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

I was pulled from the memory by a shadow in the doorway. I turned to find Lazlo’s tall form approaching, the pale scars across his face glowing in the late light. I stood at rigid attention.

“I have heard,” he said, his voice grave.

I almost couldn’t form the single syllable, my mouth was so dry. “And?”

He stepped all the way into the room. Cold power seemed to warp the air around his hands. My heart beat like a dusty drum, but I refused to cower. Whatever the answer, I sensed he had been right. The journey to Dolhasca had been my death. The old Everson Croft was no more.

“As decreed by the Order,” Lazlo said, “I am to initiate you into training tonight.”

Demon Moon

Book 1

1

I blew out a curse as the first cold droplets of rain pelted my face and punched through my magic. As if I wasn’t already running late.

Making an umbrella of my coat collar, I stooped into a run, skirting bags of garbage that swelled from the fronts of row houses like pustules, but it was no use. The downpour that blackened the sidewalk and drove rats from the festering piles also broke apart my hunting spell.

And it had been one of my better ones.

I took refuge on a crumbling porch and shook out my coat. I was in the pit of the East Village, and it stunk. Except for a flicker of street light, the block was midnight dark, the building across the way a brick shell, hollowed out by arson. Not the domicile of the conjurer I needed to stop. Or more likely save.

Assuming I could find him now.

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

Most hunting spells worked like a dowsing rod, pulling the user toward the source of something. In this case, taboo magic. But reliable hunting spells, such as those needed to navigate New York’s convoluted streets, required time to prepare. And even then they were delicate.

“Seguire,” I repeated, louder.

Though the storm was already sweeping off, the spell refused to take shape again. I swore under my breath. Magic and moving water made poor bedfellows. And here I’d dropped a fat hundred on the booster: ground narwhale tusk. Sunk cost, I thought bitterly as I hustled back to the sidewalk. There were a lot of those in wizardry, my svelte wallet the proof.

Splashing in the direction I’d been pulled before the cloudburst, I gave up on the hunting spell and resorted to twenty-twenty vision, scanning passing buildings for signs of life.

As the sidewalks thickened with larger mounds of garbage, the rats became more territorial. I knocked aside several with my walking cane. The soul eaters that hunkered like shadows in the below-ground stairwells weren’t quite so bold. They watched with hollow eyes before shrinking from the protective power of my necklace, in search of weaker, drug-addled prey. Luckily for them, post-Crash New York was a boomtown for chemical addiction.

Unfortunately for me, the financial crash had also made a growth stock of amateur conjurers.

They tended to be men and women seeking lost money or means—or simply some meaning where their prior faith, whether spiritual or material, seemed to have failed them. Understandable, certainly, but as far as my work went, a royal pain in the ass. Most mortals could only access the nether realms, and shallowly at that. In their fat-fingered efforts, they called up grubby creatures better left undisturbed. Ones more inclined to make a sopping meal of a conjurer’s heart than grant his material wishes.

Trust me, it wasn’t pretty.

Neither was the job of casting the charming beings back to their realms, but it was the job I’d been decreed. I had some nice acid burns and a missing right ear lobe to prove it. A business card might have read:

Everson Croft

Wizard Garbage Collector

Nice, huh? But unlike the city’s striking sanitation workers, I couldn’t just walk off the job.

Small messes became big messes, and in magical terms, that was a recipe for ruin. The apocalyptic kind. Better to scoop up the filth, drop it down the hatch, and batten down the lid. Plenty of ancient evils lurked in the Deep Down, their senses attuned to the smallest openings to our world. Human history was dotted with near misses, thanks in part to the vigilance of my lineage.

The thought of being the one to screw up that streak was hell on a good night’s sleep, let me tell you.

At Avenue C, I rounded a small mountain of plowed trash and shuffled to a stop. A new scent was skewering the vaporous reek, hooking like a talon in my throat. A sickly-sweet scent, like crushed cockroach or…

Fear spread through me as I raised my eyes toward the source: a steep apartment building with a pair of lights burning near the top floor. Dark magic dissipated above the building in a blood-red haze.

I was too late. And whatever the conjurer had summoned was no cockroach.

“Crap,” I spat, and launched into a run.

The smell was distinctly demonic.

2

I stumbled into a blacked-out lobby, raised my ironwood cane, and uttered, “Illuminare.”

White light swelled from an opal inset in the cane’s end to reveal an upended concierge’s desk and graffiti-smeared walls. The single elevator door opposite me was open. I moved toward it, noting the message sprayed over the burned-out elevator lights: “STEP RIGHT IN,” with an arrow inviting riders into a carless shaft. I peeked down the two-story plunge to a subbasement, where I could hear something large thump-dragging around.

No thanks.

I hit the stairwell and took the steps two at a time. The cloying smell from the street sharpened in my sinuses, making my eyes water. I had smelled demon before, but in Eastern Europe, years ago—the near-death experience had marked my passage into wizardhood, in a way.

But no, never here. Not in New York.

Which meant a seriously evil conjurer had slipped under the Order’s watchful gaze. I considered sending up a message, but that would take energy I