Death Mage (Prof Croft Book 4)

by Brad Magnarella

  Sounds like Chicory, I thought.

  The other file, considerably thicker, was labeled “James Wesson.” Another magic-user? I opened the file, but other than the name I could find no identifying features. Just a much longer scribbled list of infractions, ranging from dereliction of duty to substance abuse.

  And here I thought I was the black sheep.

  But more important than what the notes said about James was what it said about Chicory. Like the messy room I was standing in, the notes appeared consistent with an advanced, though absentminded, wizard.

  A dead wizard, I thought, picking up a gold cup from the floor: Chicory’s former communication system to the Order. An oil crystal clinked around its bottom, but no flame rose from it now.

  My throat tightened with grief as I remembered his death. His murder.

  Then why did no one from the Order come? a voice prodded inside my head.

  That was what was nagging me more than anything. Chicory had gotten through, after all. If the mission had been as important as he’d claimed, if I’d been sent by the Order, why hadn’t others followed? Why had no one responded to my message? Where were they now?

  “Goddammit,” I whispered, hating the growing tangle of doubt I felt.

  I set the cup back atop the table and searched the rest of the house. In the attic, I found an open trunk with the various wands, weapons, and artifacts Arnaud had kept in his armory and that I had passed on to Chicory. By all appearances, Chicory had given them a quick cleaning, then dumped them here. I sealed the trunk with a locking spell and moved on, checking the walls and panels for loose boards, calling out reveal invocations at intervals. But nothing appeared or stood out as unusual, in the attic or the rest of the house.

  I arrived back in the guest bedroom to find Tabitha conked out on her ottoman. I shook her awake.

  “What?” she complained.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Can’t it wait?” She flopped onto her other side so she was facing away from me.

  “Chicory is dead,” I said.

  She twisted her neck around and blinked twice. “Dead?”

  Or undead, depending on who you talk to, I thought. But with the Front monitoring me, I didn’t want to show the slightest wavering. Better to keep my doubts a secret, deny Connell and Arianna anything they could use to manipulate me. I didn’t believe they were trapped in the Refuge as they’d claimed. If they could watch me, they could reach me.

  “When Chicory came to bring me back,” I told Tabitha, “he battled the Dark Mage. Chicory was winning, but one of the mage’s minions snuck up and ran him through with my sword.”

  “Well then how did you make it back alive?” she asked, her voice bordering on accusing.

  “They released me.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “To, ah, warn other magic-users not to mess with the Dark Mage,” I lied.

  I no longer saw Tabitha’s eyes as eyes, but as peepholes. She narrowed them at me in suspicion. Can they see me right now? I wondered.

  “Look,” I said, “we just need to get out of here.”

  “Now?”

  I stood and began gathering my clothes. “The house’s defenses are down. We’re not safe here anymore.” And whose house is it anyway? a part of me wondered as I stuffed everything into the large duffel bag I’d brought.

  “The defenses are down? You mean I could have just strolled out of here and fed on male souls?”

  “I’ll contact the Order when we get back to the apartment,” I said, hurriedly throwing my books into the bag and mashing everything down to close the zipper. I was anxious to be behind my own defenses. “We can pick up some fresh goat’s milk and tuna steaks on the way.”

  Tabitha stood and arched her back until several vertebra cracked.

  “First sensible thing you’ve said since you returned.”

  12

  Chicory had parked his compact car in the small garage attached to the house. Though I hadn’t been able to find any keys in the house, a quick search of his cluttered glove compartment turned up a spare.

  I opened the trunk to stow my duffel bag, but the space was too jammed with boxes. Several more rows filled his back seat, the files they held like the ones I’d found in Chicory’s room. Names of whom I assumed were magic-users, along with scribbled notes. The files looked less like the work of a demigod than an overburdened social worker. But they might be a start.

  I shoved my duffel bag atop the boxes in the back seat and opened the passenger side door for Tabitha. As she climbed in, I took a final look at the door to the house. When you’re ready, return to the portal, Arianna had said. I had scoffed, but would I be returning here?

  “Can we go?” Tabitha said. “I haven’t had any decent sleep in weeks.”

  The drive through the Lincoln Tunnel and down to the West Village was uneventful. I arrived at the apartment to find the door triple-bolted, the wards intact, and the inside of the unit as I’d left it. A quick scan revealed no signs of intrusion. Tabitha trotted past me and hopped onto her divan. She let out a contented sigh as she curled into her sleeping position.

  I dropped my duffel bag and checked my voicemail. No messages.

  Good.

  According to Arianna, I had four days until Lich reconstituted his form. A narrow window, which might have been the point—to compel me to dive straight into the investigative work.

  Instead, I climbed the ladder to my library/lab and glanced over my hologram of Manhattan. Though I’d been gone for two weeks, the hologram was dim. It had been Chicory’s job to maintain the magic-detecting wards throughout the city. No Chicory probably meant no more wards, which meant no alarms. Another senior magic-user in the Order would have to restore them.

  Assuming there are any left, the insidious voice inside my head whispered.

  I pressed my lips together and turned to the plum-colored flame on the table. No new messages. At my desk, I sat and penned an update to the Order. I waved it over the flame, the orange flare telling me the message had been received.

  But is anyone even home? the voice taunted.

  “Shut it,” I said.

  With a Word, I revealed my books, then pulled down a tome on potions. I flipped until I found the most powerful one for dispelling magic that I could reasonably cook. It would take the rest of the day to prepare the potion, and I wasn’t even sure it would work against Whisperer magic, but I needed to try. I wouldn’t get anywhere if I couldn’t trust my own thoughts.

  I pulled out my burner and pots and got to work.

  The next morning, with the bitter dispel potion cramping my stomach, I drove Chicory’s car downtown. At the checkpoint at One Police Plaza, guards examined my ID and waved me through. Detectives Vega and Hoffman were waiting for me in the front of the building, Hoffman holding the handle of a large, four-wheeled dolly.

  “Great. You again,” he said when I got out.

  I grinned. “Admit it, Hoffman. You missed me.”

  “Yeah, like a leaking appendix.”

  “Are those the files?” Vega asked, nodding toward the back seat.

  “Yeah, and there are some more back here,” I said, unlocking and raising the trunk door.

  While the potion had been cooking, I had called Vega and filled her in on my trip to the Refuge. She had agreed to take the files as evidence in the Lady Bastet murder investigation. I had also called Caroline, my former colleague and now a fae princess. At the very least, I’d wanted to find out what the fae knew about the Whisperer. But Caroline’s old number was no longer in service and she hadn’t been seen in the mayor’s office in several days. Were the fae evacuating our world? I had considered going to the fae townhouse in the Upper East Side to find out, but I couldn’t risk losing my magic again.

  Vega gestured to Hoffman, who grumbled and began loading the boxes onto the dolly. She and I walked several paces away from the car until we were out of his earshot.

  “Are you all right?” she asked
, the skin between her eyebrows folding in.

  “Yeah. I think so, anyway.”

  “So your father didn’t kill your mother?”

  “At this point, I honestly don’t know. But either way, the same person who killed her killed Lady Bastet. That much I can say with confidence. The murderer wanted to suppress the truth. Whatever that truth is,” I added in a mumble, feeling just as confused as before I gagged down the potion.

  “And the perp might be the person whose files we’re taking in? This Chicory?” She jotted down his license plate number.

  “There’s a small chance,” I said, hating that I was even considering it. “I appreciate you doing this, by the way.”

  “What are we looking for exactly?”

  “The files contain info about other magic-users like me, maybe. I just need you to find out what you can about them, who they are, where they live, whether they knew Chicory, when they last saw him.”

  “There must be hundreds,” she said, eyeing the growing pile of boxes on the dolly.

  “Which is why I need all the help I can get.” I remembered something I wanted to ask her. “Hey, last month when you and I were on the outs, didn’t you say something about consulting another magic-user in the city?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, that guy.”

  “Do you happen to remember his name?”

  “James Wesson.”

  A charge went through me. His name had been on the other folder in Chicory’s room.

  “I should still have his info,” Vega said, pulling a wallet from her back pocket and flipping through a batch of business cards. “Here it is.” She separated out the card and handed it to me.

  The card stated his name and phone number, nothing else. “I’ll give him a call,” I said. “See if I can’t stop in and talk to him myself.”

  “Have fun,” she said dryly.

  “Why? What’s wrong with him?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “Yellow pages. He’s listed under both ‘Sorcerer’ and ‘Supernatural Consultant.’”

  That sounded odd for a member of the Order. I’d always assumed those listings were posted by frauds. “Was he helpful?”

  “You mean when he decided to do some actual work? Yeah, he came up with a few insights. Namely that the murder wasn’t the work of werewolves, and magic had decapitated the cats.”

  I reread the card and put it away. “Sounds like he knows his stuff, anyway.”

  “Said he was going to run a test on the residue, but that was around the time you and I patched things up. I had the department cut him a check and tell him his services were no longer needed.”

  I thought about how that could be my in, telling this James that I had taken over the consulting gig and wanted to compare notes. I could then introduce questions about the Order, see how much he knew.

  “So are you back for good?” Vega asked.

  “Only until tonight. There’s a trip I need to take.”

  “Where?”

  “Romania.”

  “Romania? What’s over there?”

  “It’s where my first mentor trained me, someone named Lazlo.”

  “Wouldn’t a phone call be easier?”

  “He doesn’t own one—or at least he didn’t ten years ago. And I have no other way of reaching him. Lives a pretty solitary lifestyle.” I thought about the farm outside the village where he’d taken me to train that summer. The old house, the barn, the muddy fields.

  “Can you trust him?” Vega asked.

  “The Front implied he wasn’t part of the conspiracy. So, either there really is an Order and he belongs to it, or there isn’t an Order and he thinks he belongs to it. Either way, he should be able to help me sort out what they told me. He’s really powerful, and he knew my grandfather.”

  Besides that, he’s the only other member of the Order I know, I thought.

  “Here,” she said, reaching into her pocket. She pulled out the pager I had used while consulting for her and placed it in my hand. It still had the iron case that protected the electronics from my aura. “I’ll call if anything important comes up. Let me know if you find anything on your end.”

  “Will do.”

  “Oh, and if you want your bathrobe back, I pulled it from evidence.”

  “Huh?” I squinted at her before remembering the robe of John the Baptist. My bath robe, which Chicory had imbued with a veiling spell, would have been laid bare when Chicory was slain. “Oh, crap.”

  “Yeah,” she said, crossing her arms. “The papers had a field day.”

  “I’ll be happy to take it off your hands,” I said sheepishly.

  “I already stuck it in a package and dropped it in the mail. It should be at your place later today.”

  “I owe you,” I said.

  “Just keep me in the loop.”

  “I will.”

  “And Croft,” she said, her eyes as stern as ever, “take care of yourself.”

  13

  I called James’s number from a payphone and spoke to a young woman named Carla. He wasn’t in, she said, not sounding especially happy about that fact. Probably why she volunteered the name of a bar where I could find him.

  Twenty minutes later, I pulled up in front of the address, just beyond where the Upper East Side disintegrated into Spanish Harlem. I crossed the graffiti-tagged sidewalk, pulled the door open, and stepped into a drift of smoke. At first glance, the bar looked empty. I then realized everyone was gathered in a room off to the left, where I could hear the sharp clacking of billiard balls. As I entered the pool hall, I realized I should have asked Carla for a description.

  In another moment, I realized I didn’t need one.

  Everyone was crowded around one table where a young black man in a battered bomber jacket and cowboy hat was cruising around the cushion, stroking in striped ball after striped ball, barely seeming to look at what he was doing. A membrane of silver magic moved around him.

  “Eight ball, corner,” he said, nodding at the far pocket.

  Murmurs sounded from the audience of twenty or so. I rose onto my tiptoes and saw why. His opponent’s solids were in the way. The shot was impossible. Lips barely moving, James slammed the cue ball into the edge of the eight ball, sending it in a spinning arc from the edge of the table, around the mass of solid balls, and into the pocket he’d indicated, dead center.

  He just used an invocation, I thought in alarm.

  Straightening, James adjusted his aviator sunglasses and grinned. “Game.”

  His opponent, a large man who had been watching with a constipated frown, removed a wad of bills from his pocket and slammed it on the table. As the loser stormed off, James coolly picked up his winnings and bounced it in his hand. Nodding as though he’d just calculated the dollar amount by its weight, he deposited the wad into a jacket pocket and looked around.

  “Who’s next?” he asked.

  The other patrons peered at one another and gave dubious shakes of their heads.

  “I’ll up it to twenty to one,” he said. “Five hundred dollar minimum. I win, I get the five. You win, you walk with ten G’s.” A rubber-banded fold of hundreds appeared in his right hand, and he waggled it back and forth.

  The chatter around the table got louder, but still no takers.

  “What about you, Lanky?”

  I didn’t realize he was talking to me until heads turned. The crowd stepped apart, creating a smoky aisle between me and the table. James stood on the table’s other side, cue over one shoulder.

  He was younger than he’d looked at first glance, about my height but muscular and with the kind of carved face and lips women loved. Though he couldn’t have been older than twenty-three, twenty-four, I still couldn’t get over the audacity of the guy. A member of the Order using magic to hustle? Then again, his file was thick with infractions.

  I cleared my throat. “You’re James Wesson, right?”

  “What’s this loo
k like?” he asked. “A meet and greet?”

  The crowd laughed, making my face burn with embarrassment.

  “I’m actually here on NYPD business,” I said, affecting an official tone. “I have a few questions I’d like to ask.”

  “Tough tits, porky. I’m working.”

  More laughter broke from the crowd. James chalked his cue and gave it a casual puff.

  “This is serious,” I said. “A matter of highest order.”

  I emphasized the last word, but if James caught the meaning, he gave no sign. Instead, he looked around as though he’d lost interest in me, just someone taking up space in his world. The crowd shouldered me back.

  “Forty to one,” he offered now.

  Whistles sounded at what the winner stood to gain.

  “I’ll take those odds.”

  A riotous cheer went up as the attention turned back to me and enthusiastic hands ushered me toward the pool table. The grin on James’s lips hardened as he sized me up. I’d whispered an invocation before accepting his challenge, hiding my wizard’s aura. I assumed a look of defiance now, someone who had just been humiliated and was determined to get even.

  James recovered his grin. “Let’s see the green.”

  I pulled out my wallet, which I’d just loaded with cash for my trip, and held it open. He nodded and rolled the cue ball to one end of the table as two guys fished balls from pockets and racked them at the other. I was reaching for one of the mounted pool sticks when James said, “Don’t bother. This’ll be quick.”

  I now understood Vega’s eye roll. The guy was an arrogant ass.

  I lowered my arm and watched him break. More specifically, I watched his lips. With the help of a whispered incantation, he sunk three solids. He strode around the table and lined up his shot. Magic fluttered across the green felt. The cue ball split two solids, knocking them into opposite side pockets. He used another force invocation for his next shot, hopping the cue ball over one of my stripes, and nudging his target into a corner pocket. With one solid remaining, he banged it off three cushions before dropping it into another corner pocket.