Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  “Yes!” I whispered, causing the deer to bolt.

  Like much of magic, potion-making was unpredictable. A recipe followed the same way ten times could yield ten varying results, depending on the skill of the magic user. My consistency was improving, but it was nowhere close to Elder-level magic. And even though I’d nailed the stealth potion this time, it had its limits. Time, for one. It would probably hold up thirty minutes before petering out.

  Meaning I had to hoof it.

  At the bottom of the ravine, I rock-hopped a stream and came upon an old path winding alongside the waterway. That I’d found the path at all told me it was still in use. By what, I couldn’t tell. Whether it was a trick of shadow, one set of prints looked awfully trollish.

  I followed the path, hoping druids used it, too.

  Druids weren’t wizards, but they were wizard-like. They drew energy from nature essences, ancestral worship, and, in some cases, ancient gods. They were also big into consulting stars for omens. But that was all generalization. Like any class, druids came in different flavors—and if the group I was seeking had bludgeoned the rector, then I was dealing with one of the more homicidal variety. Nigra Terra of Roman times was supposed to have engaged in human sacrifice, even using human skin as parchment for its sacred texts. If we were talking about a descendant group, I hoped they’d at least updated to bond paper.

  The path passed beneath a crumbling stone archway, fallen stones piled to one side, before seeming to end in a small clearing of boulders. The trees bordering the clearing looked impassable. I expended precious potion time searching the area but found no signs of anything. I was preparing to return down the path when it occurred to me to check for a veiling spell.

  “Svelare,” I said, sweeping my glowing cane in a slow circle.

  One by one, boulders loomed from the darkness and receded into shadow. I had almost completed the circle, when a boulder set back behind some others seemed to ripple.

  Hmm?

  I was moving toward it when a whisper rose on the wind.

  “We see you, fiend.”

  My heart beat into my throat as I killed the light. I looked around but could make out no one and nothing. Just the shadows of boulders. A chill energy swirled through the clearing. Druid magic? As I returned my gaze to the rippling boulder, it straightened into the silhouette of a hooded, scarlet-robed figure.

  I separated my cane into sword and staff. “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “We are death to your kind,” the figure whispered.

  The death part was troubling enough, but we? I ventured a peek around.

  Okay. I was surrounded by robed figures. I must have triggered a spell planted on the trail. Veiled, the druids had waited for me to walk into their midst. Like a dummy, I’d obliged—and lit my staff. With the druids’ attention now focused on me, I could feel the magic I’d pushed into my potion thinning. So much for sneaking in and out. But if dialogue proved more expedient for learning what I’d come to find out…

  “Wait,” I said as the robed figures moved nearer. “I’ve come to warn you.”

  The whisperer, who I took to be the head druid, let out a chilling laugh. “And he will appear unto mortal eyes as saintly, and earnest and righteous will seem his pleas, but do not be ye deceived, for he ariseth from the darkest pits and bringeth death and ruin. So the stars have foretold it.”

  I realized he was quoting from early pagan scripture, an omen that spoke to the return of Sathanas, demon lord of Wrath, the last to be cast from the world by Michael. I’d discovered in my research that the early druid cults defined themselves in part by the stars they consulted. The stars used by one cult in particular pointed to the present age for Sathanas’s return. That cult was Nigra Terra: Black Earth.

  “Whoa, there,” I said. “I’m not the death and ruin guy, I promise. I’m a wizard, a magic user like yourselves—”

  “Who comes bearing the stink of demon.”

  I paused to sniff my shoulder. Damn. Not only was my stealth spell starting to wear off, but the smell from my shrieker encounter three nights before lingered like cheap perfume.

  “I can actually explain that,” I said.

  “Can you explain, oh wizard, why you were seen fleeing a demonic summoning?”

  I hesitated. These guys read the Scream?

  “Since you ask, yes,” I said, “but that’s not why I’ve come. There’s talk among city officials of cracking down on magic users. I’m not sure to what lengths they’re planning to go—mass evictions, arrests, worse—but I’m trying to warn all of the groups I know before it happens. We need to unify.”

  It was a whopper of a tale, but if it gibed with the Black Earth’s reasons for killing the rector—the voice behind the campaign to crack down—maybe they would reveal as much to someone who appeared sympathetic.

  “Yes, we have heard.” My pulse ramped up in anticipation of a confession. I’d finally have something for Detective Vega. “But the city and church are not the threat,” the druid continued. “It is you, fiend.”

  My shoulders sagged. Or not.

  I tried to see the situation from the druids’ perspective. Per their star charts, the return of Sathanas was nigh. Now, in the midst of a spate of shrieker summonings, a man wanted by the police, and smelling like demon, suddenly turned up on their doorstep, claiming to offer help.

  Sketchy as hell. I got it.

  As though picking up my thoughts, the druid said, “Yes, unify us so you may betray those with the power to stop you. We are not so easily fooled.”

  The bloody message on the rector’s robe notwithstanding, I decided this Black Earth wasn’t responsible for his murder. The cult was too obsessed with preventing Sathanas’s return, and compromising the power of the cathedral would only empower a demon lord. “Black Earth” had either been written as a red herring, or it meant something completely different.

  Either way, I wasn’t going to fight these guys.

  “Great,” I said. “Well, think I’ll head on home, then.”

  The robed figures shifted into my path. The head druid spoke at my back, but he was no longer using English. I recognized the language as a variant of Latin, similar to what I used for my own Words of Power.

  Which meant—

  I threw a light shield up just as searing fire broke around me. In the sudden blaze, the remaining druids became illuminated. From the shadows of hoods, tattooed lips peeled from purple gums and fierce teeth. Wands of what looked like burned ash appeared from billowing sleeves.

  Fire casters. And here I’d been hoping for the meadow-prancing type of druid. I aimed my sword at the one blocking my path and shouted, “Vigore!”

  The energy that coursed down the blade slammed the druid from his sandals and into the trees. The rippling wake knocked two more druids onto their backs. An opening! I hit the gap at a run, calling more energy to my staff and shaping it into a protective dome of light.

  I grunted as fresh fire jetted hot against it.

  After the day’s encounter with Bashi and the White Hand, I wasn’t in any shape for an extended battle. Especially not when I was outnumbered by magic users, who, by the force of their casting, must have been calling up power from a god. It also explained how they were able to create a refuge for themselves in Central Park. Trying to match them blow for blow would only bring on Thelonious, which was the last thing I needed tonight.

  “Face your doom, fiend!” the head druid called.

  Nope. I’d made the trail and had no plans of turning around.

  But I’d barely hit my first full stride when a stone from the crumbling arch tumbled into my path. Damned druid magic. I managed to leap that one but a second stone materialized beneath my landing foot. I hit it awkwardly, and pain flared through my folding ankle. I stumbled and went down.

  Robes shuffled up behind me. I rolled onto my back, ready to nail them with another force invocation. But I couldn’t even raise my sword arm. I strained through gritted teeth and trie
d to assist with my staff arm, but it was like hefting a pair of dead animals. My tongue and lips garbled around a word that hadn’t the power to invoke anything.

  …the hell?

  That was when something warm and wet spread across the front of my pants. Well, craptastic. I had loaded the encumbering potion into a squirt gun, which I’d holstered into my waist band—and apparently just crushed. The contact with my skin was releasing the potion’s magic, not to mention the god-awful stench, transforming me into a smelly, dull-witted slug.

  Fourteen all over again, basically.

  The druids swooped around me, ember-tipped wands aimed at my face. With no Words to resurrect my shield, I was as good as cooked. I released my sword and staff at sloth speed and showed my hands.

  “Whhuuaaiit,” I slurred.

  The lead druid emerged through the others and stood over me. The hood had fallen away to reveal a shiny shaved head and strong face, ebony skin patterned with intricate white lines. Like my mental prism, the tattoos were designed to channel energy. The druid’s eyes, a fierce turquoise in the light of the wands, searched mine. When the druid spoke again, I realized the person wasn’t a man, but a woman—their high priestess.

  “Raise it up,” she ordered.

  It? I thought. Oh right, the demon. I glanced around at the others as they stooped down. Though they remained hooded, I guessed by their movements that they were all women.

  Several of them seized me beneath the shoulders and hoisted me to my feet. I stepped gingerly, and very slowly, on my twisted right ankle. I should have been terrified, but the potion was fogging my fear. When the priestess looked me up and down, I was more concerned that the leaking potion and smell had them all thinking I’d wet my pants.

  The priestess smiled around filed teeth. “A demon is no match for the fire of Brigit.”

  I was pretty sure a demon as powerful as Sathanas could flick the pagan god to which she was referring like a paper football. But even if I’d wanted to point that out, I couldn’t form the words. Plus, she was moving her wand dangerously close to my face, its glowing tip drawing sweat from my pores. I tried to lean away, but it was as though my body were bound in a slow-drying cast. Exactly the effect the Plaster of Paris ingredient had been meant to induce.

  “First,” she said, wand hovering just above my right cheek, “we burn out its eyes.”

  That she was referring to me in third person neutral was chilling enough. But the pain that had begun to build across my cornea and now pierced, searing, to the back of my eye socket was far more troubling. I shut my eyelids to the heat, but she forced them open with a bracing finger and thumb.

  I let out a low moan, which made the priestess show more of her teeth. This was not good. Arnaud and Bashi were dangerous, but at least they possessed some capacity for reason, however warped. This woman had none. It was written in her staring eyes. Her existence had come to revolve so completely around the return of Sathanas that every interlocutor now looked like a demon.

  “That it may no more curse us with its evil sight,” she promised.

  When my vision blurred, I hoped it was from tears and not the melting of my lens. Either way, it wouldn’t be long before my right socket was a smoking crater. When the priestess sucked in her next breath through the sharp spaces of her teeth, I knew it was to summon fire.

  And that brought my fear screaming back.

  31

  I tried again to speak an invocation of protection, but I might as well have been talking through a mouthful of oatmeal. The priestess took her time pronouncing her own Word, the tip of her wand swelling orange hot, strong fingers bracing my eyelids wide.

  “Ustili—garrh!” she grunted.

  Huh?

  The heat and glare fell away. She dropped the wand and dug both hands into the neck of her robe, which appeared to be throttling her. I tottered for balance as the others released me. My head rotated slowly from side to side.

  The robes were wrapping all of their necks, strangling them like boas.

  I didn’t know what the hell was happening and didn’t much care. My eye was intact, even if a blinding glare remained. Turning, I forced my arms and legs into an absurd underwater run. My sword and staff were on the ground where I’d relinquished them. I was bending in slo-mo to retrieve them when a shaking force nailed me between the shoulder blades.

  I reflexively hooked a finger into the front of my shirt collar. But instead of struggling to breathe, I was no longer struggling, period. My limbs were fluid again. I exercised my jaw and tested my voice: “Do-re-mi-fa-sol…” Someone had broken up the effect of the encumbering potion.

  Sword and staff in hands, I swung around.

  “The animation spell’s not going to last,” someone said in an Irish brogue. A short, rumpled figure hustled from the gagging druids and seized the sleeve of my coat. “We need to get a move on.”

  “Chicory?” I asked, stumbling to keep up.

  In the year since I’d last seen my mentor, he had gained a bit of weight. Even so, his feet were a blur. Instead of crossing the stream, he led me farther down the path I’d arrived by, his coat flapping around his stubby legs, then up to where the path joined a defunct road. His gray Volkswagen Rabbit sat against the near curb. As he shuffled around to the driver’s side, I peeked back, relieved to find no one—and nothing—in pursuit. The diesel engine chugged to life as I dropped inside and slammed the door behind me.

  “Man, talk about timing,” I said, inspecting my right eye in the visor mirror. It was red and puffy around the rim, but otherwise healthy. “How did you know—”

  “Magic,” Chicory said, tossing his wand into the back seat, curmudgeonly face set in a frown. Then to clarify: “Forbidden magic.”

  “You mean theirs?” I tried.

  He stared at me over a squash-shaped nose. “I mean yours.”

  I gave a nervous chuckle as Chicory swung the car around. “Yeah, about that…”

  “You violated a mandate from the Order. Two, in fact.”

  “Well, their letter was awfully short on details. It called me off a shrieker case without saying why—or what the Order planned to do about it. And cessation of magic? Was that supposed to be a blanket mandate?”

  My mentor nodded.

  “What the hell, Chicory? If the Order would ever bother to ask, they might learn that I have to make ends meet around here. I also have friends in this city, good people. Keeping my job and keeping them safe require magic sometimes.”

  I thought I’d made a reasonable appeal, but Chicory was shaking his mop of gray hair. He looked more like a frazzled physics professor than a wizard. “It’s not your place to question the Elders.”

  “So, what, they’re gods now?”

  “As far as you and I are concerned, yes.”

  I pushed out an exasperated breath. At our level, the purpose of magic was defending the mortal world from manifested evils. But the Elders dealt in other planes entirely, where linear thought and logic no longer held, necessarily. With their power and knowledge, the Elders were very nearly gods. It was what I would become one day—if I lived to be that old. When the Elders issued a decree, there was usually a very good reason for it.

  But call it hubris, I still felt like they were missing something.

  “Do they have a plan for the shriekers, at least?” I asked.

  “I’m sure they do, Everson.” His response hardly inspired confidence, but before I could press him, Chicory took up his scolding voice. “What were you doing out here anyway?” He skirted a cement barricade and merged onto Central Park West. “Picking a fight with a women’s group?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “I didn’t know they were… Look, I thought they might be behind a murder the NYPD asked me to help investigate, all right? The rector was killed at a church I used to attend.”

  “Oh, yes, about that,” Chicory interrupted. “The Order wants you off that case as well.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Not
our place to ask.”

  “Well, let me spell a few things out for you, and maybe you can run it up the flagpole.” I twisted my entire body toward him. “The church in question sits on the city’s most powerful fount of ley energy. The balance of power in the city is already tipping toward darkness because of the crisis brought on by the vampires. We lose St. Martin’s, and we may never get that balance back. New York City will become a Romper Room of evil. Father Victor, the man in position to take over as rector? I know him. He’s as devoted as they come. He’ll safeguard that fount. But he’s also about to be slammed for capital murder by a police department short on resources and long on the illusion that they’re actually solving crimes.”

  I hadn’t quite put it in those terms before, not even in my own mind, but it wasn’t a stretch. Those were the bigger stakes.

  Chicory sighed. “Fine, I’ll add it to my report.” He glanced at the folders and spiral-bound notebooks spread over his dashboard. I noticed his back seat was jammed with boxes containing more files. I wasn’t sure how many of us he was responsible for across the country, but based on the intervals between visits, probably too many. “But until you hear back from me…”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “No magic.”

  We rode in silence the rest of the way to the West Village.

  As Chicory pulled up in front of my apartment, I peeked around. I still hadn’t seen the woman Tabitha claimed to have caught watching the building. I was beginning to suspect my cat had fabricated the story to convince me she was pulling her weight around the homestead.

  My gaze returned to Chicory. “Hey, thanks for bailing me out back there.” I no longer had a suspect, but I’d managed to keep both eyes and my life, which was something. “And for the lift home,” I added.

  “Ooh, that reminds me.”

  I watched cross-eyed as he pressed an ink-stained thumb between my brows. “What the…? Ow!” I cried as a bolt of energy pierced my forebrain. Though the sensation quickly dissipated, a tingling pressure remained behind. “What are you doing?”