Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  Thick gold rings entered the light first—hands holding the lapels of a velvet smoking jacket. Underneath, a white silk shirt swelled over a loose paunch and the beginnings of man breasts. The emerging head was basketball round, anchored by a double chin and capped with an adolescent spike cut. As the man squinted at me, I wondered if he knew how stupid he looked.

  But wait, what was he asking?

  “Chin Lau Ping,” he screeched.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “And is the screaming really necess—”

  “Mr. Ping was my courier, and you murdered him. Why?”

  Courier…? Murdered…? Then it clicked. Chin Lau Ping was the Chinatown conjurer. And this man asking after him was his boss: Wang “Bashi” Gang, head of the Chinatown crime syndicate.

  I’d found an in with the White Hand after all, but not the one I probably wanted.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I tried to raise a hand before remembering they were both bolted down. “I didn’t murder anyone, least of all your courier. There’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “Misunderstanding?”

  I really wished he’d stopped screeching. It was hell on my concussion. But at the moment, I was more concerned with the glossy black-and-white photo he was shoving in front of me.

  “These were taken by the security camera at Hunan’s Restaurant.”

  The photo was actually a split shot, the first showing me about to enter the alley beside Chin’s apartment, the second, me leaving at a run—both with date/time stamps. If you looked hard enough, you could just make out the blob-like shadow of the golem in pursuit, but I didn’t think that would impress Bashi.

  Two of his thugs stepped from the wall, holding up my coat and cane as though presenting evidence in a court of law. I had to admit, the artifacts looked a lot like those in the photos.

  I decided there was no point in lying about being there.

  “Yeah, that’s me.” I gave an embarrassed laugh. “I’d knocked off a couple beers earlier. When nature called and I spotted the Dumpster in the alley… Look, it’s not my proudest moment.”

  “Start with the pinky,” Bashi said.

  The driver stepped forward and twisted a knob over my right hand. My fifth-digit blossomed with fresh pain.

  “Wait! You didn’t let me get to the part where I was planning to clean it up.”

  “The day after Chin’s murder, you went to Mr. Han’s Apothecary and asked if he knew him.”

  My mind raced. He was right. I had done that. But had Mr. Han informed on me? Though the owner could be hard to read, I got that he genuinely liked me. No, there had to be another explanation.

  Then I remembered the shadow beyond the doorway to his living quarters. Mr. Han hadn’t been the informer, but his no-good son. He was also an enforcer for the White Hand and probably the thug who had spotted me on the street.

  I hoped he was the one I’d rammed face-first into a light pole.

  “Right, right,” I said, as though remembering. “I’d heard about the murder and was just asking—”

  “That was before it was in the paper,” Bashi screeched over me.

  Right again.

  The driver gave the knob a final hard twist. For an instant my pinky felt like the cord beneath a tight-rope walker at its midpoint. And then the finger snapped. A marrow-deep pain speared my senses. I thought I was going to pass out. Instead, I made a sound like nothing that had ever come out of my mouth: part grunt, part shout, part plea—all in the same breath.

  “Should we take care of your ring finger next?” Bashi asked, a small smile pursing his lips. My agony was having a cheering effect on him, apparently. Maladjusted much?

  “No, no,” I panted, sweat breaking over my body. “Give me a minute.”

  His lips straightened. “Did the Morettis hire you? The Brusilovs?”

  He was popping off major names in the city’s Italian and Russian crime families—White Hand’s competition. I remembered what Caroline had said about Bashi’s bloody campaign of revenge. That I had murdered Chin was already established in his mind. He wanted my patron. Problem was, claiming to have no patron would get me my remaining fingers broken, additional tortures I didn’t want to think about, and a bullet in my concussed head. A false confession would probably only get me the bullet. Either option sucked.

  That left the truth. “I don’t work for anyone.”

  Bashi nodded at the driver, who began twisting the fourth knob.

  “I’m a wizard,” I shouted, forcing the words out as quickly as I could. “I save amateur conjurers from their spells. Chin was preparing a summoning. My alarm picked it up, but I reached his apartment too late. The demonic creature had already arrived. It cleaned out his organs—it’s how they gain strength—and it escaped. That’s why Chin’s window was blown out.”

  I’d squeezed my eyes closed as I babbled and was afraid now to open them. Some New Yorkers accepted magic and supernatural creatures with a shrug. Others decried such notions as batshit insane. I didn’t know where on that spectrum Bashi’s belief system fell, but the still-mounting pressure against my ring finger wasn’t a good sign. “There was another summoning in Hamilton Heights,” I added through gritted teeth. “Same night, same result.”

  My center joint was verging on failure when the squeaking knob went silent.

  “Where did Chin get the spell?” Bashi asked.

  I exhaled an unspoken thank God and opened my eyes to find Bashi showing a staying hand to the driver. One more twist and my finger would have joined its neighbor in the very-crooked club.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I said. “When I visited Mr. Han, it was to see if he knew anything about Chin’s casting background. He didn’t, but I’m on the trail of someone who was given the same spell.”

  “Who?”

  I let out a forlorn laugh. “Good question. The man was two blocks away when your boy band jumped me.”

  Bashi narrowed his eyes. I was sure the “boy band” remark had doomed me, damned pain endorphins. Bashi gestured to the driver, who began working the knobs again. But he was twisting them the other direction. The pressure across my joints eased until I could draw my fingers free. My right pinky was already halfway to ballpark frank proportions, but I flexed and extended the others.

  “When you find out who’s behind the spells,” Bashi said, “you will report back to me.”

  I stared at him in confusion before understanding took hold. In his megalomania, Bashi believed the spell to have been a personal attack on his sovereignty. I was careful not to disabuse him of the notion. “You have my word,” I said solemnly.

  His thugs began removing the belts.

  “And you have until tomorrow,” Bashi replied.

  “Wait, tomorrow?”

  He flicked a card with a phone number onto my lap, then turned and disappeared through a doorway.

  Another deadline. Super.

  29

  A letter from Midtown College stood among a clutch of bills in my mailbox when I returned to my apartment building later that afternoon. I tore the envelope open with my teeth and shook open the folded letter. It was a formal notice from the board for Monday morning’s hearing, eleven a.m.

  Well, good for Snodgrass.

  I stuffed it into a jacket pocket, too exhausted and hurt to care, and made the four-story climb to my unit.

  After Bashi’s men had thrown me back onto the same street corner they’d abducted me from, I had tried to pick up the conjurer’s trail. No dice. The hunting spell was spent, and I lacked the focus to return to the conjurer’s cleared-out apartment to create a new one. Instead, I wandered Roosevelt Park and the Bowery, squinting around and mumbling inquiries at the few people who would let me approach. No one had seen a bedraggled man lugging a trunk.

  I’d lost him.

  I closed and locked my apartment door, then leaned against it to get my mental bearings. In my still-concussed state, the shrieker and cathedral murd
er cases were starting to blur badly—and the next twenty-four hours were going to be crucial to both. I needed to concentra…

  I came to in a sitting position. The loft was dark. Between my splayed-out legs, a pair of luminous green eyes stared back at me. “I thought you were dead,” Tabitha said. Though she spoke with indifference, I picked up an undercurrent of concern. Whether for my wellbeing or her own, I couldn’t tell.

  “How long was I out?” I tried to make out the hands on my watch face.

  “A few hours.”

  “Hours?”

  I gained my feet delicately, a force pounding from my brow to the back of my head. When the room steadied, I flipped the switch for the flood lights. My purpling pinky finger looked and felt like a string had been knotted around its base and left on for several days. I hung my coat on the rack, gathered the spilled mail, and shuffled toward the kitchen. Tabitha followed on my heels.

  “You all right, darling?”

  I couldn’t remember the last time Tabitha had asked after my health. I must have looked like hell.

  “Nothing a little magic can’t fix.” I poured myself a glass of water and chugged it. I hadn’t had anything to drink since that morning. Or eat, I realized. “But first, let me get some dinner going.”

  Tabitha made a sound of annoyance as she leapt onto the counter. “You’re more likely to pan sear your hand. Just get everything out of the fridge and then go take care of yourself. I’ll handle dinner.”

  I blinked. “You’re going to cook?”

  It was less that Tabitha had non-grasping paws than she was offering to do, well, anything. Her slitted look told me to back off. Shrugging, I pulled out a couple of New York strips, shredded onion, and some sides. I started to season the pan, but Tabitha swatted my hand and shooed me out.

  I would have given anything to stay and watch, but my cat was right. I needed to put myself back together. I started in the bathroom with my pinky finger. Holding a snapped-in-half Emory board to its underside, I straightened my finger, then secured it to the splint with a yard of sports tape.

  The next step was to reconstitute my prism. As sizzling sounded from the kitchen, I leaned against the sink and repeated a centering mantra. It took a good fifteen minutes for the prism to emerge from the pink fog and become something solid. The nap must have helped.

  With the prism restored, I touched the cane to the back of my head and my pinky, uttering healing incantations. Energy coursed into both, taming the throbbing, knitting bone and tissue back together. It would take time, but I already felt better, clearer.

  Good, because I had work to do.

  After a dinner that was—I had to hand it to Tabitha—pretty stellar, I climbed the ladder to my library and lab.

  The city model in the corner was dim, which disturbed me. I’d already decided that whoever had supplied the conjurers the shrieker spell was up to something big. What, exactly, I didn’t know. But for him or her to stop now?

  No, I didn’t like it at all.

  Best case, the Order had addressed the matter. But apart from disciplining their own, the Order almost never acted with that kind of speed. Even if they had, they wouldn’t necessarily tell me. Which left me on the hook with Bashi. No matter how I squinted at the situation, I was going to have to track down the East Village conjurer and find out who supplied the spell.

  Right now, though, the cathedral case was the more pressing. There was my job at the college, sure, and needing to get the promised info to Detective Vega by tomorrow. But there was also Father Vick. The more I thought about what Vega had told me outside the cathedral, the more certain I became that the investigative noose was drawing around his neck. If I didn’t deliver a more compelling suspect, Father Vick was going to get strung up for something he hadn’t done. And given the nature of the crime, capital punishment was not out of the question.

  My best lead—all right, my only lead—was the druid cult in Central Park, who might or might not call themselves Black Earth and might or might not have any connection to Father Richard’s murder.

  Slam dunk, right?

  I set a portable range on my table and placed a cast-iron pot onto each of the two burners. I split a bottle of green absinthe between the pots and set the burners to medium. Given the kinds of horrors that lurked in the Park—and that the druid group was an unknown quantity—my objective was to get in and out unnoticed and to keep anyone or anything who tried to kill me from doing so.

  That meant potions.

  I didn’t have time to prepare the more elaborate ones I’d been planning, but I had a couple of quick and ready recipes to fall back on. Into the left pot I scattered brown clumps of rabbit’s hair, a heaping spoonful of baking soda, and about half that of chameleon scales. With a wooden spoon engraved with casting symbols, I stirred the ingredients of the stealth potion.

  “Furtiva,” I chanted, directing energy through the spoon.

  The liquid bubbled and thickened to a gray sludge. Satisfied the mixture was on its way to becoming the potion I wanted, I twisted the burner’s knob to low. In an hour or so, it would thin to a liquid I’d be able to drink.

  One down, one to go.

  I turned to the other steaming pot and took a focusing breath. This would be for self defense, and with a just-purchased vial of sloth urine on hand, I decided to go with an encumbering spell. I uncapped the vial and tipped it over the pot. To the absinthe and foul-smelling urine, I added a nugget of tungsten, a large syringe-full of condensed fog, and some Plaster of Paris. Following healthy doses of energy and intention, the mixture began to sludge and bubble, casting up a rancid odor.

  “Christ,” I muttered against my sleeve. At least I wouldn’t have to drink that one. Woe to the unlucky bastard I squirted it at, though.

  With my potions simmering, and an hour to kill, I climbed down from the lab and retrieved the music box and my revolver. It was a longish shot, but maybe Effie would have something for me by now.

  Washington Square Park drifted with the chill mist of recently-fallen rain. I checked to make sure no ghouls were lurking before climbing into the drained wading pool and winding the music box.

  “That you, Everson?”

  “Hey, there.” I twisted to face the entity who would always remain the phantasmal likeness of an eight-year-old girl. Effie’s eyes widened as they moved past me.

  “You brought me music box,” she cried, running toward it.

  It was that whole echo thing. Unless redirected, ghosts tended to repeat themselves from one encounter to the next, and often several times within the same meeting, like video loops or skipping records.

  “Hey, did you get a chance to talk to your friends?”

  “ ’Bout whut?” she asked, focused on the box she couldn’t quite handle.

  “About whether they’d been down to St. Martin’s in the last few weeks and seen anything unusual.”

  “Oh, thas right.” She gave up on the box and started skipping in a circle, her shifting dress and clogs eerily silent over the damp leaves. “Jus’ Mary, but you can’t believe a word she tells ya.”

  I frowned. Just what I needed, an unreliable witness.

  “What kind of manure is she unloading this time?” I asked.

  “Says she was there a fortnight ago, playing hide an’ seek with a feller at night.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Man with a funny robe and hood. Says ’e was in the graveyard, but ’e wouldn’t come from hiding, even when she found him.”

  “Did Mary say where he was hiding?”

  “Behind a crypt ’neath a scary tree.”

  I perked up like an antenna. She was talking about the mossy tomb I’d walked past that morning, in the old part of the graveyard. A fortnight would have been about ten days before the murder. Had the robed man been staking out the cathedral? Plotting his crime?

  “Did Mary notice anything else?” I asked.

  “Jus’ that ’e was easy to find on ’count of his mumbling.”

>   Mumbling? “Could she make out any of the words?”

  Either Effie’s ghost was tired of the questions or didn’t think anything from Mary’s mouth was worth exploring, because she didn’t answer. She stopped at her music box, and when she began to sing again, it was as though I was no longer there. I made a few attempts to bring her back to Mary’s story, but the ghost was too absorbed in her solemn lullaby.

  I sat back in thought. Some druids were known to wear hooded robes. Not much of a lead, I admitted, but neither did the ghost’s account rule them out. I checked my watch. The potions would be about ready.

  30

  It was one a.m. by the time I reached Central Park. From the relative safety of West 110th Street, the North Woods looked perfectly forbidding. As my chatty cabbie had been all too enthused to point out (I suspected amphetamine use), the area had become known as “The Bone Yard” because of the gnawed human remains that turned up from time to time.

  “So unless you’re trying to lose a whole lotta weight, guy, I’d steer clear.” His laughter had gone off like machine-gun fire in my face.

  Hilarious.

  I eyed the dense growth as the cab motored away, finding it hard to believe anyone would choose to venture in there, much less call it home—even a powerful cult of druids. But the bits of info I’d assembled pointed to just that.

  “It’s just never easy,” I muttered, pulling a water bottle from inside my jacket and untwisting the cap. The stealth potion coated my throat as I gagged it down, the aftertaste like something you’d drain from an old car engine.

  But as I ducked into the trees, the potion began to work its magic. A tingling force grew over me like a wool glove. An inspection of my body showed that I was blending into the surroundings. My footfalls softened until they made no sound. Though I didn’t have an animal’s sense of smell, I knew my odor was being suppressed as well.

  After cresting a hill, I eased my way down a rocky ravine, where I could hear water flowing. The hidden moon diffused enough pale light through the low cloud ceiling to see by. When I encountered a family of cropping deer, I weaved through them as a test. None of them even raised a head.