The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 24

  Bartholomew frigging Higham.

  I thought back to the thousands of remains he had warehoused at St. Martin’s. One of them could well have held a demon—a demon that took possession of Reverend Higham. The reverend had died, or been slain, shortly after, but if no exorcism had been performed, the demon would still be inside him.

  But why emerge now? Had someone called him up, or were there other forces at work?

  I crammed some coins into the payphone and punched Father Vick’s number. I didn’t know what the reanimated reverend was up to, but bludgeoning Father Richard and summoning lower demons? Yeah, it couldn’t be good. I needed to warn Father Vick and the others. By the fifth ring, the muscles around my clenched jaw began to ache with urgency.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” I muttered.

  The hard male voice that answered sounded like no one I knew. “Yeah?” it said.

  “Who’s this?”

  “NYPD. Who’s this?” the voice shot back.

  “I’m with the diocese,” I lied. “I’m trying to reach Father Victor.”

  “Well, he’s not here. He’s missing.”

  “Missing?” My heartbeats punched through my voice.

  “Yeah, him and the bishop both,” the officer said. “Got a manhunt going on down here. I’m gonna need to get your name and ask a few questions.”

  I hung up and closed my eyes to a wave of dizziness. Was I too late?

  There was only one way to find out. I hurried west toward the line that would deliver me back to the West Village. I needed to cook up another hunting spell and ready myself for the mother of all banishments.

  Assuming, of course, the Order didn’t kill me first.

  37

  “Has anyone been here?” I asked as soon as I’d crossed the threshold of my apartment. I triple locked the door and checked to ensure my magical wards were at full strength.

  “No,” Tabitha answered, but not from the divan.

  I turned, surprised to find her on her feet for a change. She was near my reading chair, and by her posture, it looked as if I’d caught her in the middle of pacing. For some reason, her hair was stiff with static, but I was too focused on my next steps to pay her appearance much heed.

  “How about outside?” I asked. “Anyone watching the building?”

  I believed now that she had seen someone, and I was starting to suspect the long-haired person wasn’t a woman, but Malachi. He could have observed me talking with Father Vick on Thursday morning, when Detective Vega brought me to the church, and then followed me home. Even if he hadn’t reanimated the demon rector, he could have fallen under his influence, become a spy for him. I thought of him standing outside Father Vick’s door.

  “I’ve been out every hour and haven’t seen anyone,” Tabitha said, her voice edged with something. Nerves? Add that to the static, the pacing, the very uncharacteristic touring on the hour…

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s the bloody demon moon,” she replied, irritably. “It’s on the rise again. Gets me in a fucking state every time.”

  I was too stuck on her first line to rebuke her for the last. I wasn’t big into consulting the star and moon cycles—my brand of wizardry didn’t require it. But I knew from my study of lore that a demon moon was the fourth blood moon in a season and exceedingly rare. It carried End Times portents, if you believed in that sort of thing. But from an energy standpoint, blood moons were opportune times for casting black magic and all manner of devilry, which explained Tabitha’s agitation. She was practically a demon herself.

  Might the moon also connect to the reanimated reverend?

  “Is there one tonight?” I asked, ducking my head to peer out a window. The low clouds had taken on a subtle red tinge.

  “My urges are never wrong,” Tabitha replied. “They’ve been screaming at me all day to feast on male energy. In fact, if it weren’t for your damned wards, I’d be long gone—and about time.”

  I disregarded her comment as another empty threat, but at the ladder to my lab, I turned and took in her poofed-out state again. That particular effect hadn’t come from the demon moon.

  “You tried to get out, didn’t you?”

  She narrowed her green eyes at me and resumed pacing, which told me she had. I imagined the shock the wards must have delivered. Under different circumstances, I’d be on the floor, choking on my own laughter. Instead, I said, “I warned you they were strong.”

  “Bite me.”

  Her insult was actually a reassurance, I thought as I scaled the ladder. If my wards were strong enough to keep a determined succubus spirit in, they would keep all manner of baddies out.

  That was when the final pieces snapped into place.

  Tabitha must have seen the change come over my face. “What?”

  “I don’t need a hunting spell,” I said. “The threshold.”

  “What threshold?”

  “At St. Martin’s Cathedral.” I descended and released the ladder. “The reanimated reverend, he isn’t hiding somewhere in the city. He’s stuck on the cathedral grounds, trapped behind the threshold. He can’t get out. He’s not strong enough.” Tabitha’s ears bent in confusion, but I couldn’t slow down to explain. The logic was rushing out of me. “He murdered the rector to weaken the threshold. He’s planning to do the same to the vicar and bishop. Extinguish two of the remaining bulwarks of faith that give the cathedral its strength. With the added power of the demon moon, he’ll get out. And when he does, he’ll have a small army of shriekers at his command. Shriekers he’s been too weak to summon himself.”

  Blood pumped hard behind my eyes as I pictured the ensuing carnage. The Church had prevented it from happening in the 1800s by executing the reverend—I was all but sure of that now. Problem was, destroying the host wouldn’t banish the demon. The creature had only to lie dormant in the reverend’s remains—for two centuries, in this case—until the conditions were opportune.

  I imagined an arriving demon moon would do.

  I rushed back to the newspaper I’d dropped on the counter and flipped to the weather. Noting the times for moonrise and moonset, I did a quick calculation. The demon moon would be peaking in a couple of hours. I had to get to Father Vick and the bishop before that happened. I turned over the vicar’s business card in my pocket. I’d been planning to use the card for the hunting spell, but it would only lead me to the cathedral, whose threshold would then snuff out the magic.

  “So where in the cathedral are they being held?” I asked aloud. From my brief conversation with the officer at the scene, it sounded as though their manhunt had yet to turn up anyone.

  A second later, I answered my own question. “Wherever Reverend Higham had room enough to store those thousands of remains without anyone knowing.” Panic flashed hot inside me. “Beneath the cathedral.”

  Tired of being my sounding board, Tabitha began pacing away. “Fascinating,” she muttered. A bout of knocking froze her. We both turned. The hard knocking at the door sounded a second time.

  38

  By the time the second bout of knocking subsided, I had a short list of candidates—none of them good guys, unfortunately.

  One, it was someone from the White Hand, wanting to know who had supplied Chin the shrieker spell. The deadline was today. The damned thing of it was, I had an answer, but something told me Bashi wasn’t going to accept a two-hundred-year-dead reverend. And I couldn’t afford to be dragged into his basement and finger-cranked again. There wasn’t time.

  Two, it was the NYPD, coming to arrest me for my chewed-on pencil ending up in Chin’s apartment. That would be worse. With Bashi, there was at least the chance he’d take me at my word. After all, he’d accepted that dark magic was at play. The same wouldn’t fly with Vega. I’d be looking at incarceration.

  Candidate number three? Arnaud’s goons. I’d strolled into the vampire’s territory twice now after he’d warned me away. And he clearly wanted Grandpa’s ring. He wouldn’
t think twice about having me killed to get it. Unlike Father Richard, I was a nobody in the city.

  Finally—and the one that scared me the most—was plump little Chicory, coming to execute me for violating the Order’s mandates. Bullets I could handle. A dissolution spell? Not so much.

  I waved Tabitha back as I stole up to the door. Gripping my cane, I peered through the peephole. My list of candidates erupted in smoke—it wasn’t any of them. A thin back was to the door, brown hair falling down a khaki coat, as though the person was contemplating leaving.

  Malachi?

  With energy crackling around my prism, ready to cast, I twisted the bolts and opened the door a crack. Fully expecting a man’s narrow face to round into view, I started to discover a woman’s instead. A young woman’s, and one I recognized from Midtown College.

  “Meredith Proctor,” I said, opening the door to my overachieving student.

  “Hi, Professor.” Her face looked strange, almost sinister, and then I realized I’d never seen Meredith without her glasses—or in makeup. She’d gone especially heavy on the eye shadow and lipstick. “May I come in?” she asked.

  The timing couldn’t have been more horrible, but before I could give the polite version of that answer, Meredith was stepping past me. She unfastened her coat in the front and turned for me to draw it from her shoulders. It was an awkward gesture, unpracticed, and like the makeup, looked forced on someone who couldn’t have been older than nineteen.

  I snuck a peek at Tabitha. Over the years, we had developed a body language for when I had visitors. Her staring eyes told me everything. This was the person who had been watching the apartment building.

  “So, ah, what brings you here, Meredith?” I asked, deciding to ignore the invitation to remove her coat. I reached around her to close the door.

  She turned abruptly so she was inside my arms. Thick tendrils of perfume climbed my nostrils, triggering an asthmatic cough. She managed to shrug her coat away, and it thudded to the floor. The sparkling black dress that had been hiding underneath was low-cut, high riding, and completely inappropriate for a student visiting her professor.

  “I’m going dancing with friends later,” she explained, as I stooped for her coat and hung it on the rack. “Your place was on the way, so I thought I’d stop by. Hope that’s okay.”

  Not rehearsed at all.

  “Actually, Meredith, you’ve caught me at a bad time,” I said, trying to sound professorial. “I’m rather preoccupied.”

  “That lecture on Thursday, about the First Saints Legend?” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “Wow. I just have so many questions. About your trip to Romania, your research, your published paper.”

  Suspicion prickled through me at the strangeness of her voice, the timing of her visit. Aside from being a stellar student, I knew nothing about Meredith. Was she connected to the shrieker summonings, somehow? To the resurrected reverend?

  I followed at a safe distance. But when she peeked back over a bare shoulder, I saw it wasn’t either of those. There was another explanation for why she’d been staking out my apartment. The trance-inducing effect of Thursday’s lecture? Well, it must have lingered—and judging from the batting of her mascara-caked lashes, gotten mixed up with her amorous centers.

  I had a groupie on my hands, basically.

  “Listen, Meredith,” I said. “I’m going to have to answer your questions another time.”

  She clicked to the center of the loft in a pair of strappy black heels, my words once again sailing right past. “Shall we relax on the couch?” she asked.

  I tried to circle around to the front of her. “It’s not as relaxing as it looks, actually,” I stammered. My priority now was getting her back to the door. Which I’d left ajar, I realized.

  While Meredith lowered herself, cooing over the soft cushion, I beat it back toward the foyer. The partially-opened door rattled in the doorframe, as though the window beside the staircase was open and pulling air from the corridor. That had never happened—

  Something large landed in the hallway.

  —before.

  I got my shoulder into the door, forced it closed, and was snapping the bolts home when the thick wood shook against me. A moment later, a familiar pain jagged to the depths of my eardrums.

  Only this shriek sounded more adult.

  And there were two of them.

  39

  I backed from the shuddering door and turned to check on Meredith. I found her across the couch, palms clamped to her ears. I’d chosen index fingers to block my own. Thanks to the wards, the demonic register of the shriekers couldn’t penetrate the threshold, sparing my mental prism.

  But the screams still hurt like hell.

  During a brief lull, I shouted, “Get into the bathroom! Lock the door!”

  When Meredith squinted up, I could see that terror had shattered her trance. She was probably beginning to wonder what the hell she was even doing here. She nodded rapidly and wobble-ran toward the back of the apartment.

  I looked around for Tabitha, but she had taken off somewhere—maybe out onto the ledge, and who could blame her? With her feline hearing, the sound would have been doubly piercing.

  A splintering crack sounded, and I wheeled around. I had enough time to note my front door bowing out before it was flying at me in two halves. The larger piece slammed into my left shoulder, spinning me halfway around. It took a moment for the rude clunk of dislocation to register, the bruising pain spreading from my shoulder into my neck.

  I retrieved my fallen cane. In the next moment, light shields covered my ears like muffs. With the horrid sound stifled, I rammed the front of my shoulder into the steel beam that anchored the end of the kitchen counter, popping the humeral ball back into its socket. The shoulder was a recurring thing, the only upshot being I knew how to fix it. But that didn’t make it any less agonizing.

  The world behind my closed eyes spun, and I clenched my jaw to the throbbing pain. With a cane tap and a spoken incantation, I initiated the healing to the strained and torn tissue. At last, I turned to confront my visitors.

  Sweet Jesus.

  If you took a man-sized bat, crossed it with a gargoyle molded by a demented sculptor in bloody tar, you’d be in the neighborhood of the kind of creature—correction, creatures—I was facing. The two were taking turns throwing themselves into the field that covered my threshold, sparks spattering their thorny black wings and screaming faces.

  Their juvenile selves were almost cute in comparison.

  But as big, powerful, and hideous as the grown shriekers were, they weren’t spell casters. Against my wards, it was force against force—and, like any wizard worth his salt, I’d infused my wards with years of cumulative energy. Out there, I’d be in a world of hurt. Inside my apartment, I was safe as houses. I had only to wait until dawn for the shriekers’ power to wane, whereupon they would flap off to their dark, damp hiding place to regenerate.

  Problem was, I didn’t have until morning. I needed to get to the reanimated reverend before he killed Father Vick and the bishop and escaped into the world. I hesitated on that thought.

  The shriekers showing up now wasn’t a coincidence. The reverend must have known I was a threat to him. My thoughts returned to Malachi eavesdropping on Father Vick’s and my conversation that morning. He would have heard us connecting the recent summonings, as well as Father Richard’s murder, to someone inside the cathedral. But how had the reverend known where to direct the shriekers, especially since Malachi hadn’t been staking out my apartment?

  Working backwards, I searched my memory for anything I might have left at the cathedral for the reverend to cast from, some specimen that would have held a piece of my essence. I was usually exceedingly careful about such things.

  I came up empty, empty, empty—until I arrived at the morning I’d viewed the crime scene. Before entering the sacristy, I’d donned a pair of latex gloves and had had a net pulled over my head.

  Sweat and
hair.

  Assuming the reverend had accessed the bag, he would have been able to cast from either specimen. But mine hadn’t been the only bits of protective covering. Who else might the reverend have deemed a threat to his—

  My heart missed a beat, then slammed twice as hard to catch up.

  The lead detective. Vega.

  I angled the phone on the counter toward me, already fishing Detective Vega’s card from a pocket before realizing the second I removed the shields from my ears, I wouldn’t be able to hear a thing over the shrieking. I lifted the phone, looked around, and then ran toward the bathroom, cord spooling out behind me.

  As instructed, Meredith had locked the door. I waited for another break in the shrieking before knocking. “It’s me!”

  The knob turned tentatively, and I dispelled my ear shields just before one of Meredith’s eyes appeared in the door space. Once inside the bathroom, I shut the door against a renewed cycle of screaming. Meredith had pushed a towel against the space at the bottom of the door to stifle the sound, and I shoved it back into place with a foot. It helped a little.

  “What’s going on out there?” Meredith asked, hands back over her ears.

  “Building put in a new alarm system,” I shouted. “It’s having some problems.”

  I set the phone on the lid of the toilet tank and dialed Vega’s number. A light dome around my head would have helped, but I didn’t want to cast in front of Meredith. Instead, I cupped the mouthpiece and clamped the receiver to my ear with my good shoulder. I could just make out a faint ring.

  “Vega’s office,” a man answered.

  “Is she in?”

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  I recognized the out-of-breath voice from earlier that day. “Is this Hoffman?” I asked in a tone I hoped sounded high ranking.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “There’s no time for stupid questions,” I shouted. “We’ve got a situation. Where is she?”