The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 27

  “And it’s not an illusion? That thing is real?”

  “For our purposes, yes.” I waited another minute. “Seen enough?” I didn’t want to rush her, but I couldn’t afford to expend any more of my power than necessary—especially since I still had her to protect.

  Vega stared for another moment, then straightened and nodded.

  I called back the energy from the buds and spoke another incantation, this time banishing the creature. With no particular designs on our world, it dissipated without a fuss. Its orchid wings glimmered out last.

  “And the demonic entity talked to the victims through their mirrors?” Vega asked, still studying the spot where the delicate creature had been. She affected a hardened, professional tone, even as I sensed her mind trying to shift blocks around to accommodate this new reality. I had to hand it to her, though. She had taken it better than most people would have.

  “Yes,” I replied. “He would have used what’s called a scrying mirror.”

  She repeated the word quietly. “And he had the evil creatures summoned to escape the church?”

  “No, he killed the rector for that. He plans to do the same to the vicar and bishop when the moon reaches its zenith in…” My heart sped up when I checked my watch. “In less than an hour. The shriekers are to help him once he’s free. The phalanx of his demon legion. He’ll summon more beings, I’m sure, once he’s no longer confined by the power of the church.”

  “Assuming this is all true, how do you deal with a spirit like that?” She gave a small snort. “Ghostbusters?”

  “The only person you’re gonna call is whoever’s in charge of the search at the cathedral. I need you to suspend it, terminate it—whatever. Just get everyone the hell out of there.”

  “Call it off? You’re asking a lot, Croft.”

  “They’re not going to find anything,” I said. “And if they do, they’ll be massacred.”

  “So who’s—?”

  “Me,” I said, anticipating the rest of her question. “Alone.”

  She shook her head, loose hair flipping over her shoulders. “Forget it, Croft. I’ve already given you the benefit of the doubt tonight. No way am I letting you go to a major crime scene unescorted. And with the perp and hostages on the premises? Unh-uh. I’m going with you.”

  No, you’re not, I thought, but I do need your authority.

  “Fine, first call off the search.”

  She frowned at my order even as she fished a smartphone from a back pocket. “If I find out you’re playing me for a fool,” she said, her collapsing brows promising more violence than her voice, which was promising plenty, “I’m taking you down, Croft. Hard.”

  “They’ll be no need,” I assured her.

  She relented, scrolled for the number, and tapped it. I backed away so her phone wouldn’t go funny, and listened to her tell whomever was in charge at St. Martin’s to order everyone out of the cathedral. She was bringing in a “specialist,” she explained. A definite upgrade from “probationer,” I thought—as short lived as that upgrade was going to be.

  She hung up and disappeared into her bedroom. “What’s your plan?” she asked from beyond the closed door. I heard metal hangers screech and clothes landing on a bedspread.

  “It depends on what kind of entity I’m dealing with,” I called back. That was the one thing I hadn’t been able to determine, and yeah, it mattered. Certain demons were susceptible to religious artifacts and scripture, which I was sort of counting on. There would be plenty of both at the church.

  “So that message on the rector’s back,” Vega said. “ ‘Black Earth.’ You weren’t lying about not being able to connect it to anything?”

  I thought about the fanatical cult in Central Park and started to open my mouth to reiterate what I’d said earlier—no connection—then stopped. An ice floe slid into my stomach. What if the message hadn’t been meant as a threat or a red herring, but as a warning?

  “Christ,” I whispered.

  “Croft?” she called when I didn’t answer.

  “You interviewed everyone at St. Martin’s, right?”

  “Yeah.” I could hear her questioning frown.

  “All of them over at Police Plaza?”

  “Yeah—” She stopped. “Well, all except one. Gave some weak excuse, but then got frantic when we pressed the issue. We ended up doing his interview at the cathedral, which was no biggie.”

  I swallowed dryly. “Who?”

  “Your buddy,” she replied. “Father Vick.”

  The name horse-kicked me in the chest. For a moment, the apartment tilted. I clasped my cane in both hands, as though to anchor myself. But it made sense, didn’t it? The illness, the bleeding, and now this revelation of Father Vick’s unwillingness—or more likely, inability—to leave the cathedral.

  The demon hadn’t reanimated the long-dead rector. The demon had found a new host.

  Vega emerged in her professional attire, hair stretched back and banded off.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, Detective,” I said, then whispered a Word. The force from my cane shoved Vega into the corner of the living room. A second force straightened the scuff her shoes had made in the copper circle.

  “Croft, what—!”

  I closed the circle with a more powerful incantation. When Vega lunged forward, she rammed shoulder-first into an invisible force and rebounded. What the fuck? she mouthed, looking up and down the field that bent her image slightly. She slapped the field twice, then drew her pistol. The shots sounded like distant fireworks, flattened bullets falling to her feet.

  “I’m really, really sorry,” I said so she could read my lips.

  You son of a bitch, she mouthed, murder in her dark eyes. She drew her smartphone, but the circle’s energy had killed it.

  Confident she’d be safe, I wheeled and jogged toward the door. The field was strong, but temporary. Two hours, tops. If the demon went down—no, when the demon went down, I amended—so would the phalanx of shriekers, who were bound to him. One more reason to not fail.

  My gaze moved over the framed photos and scattered toys.

  Actually, two reasons, when I considered a young boy would be without a mother.

  I stopped at the kitchen to collect the keys Vega had dropped on the counter. Now it was a matter of seeing if what I had observed Meredith doing in the police cruiser would translate into my being able to drive the detective’s sedan. I could only imagine the knives Vega was staring into my back. Hopefully, she would forgive me when this was all over.

  Two more shots sounded as I locked the door behind me.

  Then again…

  43

  The car’s accelerator and power brakes took getting used to. I had put too much weight on both starting out. Fortunately, the roads were clear at this late hour and Vega’s car was already banged up. By the time I skidded south onto Broadway, the Wall and the Financial District rising ahead, I had the driving thing down, more or less.

  With a straight shot to my destination, I leaned toward the windshield to check out the sky. For the first time in almost a week, the low cloud ceiling was breaking up. The hovering moon it exposed was red, frightfully large, and—behind a foreground of moving clouds—appeared to be rising fast.

  A distant shriek made my gorge rise. I swallowed against the cloying taste that still tainted my palate. Now two shrieks. Whether they were headed to Brooklyn or the cathedral, I couldn’t tell. I started flipping switches on the dashboard until one flashed red and blue lights between the headlights. I picked up speed, blowing through the dozen or so intersections south of Canal Street.

  At the checkpoint at Liberty, two blocks ahead, an armed guard moved into my path and held out an arm. A series of squat steel columns, meant to block vehicles, rose from the street behind him.

  Crap, I hadn’t seen those before.

  I held my velocity steady at forty, blooping the siren, like I’d seen Vega do that morning. I was hoping the guard
would understand this was a police emergency and lower the bollards. The alternative, stopping and allowing him to put that camera on my face, was a nonstarter. I’d be detained for sure, if not shot.

  With a block to go, the guard thrust his palm forward twice, then raised his rifle to his shield sunglasses.

  He could also shoot me before I even got there.

  I powered my window down. But instead of slowing, I pressed the gas. The guard barked a halt command before the muzzle of his rifle began flashing. A hailstorm lit up the front of the sedan. Sparks flew and bits of bulletproof glass stung my face. I ducked until I was peering beneath the top of the steering wheel.

  The guard moved to one side, and a second guard stepped in from the other, rifle blasting. Amid the growing storm, something thumped deep in the engine, sending a jet of steam from the right seam of the hood.

  I grabbed my cane from the passenger seat and aimed it out the window.

  “Vigore!” I shouted.

  The force threw the guards back, automatic fire bursting skyward. The car needle had jumped past seventy, and the bollards were fast approaching. I pointed the cane at the street, angling it behind the front axle.

  Please, let this work, I thought.

  I called power to my mental prism and, with the glaring lights of the checkpoint feet away, boomed, “Forza dura!”

  The force that shook down my arm and into the cane emptied against the street. I was going for Newton’s third law: for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. The reaction, in this case, was immediate. The front of the car vaulted up and angled to the right. Something slammed the undercarriage hard enough to rattle my spine—the tops of the bollards. When the same columns hit the back tires, the sedan was thrown onto its front fender.

  My forehead cracked against the windshield, and my view of downtown Manhattan became asphalt and flying sparks. The car skidded on its nose for a good hundred feet, ever on the verge of upending, before slamming me hard into the seat, downtown Manhattan bouncing back into view. But the hailstorm had returned, this time lighting up the back of the car.

  I steadied my shaken-up eyes on the street ahead and pressed the accelerator. Movement! Crippled, granted—and something large and metallic was dragging beneath the car—but a check of the rearview mirror showed the checkpoint falling away, the flashes of muzzles getting smaller.

  I cranked the wheel right. The flattened tires thudded us behind a skyscraper and out of firing range. I slowed to get my bearings, then steered a stepwise route to reach the cathedral.

  Humping the sedan over the curb, I aimed the one functioning headlight at the front of St. Martin’s—and immediately saw my error. The bronze doors were closed and certainly locked. Worse, by having everyone cleared out, there was no one to invite me over the threshold. Assuming I could even force my way inside, my powers would be stripped to the bone and then some.

  I hammered the steering wheel. “Idiot!”

  I fought with the damaged car door, finally kicking it open. Red moonlight burned bright around me as I limped toward the cathedral. To my surprise, when I moved the police tape and pulled the right door, it swung outward. That was something, anyway. But now I had the humming threshold to consider. It had been weakened, but if it was keeping a demon caged, it remained plenty strong.

  “Hello?” I called into the darkness. Nothing moved beyond the closed glass doors inside.

  I had some spell options, none great, but if that was what it was going to take…

  “Everson Croft,” someone called from behind me.

  I stiffened at the voice. If it was Chicory, I was a dead man. I’d thrown around enough magic tonight to power Yankee Stadium. And that was to say nothing of having defied the Order’s other mandate of staying off the cases. The fact I was standing at the cathedral threshold was proof enough of my disobedience. The Order would go straight to sentencing.

  But the voice that had called my name was younger than Chicory’s, more hollow-sounding. I turned. Oh, hell. Roughly a dozen young men in tailored suits and gelled hair were arrayed in the street in a semicircle, closing toward me. Vampire Arnaud’s freaking blood slaves.

  “You have something owed us,” the foremost blood slave said. It was Zarko. Even in the dimness, I recognized his short monk’s bangs. His jaundiced eyes dipped to Grandpa’s ring.

  “Look guys,” I said, “now really isn’t the time.”

  “Give it to us, and we will leave you in peace,” Zarko said.

  “How about just skipping to the leave me in peace part?”

  One side of Zarko’s mouth slid up as he stepped from street to sidewalk. I felt Arnaud’s venomous presence. “We will take it one way or another,” Zarko said. “And you do not appear in any shape to stop us.”

  I brought my fingers to where he was looking now. A wet gash smarted at my hairline, where my head had smacked the windshield. I looked past Zarko to the car’s pock-marked glass. With the high adrenaline of the encounter at the Wall winding down, pain pulsed in every part of my body. I felt as banged up and broken down as Vega’s poor sedan.

  “Can’t I set up a meeting with Arnaud to, you know…” A cold wind hit my sweat-soaked shirt and pants, shuddering out the rest of my sentence “…d-d-dis-cuss this.”

  Zarko and the rest of the blood slaves began to laugh. They had already seen my blood; now they heard my weakness. I was succumbing to shock. I aimed Grandpa’s ring at them.

  “Keep on g-giggling,” I warned, fighting to hold my voice and fist steady.

  Zarko hesitated for a half-step before striding on. “You haven’t the strength to overwhelm us all,” he—or more likely, Arnaud—decided. “Even with your family trinket.”

  He was right, of course. Though the ring was throbbing with the same urgency I’d felt in Arnaud’s office, I wouldn’t be able to channel the kind of juice needed to cripple this crew, much less destroy them.

  Which meant it was time to bluff. “Care to test that theory?” I asked, forcing my lips into a puckish grin.

  Before I saw him move, Zarko darted in, seized my throat, and lifted me. I choked on the crunch of cartilage and kicked weakly, tears springing from my surprised eyes. He hoisted me higher. I seized his ice-cold wrist in one hand and used the other to swing my cane at his head. But without leverage, I couldn’t land a solid blow. The contact mussed his hair—which was actually an improvement—but that was about it. Zarko didn’t even blink.

  “The ring,” he said.

  The other blood slaves pressed closer, but I noticed they kept a respectful distance from the threshold at my back. That respect wouldn’t necessarily hold up. They were at Arnaud’s command. The second he gave the word, they would be on top of me, fighting over my wings and drumsticks.

  Meanwhile, my vision was doing strange things. I fought to focus down the length of Zarko’s arm to his waxy face.

  “The ring,” he repeated, the lines of his mouth a growing blur.

  A warm fog of sleep began to drift over my oxygen-deprived brain. But rather than seduce me, the sensation sent down an alarm. I hooked my cane over a thumb, extended the remaining fingers, and used my free hand to tug on the ring. It clamped down, as though refusing to be relinquished, but I refused to let up. With a final twist that nearly sloughed the skin away, I felt the ring release. I drew it from my finger and held it up for the blood slaves to see. I then threw my arm forward as hard as my throbbing shoulder would allow. Heads turned simultaneously and swiveled back to face me. I showed them my empty hand.

  Zarko released his grip, and I collapsed to the pavement. Leaving me in a heap, the blood slaves spread out into a search. The towers above me spun as my breaths returned in bruised gasps. I rolled to my side and shook the ring from my sleeve back into my hand.

  One of the first sleight-of-hand tricks Grandpa had taught me.

  I swayed to my feet. I’d bought myself a little time, a little breathing room, but not enough for spell-casting. As the blood slaves searched the
street, I began calling energy to my prism. I was spent but not empty.

  I backed from the church threshold on shaky legs.

  “He still has it,” Zarko announced.

  Time’s up, I thought.

  With the rapid patter of leather soles closing, I launched into a run and shouted, “Penetrare!” Light in the form of an arrow’s head took shape around my cane. Holding it in front of me, I stooped low, shoved with my right foot, and plunged head first into the roaring threshold.

  44

  I didn’t hurt. There was nothing to hurt. I was disembodied, detached. Anchored to no one and nothing. I drifted without sight, sensing darkness all around. The darkness seemed to shift like the black sands of a far-off shore—or the folds of the Grim Reaper’s robes.

  At that second image, I paused. Wait a second…

  I’d been under no illusions my invocation would pierce the threshold—I had just needed the field to yield a little at the point of contact. I was even prepared for some god-awful pain. But straight to death? Seriously?

  Son of a bitch.

  So now what? Was there supposed to be a light or something?

  At the thought, one appeared. But it wasn’t the divine illumination I’d imagined. This light was pale yellow and fluttered like a candle’s flame. It seemed to turn a corner before drifting toward me.

  I blinked twice. I had eyelids, apparently. And a cheek, which was flattened to something hard and cold. I wasn’t dead, just badly stunned. The effort to lift my head opened the storm gates of hell. I writhed around my gnashing teeth and gnarled cries, disembodied no more.

  Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap…

  It felt as though someone had flayed me open, pounded my insides to liquid, shoveled in hot coals, and then stitched me back up again, poorly. Death would have been a mercy. I stomped the floor and punched the air, as though to beat back the agony. Exhaustion eventually did the job.

  I lay panting on my back as the pain slipped off by degrees and a coolness settled in.