The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 26

  “Wh-what in the world happened out here?”

  I turned to face Meredith, who was standing in the bathroom doorway. As she stared over the trashed and tar-splashed apartment, it looked as if she was considering retreating back into the bathroom and relocking the door.

  “Everything’s fine now,” I assured her. “Just a couple of pranksters.”

  “Pranksters?” Her gaze fell to my right shoulder. “You’re bleeding!”

  I looked down as if noticing the sopping mess for the first time. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “We need to get you to a hospital!”

  “All right, but let me grab a few things.”

  I climbed the ladder to my lab. There was no time to cook potions, but I dropped the bottle of holy water and a few spell implements into my coat pockets. Otherwise, it was going to be my sword, staff, necklace, and whatever power remained in me, which was almost none.

  By the time I descended the ladder, Tabitha had extricated herself from the drapery and was perched on the divan, trying to smack the taste of shrieker from her mouth. The black pools had all but evaporated, but the scent hung in the air like an evil mist. I gave my cat a thumbs up before striding toward Meredith, who was exclaiming over the ruined hallway.

  “I’ll be here when you get back,” Tabitha murmured, referring to the lack of wards.

  It took me a moment to realize she had also voiced her confidence that I would be coming back. My eyes threatened to well up. Sometimes all a person needed was the begrudging love of his cat. I opened my mouth to say this, but her slitted eyes suggested I not push it.

  “And I’ll have goat’s milk,” I amended. “You’ve more than earned it.”

  That got half a furry smile.

  41

  Meredith and I arrived on the street at the same time police lights appeared down the block. Before the car’s jouncing high beams could hit us, I pulled Meredith around the side of the building, into an alleyway.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “That’s a police car.”

  I peeked around the corner. Though the shrieker battle felt as though it had lasted an hour, it had only been ten or so minutes since I’d spoken to Vega on the phone. And here were Dempsey and Dipinski, as promised. With a finger to my lips, I signaled for Meredith to keep behind me.

  Confusion creased her young face. “They can help us,” she whispered.

  “Trust me,” I said. “They can’t.”

  The squad car jerked to a stop against the opposite curb. Dipinski emerged from the passenger side and squinted around. I had absorbed a little light from our space to be safe. The boy-sized officer looked past the alley, then adjusted his too-large hat as he waited for Dempsey to kill the engine and join him.

  They started across the street at a jog, Dempsey snapping his keychain to his duty belt. With the point of my cane and a soft incantation, I undid the leather clasp, then caught the keys before they clattered to the street. Using the same low-level force, I lowered the keys gently the rest of the way. Dempsey didn’t break stride. I waited until the building door knocked closed behind the officers before pulling Meredith into the street.

  “Know how to drive?” I asked her.

  “Yeah…?”

  “Good.” I scooped up the keys and handed them to her. “I need a driver.”

  At about the time I estimated Dempsey and Dipinski were emerging from the apartment building, Dempsey slapping his empty key holder, I had Meredith take a sharp left onto Delancey Street.

  “Where are we even going?” she asked.

  She was driving the police cruiser only slightly faster than my late grandmother, but at least she was driving. That had taken a little convincing, but she had consented—for no other reason, I suspected, than I was a favorite professor. I was abusing the teacher-student relationship big time, but seeing as how tomorrow’s hearing was going to be career ending for me anyway, I didn’t feel I was risking an awful lot. And with tonight being potentially life ending…

  “The Williamsburg section of Brooklyn,” I answered.

  “Brooklyn? Is that where your primary physician is?”

  “It’s where a police detective lives.”

  She stole a glance over her shoulder. “Couldn’t those guys back there have…?”

  “It’s a long story, but no.”

  “What about your arm?”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  When I didn’t offer anything more, Meredith trained her frowning face on the approaching suspension bridge, hands at ten and two. I sat back. The shoulder that had dislocated throbbed in a cold ache. The one that had been gnawed on flashed with hot barbs. I managed to put a little healing energy into both without Meredith seeing, then watched her work the pedals, having already taken note of what she’d done with the gear shift. My wizarding aura had knocked out the dashboard computer and GPS system, which would keep us cloaked.

  “The inner roadway’s clear,” I said, pointing at the lane running beside the train tracks. “How about a little pedal to the metal?”

  She hesitated, then depressed the accelerator. The cruiser jumped forward, plunging into the tunnel of scaffolding as the bridge lifted us up. When Meredith leaned over the wheel, something on her face told me she was starting to enjoy this. If nothing else, I was giving her permission to bend a few rules.

  Five minutes later, we found the street, and a minute after that, the address. Meredith cruised past Vega’s skinned-up sedan and pulled in front of the modest-looking apartment building.

  “I want you to drive straight home,” I told her. “Park the cruiser wherever but leave the keys in the ignition.” A straight-A student like Meredith would never be suspected of boosting a police cruiser, I figured, but if someone else stole it afterwards, so much the better.

  Her eyes staggered with disappointment. “What about you?”

  “I’ll be fine.” I got out of the car, then turned around and stooped to the open door. “Thanks for your help.”

  “See you in class tomorrow?”

  The hope in her voice made me hesitate. “You bet,” I said. “See you in class.”

  I closed the door and slapped the roof of the cruiser twice. She wheeled around and took off the way we’d come. I was gambling that Dempsey and Dipinski were still debating whether to call in their stolen vehicle, given that Dempsey’s missing keys would suggest negligence, not to mention gross stupidity.

  I hustled up the stone steps to the apartment. Like many buildings in the current era, an entrance that had once likely consisted of swinging glass doors now featured a steel monster. I tugged the handle. The door didn’t move, its bolt guarded by a thick metal plate.

  I looked around. At this late hour, there was almost no chance of anyone showing up for me to pull the “hey, mind holding the door? forgot my keys” routine. Given my bloody state, I was far more likely to send them screaming in the other direction.

  I dug through the spell items in my pockets until I found the vial of dragon sand. I sprinkled some into the palm of a hand, then used a licked finger to lift the dark granules and press them into the keyhole.

  When I was done, I whispered, “Fuoco.”

  Smoke curled from the keyhole followed by the hiss of white flames. Within seconds, the locking apparatus sagged in like a half-baked cookie. When I yanked the door, it swung open, the melted bolt plopping to the ground.

  I stepped over the threshold and into an anteroom. A locked set of glass doors separated me from an empty lobby. A buzzer panel to my right listed the apartment numbers in two tall columns, with the punch-out of a speaker underneath. Almost immediately, the speaker began to crackle and buzz. Sometimes all these systems took was a little hexing, and for that I wouldn’t need a spell medium. As a wizard, I was that medium.

  I pushed a little more energy into the metal panel, then tried the door. The magnetic lock gave up its failing hold, and I was inside.

  I consulted my notepad before hitting the h
alf-lit stairwell. Vega’s unit was on the third floor. Fatigue weighed down my legs as I climbed, making me think of the exhaustion I’d observed in Vega’s eyes the morning she drove me to the cathedral. Twice now, I had glimpsed something else in those eyes. Some deeper knowledge.

  And then the obvious slapped me upside the head.

  At her door, I pressed an ear to the cracked lacquer paint. No shrieking or sounds of struggle. I raised a fist, took a second to review what I was going to say, and knocked four times hard. When twenty seconds passed, I wiped the sweat from beneath my nose and knocked again, heart pounding in anticipation.

  “Drop the cane, and lock your fingers behind your head.”

  Not in anticipation of that, though.

  I did as Detective Vega said and turned slowly. She was approaching from the staircase I’d arrived by, both hands on the grip of the nine millimeter she was aiming at my head.

  “Will you at least let me talk this time?” I asked.

  Though she was wearing dark jeans and an untucked white V-neck, Vega was all business. She eased beneath the dim lights of the corridor in a practiced approach, eyes level with her line of fire. Her bottom lip swelled out, and she blew a loose strand of hair from her left eye.

  “Face the wall,” she said. “Get on your knees.”

  I turned until I was looking cross-eyed at a pattern of cheap wallpaper. I thudded to one knee, and then the other.

  “I imagine someone in Homicide sees a lot in this city,” I began, working out the epiphany that had hit me in the stairwell.

  “I didn’t say you could talk.”

  “And some of it, maybe a good amount of it, you can’t explain. Not to yourself, and certainly not to your higher ups—they want cases cleared, period. Start going to them with things that don’t conform to that goal, much less reality?” I gave a rueful laugh. “Next thing you know, you’re standing in traffic with a whistle between your teeth, right?”

  Detective Vega, who had begun a search of my pockets, didn’t respond. I heard her set my wallet and keys on the carpeted floor behind me, the blackberry scent of her shampoo mingling with the sour smells of my sweat and blood.

  “So you shut away the things you’ve seen,” I said, “the things you know to be out there. And it’s not because you’re a bad detective—far from it. It’s because you’re not given a choice. You believe in the mission on your shield, and you can only fulfill it from inside the system, blind and broken as it may be. Making the city safer. Protecting the vulnerable. Protecting your son.”

  She had moved to my coat pockets, turning out the spell items, but now I thought I felt her slow.

  “It’s why you listened to me tonight,” I said.

  “The hell are you even talking about?” she growled.

  “You took your son someplace safe, like I asked. That’s where you’re coming back from.” It was an educated guess. She could just as well have been staking out her apartment to see who might show.

  “Or maybe I just want to keep him safe from you,” she shot back.

  I gave a knowing chuckle as she resumed her rough excavation of my remaining pockets. “Why did you bring me in on the St. Martin’s investigation?”

  “That was a mistake,” she muttered.

  “I’m not the only authority on ancient languages in this city. You could have gone to any number of experts, none of them carrying the stain of probation. Care to hear my theory?”

  “No.”

  “You wanted to size me up. You knew I had no hand in that murder last year, because when you followed the evidence, it didn’t point to me. In fact, it didn’t point to anything explicable. But like a good soldier, you obeyed the orders of your higher ups. You went deeper, looking for any angle that would implicate me in the man’s death. What you found instead were strange rumors about who I was and what I could do. When you connected the dots, you realized I’d been trying to help the victim, even if it was in a way that didn’t make sense to you.”

  She finished her search. I craned my neck around until our eyes met. And there was the look, the one that spoke to deeper knowledge. What I’d missed before was the angle of curiosity.

  “The decision to arrest me for obstruction didn’t come from you. You followed orders—and felt bad about having to, I’m sure—but you didn’t forget what you’d found out. So when you needed an expert on ancient languages, you came looking for me. To see what I was all about.”

  Vega narrowed her gaze, though whether because I’d made her feel transparent again or that I was way off the mark, I couldn’t tell. “Stand up,” she ordered in a voice that could have suggested either.

  “None of this changes the fact that you’re in danger,” I said.

  “You want to tell me what you were doing at Mr. Chin’s?” The pistol she held on me drifted from my head to my midsection as I rose. “Or up in Hamilton Heights, for that matter?”

  “Trying to help,” I said, looking directly into her eyes. “And you know that.”

  Her gaze moved to the torn and bloody shoulder of my coat. I could see her trying to work up her anger again, and it wasn’t because she thought I was a degenerate. No, her anger originated from a struggle between her wanting and not wanting to understand a world that challenged the more rational, order-based parts of her mind, which was most of it.

  “Who killed them?” she asked.

  “What killed them,” I amended, “are the same creatures that came after me tonight—and that could show up here any second.”

  The spell items arrayed across the floor between us seemed a boundary between the rational and the irrational, the mundane and the magical. I imagined the struggle behind Vega’s hardened face. To trust me meant throwing a radical switch in her head, altering her thinking, her language.

  “If you’re fucking with me, Croft, so help me God…”

  “I’m not.”

  She assessed me for another moment. An urgent timer ticked down in my head, but gaining her trust was the more immediate need. If I failed, she would arrest me, and my warning would go unheeded.

  “You can lower your arms,” she said at last, giving a small nod.

  Relief swam through me as I unlaced my hands and let them down.

  “On whose order were those people killed?” she asked, holstering her pistol into her pants in back.

  “The same person who murdered the rector.”

  Her hands froze at her back, and she blinked up at me. “Come again?”

  “I’ll explain, but we should probably go inside. I’m going to need to demonstrate some of what I’m about to tell you.” She didn’t stop me when I started scooping the spell items from the floor and returning them to my pockets. When I retrieved the vial of copper filings, I assessed its weight. I should have topped it off, but there was enough inside to protect Vega.

  She wasn’t going to like it, though.

  42

  “A spirit is behind all of this?” Detective Vega watched dubiously as I sprinkled the last of the copper filings from the vial.

  To her credit, she’d remained mostly silent during my explanation.

  “A demonic entity,” I reminded her. “I know how that sounds, but think about the evisceration cases, all the evidence you’ve had to explain away. The summoning circles, for example.” I stood up from the one I’d just completed. “They were in the same room as every one of the victims, contained the same casting elements. You concluded the slayings were ritualistic, but how do you explain the absence of forced entries—just forced exits?”

  “We have some theories,” she said in a defensive voice.

  “Yeah, and I bet they require feats of mental gymnastics. But do they have the explanatory power of what I’ve just told you?”

  Instead of answering, she glanced around her two-bedroom unit. The apartment was simple and functional, with a few potted plants. Framed photos of her son and what I guessed to be extended family lined the walls, infusing the space with color and warmth. I had ch
osen a spot in the corner of the living room for the circle, scooting out a small table and standing lamp. Now I followed her gaze across the room to the lone couch, one end littered with toy trucks.

  When she looked back at the circle, I could see her mind working. She still didn’t want to believe me, but could she afford not to? “All right,” she said at last, sighing through her nose. “Show me.”

  I was very limited with what I could demonstrate, not only for time’s sake but that my powers remained in a slow state of recharge. I reached into a pocket and pulled out a bag of clematis buds.

  “The creatures we’ve been talking about were summoned from a place humans should never attempt to access.” I crushed the bag and emptied its contents into the casting circle. “An evil place.” I spread the fragrant buds around with the tip of my cane. “Rest assured, I won’t be summoning from there, but this will at least give you an idea of how it’s done.”

  Detective Vega crossed her arms and cocked a hip.

  I returned the crumpled bag to my pocket and stood back. I appraised the circle, which would need to do two jobs tonight. Deciding it looked up to the task, I pushed enough energy into the circle to close it. I trained the cane on the crushed buds next, focusing until they rustled, as though a light breeze had passed over them. With the strong scent of vanilla drifting up, I began to chant the name of something that inhabited a plane very close to our own.

  “Susurle,” I repeated.

  “Can’t believe I’m standing here watching this,” Vega muttered after a minute.

  In the next moment, her breath caught. A twist of light, and there it was: a small creature with a magnificent butterfly’s body but intelligent blinking eyes. It fluttered around the casting column with thin orchid-colored wings before descending to the buds and picking over them.

  “How in the hell did you do that?” Vega whispered, arms fallen to her sides.

  “That’s what a summoning looks like,” I said, unable to suppress the triumph I felt.