Purge City (Prof Croft Book 3)

by Brad Magnarella

  Another scuff.

  My lips trembled in fury as I summoned energy to my prism. You screwed with the wrong wizard family, you son of a bitch. Whatever happens, you’re going to know pain. Even if it kills me.

  A dark shape entered the doorway.

  “Entrapolarle!” I bellowed, swinging my staff around.

  White light burst from the opal, and a crackling shield encased the figure. I slammed the figure against the near wall and raised my sword overhead. The sound of muted gunshots stayed my arm. As the shield dimmed, I found myself staring at Detective Vega. She stared back with startled eyes.

  “Croft?” she shouted, eyebrows crushing down.

  I released her and called light to my staff. “Wh-what are you doing here?”

  “No,” she said, emerging through the sparks of the dissolving shield, “that’s my question.”

  I glanced back at the globe before meeting her gaze. “I was looking for something.”

  “You broke in here,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  The confession seemed to catch her off guard. Her dark eyes searched my face, pausing on the healing claw marks.

  “Do you want to tell me what the hell’s going on?” she asked.

  With a steadying breath, I sheathed my sword. “It wasn’t the wolves.”

  “What?”

  “The wolves didn’t kill Lady Bastet.”

  “That’s what you’re doing in here?” She holstered her firearm and took a menacing step forward. “Listen to me, Croft, and listen good. You may advise the Hundred, but that does not give you jurisdiction to investigate any old murder you just happen to take an interest in.”

  Fresh anger burned inside me. “Any old murder? Let’s see, a powerful mystic was executed on the same day I just happened to drop off something for her to read. Excuse me for taking a goddamned interest.”

  “I told you we’d be in touch.”

  “Yeah, to blow me off,” I shot back.

  “For your information”—Vega jabbed a finger against my chest—“I already eliminated the wolf angle. Nothing linked them to the murder. I moved onto a substance we found on the mutilated cats, but I guess your informant already told you that,” she added with a sneer.

  She knew about my arrangement with Hoffman. I steeled my jaw.

  “I get that you think I’m a novice when it comes to the supernatural,” she went on, “but I have other resources besides you. The substance came from magic.”

  I chaffed at the idea of her consulting another magic-user in the city. It felt like betrayal—something I didn’t need any more of in my life. “And what were you going to do with that information?” I challenged. “Stick it in your Wizard Database and look for a match? You’re out of your depth, Vega. You have no idea who or what you’re dealing with.”

  “If you’re suggesting you have info,” she said, “you’re obligated to share it.”

  I stared back at her. My emotions might have been all over the map, but I knew better than to say anything that would put Vega in the path of a powerful mage. And after what he’d done to my mother, he was my problem.

  “Forget it.” I stepped past her.

  She seized my arm. “I’m serious, Croft. I already have you on breaking and entering.”

  My anger spiked, but I talked it back down, forced myself to relax. When at last I spoke, my voice was calm, quiet. “I understand I have you to thank for getting me a spot on the mayor’s eradication team. For protection, right? I appreciate that. I do. And if you want to continue to keep me at arm’s length, fine. That’s probably being a good mother. But I’m not going to stop pursuing Lady Bastet’s killer. How you deal with that is up to you.”

  I drew my arm from her relenting grip and walked from the back room.

  “The problem with you, Croft, is I never know who I’m dealing with.”

  I turned and found her standing in the back doorway, fists on her hips.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

  “It means that I was ready to put the past behind us—only to find out you’re dealing with Arnaud again.”

  “Arnaud? I don’t have a goddamned thing to do with him.”

  “Oh yeah? You didn’t meet with one of his at a bar in the West Village last week?”

  She was referring to the morning of the mayor’s press conference. That had only been ten or so days ago, but with everything that had transpired since, it felt like ten months. I’d relegated it to the back of my mind. Explains Vega’s ball-breaking stance towards me, though, I thought.

  “Who told you that?” I asked.

  “That doesn’t sound like a denial.”

  I sighed. “It’s not what you think. Meeting with him was part of a deal for him to stay out of my life.”

  “Yeah, I know all about your deals.”

  Of course she did. The last one had led to her son getting grabbed. I cursed my word choice, but there was way too much going on in my head right now. I needed to leave. I surprised myself by walking back toward her.

  “Look,” I said, “Arnaud is always shifting pieces around his little chess board, looking for advantages. It’s how he’s stayed alive this long. But I know his game. I gave him ten minutes of my time. That was all. True to his word, he hasn’t approached me since. And if I know vampires, he won’t.”

  Vega was looking at me as though trying to decide what to make of me. In hindsight, agreeing to meet with one of Arnaud’s had been stupid. I glanced past her to the stains on the floor.

  “It’s not like I gave him my blood or anyth…” My voice trailed off as a horrifying thought struck me.

  “What’s wrong?” Vega asked.

  “The blood in the room,” I said, nodding past her. “You had it tested?”

  She looked over her shoulder and back at me. “Yeah?”

  “Did any of it…” I swallowed. “…belong to me?”

  Vega’s brow beetled as she shook her head.

  The room seemed to reel as I recalled the mage’s words: I know a lot about you. I own something vital of yours. The black cat that darted out Lady Bastet’s front door hadn’t been wearing an odd collar. It had been holding the clay tube with my blood.

  “Shit,” I spat.

  18

  I spent the next day in my apartment, afraid to leave my protective wards, not even sure they could protect me. The mage who had killed my mother had my blood, and that was bad. Super bad. With it, he could cast all manner of blood magic, up to and including a death spell.

  I would be powerless to stop him.

  I paced the length of my bookshelves again, eyes jerking from title to title, but I’d already pulled the relevant ones and read through them. They only reaffirmed what I already knew about blood magic.

  I was fucked.

  I sagged into my padded chair with a hard sigh and eyed the evidence bag beside the books on my desk. The bag held what remained of the cat hair and spell residue—my sole connection to the mage. I had mentally cycled through the spells I was capable of casting, but I was still too junior. None of them would enable me to find the mage or strike him without his knowledge. And if the mage was as adept as he seemed, he probably had a nasty counterspell in waiting.

  That left communicating with the Order—and that was where I was stuck.

  First, there were the questions. Why didn’t the Order have a record of my mother? Were they trying to hide something? And why hadn’t the Order done anything about her murder? The mage should have been toast. Was he that powerful, or was there something more going on?

  Complication number two fell back on my blood. The mage had taken it without my consent, true. But that wouldn’t earn me any pity points with the Order. The fact I had given my blood willingly, to whomever, was what mattered. If the mage used my blood in any kind of black magic, I would be considered just as guilty as he was. In which case, the only way I’d be spared the death penalty was if the mage killed me first.

  I massage
d my closed eyes, the final moments of my mother’s life flashing behind my swollen lids. The pain, the blasts, the mage with the gold mask, the bitter exchange, the cruel fire—

  The ringing phone made me jump.

  I considered letting the call go to my answering service, but I was selective about who I shared my unlisted number with, and this could be important. I arrived downstairs and grabbed the receiver on the fifth ring.

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “Everson!” the mayor said. “Listen, I know we barely touched on it in our meeting yesterday, but I want you to go ahead and start drawing up plans for the next phase in the program.”

  “Central Park?” That had been slated for late August.

  Budge lowered his voice. “Between you and me, I was hoping for a solid month of coverage on the ghoul operation, but the press is already running out of steam. We’re looking at another week, tops. They want fresh stories on the program. Maybe we can divide up the park, do it in phases?”

  “We’d have to,” I said, considering not only its size, but its creatures.

  “Yeah, maybe a series of grab-and-hold operations,” Budge said. “We could even reopen parts of the park, host a big cookout with blankets, clowns, the works—you know, something tangible for the public. Don’t get me wrong. Ridding the lines of the ghouls was great, but it’s gonna take months to get those lines in good enough shape to run trains through again.”

  I caught myself nodding. Despite that Budge had all but blackmailed me into pledging my continued cooperation, I was thankful to have another problem to divert my thoughts.

  “All right, but listen,” I said. “This is going to be a lot different from the ghoul operation. For one, we’re dealing with a different class of creature. Goblins, hobgoblins—bad, bad dudes. They might not have the regenerative powers of ghouls, but they’re smarter, more tactical minded. Also, we won’t have anything like the subway tunnels. This is going to be jungle warfare.”

  “Is that a problem?” Budge asked.

  “It is if you’re trying to avoid casualties.”

  “Hmm, good point,” Budge said. “At this phase, though, I think the public would be willing to stomach a few losses, don’t you? Shows them we’re taking the problem seriously. Just so long as the losses are minimal and they don’t include you. You’re still the face of this thing, remember.”

  I let the remark go. “When do you need a plan by?”

  “Have something Friday. If we want to maintain campaign momentum, Caroline’s saying we need to get the ball rolling by the following week. Otherwise, I’m bleeding points again.”

  Mention of Caroline sent a raw charge of emotion through me. I wondered vaguely about the looming threat she was seeing. In light of recent developments, it didn’t seem so pressing.

  I cleared my throat. “Friday it is, then.”

  I still had the mage to worry about, and whether or not to tell the Order, but in my years as a scholar I’d found that shifting my focus to a secondary problem often yielded answers to a more pressing primary problem. Subconscious incubation, I’d heard it called. I hoped that would be the case here.

  “The more spectacular, the better,” Budge said, and hung up.

  A week later found me pacing the command-and-control center’s main tent, gripping a Styrofoam cup of bitter coffee. All around me, NYPD officers and technicians manned computers and communication equipment. For the second phase of the eradication program, we had set up in Grand Army Plaza, just outside Central Park’s southeast corner. As before, Captain Cole wanted us close to the action. Only this time, there was no action.

  Across the tent, he shot me a stern look that said, Where are they?

  I dropped my Styrofoam cup into a trashcan. Above me, a series of monitors showed grainy green images of woods, overgrown paths, a derelict amusement park—but no creatures. On the GPS display, the numbered points indicated that the sweep, begun at midnight, was nearly complete.

  “Well?” Cole asked, voicing his displeasure now.

  “It’s only the first action,” I said defensively. We had divided Central Park into six sections with the plan to clear them in successive actions, south to north. Tonight we were tackling the southernmost section, up to the transverse road at Sixty-fifth Street. While half the Hundred performed the sweep, the other half were stationed around the perimeter in armored vehicles. No creature was going to get out alive. That had been the idea, anyway.

  Cole walked up to me. “You said we’d get engagement.”

  “I said maybe we’d get engagement. I’m an academic, remember? Qualifiers are our stock and trade. I also said the heaviest concentration of creatures was going to be farther north. Either way, we secure the southern park and the mayor gets to throw his cookout. Everyone’s fat and happy, right?”

  “This is about liberating, not securing,” Cole said in a menacing voice. “You don’t liberate a place by strolling through it and shouting ‘all clear.’ The local Cub Scout troop could’ve managed that.”

  “Good,” I said, turning away. “Consult their den mother next time.”

  Cole seized my wrist. “You know what I’m saying, Prof.”

  I felt my other fist balling around my cane. It was late, my nerves were stretched, and—qualifiers or not—the operation was not going as planned. And here Cole was trying to make me the scapegoat. Monitors flickered. Cole must have sensed the crackle of magic too because he released my wrist.

  “Look,” he said, “I hate the political B.S. as much as you, but it is what it is.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said, a sigh dispersing the power that had rushed to my prism. “The press needs a monster count. Otherwise, this is going to look like an expensive publicity stunt—one the mayor’s opponent will jump on as yet another example of his reckless spending.”

  “How dangerous would it be to send a team north to try to bag a few bodies?” he asked.

  I followed his furrowed gaze to the map of Central Park. It was a large aerial shot that should have answered his question. The further north one ventured, the wilder and more rugged the park became—and thus, the more dangerous. I’d only ventured into those wilds once, and that was with a stealth potion. Even then, I’d nearly been flame-broiled by druids.

  “Not worth it,” I said.

  “Team of five,” Cole went on. “If they’re killed in action, not a huge loss.”

  “It is if we have nothing to show for it.”

  But the stern line of the captain’s lips told me he’d already made up his mind. He readied his headset to issue the command.

  “We found something,” a voice crackled over the feed.

  Cole and I turned simultaneously. The GPS display showed team members converging near the park’s southeast corner—a wooded area anchored by a horseshoe-shaped pond. My eyes cut to the nearby monitors. One of the feeds steadied on the base of a giant boulder. Several armored officers were clearing branches away from what I realized was the entrance to a tunnel.

  “Careful,” I muttered.

  Cole nodded. “Drop in a couple grenades,” he ordered.

  As team members readied the grenades, I studied the tossed-off branches that had been used to screen the tunnel. Something about the concealment seemed too obvious. I eyed the GPS display. In the men’s eagerness for action, they had converged too quickly, were too close together.

  “Have them spread apart,” I told Cole quickly. “There are probably other access points to the—”

  The bangs of the exploding grenades cut me off. Fire blew from the hole, the retreating camera catching it as a white-green flare. The camera whipped around suddenly. I drew in a sharp breath at the sight of small figures blurring past the trees. Thunks sounded, and the camera fell to the ground. Out ahead of the camera lens, beyond a spray of twigs, I could see two downed members of the Hundred, the seams in their body armor bristling with arrows.

  A blow horn sounded, followed by a chorus of garbled cries.

  “S
on of a bitch,” I said, instinctively drawing my cane apart. “Goblins.”

  “We have engagement!” Cole shouted into his headset. “I repeat, we have engagement!”

  19

  Unlike many of the creatures in the city, Goblins were not undead. Neither were they descended from the original demons. They had come up from the faerie realm in an age before fae kingdoms controlled the portals. Passing for stunted humans, they were a mean, marauding race. They never adopted modern weaponry, however, and were eventually killed or driven into hiding. But their love of human treasure kept them close to urban centers.

  Several of the monitors showed small figures cutting in and out of view, pursued by bursts of gunfire. Arrows flashed at cameras in a deadly hail. Though more likely to pilfer than plunder these days, the goblins’ skill in battle had never left them.

  “They’re everywhere,” a team leader called through one of the feeds. “Coming from all sides!”

  “Everyone to the southeast quadrant,” Cole ordered. “Perimeter team, move in.”

  “We don’t know how many there are,” I said. “There could be hundreds.”

  “That’s not what you told us at the briefing,” Cole growled.

  I stammered for a moment, but he was right. I’d told him and the mayor that we could expect a few dozen creatures, a number I’d extrapolated from the statistics on murders and attacks in and around south Central Park.

  When I found my voice, I said, “So we pull back, reassess.”

  “We’ve got personnel pinned down,” Cole answered. “They need backup.”

  A nauseous heat broke out over my face. “There’s no telling how far the goblin tunnels extend. You could be sending your forces into a bigger trap.”

  Cole ignored me, shouting more commands into his headset as he moved off.

  I looked from my inert sword and staff to the frenzy of activity around me. On the monitors, more helmet-mounted cameras were staring at the ground or up into trees, their operators dead or dying. I’d underestimated the number of goblins. Underestimated their cunning. Once the sweep team had converged on the poorly hidden hole—a decoy, no doubt—the goblins had poured from surrounding holes and launched an ambush. And something told me the goblins had a second ambush in waiting for whatever backup arrived.