Night Rune (Prof Croft Book 8)

by Brad Magnarella

  “There’s room in here, if it’s not too big.” He grimaced when he saw me tuck the amulet inside. “Cold iron?” Though not as susceptible to the metal as Faerie’s magic-wielding beings, goblins still didn’t care for it. Their own iron was forged in fire, making it less effective against fae creatures, but easier to wield.

  “It’s just for the trip. I’ll take it back once we’re there.”

  “You think we’ll encounter fae?” He closed the pouch again.

  I glanced over at Caroline, who was helping Arnaud to his feet. I remembered her warning about Malphas controlling a fae. But there was also Caroline herself.

  “It’s more a precaution,” I said, returning my gaze to Bree-yark.

  At my apartment, I’d stored some of his street clothes in my interplanar cubby hole. He’d gone ahead and changed into them and was back in his bomber jacket and a pair of steel-toed boots. He’d also traded his bow for a shepherd’s sling that he could stuff inside a pocket. Less conspicuous.

  Vega smoothed my coat lapels. “I’m not going to tell you to be careful.”

  “Then I won’t tell you either. The thing that’s hunting me is still out there, and the fae could come looking for Caroline.” I touched Grandpa’s coin pendant through Vega’s blouse and topped off the energy. “Carry hybrid rounds, just in case.”

  “I’ll have the Sup Squad escort me back to my apartment later.”

  “Given the time differentials, I should be back before your shift ends.”

  Vega managed to smile. “I’ll look for you, then.”

  I pressed my lips to the top of her head. “I won’t let Arnaud out of my sight.”

  “Come here, stupid.” She gripped my lapels and pulled me into a real kiss.

  When we separated, she blinked back some moisture and nodded. “You’ve gotta go.”

  “C’mon, Everson,” Bree-yark said, jerking his head as he started toward the circle.

  Reluctantly, I let my hands fall from Vega’s. “I love you.”

  “I trust you.”

  Not the words I’d been expecting, which made them ring more powerfully.

  Caroline’s long cloak shifted as she stepped back to make room in the circle. Arnaud’s entranced eyes stared above his muzzle. None of us were dressed for 1776 New York, but Caroline assured me she would take care of the needed glamours. Given her power demonstrations thus far, I believed she’d deliver.

  “Is everyone ready?” she asked as I squeezed into the circle beside Bree-yark.

  I looked over to find Vega standing in the same place, her face firming around the emotions clashing in her eyes. I’d given her every reassurance, but we both knew the danger was through the roof. I felt my gaze wanting to drop to her stomach, but if I started dwelling on our daughter, I was going to lose it.

  Instead, we gave each other a final wave.

  I turned back to Caroline. “Ready.”

  19

  Without warning the bottom of the casting circle dropped out, and we fell into a steep, shuddering descent. Sulfur-yellow flames flickered, then roared past the sides of our column, some resolving into the visages of claimed souls.

  Definitely a demonic line, I thought sickly.

  “Holy thunder!” Bree-yark cried when one especially tortured face appeared inches from his. I gripped his arm, as much to calm him as to steady myself, because our plummet was turning increasingly turbulent.

  Bree-yark shouted something else, but the rattling reduced his words to garbles. Dropsy became a chaos of jumping light. But Caroline remained the image of self-possession, eyes closed, hands on Arnaud’s shoulders. Cool blue lines of fae energy rippled over our column, buffering our violent passage.

  She got us through the lunar door, I thought. She’ll deliver us through a demon line.

  Unless of course she was the one who had fallen under shadow…

  I was thinking of the cold iron amulet in Bree-yark’s bouncing pouch when the yellow flames dispersed, and we stopped moving. Bree-yark exhaled a few choice words, while Dropsy looked from side to side dizzily.

  Above Arnaud’s head, Caroline opened her eyes, her luminescent gaze meeting mine before peering around. Through the lingering dust of the infernal energy, the stone walls of a room were taking shape. Bookshelves and what appeared to be a large desk stood in the shadows just beyond Dropsy’s glow.

  “We’re here,” Caroline announced.

  I peered down at my shoes, black leather boots now, alarmed to find them planted in a blood circle. Arnaud had rendered an identical circle in his Manhattan penthouse only days earlier, a portal to Malphas.

  “Everyone out,” I whispered, shuffling from the demonic symbol.

  “It’s not active,” Caroline said. “The connection’s been broken, and no energy remains.”

  “Oh.” I took another look. “You’re right.”

  Though the circle served as a terminus for the demonic line, Arnaud was now cut off from his master. The reverse was also true. Without that connection, Malphas’s energy couldn’t access the symbol to trap us or hit us with any number of infernal spells. Bree-yark, whose furrowed brow suggested he had no idea what we were talking about, followed Caroline and Arnaud from the circle.

  The heat of embarrassment sank back into my cheeks. Though rushing the journey here had been necessary, there were consequences. One being that beyond basic planning, I hadn’t had time to think deeply. Ever since waking up that morning, it had been go, go, go just to find a way back here.

  “We’re alone,” Caroline said.

  She’d left off her male glamour, but she’d made adjustments to her attire—all of ours, in fact. Breeches and riding boots showed below the hem of her long cloak. Meanwhile, Arnaud’s robe had become the disheveled attire of a rebel prisoner, his restraints featuring iron components and thick leather straps. Bree-yark looked like a dockworker, a ratty coat over a rough linen shirt and breeches.

  I expected to find myself in a similar disguise as the last time, a common man. Instead, I was looking at a red coat over a brass-buttoned shirt and starch-white breeches. A British soldier? But when I took a second look at Arnaud, it made sense. The city was under English control, and he was my prisoner.

  “Is it safe to be casting?” I asked Caroline, remembering Osgood’s warning from the last time about magic drawing unwanted attention.

  “Malphas already knows someone used an infernal line to arrive here,” she replied. “How he responds is another question.”

  I walked toward a pair of arched windows. Stars twinkled beyond the paned glass. A full moon came into view and then its reflection, glistening from a broad river. When I caught the edge of a fort, I nodded.

  “We’re near the southern tip of Manhattan,” I said, still not quite believing I was back. “In 1776, Arnaud was using this as a place of business slash fortress.”

  I remembered how he’d tried to lure me to this very building while a smiling Zarko—who had turned out to be the present-day Arnaud—grinned at his back. In our final confrontation, the real Arnaud had destroyed his 1776 counterpart, which meant one less worry now. The blood slaves he’d employed as henchmen would have regained their mortality or died. No doubt why the building was empty.

  “Place has been ransacked,” Bree-yark said, returning from across the room.

  He’d lit several candle stubs, and in their guttering light, I saw what he meant. The drawers of the desk were sticking out like tongues. The bookshelves were barren. And a corner safe was pried open, a mess of papers spilling onto the floor.

  I turned to Caroline. “How about we take a few minutes to search what’s here?”

  “It could give us some insights into his activities,” she said, completing my thought. “I can start on the safe if you don’t mind tackling the desk.”

  “What can I be doing?” Bree-yark asked.

  I hesitated a beat before saying, “How about watching Arnaud?”

  With an authoritative grunt, Bree-yark took the de
mon-vampire by an arm, sat him in a corner, and stood over him, blade drawn. Enchanted and bound, Arnaud’s yellow-flecked eyes stared out at nothing. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking of my promise to Vega about not letting Arnaud from my sight.

  “He can’t go anywhere,” Caroline assured me, already crouching before the safe.

  My gaze lingered on Arnaud for another moment before I approached the mahogany desk. I spent the next several minutes leafing through papers on the desktop trying to make sense of them. Most were neatly penned financial statements or letters from loan-seekers. The sprouts of Arnaud Thorne’s financial empire.

  The drawers had been cleaned out, but a couple of ledgers remained. I removed the thicker of the two and started working backwards from the most recent entries. They listed deposits and withdrawals in various currencies. I swapped it for the other one, which appeared to catalogue commodities purchased. Before long, a block of entries caught my eye. They were for copper-plated panels. I mouthed the dimensions. Six feet by nine. Twelve feet by sixteen. Big copper-plated panels.

  “I may have something,” Caroline said.

  The sound of her voice beside me made me jump. She spread a parchment over the desktop.

  “There were several maps of Manhattan, most demarcating properties,” she said, “but this one is interesting.” I moved the ledger so she could shift the map more fully into the light of the candle. “It shows St. Martin’s.”

  Indeed, the professionally drawn map was centered on the site of St. Martin’s Cathedral. The Hudson, which I’d just viewed out the window, was depicted as a series of ripples. But someone had used dark ink to mark the area immediately around the cathedral with vertical and horizontal lines.

  “Son of a bitch,” I muttered.

  “What is it?” Caroline asked.

  “This is how Arnaud was channeling the energy coming from the St. Martin’s site.”

  I showed her the ledger entries for the massive plates, copper being only second to silver as a container for energy, but considerably cheaper. I used copper in many of my casting circles and for the same reasons. Hell, I was carrying a tube of the shaved stuff in my coat pocket at that moment.

  Caroline looked from the entries to the lines on the map. “He could have installed them in the sides of the buildings,” she said, tracing one on the corner of Broadway and Stone Street with a finger, “then covered them over.”

  “He was also able to turn the plates on and off. Send the energy to very specific places.”

  I remembered our final encounter in the alleyway and how he’d deprived me of ley energy. When he’d done the same to the time catch version of my grandfather, Arnaud had inadvertently sent a current running back through me, allowing me to snag him and deliver him to the cell at 1 Police Plaza.

  “He must have been tapped into the plates,” she said. “Probably through demonic sigils.”

  “But what was the point?” I muttered in thought.

  I was so absorbed in the map I didn’t notice that Caroline’s and my shoulders were touching until she moved her hand and tapped the St. Martin’s site. “I believe the plan was to direct the energy back to the source.”

  A mental flashbulb went off. With a finger, I began drawing lines from every plate back to the center of the St. Martin’s site. “Arnaud was only activating the plates selectively, but activate them en masse and, bam, magnified output. The ley coming up, plus the ley from fractions of a second earlier.”

  “Boosted energy,” Caroline agreed.

  “But that alone doesn’t create a portal for Malphas,” I said. “The energy would have to be converted somehow. I don’t see anything on here about that, and the site was burnt to the ground the last time I was here.”

  “Nothing on the other maps, either,” Caroline said.

  “Arnaud was trying to buy the parcel, though. Probably with plans to construct something.”

  “Either way,” she said, “I believe we’ve found our answer to how to stop Malphas.”

  “Destroy the plates and ward the site.” It didn’t seem like it should have been that easy, but that would definitely deny Malphas his power source.

  “That should also normalize the energy here.” Caroline began folding the map to take with us. “If you’ve noticed, it’s a little irregular.”

  I had noticed, but it was far from the instability Arnaud had suggested. Probably a bluff to introduce urgency. It had gotten me moving, just not in the Let’s Make a Deal way he’d planned. I glanced over at him now with a skintight grin.

  Nice try, pal.

  “It will also make it safer to find your friends,” Caroline added.

  While she tucked the map inside her cloak, I inspected the druidic symbol on my hand that once bonded me to the rest of the Upholders. Though I pushed power into it, I still couldn’t pick them up. Was that because Jordan had released me from its obligation, or because the others were no longer in the time catch?

  I lowered my hand again. “The church is only a few blocks from here.”

  “We can take Beaver Street over to Broadway.” When I looked at Caroline in surprise, she returned a cagey smile. “Scholar of urban history, remember? I know the layout of the city back to its founding.”

  For a moment, she looked exactly like my classroom neighbor and friend. It was the light in her eyes, as if she were inviting me to come back with a quip, something I would have done those few years ago. The look also suggested that our shoulders touching a minute earlier hadn’t been an accident.

  I quickly turned to Bree-yark. “You ready?”

  “Let’s go,” he said, hauling Arnaud to his feet.

  We descended from the turret and arrived on a floor that looked as if it had been Arnaud’s living quarters. But like the office, the space was ransacked. Dropsy’s light glowed over a wooden floor where dark patterns showed the former locations of rugs and furniture. Arnaud’s staring eyes gave no reaction.

  The ground floor, where the day-to-day operations of Arnaud’s enterprise had likely been conducted, were stripped too. Probably by British soldiers appropriating materials, but I wondered why they hadn’t commandeered the building itself. The main door to the outside was ajar, and I pushed it open. As we filed out, the unpaved street felt warm underfoot, as if the sun had only set an hour or two earlier.

  Bree-yark grunted what I was thinking: “Pretty quiet.”

  “Dark too,” I said. “The last time I was here, the streets had oil lanterns.”

  “Something’s off,” Caroline said, squinting slightly, “though I can’t say what.”

  “The best kind,” I muttered. “All right, let’s play our parts so we don’t stand out. I’ll take Arnaud. Bree-yark, hang back a few paces. And Caroline, can you watch the rear?”

  It was only upon asking her that I realized I was assuming leadership like I had with the Upholders—the role coming more naturally to me now—but Caroline was fae royalty. If she minded, though, she didn’t show it.

  I seized Arnaud’s manacled wrists and assumed the role of a British soldier delivering his rebel prisoner somewhere. To avoid the fort and governor’s house, I marched up New Street before cutting toward Broadway. Under Caroline’s subservience enchantment, Arnaud matched my clipped pace.

  Behind me, Bree-yark scanned the houses to either side, one hand holding Dropsy aloft, the other touching the hilt of his sheathed blade. Caroline, meanwhile, moved like an apparition, her hood pulled low to hide her face.

  Block by block, the silence of the city persisted. Every building we passed was either shut and shuttered or else thrown wide. But in all cases they were dark. Even the stench of raw sewage, so prevalent the last time, was minimal now. The cool breeze blowing against my face smelled of salt and marsh.

  What in the hell could have happened for the city to clear out? As the question moved uneasily through me, I refocused on our immediate objective—destroying the copper panels and warding the site. Then we’d search for the Upholders.

>   We approached the wide dirt lane of Broadway to find it dark and empty. Blackened lots and the occasional husk of a burned building stood on the side opposite us. That much hadn’t changed. When Bree-yark and Caroline arrived beside me, I pointed out the St. Martin’s site a couple blocks to the north. Stone slabs from the original foundation showed through a layer of earth and cinder, but that was it.

  “No new construction,” I said.

  Caroline consulted the folded map, then raised her face. “We’re a block from the copper panels on the corner of Broadway and Stone.” But she seemed to hesitate, a small fold forming between her eyes.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The ley energy is too diffuse.”

  I shifted to my wizard’s senses. I could see the energy founting from where St. Martin’s had once stood, but Caroline was right. The passing currents were way too weak. I wondered if it had something to do with the plates.

  Bree-yark grumbled, “I’m picking up some strange smells.”

  Dropsy pulsed several times as if to announce something was bothering her too.

  “We should go carefully,” Caroline said.

  With a Word, I hardened the air around us into a shield. But with the dearth of ley energy, the manifestation was feeble. It sputtered several times before stabilizing into something semi-protective. Has to be the plates, I thought. Dismantle them and the energy flow will return to normal.

  I took the lead up Broadway, eyeballing the approaching corner.

  Caroline started to speak when, in a blinding burst of sparks, something crashed through my shield and landed against my chest. The impact jolted Arnaud from my grip and drove me to the ground. Blinking rapidly to clear the bright afterimage from my eyes, I made out a reptilian head with large serrated teeth.

  And it was lunging toward my face.

  20

  I met the oncoming head with a sword swing, the flat of the blade smacking off the snout. The creature reared back, giving me my first good look at it. Reptilian, yes—but its body was sheathed in gray feathers. It stalked around on a pair of legs that ended in lethal talons, head cocked to one side to peer down at me.