Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  “So where in the cathedral are they being held?” I asked aloud. From my brief conversation with the officer at the scene, it sounded as though their manhunt had yet to turn up anyone.

  A second later, I answered my own question. “Wherever Reverend Higham had room enough to store those thousands of remains without anyone knowing.” Panic flashed hot inside me. “Beneath the cathedral.”

  Tired of being my sounding board, Tabitha began pacing away. “Fascinating,” she muttered. A bout of knocking froze her. We both turned. The hard knocking at the door sounded a second time.

  38

  By the time the second bout of knocking subsided, I had a short list of candidates—none of them good guys, unfortunately.

  One, it was someone from the White Hand, wanting to know who had supplied Chin the shrieker spell. The deadline was today. The damned thing of it was, I had an answer, but something told me Bashi wasn’t going to accept a two-hundred-year-dead reverend. And I couldn’t afford to be dragged into his basement and finger-cranked again. There wasn’t time.

  Two, it was the NYPD, coming to arrest me for my chewed-on pencil ending up in Chin’s apartment. That would be worse. With Bashi, there was at least the chance he’d take me at my word. After all, he’d accepted that dark magic was at play. The same wouldn’t fly with Vega. I’d be looking at incarceration.

  Candidate number three? Arnaud’s goons. I’d strolled into the vampire’s territory twice now after he’d warned me away. And he clearly wanted Grandpa’s ring. He wouldn’t think twice about having me killed to get it. Unlike Father Richard, I was a nobody in the city.

  Finally—and the one that scared me the most—was plump little Chicory, coming to execute me for violating the Order’s mandates. Bullets I could handle. A dissolution spell? Not so much.

  I waved Tabitha back as I stole up to the door. Gripping my cane, I peered through the peephole. My list of candidates erupted in smoke—it wasn’t any of them. A thin back was to the door, brown hair falling down a khaki coat, as though the person was contemplating leaving.

  Malachi?

  With energy crackling around my prism, ready to cast, I twisted the bolts and opened the door a crack. Fully expecting a man’s narrow face to round into view, I started to discover a woman’s instead. A young woman’s, and one I recognized from Midtown College.

  “Meredith Proctor,” I said, opening the door to my overachieving student.

  “Hi, Professor.” Her face looked strange, almost sinister, and then I realized I’d never seen Meredith without her glasses—or in makeup. She’d gone especially heavy on the eye shadow and lipstick. “May I come in?” she asked.

  The timing couldn’t have been more horrible, but before I could give the polite version of that answer, Meredith was stepping past me. She unfastened her coat in the front and turned for me to draw it from her shoulders. It was an awkward gesture, unpracticed, and like the makeup, looked forced on someone who couldn’t have been older than nineteen.

  I snuck a peek at Tabitha. Over the years, we had developed a body language for when I had visitors. Her staring eyes told me everything. This was the person who had been watching the apartment building.

  “So, ah, what brings you here, Meredith?” I asked, deciding to ignore the invitation to remove her coat. I reached around her to close the door.

  She turned abruptly so she was inside my arms. Thick tendrils of perfume climbed my nostrils, triggering an asthmatic cough. She managed to shrug her coat away, and it thudded to the floor. The sparkling black dress that had been hiding underneath was low-cut, high riding, and completely inappropriate for a student visiting her professor.

  “I’m going dancing with friends later,” she explained, as I stooped for her coat and hung it on the rack. “Your place was on the way, so I thought I’d stop by. Hope that’s okay.”

  Not rehearsed at all.

  “Actually, Meredith, you’ve caught me at a bad time,” I said, trying to sound professorial. “I’m rather preoccupied.”

  “That lecture on Thursday, about the First Saints Legend?” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “Wow. I just have so many questions. About your trip to Romania, your research, your published paper.”

  Suspicion prickled through me at the strangeness of her voice, the timing of her visit. Aside from being a stellar student, I knew nothing about Meredith. Was she connected to the shrieker summonings, somehow? To the resurrected reverend?

  I followed at a safe distance. But when she peeked back over a bare shoulder, I saw it wasn’t either of those. There was another explanation for why she’d been staking out my apartment. The trance-inducing effect of Thursday’s lecture? Well, it must have lingered—and judging from the batting of her mascara-caked lashes, gotten mixed up with her amorous centers.

  I had a groupie on my hands, basically.

  “Listen, Meredith,” I said. “I’m going to have to answer your questions another time.”

  She clicked to the center of the loft in a pair of strappy black heels, my words once again sailing right past. “Shall we relax on the couch?” she asked.

  I tried to circle around to the front of her. “It’s not as relaxing as it looks, actually,” I stammered. My priority now was getting her back to the door. Which I’d left ajar, I realized.

  While Meredith lowered herself, cooing over the soft cushion, I beat it back toward the foyer. The partially-opened door rattled in the doorframe, as though the window beside the staircase was open and pulling air from the corridor. That had never happened—

  Something large landed in the hallway.

  —before.

  I got my shoulder into the door, forced it closed, and was snapping the bolts home when the thick wood shook against me. A moment later, a familiar pain jagged to the depths of my eardrums.

  Only this shriek sounded more adult.

  And there were two of them.

  39

  I backed from the shuddering door and turned to check on Meredith. I found her across the couch, palms clamped to her ears. I’d chosen index fingers to block my own. Thanks to the wards, the demonic register of the shriekers couldn’t penetrate the threshold, sparing my mental prism.

  But the screams still hurt like hell.

  During a brief lull, I shouted, “Get into the bathroom! Lock the door!”

  When Meredith squinted up, I could see that terror had shattered her trance. She was probably beginning to wonder what the hell she was even doing here. She nodded rapidly and wobble-ran toward the back of the apartment.

  I looked around for Tabitha, but she had taken off somewhere—maybe out onto the ledge, and who could blame her? With her feline hearing, the sound would have been doubly piercing.

  A splintering crack sounded, and I wheeled around. I had enough time to note my front door bowing out before it was flying at me in two halves. The larger piece slammed into my left shoulder, spinning me halfway around. It took a moment for the rude clunk of dislocation to register, the bruising pain spreading from my shoulder into my neck.

  I retrieved my fallen cane. In the next moment, light shields covered my ears like muffs. With the horrid sound stifled, I rammed the front of my shoulder into the steel beam that anchored the end of the kitchen counter, popping the humeral ball back into its socket. The shoulder was a recurring thing, the only upshot being I knew how to fix it. But that didn’t make it any less agonizing.

  The world behind my closed eyes spun, and I clenched my jaw to the throbbing pain. With a cane tap and a spoken incantation, I initiated the healing to the strained and torn tissue. At last, I turned to confront my visitors.

  Sweet Jesus.

  If you took a man-sized bat, crossed it with a gargoyle molded by a demented sculptor in bloody tar, you’d be in the neighborhood of the kind of creature—correction, creatures—I was facing. The two were taking turns throwing themselves into the field that covered my threshold, sparks spattering their thorny black wings and screaming faces.

>   Their juvenile selves were almost cute in comparison.

  But as big, powerful, and hideous as the grown shriekers were, they weren’t spell casters. Against my wards, it was force against force—and, like any wizard worth his salt, I’d infused my wards with years of cumulative energy. Out there, I’d be in a world of hurt. Inside my apartment, I was safe as houses. I had only to wait until dawn for the shriekers’ power to wane, whereupon they would flap off to their dark, damp hiding place to regenerate.

  Problem was, I didn’t have until morning. I needed to get to the reanimated reverend before he killed Father Vick and the bishop and escaped into the world. I hesitated on that thought.

  The shriekers showing up now wasn’t a coincidence. The reverend must have known I was a threat to him. My thoughts returned to Malachi eavesdropping on Father Vick’s and my conversation that morning. He would have heard us connecting the recent summonings, as well as Father Richard’s murder, to someone inside the cathedral. But how had the reverend known where to direct the shriekers, especially since Malachi hadn’t been staking out my apartment?

  Working backwards, I searched my memory for anything I might have left at the cathedral for the reverend to cast from, some specimen that would have held a piece of my essence. I was usually exceedingly careful about such things.

  I came up empty, empty, empty—until I arrived at the morning I’d viewed the crime scene. Before entering the sacristy, I’d donned a pair of latex gloves and had had a net pulled over my head.

  Sweat and hair.

  Assuming the reverend had accessed the bag, he would have been able to cast from either specimen. But mine hadn’t been the only bits of protective covering. Who else might the reverend have deemed a threat to his—

  My heart missed a beat, then slammed twice as hard to catch up.

  The lead detective. Vega.

  I angled the phone on the counter toward me, already fishing Detective Vega’s card from a pocket before realizing the second I removed the shields from my ears, I wouldn’t be able to hear a thing over the shrieking. I lifted the phone, looked around, and then ran toward the bathroom, cord spooling out behind me.

  As instructed, Meredith had locked the door. I waited for another break in the shrieking before knocking. “It’s me!”

  The knob turned tentatively, and I dispelled my ear shields just before one of Meredith’s eyes appeared in the door space. Once inside the bathroom, I shut the door against a renewed cycle of screaming. Meredith had pushed a towel against the space at the bottom of the door to stifle the sound, and I shoved it back into place with a foot. It helped a little.

  “What’s going on out there?” Meredith asked, hands back over her ears.

  “Building put in a new alarm system,” I shouted. “It’s having some problems.”

  I set the phone on the lid of the toilet tank and dialed Vega’s number. A light dome around my head would have helped, but I didn’t want to cast in front of Meredith. Instead, I cupped the mouthpiece and clamped the receiver to my ear with my good shoulder. I could just make out a faint ring.

  “Vega’s office,” a man answered.

  “Is she in?”

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  I recognized the out-of-breath voice from earlier that day. “Is this Hoffman?” I asked in a tone I hoped sounded high ranking.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “There’s no time for stupid questions,” I shouted. “We’ve got a situation. Where is she?”

  “Home,” Hoffman said after a moment. “Kid’s sick.”

  I remembered the little boy in the photo, and my heart rate kicked up again. I had to think fast, act fast.

  “All right, listen,” I shouted above the shrieking. “This is”—I gave a garbled name. “I’m working homicide in the Bronx. Got a case that’s looking like some of yours down there. Gonna need to run a car by Vega’s place to ask her some questions. She’s over in Queens, right?” It was a shot in the dark, but I needed to get to her before another pair of shriekers did.

  “Wrong borough,” Hoffman said smugly. “And I’m not giving you an address. You gotta call personnel for that.”

  “Listen to me—”

  “No, you listen to me,” he shouted back. “I don’t give a ratshit if you’re the pope and the four horsemen are charging down Broadway. There’s a protocol for getting info on our detectives. How do I know you’re not some scumbag wanting to settle a score?”

  As a breed, New York cops were hard to cow. Despite my initial read on the man, Hoffman was no exception. “Can I get her cell at least?” I asked, the authority deflating from my voice.

  “Personnel,” Hoffman repeated, and hung up.

  Shit. I eyed Vega’s business card. I could cast a spell to locate her, but that was going to take too much time—not only in the casting, but the tracking. No, I needed an address.

  I had one more card to play. Literally.

  I swapped Vega’s card for the one Bashi had flicked onto my lap before having me hauled off. I peeked over at Meredith, who was sitting on the side of the tub, hands still over her ears, and dialed the number.

  “Yes,” a voice answered evenly.

  “This is Everson Croft.” I shouted to be heard. “I need to speak to Mr. Gang.”

  “Then speak.”

  “Is this him?”

  “Speak,” he said shrilly.

  That I’d been given a direct line to the boss himself told me how badly Bashi wanted to nail whomever had arranged for a shrieker to be conjured in his neighborhood. I needed to use that to my advantage.

  “I know where the spell came from,” I said.

  “Tell me.”

  I checked my reasoning before answering. “St. Martin’s Cathedral.”

  Bashi repeated the name, his voice dripping with venom. Telling him the truth was a risk, but a conservative one, I concluded. The officials were missing and the church itself was crawling with NYPD. There was no one there for him to exact revenge on. Not tonight, anyway.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said quickly. “We’re dealing with a supernatural being. A powerful one. Bullets won’t do anything. A job like this is going to require serious magic.”

  The use of we and job was intentional. I needed to get him thinking collaboratively.

  “You said you were a wizard,” he screamed.

  “I am, but my magic’s not cheap.”

  “Maybe I’ll just have you killed. How about that?”

  “Wow.” I’d been expecting a money offer, but either way… “Or how about payment in information,” I countered. “An address and phone number, that’s all, but I need them up front.”

  “Whose?”

  “Detective Vega in Homicide.”

  Any of the major crime syndicates in New York would have that kind of information—for levying bribes, threats, or to eliminate a troublesome investigator—but I only had access to Bashi. Who had gone silent.

  Outside, I could hear the shriekers continuing their assault on my threshold. I only hoped the reverend had perceived me as the greater threat and cast my spell before Vega’s.

  “Fine,” Bashi said at last. “But the job gets done tonight.”

  Like I had a choice. Demon moon … hello?

  “You have my word,” I assured him.

  “Or I have your head.”

  Fair enough, I guessed.

  I was put on hold. Two minutes later, another voice came on and gave me Vega’s number and address. I jotted them down in my notepad. The address was in Brooklyn, not far over the East River. Good, because from there I would need to hightail it to St. Martin’s before the moon neared its zenith—which would mean getting past the Wall again.

  But first I had a bigger challenge, I thought as I eyed Vega’s cell number. Convincing the good detective she was in mortal danger.

  40

  “Croft?” Vega said, not nicely.

  “Detective,” I called into the cupped mouthpiece, “I need you to listen
—”

  “Where in the hell did you get my number? Were you the one who just called my office?”

  Crap. The second that jerk Hoffman had hung up on me he must have called and alerted Vega. Fortunately, she was too irate to let me answer.

  “And what’s that racket?” she went on. “Are you at home?”

  “Yes, but listen—”

  “No, you listen,” she shouted. “The analysis came back on the pencil. The marks are yours, Croft. I gave you a chance to come clean. Remember that. Dempsey and Dipinski are on the way. Try to run, and I’ll up your case to felony fugitive so fast it’ll make your ass hurt.”

  “You’re in danger,” I yelled into the brief space she allowed me. “You need to get your son someplace safe and then—”

  “Are you threatening my family, you piece of…” The rest was lost to the noise outside.

  “I’m trying to help you,” I shouted.

  Detective Vega fell silent. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said at last, coldly. “In your cell.”

  The line clicked off.

  I hung up too, my heart pounding with anger and futility. There was no sense calling back. I would have had to go to her either way, but I’d hoped to convince her to usher her son someplace safe in the meantime. Vega wouldn’t be able to hide herself. With the binding nature of the hunting spell, the shriekers would draw a bead on her, not where she lived. The only positive to glean from our chat was that the creatures had yet to arrive. I still had time.

  But first I had to face the nightmare version of the Bobbsey Twins and then get out before Dempsey and Dipinski arrived.

  I squeezed Meredith’s arm until she opened her sealed eyelids. “I want you to lock the door after I step out and then stay here until well after the alarm stops. Do you understand?”

  “Can’t I just leave?” she asked, tears threatening her mascara.

  “The alarm probably went off for a reason. You’ll be okay as long as you stay in here.”

  She didn’t need to see her professor battling a pair of creatures from the pits of hell, I decided. I only prayed that if I failed, those same creatures would bugle a mission accomplished and sail home, sparing Meredith and the others in the building a messy fate.