The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

She sighed and heaved up her bulk. Only after staring daggers at me did she drop from the divan. “You’re such a brute sometimes.”

“Anything out of the ordinary,” I reminded her. “Or anyone watching. Especially if they’re young men in expensive suits.”

She muttered something I probably didn’t want to hear and squeezed through the cat door. With Tabitha out of the way, I swapped the bag of peas against my face for the phone receiver and dialed Caroline’s number. Just hearing her voice would do wonders for my anxiety.

I got her recorded voice instead. Nuts.

“Hey, Caroline,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Just wanted to check in and see how the rest of your night went. Make sure you made it home all right. I’m sorry again for ducking out like that. There was a good reason, actually. I was hoping I could tell you about it over breakfast. Or brunch, whichever. My treat. Anyway, if you could give me a call when—”

The voice mail cut me off with an abrasive beep.

“—you get this.”

I hung up, feeling like a bumbling fifteen-year-old. Good thing Tabitha hadn’t been around—I would never have heard the end of it.

All right, so either Caroline’s phone was out of service range, which would never happen in the city, or she had shut it off for the night to sleep. Alone, I hoped.

Tabitha reappeared just as I was placing the frozen peas back against my jaw.

“Anything?” I asked.

“No male models in suits.” She hopped up on her divan and collapsed onto her side. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

Arnaud must have figured he’d made his point. Meaning I was now stuck between his warning and my pledge to help Detective Vega.

I prepared Tabitha a bowl of warm goat’s milk, fixed myself a pot of Colombian dark roast, and climbed the ladder to my library/lab. It was late, my face and stomach hurt, my ego was bruised, and I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and shut off my brain, but I had work to do. Stepping past my hologram of the city—dim, thank God—I stopped and faced the wall of mundane books.

“Svelare,” I said in a low, thrumming voice.

A ripple moved across the spines. In the next moment, encyclopedias and classical titles became magical tomes and grimoires. I retrieved a thick black book from the bottom shelf, a tome on the undead. At my desk, I took my first sip of coffee and opened the book to a section concerning vampires—blood slaves, in particular. I jotted down notes on a yellow legal pad as I read.

An hour later, I closed the book and reviewed my notes, pen tapping between my teeth. It was looking like a good news, bad news scenario—and unfortunately, more of the second.

Good news: being unsophisticated creatures, blood slaves tended to lair in the same proximity to where they fed. That narrowed our search radius considerably. Bad news: that small radius also meant that if we failed to find the creature before he fed again, Ferguson Towers could be looking at body number three—and if Vega was right, at an all-out war between Stiles and this person Kahn in the west towers.

That was bad news item number one.

Bad news item number two was the blood slave itself. I hadn’t needed to read up on them to appreciate their speed, strength, and lethality. A blood slave, especially one without a master, would tear through Detective Vega and her squad like lunch meat. I would need to be physically involved, not only in the search, but in the creature’s eventual execution. Thanks to my research, I had plenty of material to work with in that second department—silver through the heart being the most surefire way of doing the deed.

But the fact that my direct involvement was needed led to bad news item number three: Arnaud Thorne.

The vampire had warned me off the case. If I ignored his warning, his slaves would be back, this time to deliver more than a stiff jaw. I had Grandpa’s ring now, sure, but we weren’t talking about a showdown at the O.K. Corral. Arnaud would pick the time and place, and not by mutual consent. I probably wouldn’t even see his slaves before I was missing limbs.

I stood with my cup of coffee and paced the length of the bookshelves. Though hard to understand at times, vampires had their own code of decorum. For an eminent vampire like Arnaud, losing control of a blood slave and having it run amok was tantamount to weakness, profoundly embarrassing. He probably wanted me off the case so he could take care of the errant slave without anyone knowing. Maybe all I had to do was back off for a couple of days. Let Arnaud’s blood slaves snatch up the killer and sweep him under the rug.

I returned to my desk and penned a report to the Order on the night’s riddler banishment. I had already asked for, and received, permission to work with Detective Vega, but I included a reminder anyway. When dealing with the Order, it was always better to err on the side of caution.

The message sent, I cut the lights and headed down to bed. Despite my exhaustion, I tossed and turned, seeing the disappointment in Caroline’s eyes when I told her I was leaving, remembering Angelus’s subtle possessiveness. I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d lost her, somehow.

Eventually, I fell into a dark and troubled sleep.

9

Though I had set my alarm, it was the ringing telephone that woke me the next morning. I held my wind-up clock to my face—eleven?—and thrashed out of bed. The phone rang again, hopefully Caroline responding to my message left last night.

I reached the telephone on the fourth ring, clearing the sleep from my throat, and lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Sleeping in, Croft?”

“Oh.” My heart sank. “Hi, Detective.”

“What do you have for me?” she asked.

“Well, I had an interesting encounter last night,” I said, carrying the telephone