Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  Cyrus unlocked a door in the iron gate that ran along Washington Street. I thanked him and stepped through the curtain of energy that protected the sanctuary. Definitely weaker, I noted.

  My plan was to get home and prepare some spells for a trip to Central Park that night. Yeah, yeah, magic verboten. But I’d already worked it out—I was going to play the dumb card: Ohhh, I thought you meant no magic in relation to the shrieker case. Cue smacking of forehead.

  Would the Order buy it? Who knew, but this was bigger than saving my job. I was thinking about Father Vick now, a man whose paternal concern was still palpable twenty years later. And the way he’d looked when I made him talk about the rector’s death and even suggested he might have had a motive in his slaying?

  So yeah, screw the Order. I’d deal with the fallout later. The more immediate challenge was going to be putting Detective Vega off for another day. At least until I could—

  “Croft!”

  —point her in the right direction.

  I wheeled to find the one-woman Homicide squad striding up behind me, a black umbrella glistening above her stretched-back hair. She was wearing the same style of suit she seemed to favor, black jacket and pants, blouse opened at the neck. It was a good look for her, and if it ain’t broke…

  “What in the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “Besides enjoying the weather?”

  “Were you just inside the church?” When she arrived in front of me, the challenge in her dark eyes told me she already knew the answer.

  “Well, I wasn’t not in the church, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I don’t have time for this, Croft. Yes or no.”

  “Si.”

  “You have no business being in there.”

  “Look,” I said, holding up my hands in a no-harm, no-foul gesture, “my grandmother and I attended St. Martin’s when I was growing up. Father Vick was my youth minister. Thursday was the first time I’d seen him in almost twenty years. He invited me to come back and visit him.” All technically true. “I had some time this morning, so…”

  “Father Victor is a suspect in a homicide investigation—one you’re consulting on, I should remind you. You’re not to fraternize with him until we’ve wrapped up. I thought I made that clear.”

  I was starting to get a little sick of being told what I could and couldn’t do.

  “Oh, c’mon, it’s not like—”

  “I’m dead serious, Croft.”

  “You don’t honestly believe Father Vick had anything to do with the murder. Or are you just aiming for ‘good enough’ again?”

  When her eyes glowered, I realized I’d gone too far. “For your information,” she hissed, drawing up until her umbrella was dripping water in front of my face, “his trace evidence is all over the crime scene.”

  “Yeah, and maybe that’s because he lives and works there.”

  “So you’re an investigator now?”

  “Just…” I took a deep breath and let it out. “Father Vick is a good man. He helps people. Just make sure you talk to those who know him before jumping to any conclusions.” I wasn’t sure whether I was trying to convince Detective Vega or myself. After all these years, how well did I really know him?

  “The message,” Vega said abruptly. “It’s been two days. What do you have?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “I was actually going to call you about that. I’m going to, ah, need another day.”

  “That wasn’t the deal.”

  “Right, but I put out a professional inquiry. I’m expecting an answer tonight.”

  Vega looked at me a long moment, sharp suspicion in her stare, then sighed through her nose. “Tomorrow morning, but that’s it. No more extensions or the deal’s off. We clear?”

  I shifted my cane to my left hand and offered to shake on it.

  But Vega’s gaze remained on my cane, the suspicion back in her eyes. “Ever been to Hamilton Heights, Croft?”

  “I try not to.”

  “Where were you two nights ago?”

  Other than running down a street, being shot at by you? “Home, slogging through student papers. In fact, I received a visit from a couple of your associates. Dempsey and Dipinski?”

  She studied my eyes.

  “Know them?” I asked.

  After another moment, she gave a reluctant nod. “They liked your cat.”

  I laughed. “I’m pretty sure the feeling wasn’t mutual.”

  Vega’s lips pulled to one side, but only slightly. I bet she had a killer smile. “Watch yourself, Croft,” she said as she turned to leave. “I’d hate to have to arrest you again.”

  That makes two of us, I thought as I watched her pace back toward the cathedral.

  26

  I caught a bus up Broadway, disembarking at the heart of Greenwich Village.

  The plan, of course, was to return to my apartment, light a fire, and spend the day indoors, cooking spells. All of that lay west. And yet I felt an urgent pull toward the garbagy, graffiti-bruised East Village and the amateur conjurer who would be rising and shining about now.

  “Better think about this, Everson,” I muttered, leaning against the cornice of a building on West Third. I might get away with playing dumb on the magic ban, I thought as I observed the funeral flow of foot and car traffic, but the “cease pursuit of the matter” part had been pretty plain.

  Still, I’d received no assurance the Order intended to do anything about the “matter” other than call me off it. More likely, whatever they were planning would grow moss before it made it out of committee, by which time our sole lead to the spell supplier could be long gone.

  Anyway, the Order didn’t have eyes on me twenty-four seven. The perks of being a bottom-runger. Their wards would pick up any magic I cast, sure. So I wouldn’t cast any magic. Problem solved.

  But there was still that whole violation-of-decree thing.

  I peered down Third Street, into a wind stinking of trash and diesel. Then I looked west, toward home.

  “Oh, fuck it,” I said, and began kicking my way east.

  Some neighborhoods looked less menacing in the light of day. The East Village wasn’t one of them. Not only were the blackened buildings and trash piles more vivid, but locals were now on the roam, most of them burned out and trashed, too. Beginning at Avenue A, I passed men and women in tatters, yellow skin stretched taut over sharp facial bones, teeth rotten to their roots. A woman with flaking patches of scalp beseeched me for money in a voice that was hardly human. The rest stared from vacant eyes, tagging them as junkies, the soul-eaten, or both.

  I chanted to reinforce the strength of my coin pendant.

  At Avenue C, I spotted a familiar mountain of garbage and, across the street, the conjurer’s apartment building—one of two on the block still standing. Entering the lobby, I hit the stairwell at a jog.

  On the top floor, at the end of the hallway, I readied my cane and threw open the conjurer’s door.

  The room was empty. Against the far wall, the cheap furniture had been piled up, as though someone meant to collect it later, but the line of laundry and spill of canned goods—the signs of habitation—were gone. My one hope was that the conjurer had been robbed while he slept, but he wasn’t in his bedroom. Only the spring metal frame and a scatter of books remained.

  Balls.

  I checked the other rooms to confirm his absence. The table in his makeshift laboratory remained, as well as the mirror, which lay shattered on the floor, but the spell items were missing, probably packed into his trunk and hauled away. I returned to the main room and paced the newspaper-strewn floor in thought.

  Had the conjurer left of his own initiative, or been taken? If the second, there was a good chance the mysterious spell supplier had been involved. Finding the conjurer could mean finding the supplier. There were ways to track the conjurer, but they all involved magic, dammit.

  At that thought, a low humming shook through the floor and into my sho
es. The sensation was followed by the muted cry of guitars.

  Maybe someone had witnessed his departure.

  It took a minute for the guitars to die down and shouted voices to decide someone was knocking at the door. The generator idled down next until I could hear a series of bolts being worked. When the door cracked open, a shotgun barrel appeared beneath a squinting eye. The eye widened in surprise.

  “Mr. Wednesday Night!” Tattoo Face exclaimed. The door opened until his giant frame was standing over me. “We were wondering if you’d come back!” He leaned his pump-action shotgun against the doorframe and clapped my shoulder with enough enthusiasm to send me into a sideways stagger. “Got another gig tonight, and everyone wants you there.”

  I braced myself against the wall. “Really?”

  “Talk about a show stealer,” Blade said, coming up beside him, a rail in comparison. She looked me up and down, her neon-pink smirk reminding me what she’d said the other morning about a strip tease.

  Thanks, Thelonious.

  “Much as I’d, ah, love to come,” I stammered, my face warming like a furnace, “I’ve got a load of work. I was actually stopping by to ask if you knew anything about your upstairs neighbor.”

  “What about him?” Tattoo Face said.

  “Well, it looks like he cleared out. Probably in the last day or so. Know where he might’ve gone?”

  Blade shrugged. “People come and go all the time. Sort of the character of the neighborhood.”

  “Did he have any recent visitors?’

  Tattoo Face worked his lips in thought. “None that I know of.”

  “Guy with stringy hair and thick glasses?” someone asked.

  Blade and Tattoo Face parted so that I could see the young black man with green hair and skin-tight leathers. He was sitting on a couch, fiddling with the tuning knobs on a battered electric guitar, fingers buried in a spray of wires.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s the guy,” I said.

  “Bumped into him on my way in this morning. He was hauling a trunk out into the street.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Far as I could tell.”

  “Did you see which way he was headed?”

  “Not really.” Green Hair remained fixated on his tuning project. “Screamed when he saw me. Something about the End Times. Then he dragged his trunk to the other side of the street and stared till I’d gone inside. Dude was on something. ’Course, so are most the freaks around here.”

  So the conjurer had left solo.

  “All right, guys,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Sure we can’t talk you into making a cameo tonight?” Tattoo Face clasped his meaty hands to his chest in a fervent plea.

  Blade smirked again. “We can probably arrange to have a dancing pole brought up.”

  “In that case…” I said. “Not a chance in hell.”

  I duly weighed the stupidity of what I was about to do before returning to the conjurer’s apartment. Hair made a good target item, and I found several strands in the conjurer’s former bedroom. I placed them in the center of a circle of copper filings. Feather of homing pigeon or, better yet, tusk of narwhale made great catalysts, but I was fresh out.

  Yeah. I was planning to cast a hunting spell right under the Order’s nose.

  I took a breath before aiming the tip of my cane toward the tangle of hair. The incantation was basic. White light swelled from the cane, absorbing essence from the smoldering hair. A few minutes later, after the hair had popped into foul-smelling flames, it was done. I’d get a direction by the time I reached the street.

  If an agent of the Order didn’t swoop down on me before then.

  As I was about to leave the bedroom, a book among the scattered pile of them caught my eye. I lifted the Bible by its pebbly black spine and flopped it open to its back page. Sure enough, stamped in the top left corner in black ink:

  St. Martin’s Cathedral

  New York, NY 10006

  Now that was interesting.

  27

  I hustled down the stairs, already putting my discovery in perspective. St. Martin’s was involved in various outreach programs for the homeless; the conjurer had likely picked up the Bible at a shelter or soup kitchen. Or maybe a parishioner had seen him on the street and handed it to him.

  But call it wizard’s intuition, something about the finding nagged me.

  I filed the discovery away as my shoes hit the sidewalk and the hunting spell tugged my cane south. I assumed the conjurer hadn’t gotten far, given the loaded trunk he was lugging. But blocks later, where the East Village became the Lower East Side, I began to wonder.

  My cane pulled me into the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. I suddenly found myself dodging through a shantytown that spread from the bridge’s massive concrete pylons onto the sidewalk and half the street. Soot-faced residents watched from sagging boxes and tents made from sheets of industrial plastic. The intelligence in their eyes scared the hell out of me. These were the ones who had held jobs and leases but now lacked the means to even leave the city. The ones the Crash had absolutely plowed over.

  As I cleared the underpass, I barely avoided bowling over a man who might have been my high school principal. There was no time to check. At an abandoned police precinct, the spell jerked me hard west. I was practically running to keep up now. The conjurer was close.

  I saw the trunk first, dirty blue with aluminum binding, then the back of the stringy-haired man dragging it. He was almost two blocks ahead of me and looked to be heading for Roosevelt Park.

  “Hey!” I shouted, breaking into a sprint.

  He turned his head enough for me to catch the edge of a thick lens, but he didn’t slow. The light changed at the next intersection, and I pulled up, craning my neck to keep him in view through the traffic. The surrounding businesses told me I was where Chinatown was growing into the Lower East Side.

  “C’mon, dammit,” I whispered, looking for a break in the cars.

  I was too focused on the conjurer to pay much attention to the group of teenagers stepping from a corner store. They were dressed in loose white suits, wife beaters for shirts, their ink black hair slick with something.

  “It’s him,” I heard one of them whisper. “That’s the man.”

  Shoes scuffed. I wheeled in time to see a collapse of bodies. What the…? An incoming fist opened my lower lip. A second blow rammed my temple, icing half my face. The sidewalk slammed into me next. I got my forearms up as stomps joined the descending fists.

  The young men, who remained savagely silent, were enforcers for the White Hand. The suits told me that much. But what in the hell had I done to them? When the toe of a shoe nicked the family jewels, I decided I didn’t care.

  “Vigore!” I thundered.

  The explosion from my cane threw the attackers in all directions. I gained my feet and rotated, sword and staff in hands. A thug who had eaten a light pole crawled in a crippled circle, blood from his face stippling the sidewalk. But the other four jumped up quickly.

  “Stay back,” I warned, summoning a light shield.

  Pedestrians gave us a wide berth, eyes averted. As a general rule, the less you saw on the streets, the better. It was why I hadn’t taken a lot of pains to hide my cane after the police sketch went public. Is that what this is about? I wondered now. I hadn’t seen anything in the paper about a money reward.

  Beretta pistols appeared from waistbands. With subtle jerks of their heads, the thugs tried to encircle me. Naturally, I’d left my own gun at home. The black bores of their weapons eyed my face. Whatever their motive, the thugs had left the street at my back open. Hearing the traffic slow and then idle for a red light, I snorted.

  Amateurs.

  I was two steps into my retreat when a head blow reduced my world to a ringing fog. I plummeted like a bag of bottles into someone’s arms, which hefted me through the side door of a van.

  The enforcers had transport, evidently, and a driver I hadn’t seen.

&
nbsp; I landed on the floor of the van. The thugs piled in after me. A foot forced my face against the gritty metal while sharp knees pinned the length of my body. Not that I had any fight left. I was in Woozyville. As the side door rammed closed and the van jounced from the curb, I found my thoughts fluttering around the conjurer—the key to the demonic summonings—as he drifted farther and farther away.

  28

  I didn’t lose consciousness but would have preferred it to the jack-hammering in my head. Whoever was driving the van wasn’t helping. He made several nauseating turns and hard brakes before rearing to a final stop.

  The thugs lifted me under the arms and dragged me through a dark garage. In an adjoining basement room, they stripped my jacket and dropped me into a scary-looking chair. A thick leather strap went over my lap and one apiece around my chest and throat, the last cinching until I could hardly swallow.

  Instead of struggling, I fumbled for my casting prism. It wasn’t there. Brain too bruised.

  My wrists and ankles received similar restraining treatment as my torso, the fingers of both hands forced into a pair of metal contraptions attached to the armrests. That couldn’t be good. A muscled thug—the driver, I guessed—twisted a series of knobs until my finger joints were pressed straight. His next twists brought them to the verge of bending backwards. Something told me he’d done this before.

  “Hey,” I mumbled as the first throbs started up, “think you could back off a hair?”

  The driver lumbered to a shadowy wall to my right.

  Guess not.

  I eyed my splayed hands, wondering how long I’d be able to hold out. I’d never been tortured before and didn’t think I was going to be very good at it. But who was torturing me, exactly—and why?

  “Chin Lau Ping.”

  I squinted at where the voice had come from. Its strained quality sounded like that of a girl on the verge of a tantrum. But the figure looming from the shadows ahead of me was too hulking to be a girl.

  “Chin Lau Ping,” the high voice repeated. “Why?”