Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  I took aim at the ghoul’s head and squeezed. A pair of silver slugs slammed it sideways. The ghoul yowled and kicked through a line of benches. Wooden planks and iron flew up around its hulking body. My backward steps became an awkward jog, jostling my aim. My next shot missed entirely.

  The ghoul loped into a run, anticipating its midnight snack.

  I wasn’t going to outrace it. Stopping, I set my legs in a shooter’s stance and aimed with both hands. I tried to remember what the instructor at the firing range had taught me, oh, six or seven years ago. One of the ghoul’s yellow eyes bobbed in and out of the revolver’s sight, growing larger. I squeezed three times. The final crack sprayed fluid and snapped the ghoul’s head back. Both hands flew to its right eye as the creature fell to the pavement, howling.

  “Go on,” I shouted, stomping my foot. “Get out of here!”

  The ghoul thrashed up and scrambled off. They were survivalists first, man-eaters second. I waited until its pained cries and smacking footfalls faded east before returning the revolver to my pants.

  All right. I let out a tremulous sigh. Back to business.

  Where the park opened out, I climbed into the dry wading pool and approached the central ring from which water used to fount. Washington Square Arch, no longer lit at night, loomed as a massive silhouette to the north. I knelt at the pool’s center, dry leaves crackling beneath me, and wound a small music box. When I released the key, a tinkling melody rose into the night.

  I set the box on the ring and whispered, “Effie.”

  I’d found the music box in an antique shop years before. Curious, I took it to a local diviner. She told me it had belonged to a girl who succumbed to yellow fever in the 1800s and was buried in the city’s pauper grave. Her remains now rested among twenty-thousand others, roughly beneath where I was kneeling. Her spirit, however, was as restless as mine.

  “That you, Everson?” an innocent voice asked, clear as a bell.

  When I turned, the eight-year-old girl was standing behind me, eyes large and inquisitive. Plain brushed hair fell over the shoulders of the gown she’d probably been buried in, light blue with a broad ribbon fastened belt-like above her waist. Her shoes were simple clogs.

  “Hi there, Effie.”

  “You brought me music box,” she exclaimed, moving past me to stoop over her former possession.

  I smiled sadly. Ghosts weren’t souls. They were best described as living echoes, possessing the appearance and personality of the departed, but little in the way of free will. The more malignant ones could drive a person to insanity, true, but Effie’s ghost represented the sweet end of the spectrum. My heart broke a little as I watched her attempt to pick up the box.

  To distract her, I said, “What did you do today, Effie?”

  “I tried making friends with a boy, but ’e wouldn’t talk to me.” When she turned, her lips were bent in an indignant frown. She was no doubt referring to a human boy without Sight.

  “Probably a loser,” I said. “What about the friends you already have?”

  “They’re a’right,” she replied. “But Mary’s gettin’ plumb on me nerves with her tales.”

  “Ugh. Mary and her tales.” I shook my head. “Hey, uh, speaking of your friends, I have a question I’d like you to ask them.”

  “Whut is it?”

  “You know St. Martin’s Cathedral downtown, right?” Fortunately, it was old enough to have been standing during Effie’s time in New York. I watched her nod. “Good. I want you to ask your friends if they’ve seen anything unusual around there in the last month or so.”

  “Like whut?” she asked.

  I was throwing a blind net. Ghosts were drawn to ley energy, and with the intensity around St. Martin’s, I was hoping one or several in Effie’s circle had made their way down there, maybe picked up on something. A shame I hadn’t befriended any of the ghosts at St. Martin’s, but such things took time.

  “Just … anything that might have struck them as odd,” I answered.

  Effie appeared to think about that before nodding her head. “A’right,” she said. She turned back to her old music box and, in a soft, haunting voice, added words to the tinkling lullaby.

  Sweet babe, a golden cradle holds thee

  Soft snow-white fleece enfolds thee

  In airy bower I’ll watch thy sleeping

  Where branchy trees in the breeze are sweeping

  Ghosts usually required a full day/night cycle to carry out requests, but I was in no hurry to return to my sheet-tangled bed. Ghouls or not, it was a sleepless night. Too many thoughts knocking around my head: at-large shriekers, no-magic decrees, the cathedral murder, the police sketch, the mystery person watching my apartment, my impending hearing at the college. It made the straightforward existence of the undead seem enviable in contrast.

  I wound the box for Effie several more times. Sometime after three, her apparition faded along with her solemn notes.

  24

  It was half past eight the next morning by the time I made it through the pedestrian checkpoint. My NYPD card had worked its charm a second time, but even so, I was thirty minutes late.

  I hurried south from the Wall, aware I was challenging Arnaud by returning to his district. I pictured the vampire at his top-story window but doubted the drizzly morning offered him much of a view. The head of his building had been hidden by a drift of low clouds since early light, meaning he couldn’t see me. When I peeked up again, my face prickled with current.

  Damn. Something told me he could.

  I dropped my head and cut west to put a few skyscrapers between us. Soon, I was coming up on the steps of St. Martin’s. Beyond the tall bronze doors stood Father Vick, the image of patience.

  “Forgive me,” I said, hustling up to the other side of the threshold and shaking the collection of moisture from my coat. “Should have known to add an extra hour to the commute.”

  “It’s certainly not what it used to be,” he said with a smile. “Please, Everson, come in.”

  The invitation. I peeked past him to make sure no police were inside—or Detective Vega herself—and crossed the threshold. The wave that rippled through me felt thinner than last time. It didn’t induce the same queasiness or deprive me of quite as much power. I wondered whether the shocked and grieving atmosphere of the past two days had something to do with that.

  “I’m back here,” he said.

  I followed his shifting cassock through several doors and across an inner courtyard. The cathedral around us was stone silent. It wasn’t until we had reached his one-room apartment that he spoke again.

  “How have you been, Everson? I was sorry to hear of your grandparents’ passing.”

  He left the door open a crack behind me, allowing a slipstream of fresh air into the monastic space.

  “I’m well,” I replied. “Busy. Teaching at Midtown College and now consulting for the NYPD.” I intentionally left out that I was doing the second to get six months whacked off my probation—all in the hopes of saving the first. I didn’t need to share the wizarding bit, either.

  Father Vick moved a pile of prayer books from the seat of a wooden armchair and gestured for me to sit.

  “So you’re back in the city?” He placed the books on a small desk beneath his lone window and beside what appeared to be a draped handkerchief, then turned his desk chair so he could face me.

  I nodded a little uneasily, sensing the question in his raised eyebrows.

  “Well, I hope you know you’re always welcome back at St. Martin’s,” he said.

  I was pretty sure the threshold would beg to differ, as well as higher-ups in the denomination who hadn’t much cared for my published thesis on the First Saints manuscript.

  “That means a lot,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He studied me for a moment, hand on his cinnamon beard, before breaking into a pleasant chuckle. “I remember when you were in my beginning Sunday school class. You couldn’t have been more than five or six. The
biblical stories fascinated you, but you never liked to hear about anyone getting hurt.” He chuckled again. “At the time, I thought, ‘Now here’s someone destined for the ministry.’ I sense, though, that you help people in other ways?”

  “I do my best,” I said noncommittally.

  His pale blue eyes studied me again until I felt my body wanting to shift.

  “Before we get to your questions,” he said, “is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

  As a shadow exorcist, he could perceive a person’s light/dark conflicts—a skill honed through faith and enhanced by the ley energy that coursed up through the cathedral’s foundation. By the subtle shift in his tone, I could tell Father Vick had seen something in me. Whether it had to do with my magical bloodline or my darker Thelonious nature, I couldn’t say.

  “Thank you, Father, but I’m not here for myself.”

  “Very well,” Father Vick said. He set his clasped hands on his lap to signal he was ready to begin.

  “Would you mind going over what happened the, uh—” I fumbled for my pocket notebook. “—the night of Father Richard’s murder, leading up to the discovery of his body the next morning?”

  “Following Wednesday night’s Mass, the four of us who live here—the groundskeeper, an acolyte in residence, Father Richard, and myself—we had a late dinner and then retired to our rooms, around ten. Father Richard must have gotten up at some point to go to the sacristy.”

  “Would that be unusual?” I patted my pockets for something to write with.

  Father Vick handed me a ballpoint pen from his desk. “No, he would often spend time there when he couldn’t sleep. An hour or so organizing the cupboards, polishing the chalices, preparing for the next day’s service.”

  “Did everyone know about this?”

  “Those of us here, yes. Though maybe not the acolyte. Malachi has only been with us for a couple of months. I don’t know if Father Richard’s habit was ever mentioned in his presence. In any case, nothing was heard that night. The next morning, Cyrus, our groundskeeper, found him…” Father Vick frowned severely as though to prevent tears from forming in his eyes. “Found him on the floor. Just as you probably saw him the other day.”

  I gave the moment its solemn due before continuing. “Is the cathedral locked at night?”

  Father Vick composed himself, then nodded. “It’s Cyrus’s duty to secure all of the doors and windows, and he’s very regimental about it. Our locks are security grade, reinforced by the power of the church. No one’s ever broken in, and there were no signs anyone had.”

  “Was everything locked the next morning, as well?”

  “Yes. Cyrus checked.”

  I finished writing, then tapped the pen against my chin. That seemed to rule out someone slipping in with the day crowd, hiding until he could take care of the rector, and then stealing back out. But it didn’t rule out lock picking.

  “In the last few weeks, did you notice anyone watching the church, staking it out, anything like that?”

  “I stay so busy, Everson. I can’t say that I did.”

  He seemed to be apologizing for his lapse in vigilance, which sent a fresh wave of guilt through me. Here I was, posing as a police investigator, interrogating my bereaved former youth minister, all so I might keep my day job. Despite what I’d told Father Vick earlier, I was here for myself.

  “Had the rector received any recent threats?”

  “Several from the White Hand in Chinatown. The church’s commitment to human rights had been butting up against their business interests. The police are supposed to be pursuing that angle.”

  I nodded. Maybe I’d leave that one to Detective Vega. I still doubted a Chinatown hit man would have left an obscure message in pre-Latin. Why not the White Hand insignia, meant to inspire fear? I decided to go bolder.

  “How about threats from less … mundane quarters?”

  Father Vick looked at me thoughtfully before gazing out the window. The drizzle had become a steady rain, splashing over the courtyard’s dark-red flagstones.

  “Father Richard came from a more conservative tradition,” he said after a moment, “one that believed all magic was the work of Satan or one of his horde. Even sacred magic could open one up to evil forces, he insisted. I tried to help him see otherwise, but he was very rigid in his mindset.”

  I thought of the violence at the crime scene. “Were his views well known?”

  “Well, he didn’t seem to think the city was doing enough about the ‘occult problem,’ as he called it.” When Father Vick turned from the window to face me again, it was with a look of apology. He sensed my magic. “He had been preparing to meet with city commissioners and police officials. He wanted them to start cracking down on the ‘openly-practicing’—another one of his terms.”

  I doubted this was something Father Vick had shared with the investigators. If the druid cult had gotten wind of the rector’s campaign, maybe they had decided to preempt it. “Have you ever heard of a group called Black Earth?” I asked.

  Father Vick frowned steeply in thought. “I’m aware that esoteric groups exist in the city, but my work takes me into the lives of individuals. Those who have lapsed beyond doubt into darkness, aligned with the shadows that dwell there. I’ve never believed the church’s role should be castigation, Everson. We should offer sanctuary and, when possible, healing. Like that young boy in my Sunday school class, I don’t like to see people hurt.”

  He hadn’t answered my question, but before I could try again, a sharp pain stole my breath away. Father Vick had raised two fingers, and a force was stabbing through me.

  I stared back at him. What in the hell…?

  But he wasn’t causing the pain, I realized, not directly.

  Thelonious had been caught off guard and was now burrowing into my energy like a giant tick. Father Vick’s powers of exorcism were strong, but not strong enough to dislodge a determined incubus. I raised a hand to show him I was okay. The force and pain relented.

  I searched for words to paper over the awkward moment, but Father Vick’s pale eyes were gazing past me. I turned and jumped a little to discover someone standing just outside the cracked-open door—a young woman in a white robe, from the segment I could see.

  “Come in, Malachi,” Father Vick said.

  Malachi? The door opened wider, and I saw the person was, in fact, a dude. Though he must have been twenty or so, his nervous, narrow face remained in smooth adolescence. His hair had also thrown me, brown hair long enough to have been gathered into a ponytail in back.

  “Malachi is our resident acolyte,” Father Vick informed me as way of introduction. “He’s interested in St. Martin’s history and has been going through our vast archives. Some fascinating items in there.”

  I stood and shook the boy’s pliant hand. “Everson Croft.”

  The young man mumbled something that was barely audible, his smallish eyes flitting around my gaze.

  “Did you have something to tell me?” Father Vick asked him.

  “Um, the police are here. They want to see you again.”

  I knew there was a chance of that happening, but crap.

  “Have them wait for me in the nave. We shouldn’t be more than another minute.”

  As the door closed behind Malachi, Father Vick gave me an ironic smile. “It looks like your colleagues have more questions.” He shrugged as he stood. “Given the circumstances, who can blame them? By all appearances, the murder was committed by someone inside these old walls.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Besides no one having any grievances against Brother Richard? Cyrus is too old to have carried out so violent an attack, and Malachi too gentle. There is no malice in either of them.”

  Father Vick did have that perceptual ability, but I noticed he’d left himself out.

  “I have to ask,” I said, already wincing inwardly at what I was about to say. “Did the two of you have any conflicts? I mean, you seem to have
been divided on the issue of magic.”

  “A fair question,” he replied, holding my gaze. “And yes, we did argue about the matter. But you don’t have to see eye to eye on every issue to be close.” Grief clouded his face. “If you had siblings, you would understand.”

  I nodded and lowered my gaze. Congratulations, Everson, you’ve just leveled up in shittiness.

  Father Vick placed his hands warmly on my shoulders. “It has been good to see you, Everson. And I meant what I said. You’re welcome at St. Martin’s anytime. You’re not the exile you seem to believe yourself to be.”

  “Good to see you too, Father.”

  With a final smile, he stepped past me. “Well, I suppose I need to get to another meeting. And if I read your earlier reaction correctly, you need a back door to depart through.”

  “I guess investigators have their own conflicts,” I said sheepishly.

  “Say no more. You can leave through the graveyard.” He led me out to the covered walk that ran around the courtyard. I noticed he took care to lock the door behind him. “I’ll have Cyrus let you out.”

  I glimpsed something dark and shining in his ear.

  “Father, you’re bleeding.” I pointed to my right ear.

  He touched his hair-thatched canal, then inspected the blood on the tip of his finger. “Yes, that happens sometimes.” He reached out and washed his finger beneath a string of water falling from the eave of the courtyard. “We are mortals channeling forces far beyond us, after all.”

  25

  I saw what Father Vick meant about Cyrus. The stooped and palsied groundskeeper could hardly heft his ring of keys, much less bring a chalice down on a man’s head with enough force to smite him. And I sensed no magic around him.

  I followed Cyrus out a back door and along a path beaten in the grass. We were in an older part of the graveyard behind the church. Dark, weathered tombstones rose like crooked teeth. Raised sarcophagi leaned here and there, a particularly mossy one in a solitary corner, beneath a knotted willow. Though the rain had passed, the chill air was stippled with moisture. A good day for a blazing fire.