Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1) Read online

  Something solid had struck the back of my head.

  14

  I twisted and blinked up at my attacker. The looming figure was hard to make sense of. It was as though someone had taken the chunks of pavement beside the Dumpster, assembled them into the proportions of a large human, and endowed them with life. I peeked past the figure. Sure enough, the pavement pile was gone.

  Wonderful. I was dealing with a golem.

  With a low moan, the golem raised a giant fist. I might or might not have screamed as I threw myself from its trajectory. Pavement exploded behind me. I gained my feet and staggered backwards, sword out. The blow had turned my legs to noodles, but my mental prism remained intact.

  “Vigore,” I cried.

  The force from my sword destroyed the golem’s right arm, which went knocking down the alleyway. But though the golem rocked back, its legs held fast. It lumbered forward and swung its remaining arm. I got my light shield up in time, but the concussion from the backhand sent me into a brick wall, dealing my head another lovely smack. The alley tilted one way and the other before I could stare it straight again.

  “Forza dura!” I shouted.

  With my prism wavering, the force wasn’t up to the task of a charging golem. Though chunks blew from its torso, the creature hardly slowed. I wheeled and staggered toward the mouth of the alleyway. I needed some kind of backup, but from whom? The city was sprinkled with magic users, but I had no idea who did and didn’t belong to the Order—which was just how the Elders seemed to want it.

  As I cleared the alley, an idea struck me: Canal Street, just north of here. A branch of the defunct Broadway line ran beneath it.

  I veered right. Seconds later, the golem’s smashing footfalls fell in behind me.

  Pumping my cane like a relay baton, I remembered an account of a dark sorcerer using golems to protect his spell-casting sanctum. That had to be it. Someone knew last night’s shrieker summoning had been thwarted. Looking to avoid a repeat, he had not only arranged for tonight’s twin summonings at opposite ends of the city, but placed a golem at the closer one, perhaps as a component of the shrieker spell, for any wizards who might come sniffing around. My stepping over the conjurer’s threshold had probably triggered the animation.

  But how had the person known I was closer to Chinatown than to Harlem? Unless he knew where I lived. I thought of the brunette woman Tabitha had seen watching my building.

  Did the woman play a role in this? Was she the sorcerer?

  I snuck a peek over my shoulder and regretted it. The thing was less than a half block away and gaining, its clunky strides literally eating up concrete. But I’d reached Canal Street. I took a hard right and began squinting ahead for…

  There!

  I aimed my sword toward the subway vent that took up half the sidewalk. With a shouted Word, I blew it from its foundation. Tight-roping the ledge between the sudden hole and a storefront, I gathered more energy to my prism, hoping to hell the golem would play follow-the-leader.

  When I turned, it was. Sort of.

  Instead of veering around the hole, the golem had chosen to stretch a clunky leg across. I aimed my sword at its front foot.

  “Vigore!”

  As foot touched sidewalk, the golem’s leg erupted at the shin. With a surprised moan, the rest of the golem plummeted from view—only for stony fingers to reappear and seize the ledge. But a second Word demolished its hand, and I watched the golem crash-bang down into the foul-smelling void.

  Head still ringing, I stooped over to catch my breath. Then I replaced the steel grating over the hole and hemmed the mess in with some nearby construction barricades that littered the city. Far below, the retching, rumbling battle was already underway. Ghouls versus golem.

  With any luck, my new friend would land a few solid shots before being torn apart. In any case, it was on its own.

  I had a ride uptown to catch.

  15

  As it turned out, I hadn’t needed a hunting spell to locate the site of the second summoning. The small army of police cruisers did the job for me.

  “This you, buddy?” the cabbie muttered as he pulled over. “Christ.”

  He hadn’t been too happy about the address. Following the Crash, Hamilton Heights had fallen as hard as any neighborhood and was neck-and-neck with the South Bronx for most homicidal.

  “You mind waiting?” I asked. “I won’t be long.”

  The man’s pouchy eyes jerked from building to building as though bullets were going to fly from them at any second. “Sorry, pal,” he said, shaking his head at the extra twenty I held out. “I’m as hard up as anyone but not that hard up.”

  As the cab U-turned and took off back south, I hurried toward the crime scene, an unadorned brick apartment building, twenty-odd stories high. Several residents had gathered out front as police appeared and disappeared through the building’s entrance. I eased up to the edge of the crowd and stood behind an older couple, both in thick night robes.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Flash got himself killed,” the man said without turning.

  “Murder?”

  “Big old messy one,” the woman said.

  “Someone tore into Flash good,” the man took up again. “Super found him after we complained of some ungodly screaming from his unit.”

  I imagined a similar scene to the one in Chinatown.

  “Did they catch the guy?” I asked.

  “Nun-uh.” The man cocked his head up. “Broke out through the window, must’ve went down the fire escape.”

  “Either that or had wings,” the woman put in, “cause the man live twelve stories up.”

  Yeah, nastiest wings you ever saw, lady. Which meant we had two shriekers on the loose.

  “What sort of work did Flash do?” I needed to find some sort of connection between the conjurers, a common cause. That the couple seemed to know the latest victim was to my good fortune—not something I fell into very often.

  But instead of popping off another response, they turned around for the first time. Beyond their glasses, I watched squinting suspicions take hold. So long, fortune. Not only was I foreign to the neighborhood, but my face was freshly banged up. I followed the man’s gaze to my gloves, both bloodstained from patting down the Chinatown conjurer.

  “O-officer!” the man called over a shoulder as he backed his wife away. “Officer!”

  “Now wait a minute,” I said, showing a palm.

  Bad move. Now the woman could see the blood. She responded with a piercing scream.

  That would get someone’s attention. Lowering my head into the shadow of my hunched-up collar, I wheeled and strolled south, Mr. Nonchalant himself. I kept an ear trained on the excitement of voices behind me. When I picked out “white man” and “killer,” I decided to speed my pace.

  To an all out sprint.

  “Stop!” a woman’s voice called.

  Sorry, Officer, but being nabbed for a probation violation is bad enough. Being nabbed with the blood of another stiff on my hands, and without a good explanation of how it got there? Yeah, not gonna happen.

  I rounded the corner of the building as a pair of cracks sounded behind me.

  Of course, you could just shoot me dead.

  For the second time that night, I was in full flight mode. I narrowed my sights on a south-facing entrance to the same apartment building. But instead of ducking inside, I pressed my back to the ninety-degree angle the jutting entrance made with the building’s brick siding.

  Holding my cane at chin level, I whispered a Word: “Oscurare.”

  As the police officer slapped around the corner into view, the white opal in my cane absorbed the immediate light. The shadow I stood inside turned darker, more obscuring.

  Slowing, the officer snapped on a flashlight and held it level with her firearm. The beam swept side to side, then shot under a pair of stripped cars leaning curbside. Ninety-nine percent of the current force would have said, “The hell wi
th it,” backed away, lived to police another day. Hamilton Heights at night was no place for a cop to be caught alone. But it seemed my pursuer belonged to that hallowed one percent who still believed in Serving and Protecting.

  Lucky me.

  At that thought, the beam glared across my face. The officer began running my way.

  Not officer, though—detective. As in Vega.

  I felt explanations bunching up in the back of my throat, none worth a spit. To Detective Vega, I was just another degenerate in a city running over with them—not someone trying to help clean up the mess. Nothing I said would change that. Even in the dark, I could see her glossy black eyebrows creasing sharply down.

  But she wasn’t hitting me with the light anymore. The beam was trained on the entrance I was hidden beside. She hurried past my spot and disappeared. I listened to a large door shake but remain locked. Detective Vega huffed out a sigh. The beam swung around, this time into the street.

  My knees buckled in relief—until a pair of male officers came running up, their own flashlight beams wavering dangerously close. I stiffened straight, wondering how long I could hold the spell.

  “Find him?” the larger officer asked.

  “I think he went in,” Vega said from just out of sight. “Locked the door behind him.”

  “Want us to do a top-to-bottom,” the other one asked, clearly uncomfortable with his own suggestion. Beside his partner, he looked like a twelve-year-old. They had chosen a spot five feet in front of me to hold their end of the meeting. If I reached out with my cane, I could have goosed either one.

  “No.” Vega joined the meeting in profile. “I want you to check on one of our probationers, make sure he’s home.”

  You cannot be serious.

  “What’s the name?”

  I closed my eyes. Please, not—

  “Everson Croft,” Vega said. “The address is in the system. West Tenth, I think.”

  “We’re on it.”

  As the officers took off, Detective Vega gave the street another pass with her light. I’d tried to keep my cane concealed while fleeing, but I hadn’t been careful enough, it seemed. She must have seen it. At least my cane was doing a better job of concealing me at the moment.

  Detective Vega lowered her light. Something in the disappointment, if not defeat, of the gesture poked me square in the sympathy center. My own night wasn’t going much better. Under different circumstances, I might have pulled her into a hug. Then again, Vega didn’t strike me as a cuddler.

  Gun in hand, she stomped back toward the front of the building, a muttered threat trailing behind her.

  “And if you’re not home, Croft…”

  All right, sympathy time over. If I didn’t want to learn the second part of Vega’s threat, I needed to figure out how to race a speeding police cruiser one-hundred thirty blocks south.

  And win.

  16

  I ran south for several blocks before cutting west.

  I’d already eliminated the subway as an option. Too unreliable. My plan was to flag a cab, empty my wallet onto his lap, and have him turn the West Side Highway into his personal Autobahn. The police cruiser had taken off down Fredrick Douglass Boulevard a minute before, bottoming out at an intersection. I was gambling they’d hold that course, hopefully hit a traffic snag or twelve from Midtown south.

  But for my plan to work, I needed a taxi. I pulled up wheezing at the edge of St. Nicholas Park, where the danger factor lessened slightly, and peered down the street to the glowing entrance of a metro stop.

  Not a single cab.

  “Oh, c’mon,” I shouted in frustration, “it’s not even a full moon!” Our wooded parks had a bit of a werewolf—or blood-thirsty feral dog—problem, depending on who you talked to.

  I sized up the few cars parked along the curb. Even if I could’ve hotwired one, I wouldn’t have known how to drive it. (Hey, I grew up in the city). That left hijacking the next vehicle that happened to pass. Or acting like a wizard.

  Ducking tree branches, I hurried up a cement staircase into the park. The path it led to was little more than a crumbling line of pavement, quickly swallowed by a decade’s worth of overgrowth. Joggers, bikers, and strollers—not to mention the Department of Parks and Rec—had long since abandoned St. Nicholas to its new denizens: an assortment of shadow creatures and the occasional junky desperate enough to shoot up back here.

  I didn’t go far, veering off path to scrabble over an eruption of boulders. Inside, I discovered a small dirt-packed clearing. As any druid would tell you, mineral-rich stones made good energy containers. I kicked aside some soiled clothing, drug needles, and what might have been a human femur and looked around. It smelled like a Porta-Potty, but the space would do for my spell.

  Using the tip of my sword, I drew a man-hole sized circle in the dirt and inscribed my family symbol inside: two squares, one offset at forty-five degrees to look like a diamond. I connected the corners with four diagonal lines and scratched a sigil at each end. From inside my coat, I pulled out a tall vial of copper filings and sprinkled them along the furrows.

  To connect the circle to the spell target, I removed three keys from my jangling chain—one gold, one silver, one bronze—to correspond with the three locks on my door. I arranged them near the edges of the casting circle in a triangular pattern and stood back.

  The spell would require energy, and lots of it. That was where I had to be extra careful. I couldn’t afford to let Thelonious through the door. Not tonight, and definitely not out here, where night hags were rumored to wander. Thelonious had chased skirts more putrid, believe me.

  “All right,” I said, shaking my arms loose.

  I was about to attempt a projection spell, one that would manifest a walking, talking likeness of me at the target. Besides requiring a healthy dose of energy, they were tough as hell to get right, especially over long distances. Even then, they were ephemeral. Though I’d practiced the spell countless times, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d put it into actual practice.

  Let’s just say the results had been a mixed bag.

  I stepped into the center of the circle and, feet together, began to chant an ancient Word that translated into home. As the sound vibrated in my core, I pictured the inside of my door as vividly as I could: the molding, the glass peephole, the brass knob. I imagined the feel of the shag rug under my feet, the cavernous space of the loft at my back.

  With every chant, ley energy surged voltage-like through my mental prism, down my body, and into the casting circle. There it coursed along the lines of my symbol, glowing whiter, gaining strength.

  Within minutes, it became a self-sustaining force.

  “Oikos,” I repeated.

  A high resonance began to ring from the door keys. A moment later, the inside of my door wavered into being, a ghost image over the blacked-out park. I was taking shape in my apartment. I channeled more energy, imagining away my bulky attire, replacing it with the cottony feel of pajamas and the loose grip of tube socks.

  “Oikos.”

  I was putting the finishing touches on my bed-headed coif when a knock sounded.

  “Mr. Croft?”

  I’d managed to beat the police officers, but only just. I waited the requisite ten seconds for them to imagine me waking up, climbing out of bed, crossing the room…

  A harder bout of pounding. “Mr. Croft, it’s the police.”

  “Coming,” I called, my voice strange-sounding, as though I were hearing myself from the opposite end of a tunnel.

  I extended a pajama-clad arm forward and twisted the bolts, the hard feel of them also seeming to arrive from a hollow distance. The two officers I’d been hiding from only a short time before appeared in the opening doorway. I blinked between them blearily.

  “Mr. Croft?” the larger one asked from a lumpy boxer’s face.

  “Last time I checked.” I read his name tag. “Officer Dempsey.”

  The two officers took a moment to ex
amine me, no doubt lining up my features with the stats and mug shot on their dashboard computer. The other one’s name was Dipinski, which also seemed to fit him. Something in their stares told me I wasn’t dealing with the department’s sharpest tacks. From experience, I knew that could cut either way.

  “Help you with something?” I asked.

  Dipinski, whose eight-point police hat barely reached the height of my chin, stepped forward. “Have you been home all night?”

  “I have, in fact.” I stifled a fake yawn and gestured vaguely behind me. “Was grading papers till about ten and then conked out.”

  Their eyes darted past me as though eager to find something amiss. I turned with them, mostly out of curiosity. The apartment, superimposed over the park’s boulders, was as neat as I’d left it, Tabitha curled up on her divan, dead to the world. That was one less worry, anyway.

  “Well, consider this a random audit,” Dempsey said.

  His partner aimed a finger up at me. “We come after eight at night and you’re not in, you’re in violation of your probation, bud. And then guess what? We’re going to take a little ride.”

  Yeah, and had I goosed you with my cane back there, dipshit, you’d be duck-walking in those little polyester pants.

  “Got it,” I said.

  Dipinski glared at me as though trying to decide whether my curt response was meant as an insult. While it was true I held him in roughly the same regard as a peanut, I just needed these guys gone.

  At last he lowered his finger and began to back off. That was when the image wavered.

  Spent energy was leaving the spell, dammit, and I was in no position to resume incanting. Though I managed to steady the projection by force of will, Dipinski had caught the disruption. His small, freckled face pinched into a squint. Once more, the spell tried to tremble away.

  “I don’t believe it!” his partner exclaimed, seeming to choke on his own breath.

  I drew back before realizing he wasn’t looking at me. Following his floating finger, I found Tabitha stretching and rising to her haunches.