Black Luck (Prof Croft Book 5) Read online

  “Well this isn’t for leveling!” I worked the book free and inspected the cover. Fortunately, it wasn’t torn.

  “At least you know I got up today,” she said.

  I fought to control my voice. “Ask next time, all right?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, darling. You’re hardly around to ask. I wouldn’t doubt your lady friend feels the same way. And it’s all because of that infernal book. Are you sure it’s not cursed?”

  “It’s not,” I said thinly.

  “I mean, look at that man’s hideous face.” She shuddered.

  I turned the book around to the back cover, where there was a photo of the author, Jocko Wraithe. I’d never really looked at him, but my cat had a point. Beneath a styled shock of white hair, his dark eyes glinted over an almost nonexistent nose and an enormous smile of too-bright teeth.

  “Well, this infernal book is the reason I was able to banish four nether creatures this morning,” I said, “all while maintaining a form-fitting defensive shield and two locking spells.” I didn’t mention Mae or Buster, of course. “Whatever your problem with my new routine, it’s working. I’m a better wizard—hell, a better everything—because of them.”

  Tabitha smirked. “But are you your best wizard?”

  She’d no doubt overheard my morning affirmations. With a tight breath, I let the remark go. “The point is that this has nothing to do with Vega and me.”

  “I know what this is about, darling.”

  “Oh, this oughta be good.”

  “I’ve seen the way you moon over your sword. You want to be like him.”

  “Like who?”

  She lowered her eyelids at my attempt to play dumb.

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?” I challenged.

  “Nothing. I spent time with your father, remember? The most powerful wizard I’ve seen up close. Handsome too. What son wouldn’t want to emulate him? Not as charming as Chicory, granted, but then few are.”

  I stared at her for a moment. “Chicory’s real name was Lich, and he tried to destroy the world.”

  “Since when does that disqualify someone as a charmer?”

  But I barely heard her. Mention of Chicory had brought back a flood of images. Largely through luck, I’d managed to kill the Death Mage in his keep, but the thrill of victory had been short lived. I’d watched helplessly as my father leapt into a portal that extended beyond the Deep Down, shouting a Word powerful enough to repel Dhuul. A Word that only someone of his strength and constitution could have channeled … if only for a few moments.

  He’d sacrificed himself to save humanity.

  And in the moment before Arianna had pulled me from that realm, I had felt something being passed to me: a responsibility to become the wizard and leader my father had been for the Order in Exile. No more irresponsible Everson. No more falling ass backwards into one lucky solution after another. No more solo wizarding. It was time for me to develop my abilities and lead the team Arianna said would find me “one by one.”

  “Anyways, I understand what you’re trying to do,” Tabitha said. I blinked her back into focus. “And it’s admirable, I suppose. Just don’t be surprised if Vega feels the same way I do.”

  Vega had said she wanted to talk tonight, but not about what.

  “Whatever. I need to get ready.” I spun toward my room, the book clutched to my chest.

  “See?”

  “This has nothing to do with Vega and me,” I repeated.

  “Hmph. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  6

  Ricki Vega was still dressed in her work clothes—black suit and blouse—when she arrived at Da Vinci’s, an Italian restaurant not far from her place in Brooklyn. Her midnight hair, usually secured in a ponytail, was down over her shoulders in a wavy luster. I stood from the table I’d reserved and waved to her. Spotting me, she smiled tightly and walked over.

  “Sorry I’m late.” She gave me a light kiss. “Had to finish up some paperwork.”

  “No worries. Just got here myself.” I pulled out her chair and scooted it in as she sat. I returned to my seat across from her and spent a moment taking in her smooth Latin face, dark, intelligent eyes, and the tiny mole beside her lips.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Sorry, but you’re a dream.”

  Vega rolled her eyes and took a sip of her water. “Good day?” she asked.

  There it was, dammit. The formality I’d started to pick up in the last month.

  “Interesting day. I responded to a call this morning up in Harlem.” I lowered my voice as I told her about meeting Mae. “The woman’s been living with five nether creatures for the last half year. Five.”

  “And you didn’t know?”

  “They never tripped the wards for some reason. Not until this morning. After class I checked out the wards that triangulate for her neighborhood, and they all seemed to be working.”

  Following Chicory’s death, the Order had reestablished the network of twenty-one wards to monitor the city. A nether creature’s entrance into our world was accompanied by a discharge of energy that the creature continued to emit for a time. The powerful wards were calibrated to sense that energy and pinpoint its origin. After triggering a gem I’d installed in my watch, that information went into a hunting spell that directed me to the source, normally without fail.

  “Have you told your Order?” Vega asked.

  “I left them a message, but there’s no telling when they’ll be able to check it out. Could be tonight, could be next week.”

  “Still stitching up the rips, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said, wishing I possessed enough skill to pitch in, or at the very least to reboot the wards over the city myself. The Elder members of the Order had enough on their plate without having to help out the junior varsity.

  The waiter came and greeted us with a “Buona sera.” We ordered and then waited until he was out of earshot again before resuming our discussion.

  “About those five creatures,” Vega said. “I’m not gonna get called to Harlem, am I?”

  “Not because of them, no. At least I don’t think so.” I described how I’d destroyed four of the creatures before running into Mae, who would have bludgeoned me with an assortment of kitchen implements before allowing me to lay a finger on her precious Buster.

  “Great, so there’s a homicidal lobster running loose,” Vega muttered.

  “Only until I can go back and take care of it. Anyway, it’s not loose. Mae housetrained it.”

  She snorted a laugh. “I feel so much better.”

  “Seriously, it’s small time, like a lot of what’s been coming up here in the last year. Well, except for the White Dragon. But he was a shifter, not a nether creature. And the Blue Wolf did the heavy lifting on that one.”

  At mention of the Blue Wolf, Vega arched an eyebrow.

  “He’s not make-believe,” I said with a laugh. It had become a running joke between us. Vega hadn’t been around the times I’d worked with the Blue Wolf in the past year, and she was having a hard time picturing a seven-foot werewolf with blue hair. She accused me of having a Mr. Snuffleupagus, Big Bird’s imaginary friend on Sesame Street.

  “I’ll believe it when I see him.”

  “I actually invited him to team up. If he’d said yes, you would have seen a lot of him by now.”

  The Blue Wolf’s decision not to join forces had smarted a little. A part of me still held out the hope he’d change his mind. I had taken Arianna’s counsel about forming a team to heart.

  The waiter returned and set down Vega’s red wine, my beer, and a cutting board of steaming bread.

  “Do you mind?” Vega asked me, reaching for the bread. “I’m starving.”

  “Hey, it’s not going to dive into the olive oil and eat itself.”

  “Well, what about Wesson’s replacement?” she asked tearing off a chunk. “Have you worked with him yet?”

  She was talking about the wizard who had
taken over the five boroughs shortly after James Wesson’s relocation to Colorado. Someone named Pierce Dalton, from London. He’d actually covered for me the few times I’d gone out West to help James, but that had been mediated through the Order. I knew little about him other than that his magic related to Japanese Himitsu paintings.

  I shook my head. “I keep meaning to get in touch, set up a lunch or something, but … well, other things keep popping up, I guess.”

  As the city’s senior wizard, I really should have contacted him months before, oriented him to the area, even accompanied him on his first few calls to make sure he knew what he was doing. Then again, he had my number too. If he needed help, he would have called, right?

  It seemed a little strange now that he hadn’t.

  Vega snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. “Dispatch to Everson.”

  I forced a chuckle as she returned to focus. “I’m here, I’m here. So how about you? How was your day?”

  “It was fine.” She finished the piece of bread she’d been working on, took a swallow of wine, and then leveled her gaze at me. “Everson, we need to talk.”

  “I thought we were.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Oh boy. She did sound serious. I set my beer to one side and clasped my hands on the table to show that she had my undivided attention.

  “What are we doing?” she asked pointedly.

  I glanced around. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this. Us.”

  “Enjoying each other’s company?” I offered.

  “That was fine for the first few months—a dinner here, a movie there, a sleepover now and again—but we’re going on a year now. Shouldn’t we be beyond that? Like way beyond that.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, why aren’t we?”

  I opened my mouth without knowing what I was going to say. Thanks to my double life as a wizard, none of my romantic relationships in adulthood had lasted beyond a few months. I always assumed relationships just matured from repeated encounters over time. Before I could attempt to bumble that into words, Vega answered the question herself.

  “I’ll tell you. Because you’re not committed. I need to know why.”

  “Wait, back up a minute. Not committed? How am I not committed?”

  “When have we ever spent more than one day or night together?”

  “We’re busy people. We—”

  “When have you ever said, ‘Let’s sleep in this morning, then take Tony to brunch and hit the park after? Never. It’s always, ‘I’ve gotta be up at five so I can do this or that’—even on the days you’re not working. Then, boom, it’s straight to your lab, and I don’t see you again.”

  “You’re starting to sound like my cat.”

  “Twice last month I left your apartment in the morning without saying anything. I wanted to see if you’d notice. And guess what? No phone call to ask where I’d gone, no visit to my office or apartment later in the day. Nothing. Did you even remember I was there?”

  “Of course I did,” I said, struggling to recall what two mornings those would have been. “I just—”

  “Speaking of my son,” she cut in, her eyes softening even as her voice hardened, “he looks up to you, Everson. He wants to spend time with you. Tony got so excited back in June when you mentioned the fair out on Long Island, and then you never brought it up again.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “You can’t do that to a seven-year-old.”

  I couldn’t quite remember that episode either, but I believed her. I nodded and took Vega’s hands, half surprised when she let me. A weariness had fallen over her face, and I wondered how much of that I was responsible for.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re the best thing in my life right now. I mean that. You know who I am. You get what I’m doing. My mind’s just been … other places, I guess.”

  I hated it when Tabitha was right.

  “Everson, I need to know if this is the way it’s going to be from now on. Because if it is…”

  I gave her hands a gentle squeeze and released them. “When you were trying to make detective, you put in a lot of late nights, right? Early mornings. Extra hours. Time you wish you could have spent with your son. But you told yourself it was going to be the best thing for him in the long run, right? The best thing for the city?”

  When she saw what I was doing, she pressed her lips together.

  “I’m just saying that sometimes we have to make sacrifices in the short term in order to be…” I almost said the best at what we do, before remembering Tabitha’s dig from earlier. “To be in an optimal position to help others. Arianna made it clear that there are going to be more threats to the city. Big threats. On top of the rips, New York has a high concentration of ley energy. And when those threats come, I want to be ready. I need to be ready. That’s what this is about.”

  She sighed through her nose, but it sounded conciliatory. “I know that, Everson. I live the part about needing to be ready every day. But in the last year, I’ve learned something else. If all you do is go, go, go, you’re gonna burn out. Then you’ll be no good to anyone.”

  “It’s just until I get—”

  “Your feet under you?” Vega finished. “I used to tell myself that too.”

  “Regardless, it’s only for a few more months.”

  “Until those months turn into years.”

  For a long moment, neither of us said anything. As I searched Vega’s eyes, I remembered why we had ended up together. Despite our outward differences, we were fundamentally alike: driven by the memories of our fallen fathers, committed to protecting the innocent. Now she was asking if we were going to do anything with that, or if we—if I—was going to sacrifice it in my quest for perfection.

  “I need to know,” she said at last.

  “Look…”

  The gem in my watch began to flash. I seized my cane before it could launch itself in the direction of whatever had just popped into our world. I started to explain to Vega what was happening, when her phone rang. Following a terse exchange, she ended the call.

  “I’ve gotta go,” she said, already standing. “There’s been an attack on East Houston.”

  I dropped some bills on the table and lined up the strong pull of my cane with a mental map of the city.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said. “Looks like we’re being called to the same location.”

  Suspension cables flashed past my window as Vega sped over the Manhattan Bridge. She was speaking into a Bluetooth, and between her side of the conversation and the bursts of chatter coming over her radio, an ugly picture of the crime scene was taking shape. Someone or something had attacked a group of movie goers at a theater on Houston Street, and it didn’t sound like a shallow nether creature.

  We bombed down the off ramp and squealed right onto Forsyth.

  Vega ended the call. “Two confirmed dead, scores of casualties, and four still trapped inside the theater. Eyewitnesses say the suspect is a man who can summon black fire. Have you heard of anything like that?”

  “Could be any number of things,” I said, looking down at my kicking cane. This felt big. “Make sure they’re keeping everyone back, officers too. I should be the first one in.”

  While Vega relayed that information, I proceeded through the steps I had been practicing every morning for the last year: centering myself, fortifying my mental prism, tapping into ambient channels of ley energy. They were the basic steps to prepare oneself for casting, but they were also steps I’d gone about haphazardly in the past, not taking full advantage of their potential. It was similar to plumbing in that, sure, you could piece together pipe segments willy-nilly and get a flow, but you were also going to get a lot of leakage.

  I was doing it the right way now, tightening each joint to maximize the flow’s volume and force. My body vibrated with powerful energy. It wasn’t until Vega frowned at me that I noticed her instrument panel flashing.

  “You mind?�
� she said as the radio began to bray static.

  “Sorry.” I tamped down my thrumming aura enough to restore her electronics. I was anxious to get to the victims—and yeah, also anxious to test myself.

  Vega veered right onto Houston. We passed a cluster of ambulances and pulled up to a police cordon. We both got out, and I followed Vega to an official at the scene. I groaned as his portly body rounded toward us. It was Hoffman.

  “Detective,” I managed.

  Instead of returning the greeting, he directed his scrunched-up face at Vega. “What’d you bring Merlin for?”

  Thanks to the NYPD’s Byzantine politics, the corrupt detective had managed to remain in Homicide as Vega’s partner. A situation made more frustrating considering the kinds of cases they worked. Hoffman didn’t believe in the existence of magic or the supernatural, despite recent glaring examples to the contrary, and he believed even less in me.

  Vega ignored his question. “Are there still people inside?”

  “Yeah,” Hoffman said. “Four of ’em. Sounds like we’ve got a real nutjob down there.”

  “How many ways in?” she asked.

  “Just the front door. No windows.”

  I looked down the street where more police and ambulance lights flashed. Between us and them, about a half block away, I spotted the entrance to the theater. The smoke that curled from the below-ground entrance gave it away. I was preparing to cross the cordon, when I noticed the silhouette of someone with a bald head in the back seat of Hoffman’s car.

  “Is he a witness?” I asked.

  “She,” he said. “And no, you can’t talk to her.”

  I looked at Vega. “It’ll just take a sec. I need to know what I’m dealing with.”

  “You’re dealing with a homicidal freak and a bunch of drugged-out kids seeing things,” Hoffman said. “We should’ve breached the theater ten minutes ago.”

  “Let him talk to her,” Vega ordered.

  With a grumble, Hoffman jerked the door open. Inside, a thin girl with a shaved head peered up at me, eyes large and dilated. She was done up in punk chic: dark makeup and black leggings that looked as if someone had attacked them with a razor blade.