Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

“Did you know any of them?” I asked.

  Sitting up, Father Vick took a pair of reading glasses from his nightstand and frowned over the article on last night’s quadruple slaying. I watched his face go from pale to a blotchy ashen. “Good God,” he muttered. “These three were parishioners, and she participated in the city’s Interfaith Council.”

  “Father,” I said carefully, “I think we have to consider that the spells came from someone inside the cathedral.”

  “From here?”

  “It’s the common factor.” I allowed a moment for the fact to sink in. “I think we also have to consider that whoever supplied the spells may have murdered your rector. Father Richard may have been onto what this person was doing.”

  Father Vick removed his glasses and set them aside. He looked destroyed.

  “Did the rector ever share any concerns with you?” I probed. “About anyone here or in the congregation?”

  “Not that I recall,” he answered after a moment. “He was a stoic man, praying on problems before acting on them. So even if he’d had such concerns, I wouldn’t necessarily have known of them. His concerns tended to be more external, anyway. The corruption he observed in the city. The practice of magic. He was uncomfortable with the archival work, though.”

  “Your acolyte’s research?” I asked. “Why?”

  Before he could answer, a soft knock sounded at the door. I looked over to find the acolyte himself peering through the crack. I wondered how long he’d been standing there, listening.

  “Father Vick?” he asked.

  “Yes, what is it Malachi?”

  “The, um, bishop called to say they’re a half hour out.”

  Father Vick nodded and pushed the cover from his legs. “I suppose I should get ready, then.” When he sat up, blood spattered the lap of his robe. I rose in alarm before realizing it was falling from his nose.

  I stretched past Malachi, who was standing slack-armed in the doorway, and reached for the kerchief on the desk.

  “No, no,” Father Vick said, plugging the bleeding nostril with a thumb. “The tissues.”

  I followed his finger to the windowsill and pulled several tissues from a plain box of them. He accepted the wad with a grateful nod and, after wiping his bearded mouth and chin, held it to his tipped-back nose.

  “That’s a heritage item,” he said of the kerchief.

  “Ah, sorry.”

  I looked around, but Malachi was no longer in the doorway. His robed form flashed beyond the window, lank ponytail falling over the hood bunched behind his neck. Remembering the hooded man Effie’s ghost friend had observed in the graveyard, suspicion spiked hot inside me. I wheeled back to Father Vick.

  “What was it about Malachi’s work that bothered the rector?” I asked quickly.

  Father Vick had gotten control of the bleeding and was now dabbing around it. “Oh, he just believed some things should remain in history. Because of the power of this site, I suspect, the church wasn’t always represented by honorable men.”

  I needed more, but at that moment the church bells began to ring out the hour.

  I checked my watch. Crap. I had ten minutes to get back to the checkpoint.

  “Can I call you later?” I asked.

  “Of course.” Father Vick wavered to his feet but embraced me with warm strength. I reciprocated. “You are exactly what Father Richard didn’t understand,” he said, “that the relative good or evil of magic depends entirely on the channeler. Though darkness clings to you, Everson, your foundation remains as solid and pure as when I first taught you. It is why you were called back here. Remember that.”

  In many ways, he had been my first mentor—and a great one.

  “Thank you, Father. I’ll try.”

  34

  Assuming my watch was synced to the guard’s, I had less than twenty seconds to spare by the time I arrived, panting, at the pedestrian checkpoint.

  I’d risked precious time by having Cyrus let me out through the graveyard again, but I’d wanted to inspect the mossy tomb beneath the willow tree. If Effie’s friend was to be believed, someone had been creeping around the site in the dark of night, muttering what might have been an incantation. And I was beginning to suspect that person had been Malachi. I found the raised sarcophagus sealed tight, the ground around it apparently undisturbed.

  I read the deceased’s name and dates: Bartholomew Higham, 1772 – 1824. No other information. It wasn’t until I pulled out my notepad that I remembered my small pencil was absent from its spiral binding. I resorted to cramming the info into my memory, hoping it would stay.

  “Where’s the fire?” a guard asked as I hurried up to the checkpoint.

  I looked from him to his partner. Neither was the one who had let me through an hour before.

  “Where’s the other guy?” I asked, breathlessly. “The one who was here earlier?” The last thing I needed was for someone else to be hunting me for having violated some agreement.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I, ah, I knew him,” I replied lamely.

  “Well, not anymore,” the guard said.

  The second guard opened his mouth to join in—it was a slow day at the checkpoint, evidently—but then paused as though someone was speaking into his earpiece. He nodded at the first guard, who, without comment, stepped forward and drove the barrel of his rifle into my gut. I grunted and dropped to a knee, the impact leaving me sick and gasping. From my new vantage, I noticed a smear of reddish oil on the pavement below my face.

  Wait … blood? My bribe had gotten the guy killed?

  “If you don’t wanna join your friend,” the guard said, wrestling with my hand now, “you’re gonna give this up.” I realized he was trying to pull Grandpa’s ring off my finger.

  Arnaud, I thought. By his reasoning, I had entered his territory; ergo, he had rights to my ring. I balled my hand against the guard’s wrenching fingers. I was risking my life, yeah, but the ring seemed to be compelling me—it had some future role to play, and it wouldn’t do to be in a vampire’s possession. My hand balled tighter, gripped by the mother of all cramps. If my own life played a role, it appeared it was going to be as a footnote.

  “Tough guy, huh?” the guard said, ramming an elbow against my ear for leverage.

  I was angling my cane toward him, wondering what the penalty would be for magic exercised in self defense, when his partner entered my peripheral vision.

  “Stand back,” he said, raising his rifle.

  Before I could summon my light shield, a pair of explosions sounded. In the ringing aftermath, I recognized the register. I opened my eyes and blinked twice. The shots hadn’t come from an assault rifle.

  “NYPD,” a familiar voice shouted. “Get the fuck away from him!”

  I raised my face to find Detective Vega storming toward us. She lowered the nine millimeter she’d fired until it was level with the nearer guard’s head. He backed away, palms showing. His partner adjusted his rifle’s aim from me to Vega, but he looked hesitant before the tiny tornado in a black suit.

  “This man’s wanted in an investigation,” Vega said, using her free hand to haul me up. The guard who’d been grappling for my ring began to stammer. Before his words could take on intelligence, Vega was pulling me toward her sedan, which she’d left idling at the auto checkpoint.

  I wasted no time getting in. She joined me on the driver’s side and drove us from the Financial District.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” she demanded.

  “I was making friends,” I said. “Sheesh. Now they’ll never call.” I was buying time until I could determine just how much she knew about my morning excursion.

  “Were you at the church?” she asked.

  The inflection in her tone told me it was an honest question. I’d caught a break.

  “Um, sorry, but were you not just witness to my near-execution?” I jerked my head back. “I was kidding about being pally-wally with those guys, in case you missed that, to
o.”

  “You were intending to go to the church, though.”

  “Can you prove it?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Ripping off a string of Spanish curses, Vega accelerated around a line of cars, blooped her siren, and shot through a red light. “You’re lucky I had business downtown,” she said when she’d calmed down enough to return to English. “Those guys could’ve put two dozen bullets in you, and the NYPD wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Official immunity,” she grumbled.

  I nodded in understanding. Probably one of Arnaud’s conditions for bailing out the city. Which also meant that if the guards had gotten it into their meaty heads to gun down Vega, they could have done so without fear of prosecution. Boy, did that make me feel like a dick.

  “Hey, listen—”

  “Save it,” Vega said sharply. “The next words I want out of your mouth are what you can tell me about the message. Today’s the deadline. In case you forgot,” she added wryly.

  “Well—”

  She cut me off again. “Not here. My office.”

  We emerged from underneath the off ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge and into view of One Police Plaza. I had a sinking sense of déjà vu. The last time Vega had driven me here, it was for processing.

  She veered into a secure underground garage. We rode an elevator up in silence, stopping every floor or two for plain-clothed personnel and uniformed officers to get on and off. I caught more than a few sidelong glances. It was my six-foot frame, dark brown hair, and cane. I could all but feel my face being lined up with the police sketch and had a feeling Detective Vega was the only reason I wasn’t being slammed against a wall and cuffed.

  I edged closer to her.

  On the eighth floor, I followed her off the elevator and down a hallway to a busy workspace whose cluttered desks and colony of Styrofoam coffee cups shouted HOMICIDE. Of course, I’d been here before, so I was cheating. Vega led me into a windowless office—not an interrogation room this time, thankfully—rounded a desk with piled-up folders and an outdated computer, and sat down hard. I scooted up one of the folding metal chairs.

  “Speak,” she said as I lowered myself.

  I had already decided to be as truthful as I could. I owed her that much.

  “All right.” I laced my fingers, save my splinted pinky, and bent them back until they cracked. “The message on the rector’s back translates to ‘Black Earth.’ ”

  “What does it mean?” she asked, jotting it down on a notepad.

  “I don’t know.”

  She stared up at me as though there had to be more. I shrugged.

  “I gave you three days for that?” She threw her pen at the pad.

  The pen ricocheted and collided into a propped-up frame, knocking it onto its felt back. When I reached forward to right it, I saw it held a photo of a smiling Detective Vega—white teeth and all—clutching a giggling boy of five or six, her chin propped on his feathery curls.

  “Your son?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied, her frustration seeming to have gotten lost for the moment. She took over the task of righting the frame, angling it toward her, where I could no longer see the photo.

  “Good-looking kid,” I said. But then so was his mother. And I’d been right about her smile—wow. I blamed Thelonious for flicking my eyes to Vega’s left ring finger, which was unencumbered. Dream on, pal. I thought at my incubus. A homicide detective and a probationer?

  “Something funny?” Vega asked, her face creasing with renewed sternness.

  I’d snorted at my own thought, apparently. I tried to cover it up with a second snort meant to sound functional. “Allergies.”

  “I thought you were pursuing some kind of lead.” She gestured to the pad. “Is there a group that goes by this name?”

  I searched the wall of aged vertical filing cabinets behind her. I didn’t want to think about what would happen to Detective Vega if she showed up in that crazed cult’s midst. “It turns out there isn’t.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Guess we’re gonna have to see what we can do with this,” she said of the message, but without much hope.

  I leaned forward. “Look, I know I come off as a smart aleck sometimes, but I meant what I said about Father Victor yesterday. It’s not in his nature to raise his voice, much less act violently. And I couldn’t find any connection between him and this Black Earth.” The image of the vicar’s ill face and bleeding nose wavered in my mind’s eye. “The man is under incredible strain. Arresting him would … well, not to sound overly dramatic, but it could kill him.”

  I was thinking of Father Vick’s health as well as that of the cathedral.

  Detective Vega shrugged. “We have to go where the evidence takes us.”

  “Just make sure that’s what you’re doing.” Though I tried to offer it as a suggestion, it came out sounding critical. I expected her eyebrows to crush together, but instead, an odd look came over her face.

  “Since we’re done here,” she said, “I’m gonna need you to hand over your notes on the case.”

  “Yeah, sure.” In my relief, I quickly withdrew my notepad, tore out the pages relevant to the message, and pushed them toward her. My scribblings were mostly illegible, but she wasn’t trying to read them. Her dark gaze had remained fixed on my notepad.

  “Lose something?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  She pulled open a desk drawer, reached inside, and held up a clear Ziploc bag. My stub of a pencil, which used to ride in the pad’s binding, was nested at its bottom. I almost asked where in the world she’d found it before realizing the Ziploc was an evidence bag.

  “Now, do you want to tell me what in the hell’s going on with those other murders?”

  I maintained a poker face while my thoughts shuffled madly. They stopped on the apartment of Chin Lau Ping. I thought I’d lost the pencil at the downtown checkpoint, but I’d last used it in Chinatown, to jot down Chin’s name. I must have set the pencil down when fixing his wallet.

  Heat prickled over my face. “If you’re suggesting that pencil’s mine…”

  “You have one just like it,” she said. “Or used to. I saw you using it in the cathedral. And you’re a nibbler, Croft.”

  “Nibbler?”

  But I knew exactly what she meant. When struggling for a thought, I had a habit of gnawing on my writing utensils. From across the desk, I could see the teeth impressions in the pencil’s green paint. My stomach performed a steep dip.

  “We have your dental records on file, you know,” Vega went on. “Even with our strained budget, given the priority of the cases, I could have these marks analyzed inside of a day.”

  Man, and I thought she’d been bluffing when she told the guards I was wanted in an investigation. Was she bluffing now? Detective Vega gave the bag a shake, her face frowning in impatience.

  “I, ah—”

  “Think before you answer,” she said. “Whether or not you had anything to do with the murder, lying about being at the scene of a crime—either before or after it was committed—is obstruction and a serious violation of your probation. That spells prison, Croft.”

  “At least I wouldn’t have to worry about unemployment,” I muttered.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “My department chair knows about my probation. There’s going to be a hearing Monday, which means I’m out of a job.” I found my irritation at Snodgrass spreading to Detective Vega, for having talked to him. Or maybe I was just fed up with authority in general. I jabbed a finger at the bag. “That’s not my pencil,” I lied. “And if it is, I don’t know how it ended up wherever it did. Maybe someone found it on the street and wanted to give it a good home.”

  “Yeah, the home of someone whose organs were cleaned out,” Vega shot back. “Not unlike the victim whose apartment we found you passed out in last year. You know something, goddamm
it.”

  Though her dark eyes shimmered with anger, I could also see whatever it was I had glimpsed the day she’d driven me to the cathedral. Some deeper intelligence. She blinked rapidly, and the look was gone.

  “I’m sorry, Detective,” I said, “but I don’t know anything more than what I’ve already told you.”

  What was the alternative? Telling her who I was and why I had been tracking the conjurers? She wasn’t Father Vick. A story like that would land me in a pen with the poo slingers and droolers. And even if Vega accepted my story, I couldn’t very well share my suspicion that the spells had originated inside the church. That would only bring more heat on Father Vick.

  Detective Vega stared at me another moment. When she saw I wasn’t going to answer, she shook her head and craned her neck toward the open office door.

  “Hoffman!” she shouted.

  A balding man with a greasy red face came hustling in. “What’s up?”

  Vega scribbled my full name on her notepad, tore the page out, and set it and the evidence bag on the corner of her desk. Her eyes darted to mine as though to say, This is your last chance.

  When I remained silent, she exhaled through her nose. “I need a priority bite-mark analysis done on this,” she said. “It’s for the disembowelment cases.”

  Hoffman, in a brown polyester suit, nodded earnestly. “I’ll run it right over.” He collected the bag and note and hustled out.

  Vega turned toward me. “Guess we’ll be in touch.”

  My legs wobbled slightly as I stood with my cane, unable to meet her eyes.

  “Guess so,” I replied.

  35

  From One Police Plaza I caught an express subway to Midtown and then hurried the pair of blocks to the New York Public Library.

  The looming bite-mark analysis had collapsed my window for finding and stopping the spell supplier, but I had the church in my sights. The next step was finding out what I could about Bartholomew Higham, the man who had been interred in that tomb. Someone at St. Martin’s, probably Malachi, had been interested in him in the days leading up to the rector’s murder.

  I jogged up the marble steps to the library, passing between the iconic stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, and entered through the soaring central portico. Inside the vast stone hall, I paused to get my bearings and strategize. Because the Order was listening in—and without a strong threshold to buffer me—I was trying to veil my intentions with innocent curiosity. Whether it was working or not, I didn’t know and couldn’t afford to care.