before my right socket was a smoking crater. When the priestess sucked in her next breath through the sharp spaces of her teeth, I knew it was to summon fire.

  And that brought my fear screaming back.

  31

  I tried again to speak an invocation of protection, but I might as well have been talking through a mouthful of oatmeal. The priestess took her time pronouncing her own Word, the tip of her wand swelling orange hot, strong fingers bracing my eyelids wide.

  “Ustili—garrh!” she grunted.

  Huh?

  The heat and glare fell away. She dropped the wand and dug both hands into the neck of her robe, which appeared to be throttling her. I tottered for balance as the others released me. My head rotated slowly from side to side.