The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Read online

  I staggered to my feet, recalling all that had happened last night. The deception, Bertrand’s summoning, Thelonious. I could feel the incubus spirit now, a dark twining, a stain on my soul.

  “You are a fool.”

  I wheeled to find a tall man stepping from Flor’s room. Though he was without his peasant hat and no longer spoke in broken English, I recognized him by his battered rubber boots. The cart driver paced into the courtyard, The Book of Souls open in his hands.

  “I told you the journey would be your death,” he said.

  I didn’t like his threatening tone. “Who are you?” I asked, stooping for a rock.

  He raised his disfigured face from the book. When I drew back the rock in warning, he flicked his fingers and uttered something. An invisible force hit my hand, knocking the rock away.

  “You are the grandson of Asmus Croft.” He appraised me with sober eyes, his left one cloudy from the wolf attack.

  I rubbed my hand. “You knew him?”

  “Of course.” The dragon ring on his third finger gleamed dully as he closed the book. “He was a member of the Order, a principal in the war against the Inquisition, a grand mage.”

  “A wizard?”

  The man’s statement seemed to affirm something I had known on a cellular level, and it explained so much. There was no time to marvel, though. I sensed danger around the man. He had made the perilous journey through the forest, after all, and just disarmed me with a word and gesture.

  “Who are you?” I glanced around. “What are you doing here?”

  “I am called Lazlo. I am a Keeper of the Books.”

  “Keeper of…?” I quickly fit the pieces together. “So you’re the one who hid the books in the vault? Wh-who set up the spell to animate the gargoyles?” I recalled the battered looters downstairs and stepped back.

  “Books must be kept from certain hands.” He tapped his scarred temple as he strode forward. “Certain minds.”

  “Look, I’ll leave here and never come back, never talk about the texts again. I-I’ll forget everything I saw. I promise.”

  When Lazlo arrived in front of me, I sensed a being who was much older than he appeared. And had he said something about a war against the Inquisition? Could that have been the “awful war” Nana mentioned? But the Inquisition was centuries ago. My mind seized on the poster in Grandpa’s closet, the one advertising “Asmus the Great!” at Barnum’s American Museum. The depicted stage magician hadn’t been his grandfather. It had been Grandpa himself.

  “You have read the Words,” Lazlo said. “You have spoken them. And yet here you stand while your friends are fallen.” His gaze shifted from James to Flor, then to the pile of clothes that had belonged to Bertrand. “It means you are a magic born, like your grandfather.”

  “What?”

  “But you are still a fool. You made an accord with an ancient being, one that would have consumed a lesser soul. Such an accord might be tempered with practice, but it can never be unbound. You are marked for all time, Everson Croft.” The judgment in his tone made me shudder. “I have contacted those more knowledgeable in such matters. I am waiting to hear from them.”

  “Hear what?”

  “Whether to train you into our Order or to destroy you.”

  I once wondered what it was like for a man awaiting execution to hear whether a last-minute stay had been granted. Now I knew. It was a hard stone in the pit of my stomach. A prickling nausea. A constant disbelieving. While Lazlo took care of the bodies, I spent the day confined to my prayer cell—organizing my pack, reflecting on my life, and, yes, praying.

  Praying and wondering.

  Grandpa must have suspected I was a magic born, as Lazlo put it. But why hadn’t he said anything? Or had he? I remembered him placing the necklace with the heavy coin around my neck. Wear it in the city, under your shirt. And be very careful the words you speak.

  A warning. But against what?

  He had given me something else of his, the day before his death, though I hadn’t recognized it at the time.

  The day was Sunday. I had ridden the train in from the city for the weekend. Nana and I attended morning Mass at the neighborhood cathedral, one that never seemed to resonate for me in the same way St. Martin’s in Manhattan had. Afterwards, when Nana had gone upstairs for her nap, Grandpa called me into his study.

  “Everson,” he said, turning toward me from his desk. His cane rested across his long knees, the same cane he had carried since as far back as I could remember, whose hidden blade had once bitten my finger. “It seems I am having trouble opening it. Would you try?”

  A bracing fear seized me, similar to the one I had felt upon being discovered in his closet. I hadn’t seen the blade since that night, almost eight years before, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it again.

  “Yeah … sure.”

  “Hold it at the top and middle, like this.”

  I did as Grandpa said, the wood smooth and cool in my uncertain grip.

  “Now do not think about it,” he said. “Just pull.”

  The cane seemed to catch at first. No, clench. It was clenching. But after another moment, the wood warming in my hands, it released, sliding apart in a single smooth stroke. I looked at the handsome sword I held in my right hand and then at the staff in my left. I was surprised at how comforting their weight felt, like they were extensions of my arms.

  But more than that, they felt … empowering.

  “Very good,” Grandpa said, taking them back from me. He slid the sword home again, the two parts he had wanted me to separate slotting along an invisible seam. “It remembers you.”

  Remembers?

  A flash of him thumbing away my blood and running it along the sword blade came back to me. But before I could ask what he meant, Grandpa turned to his desk. “If you’ll excuse me, Everson, I have some things to tie up now.”

  Our final conversation. So little said—and yet maybe that had been the point.

  I was pulled from the memory by a shadow in the doorway. I turned to find Lazlo’s tall form approaching, the pale scars across his face glowing in the late light. I stood at rigid attention.

  “I have heard,” he said, his voice grave.

  I almost couldn’t form the single syllable, my mouth was so dry. “And?”

  He stepped all the way into the room. Cold power seemed to warp the air around his hands. My heart beat like a dusty drum, but I refused to cower. Whatever the answer, I sensed he had been right. The journey to Dolhasca had been my death. The old Everson Croft was no more.

  “As decreed by the Order,” Lazlo said, “I am to initiate you into training tonight.”

  Demon Moon

  Book 1

  1

  I blew out a curse as the first cold droplets of rain pelted my face and punched through my magic. As if I wasn’t already running late.

  Making an umbrella of my coat collar, I stooped into a run, skirting bags of garbage that swelled from the fronts of row houses like pustules, but it was no use. The downpour that blackened the sidewalk and drove rats from the festering piles also broke apart my hunting spell.

  And it had been one of my better ones.

  I took refuge on a crumbling porch and shook out my coat. I was in the pit of the East Village, and it stunk. Except for a flicker of street light, the block was midnight dark, the building across the way a brick shell, hollowed out by arson. Not the domicile of the conjurer I needed to stop. Or more likely save.

  Assuming I could find him now.

  “Seguire,” I said in a low, thrumming voice.

  Most hunting spells worked like a dowsing rod, pulling the user toward the source of something. In this case, taboo magic. But reliable hunting spells, such as those needed to navigate New York’s convoluted streets, required time to prepare. And even then they were delicate.

  “Seguire,” I repeated, louder.

  Though the storm was already sweeping off, the spell refused to take shape again. I swore under
my breath. Magic and moving water made poor bedfellows. And here I’d dropped a fat hundred on the booster: ground narwhale tusk. Sunk cost, I thought bitterly as I hustled back to the sidewalk. There were a lot of those in wizardry, my svelte wallet the proof.

  Splashing in the direction I’d been pulled before the cloudburst, I gave up on the hunting spell and resorted to twenty-twenty vision, scanning passing buildings for signs of life.

  As the sidewalks thickened with larger mounds of garbage, the rats became more territorial. I knocked aside several with my walking cane. The soul eaters that hunkered like shadows in the below-ground stairwells weren’t quite so bold. They watched with hollow eyes before shrinking from the protective power of my necklace, in search of weaker, drug-addled prey. Luckily for them, post-Crash New York was a boomtown for chemical addiction.

  Unfortunately for me, the financial crash had also made a growth stock of amateur conjurers.

  They tended to be men and women seeking lost money or means—or simply some meaning where their prior faith, whether spiritual or material, seemed to have failed them. Understandable, certainly, but as far as my work went, a royal pain in the ass. Most mortals could only access the nether realms, and shallowly at that. In their fat-fingered efforts, they called up grubby creatures better left undisturbed. Ones more inclined to make a sopping meal of a conjurer’s heart than grant his material wishes.

  Trust me, it wasn’t pretty.

  Neither was the job of casting the charming beings back to their realms, but it was the job I’d been decreed. I had some nice acid burns and a missing right ear lobe to prove it. A business card might have read:

  Everson Croft

  Wizard Garbage Collector

  Nice, huh? But unlike the city’s striking sanitation workers, I couldn’t just walk off the job.

  Small messes became big messes, and in magical terms, that was a recipe for ruin. The apocalyptic kind. Better to scoop up the filth, drop it down the hatch, and batten down the lid. Plenty of ancient evils lurked in the Deep Down, their senses attuned to the smallest openings to our world. Human history was dotted with near misses, thanks in part to the vigilance of my lineage.

  The thought of being the one to screw up that streak was hell on a good night’s sleep, let me tell you.

  At Avenue C, I rounded a small mountain of plowed trash and shuffled to a stop. A new scent was skewering the vaporous reek, hooking like a talon in my throat. A sickly-sweet scent, like crushed cockroach or…

  Fear spread through me as I raised my eyes toward the source: a steep apartment building with a pair of lights burning near the top floor. Dark magic dissipated above the building in a blood-red haze.

  I was too late. And whatever the conjurer had summoned was no cockroach.

  “Crap,” I spat, and launched into a run.

  The smell was distinctly demonic.

  2

  I stumbled into a blacked-out lobby, raised my ironwood cane, and uttered, “Illuminare.”

  White light swelled from an opal inset in the cane’s end to reveal an upended concierge’s desk and graffiti-smeared walls. The single elevator door opposite me was open. I moved toward it, noting the message sprayed over the burned-out elevator lights: “STEP RIGHT IN,” with an arrow inviting riders into a carless shaft. I peeked down the two-story plunge to a subbasement, where I could hear something large thump-dragging around.

  No thanks.

  I hit the stairwell and took the steps two at a time. The cloying smell from the street sharpened in my sinuses, making my eyes water. I had smelled demon before, but in Eastern Europe, years ago—the near-death experience had marked my passage into wizardhood, in a way.

  But no, never here. Not in New York.

  Which meant a seriously evil conjurer had slipped under the Order’s watchful gaze. I considered sending up a message, but that would take energy I couldn’t afford at the moment—not to mention time. The Oracular Order of Magi and Magical Beings was an esteemed and ancient body. Accordingly, they made decisions at a pace on par with the Mendenhall glacier.

  That, and I was still on their iffy list for what had happened ten years earlier, during the aforementioned demonic encounter. Never mind that my actions (which, okay, had involved summoning an incubus spirit) saved my life, or that I was only twenty-two at the time.

  So yeah, the less contact with the Order, the better, I’d since learned.

  Between the third and fourth floors, the stairwell began to vibrate. At the fifth floor—the one on which I’d observed the lights from outside—the vibrating became a hammering. I pulled the stairwell door open onto a stink of hard diesel and understood the commotion’s source: a gas-powered generator. At the hallway’s end, light outlined a door.

  I was halfway to the door when a woman’s scream pierced the tumult. Jerking my cane into two parts, I gripped a staff in my left hand and a steel sword in my right. A shadow grew around the door a second before it banged open.

  The man was six foot ten, easy. Blades of black tattooing scaled his pin-pierced face, giving over to an all-out ink fight on his shaved scalp. Leather and spiked studs stretched over powerful arms holding what looked like a pump-action shotgun.

  The sorcerer’s bodyguard?

  He inclined forward, squinting into the dim hallway. The screaming behind him continued, accompanied now by angry beats and the wail of a guitar. I exhaled and sheathed my sword.

  Punks. The literal kind.

  “Hey!” Tattoo Face boomed as I retreated back toward the stairwell. “You’re missing a kickass set. Blade’s only on till two.” Then as a further inducement: “Half cover, since you got here late.”

  I sniffed the air, but the generator’s fumes were still clouding over the demon smell. I couldn’t fix on a direction. I returned to Tattoo Face, shouting to be heard. “Do you live here?”

  He shrugged as he lowered the shotgun. “Live. Squat.”

  “Seen anyone strange in the building?” I peered past him into the hazy room of head-bangers, the pink-haired singer/screamer—Blade, I presumed—standing on the hearth of a bricked-over fireplace. I decided to rephrase the question. “Anyone who looks like they don’t belong?”

  Behind all of his ink, the punk’s face was surprisingly soft, almost boyish, but it hardened as I stepped more fully into the generator-powered light. I followed his gaze down to where my tweed jacket and dark knit tie peeked from the parting flaps of my trench coat. Beneath his own jacket, he was wearing a bandolier of shotgun shells.

  “You a narc or something?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Just looking for someone.”

  His eyes fell further to my walking cane, which, not to polish my own brass, was at definite odds with someone six feet tall and in his apparent prime. My hairline had receded slightly, but still… Tattoo Face frowned studiously, as though still undecided if he could trust me.

  “I help people,” I added.

  After another moment, he nodded. “Strange guy showed up a couple of weeks ago. Hauled a big trunk upstairs.” He raised his eyes. “Unit right above ours. Talks to himself. Same things, over and over.”

  I sprinted back to the stairwell, not bothering with the usual pretense of a trick knee to explain the cane. Tattoo Face seemed not to notice.

  “Blade’s on till two!” he shouted after me.

  I raised a hand in thanks for the reminder, but I was still mulling the talks to himself part. The over and over sounded like chanting.

  Add them up and I’d found my conjurer.

  3

  On the sixth floor, the demon stink was back. And gut-rottingly potent. I called more light to my cane and advanced on the door at hallway’s end, weathered floorboards creaking underfoot.

  The knob turned in my grasp, but one or more bolts were engaged. Crouching, I sniffed near the dark door space and immediately regretted the decision. “Holy hell,” I whispered against my coat sleeve. The sickly-sweet scent burned all the way up to my brain, like ammonia.r />
  Drawing the sword from my cane, I pointed it at the door and uttered, “Vigore.”

  A force shot down the length of the blade and snapped the bolts. The door blew inward. With another incantation, the light from my staff slid into a curved shield. I crouched, ready for anything, but except for the vibrating coming from one floor down, the space beyond the door was still and silent.

  I tested the threshold with the tip of my sword. It broke the plane cleanly, which meant no warding spells.

  Odd…

  I entered, sword and glowing staff held forward. The unit was a restored tenement that, like many in the East Village, had been written off in the Crash’s rumbling wake and left to die. Shadows climbed and fell over a newspaper-littered living room. I crept past sticks of curb-side furniture and a spill of canned goods before ducking beneath a line of hanging boxer briefs, still damp.

  Hardly the evil-sorcerer sanctum I’d imagined.

  I stuck my light into one of the doorless bedrooms, the silence tense against my eardrums. A thin roll-up mattress lay slipshod on a metal bed frame, dirty sheets puddled around its legs. A cracked window framed the bombed-out ruin of a neighboring building. When a pipe coughed, I wheeled, my gaze falling to a crowded plank-and-cinderblock bookcase.

  In the light of my staff, I scanned book spines that might as well have read “Amateur Conjurer.” Abrahamic texts, including a Bible, gave way to dime-store spell books and darker tomes, but without organization. Spaghetti shots in the dark. Someone looking for power or answers.

  So where had the demon come from? More crucially, where had it gone?