Purge City (Prof Croft Book 3)

by Brad Magnarella

  “And what did she say?”

  “Same old, same old.”

  Even as I waved a dismissive hand, Caroline’s warnings continued to echo in my head. You’re standing on a precipice, Everson. And it’s crumbling. As one of the chief architects of Budge’s reelection campaign, she was seeing something that I couldn’t. But what?

  “Hmm. Perhaps I was wrong,” Tabitha said in a musing voice.

  “About what?”

  “While I wouldn’t put it past her to claim you were in danger in order to get closer to you…”

  “You don’t even know her.”

  “…her persistence in the face of so hopeless a case makes me wonder now.” Tabitha propped her chin on a curled paw. “Perhaps you should take her at her word. You might actually be in danger.”

  “We’re not going to the faerie buffet.”

  “It’s not about food,” she said, then added, “not entirely.”

  I met Tabitha’s gaze. Was my cat right? Was refusing to listen to Caroline my way of retaliating for her choosing a life with Angelus and the fae over me? Was I jeopardizing my safety to prove to Caroline that I could take care of myself, that I didn’t need her help?

  “All right,” I admitted, “maybe ego has a tiny bit to do with this, but it’s not the whole story.” I lifted my satchel onto the table and pulled out the evidence bag with the cat hair. “I need to stay here to figure out the whos and whys of Lady Bastet’s murder. The answer might not only have implications for me, but also Detective Vega.” I was still puzzling over Vega recommending me for the eradication team. Had it been to protect me, as the mayor suggested?

  “Well, the whos are the wolves, correct?” Tabitha asked.

  “Huh?” I said, emerging from my thoughts. “Oh, I’m not so sure. I had a little run-in with them earlier, and they showed impressive restraint. They would rip me to shreds if left to their instincts, but someone’s got a tight hold on their leashes. And they have a hell of a lot more reason to kill me than to kill Lady Bastet.”

  “What about the mauled cats?” Tabitha asked.

  I considered the mystic’s disabled warding glyphs, the lack of signs of struggle. At last, I considered the evidence bag in front of me: sulfur lifted from the torn necks of her cats. “I’m starting to think the real killer wanted the murder to look like the work of wolves.”

  “What in the world for?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping to find out,” I said. “So either keep quiet so I can focus, or go back to your cat bed.”

  Muttering something about crappy ice bags, Tabitha remained in a languid heap on my table. She lowered her head to her paws. I waited another moment to ensure she would stay silent before I opened the plastic bag and emptied the contents into the casting circle. Stepping into my protective circle on the floor, I drew my staff and called energy to my prism.

  “Cerrare,” I said.

  Energy infused the sigils and moved around the concentric circles, closing them. Brow furrowed, I concentrated toward the cat hair. My first spell would be a simple detection spell to determine the nature of the residue, to learn what sort of being had deposited it.

  “Rivelare,” I said, staff pointed at the circle.

  The hair swirled and amassed at the circle’s center. In the next moment, small popping noises sounded, and a yellow smoke drifted from the clump of hair. The sulfurous smell intensified, but now it carried something else: a distinct odor of ozone. That went with casting.

  “The residue originated from a spell,” I said.

  “And not from a demonic spell,” Tabitha put in.

  “No?” I hadn’t progressed that far.

  “I have a nose for my own. That carries the taint of human.”

  “Black magic, then.” I gave another sniff, opening my wizard’s senses further. “Cast from elder wood.”

  I withdrew energy from the detection spell. A fellow magic-user. And if he or she had disabled Lady Bastet’s glyphs and killed her without a struggle, then we were talking about a powerful one. Personal enmity between the mage and the mystic? Maybe, but I didn’t like the timing.

  “Let’s do a little hunting,” I said.

  “Knock yourself out,” Tabitha murmured.

  With a spoken Word, I shifted half the hair to one side of the circle as a reserve and kept the other half in the circle’s center. I aimed my staff at the small pile and incanted. After several moments, a subtle pull took hold on my cane as it began to absorb the residue’s essence. The pull grew stronger, which was a relief. I’d feared the mage had covered his tracks and that the spell would crap out. That he hadn’t cast a spell to avoid detection suggested the mage either wasn’t as powerful as I’d thought or so powerful that he didn’t care.

  “I see you.”

  I jumped at the distorted voice. My gaze searched the circle, but there was no one and nothing there. To the circle’s right, Tabitha had shuffled back into a threatening crouch. Her hair was puffed out, ears flat to her skull. But her dilated eyes weren’t aimed at the circle. They were glaring at me.

  “Yes,” she said, “I see you, Everson Croft.”

  “Tabitha?”

  But it wasn’t Tabitha. A hunting spell worked like a plumbing snake, reaching through the essence of something to hook a target. But that conduit ran both ways, enabling an adept target to lash back and hook the casting circle. Which was exactly what had happened. The minute I knew we weren’t dealing with a demon, I should have reconfigured the circle. Not only that, but I’d been careless in removing Tabitha’s errant hairs. A few must have remained inside the circle, allowing the mage to take possession of my cat.

  I cycled through Word after Word to break the hunting spell, but Tabitha’s lips only forked into a grin.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “I was of no concern to you, Everson Croft,” the mage said through Tabitha.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I know a lot about you. I own something vital of yours.”

  The confidence with which the mage spoke sent a cold shudder through me. What in the world was he talking about?

  “Leave it, Everson,” he warned, “or you will join others who have waded into matters beyond their purview. Indeed, crossing paths with me a second time would be very bad luck.”

  He was speaking as though in riddle. Bad luck and crossing paths called to mind black cats. And a second time?

  In a sudden flash, I remembered the cat that had darted out when I’d blown open Lady Bastet’s door. I had assumed the cat with the sleek midnight coat to have been the lone survivor of the massacre, but something told me the feline hadn’t belonged to Lady Bastet.

  Had I crossed paths with the departing mage?

  To test the theory, I said, “You killed Lady Bastet.”

  Tabitha’s black eyes moved back and forth over mine. At last, her lips grinned again. “You’re more astute than you appear,” the mage said. “But don’t mistake astuteness for adeptness. You’re still a babe in the woods.”

  The satisfaction in the mage’s voice stoked a raw rage inside me. Without forethought, I called a tidal wave of power to my prism. “Uccidere!” I shouted, unleashing the power through the conduit, the force shoving me backwards. Tabitha recoiled too, eyes startling wide.

  A moment later, though, her body shook with laughter.

  “You’re a tempestuous one,” the mage said. “It looks like you require a more tactile warning.”

  Before I could raise my staff, Tabitha sprang, claws flashing. Her rear legs kicked me in the chest, toppling me backwards. Hot tines raked my right cheek. I landed hard, cracking my head against the edge of a bookshelf. The room blurred as I struck out my arms in defense.

  “Are you all right, darling?”

  I blinked over to where Tabitha was sauntering up. I started to shrink away before sensing she was herself again. A quick check showed me the hunting spell had been broken.

  Tabitha’s pupils narrowed inside her
green irises as she leaned down to inspect my cheek. “Who did you manage to piss off this time?”

  “A mage,” I replied, understanding that Tabitha had no memory of the possession.

  I touched the knot on the back of my head and inspected my fingers. I wasn’t bleeding there, anyway. My face was another matter. I looked down at the blood spattering the thigh of my pants. The claw marks felt deep enough to leave scars, even with healing magic. No doubt the mage’s intention. I drew a handkerchief from my pocket, balled it up, and pressed it to my cheek. I then used the bookcase to pull myself to my feet.

  “So the hunting spell was a score?” Tabitha asked.

  “Not quite,” I said. “The mage was too powerful. He let the spell go just long enough to issue a warning.”

  “Seems you’ve been getting a lot of those lately.”

  “No shit,” I muttered. “This one was to keep my nose out of Lady Bastet’s murder—which the mage all but confessed to.”

  I limped back to my lab table and looked down at the smoking casting circle. I thought about the shriveled strand of hair the investigators had found on Lady Bastet’s lap. If it had belonged to my mother, as I suspected, maybe it explained the timing of the murder.

  I repeated the mage’s warning in a whisper: “Leave it, Everson, or you will join others who have waded into matters beyond their purview.”

  “What, darling?” Tabitha asked.

  …matters beyond their purview, I repeated to myself.

  I turned toward Tabitha, speaking quickly. “All this time I’ve been thinking the murder had to do with the wolves or the mayor’s office. But what if the mage killed Lady Bastet for what she’d learned?”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” she asked in irritation.

  I thought back to the murder scene. The toppled shelves, the decapitated cats, Lady Bastet’s slit throat, and in front of her … the scrying globe! If Lady Bastet had been killed at the conclusion of the divination session, the final images she received might still be in the globe.

  I slotted my sword into my staff, grabbed several spell items from my drawers, and made for the ladder.

  “Where are you going?” Tabitha asked.

  “To ignore a warning,” I said.

  17

  I descended the steps to Lady Bastet’s former business to find the door secured by a police padlock. I drew my sword and inserted the tip inside the shackle. With a whispered “Vigore,” I cracked one of the shafts from the body and slipped it from the hasp.

  I opened the door. Inside, afternoon light fell through the high basement windows in dusty slants. The showroom was clean, the hanging rugs gone, probably in a forensics lab somewhere. For a panicked moment, I became certain the scrying globe would be gone too.

  After sensing no one else inside, I sealed the door behind me with a basic locking spell and hurried to the windowless back room. I called light to my staff and exhaled. The globe was there, on the table. The rest of the room had been straightened, shelves righted, the items that had fallen from them swept into a pile. Blood stains still marred the floor, though.

  I returned my gaze to the scrying globe. It seemed to absorb the light from my staff, giving nothing back. The orb simply stared, a gray, inscrutable eye. The chair in which I’d found Lady Bastet was scooted out at a slight angle, as though inviting me to sit. I didn’t sense any traps, but given the power of the mage, and that he seemed to have anticipated my hunting spell, I built a protective circle around the chair before lowering myself onto the seat.

  “All right,” I whispered, eyeing the globe. “Let’s see if there’s anything left in your memory.”

  I set my sword and staff on the table and pulled two silver candles from my pockets. I lit them and stood them on either side of the globe. Next, I extinguished my staff. As darkness collapsed around the candles, the marble-like surface of the globe shifted. Nothing appeared, though. Scrying required a level of intuition that I lacked, not only to perceive images but to interpret them.

  Fortunately, I kept an Elixir of Seeing on hand. It had been drawn from a ’48 batch, which was supposed to have been an especially good year. I pulled the flask from my shirt pocket and drank the bitter potion down.

  It didn’t take long to start working. Within minutes, I began to feel insubstantial, ghost-like. A dull pressure built between my eyes while, from the sides of my vision, a dark mist drifted in. The mist thickened until I could no longer see the candles in front of me. With a final, rude gouge, the pressure in the center of my brow relented, and a third eye opened.

  The scrying globe hovered in front of me like a misty planet, larger than it had appeared to my physical eyes. Light from the candles glistened over a surface that had begun to swirl. Images flashed forth, talking to me in a strange language—one I could suddenly understand.

  Oh, God.

  The images were horrifying. But I was no longer just observing them.

  I was living them.

  I staggered in the center of a pillared room, a woman, pain seething in every part of my body. The metallic tastes of blood and fear stained my palate. Through hanks of sweat-soaked hair, I could see the burning candles that ringed me. Robed figures stood among them.

  “Please,” I managed, the word raw in my throat.

  Their responding voices rose at once, a single word climbing above the others: “Traitor.”

  “No,” I said, searching for a way out.

  A force blast caught me in the chest and knocked me back. Breathless, I stumbled to keep my feet. Another blast nailed me between the shoulder blades, pitching me onto my hands and knees. My right collarbone cracked in a harsh flare, and I moaned. The figures swam toward me.

  My son, I thought through the haze. Need to stay alive for my son.

  “Did you really think you could keep up this shameful duplicity without me finding out?”

  I squinted at the tall figure emerging through the others. The face beneath his hood was an ornate gold mask, the eyeholes dark and vacant, open mouth set in a frown. A mask of judgment.

  “I did nothing,” I said.

  The mage’s black gown shuffled to a stop in front of me. “Nothing?” he scoffed. “You joined the Front as a sworn rebel against tyranny. You pledged your allegiance, your life. Only for us to learn that you’re a plant for the Order.”

  I shook my head. “That’s a lie.”

  The mage drew a wand. I could smell the elder wood. “Then you shouldn’t have a problem submitting to a mind flaying.”

  My insides twisted up. A mind flaying would entail a level of pain beyond anything physically imaginable. It would lay bare everything—not only my infiltration of the Front, but my true feelings for my son. I had acted as if he were a mistake, a nuisance to be tolerated.

  Struggling to my feet, I faced the mage. “I will submit to nothing.”

  “Then you are admitting guilt.”

  “If that’s what you want to believe.”

  “It’s the truth, traitor,” he said. “And you know the penalty.”

  I looked past the eyeholes of his mask, defiant. “Do your worst.”

  With a grunted Word, he thrust his wand toward me. The force threw me against a stone pillar, knocking the wind from me. He spoke another Word and vines snaked up through cracks in the floor. I was too stunned to move. Could only watch as the vines encircled my legs, my broken body, binding me to the pillar. They wrapped my throat and squeezed until I gagged.

  The mage moved closer. “It didn’t have to end this way, Eve.”

  From a great distance, I flinched at hearing my mother’s name.

  The mage turned toward the other robed figures, fellow magic-users. “Behold the penalty for treachery,” he announced. I imagined a hard grin forming behind his mask. “Death by fire.”

  No, I thought.

  Though my eyes remained fixed on the mage, I saw my son’s face. He had just turned one. The week before, he had taken his first steps, spoken his first co
herent sentence: Mama, read me. Such a smart boy.

  A crushing sadness filled my heart at the knowledge he would never know me. Not really. I had already discussed the contingency with my parents. My mother would love him as her own. My father would protect him. The Order would look after him as well…

  “Fuoco!” the mage shouted.

  Dark red flames sprang up around me and glistened in the mage’s gold mask until he looked like something demonic. Soon, the flames hid his face, and there was only pain.

  I love you, Everson, I felt my mother’s cracking lips whisper.

  I landed against the cold floor with a gasp. The room was dark, my shirt soaked with sweat. I pawed around until I encountered the stone table and pulled myself to my feet. The globe stood from the darkness, its surface dimming. The candles on either side had burned to their nubs and gone out, the puddles of wax cool and firm when I touched them.

  How long was I out?

  I stared at the spent candles, remembering the fire from my vision. It had consumed me. No—consumed my mother. I had relived the agony and sorrow of her final moments, felt her vanishing love for me. The experience—too raw to put into words—tore around my insides.

  Arnaud had been telling the truth. I believed now that my grandfather had gone to him after my mother’s death and said the words, They killed her. My God, they killed her. My mother had been murdered by a rebel group she had managed to infiltrate. Had been burned alive by their presumed leader, a mage with a gold mask whose voice I recognized.

  A scuff sounded from the showroom.

  I seized my sword and cane from the table and spun. The sun had set while I’d been entranced; the showroom was now cast in dark shadows. Another scuff sounded: someone trying to exercise stealth. Either the locking magic on the front door had petered out or someone had dispelled it.

  Heart slamming, I moved to one side of the door in the rear room and pressed my back to the wall. My mother’s executioner was still alive. He had murdered Lady Bastet to keep his deed a secret. He had hijacked my hunting spell and spoken through Tabitha to warn me not to pursue the matter. That was where I’d recognized the mage’s voice from.