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

couldn’t afford at the moment—not to mention time. The Oracular Order of Magi and Magical Beings was an esteemed and ancient body. Accordingly, they made decisions at a pace on par with the Mendenhall glacier.

That, and I was still on their iffy list for what had happened ten years earlier, during the aforementioned demonic encounter. Never mind that my actions (which, okay, had involved summoning an incubus spirit) saved my life, or that I was only twenty-two at the time.

So yeah, the less contact with the Order, the better, I’d since learned.

Between the third and fourth floors, the stairwell began to vibrate. At the fifth floor—the one on which I’d observed the lights from outside—the vibrating became a hammering. I pulled the stairwell door open onto a stink of hard diesel and understood the commotion’s source: a gas-powered generator. At the hallway’s end, light outlined a door.

I was halfway to the door when a woman’s scream pierced the tumult. Jerking my cane into two parts, I gripped a staff in my left hand and a steel sword in my right. A shadow grew around the door a second before it banged open.

The man was six foot ten, easy. Blades of black tattooing scaled his pin-pierced face, giving over to an all-out ink fight on his shaved scalp. Leather and spiked studs stretched over powerful arms holding what looked like a pump-action shotgun.

The sorcerer’s bodyguard?

He inclined forward, squinting into the dim hallway. The screaming behind him continued, accompanied now by angry beats and the wail of a guitar. I exhaled and sheathed my sword.

Punks. The literal kind.

“Hey!” Tattoo Face boomed as I retreated back toward the stairwell. “You’re missing a kickass set. Blade’s only on till two.” Then as a further inducement: “Half cover, since you got here late.”

I sniffed the air, but the generator’s fumes were still clouding over the demon smell. I couldn’t fix on a direction. I returned to Tattoo Face, shouting to be heard. “Do you live here?”

He shrugged as he lowered the shotgun. “Live. Squat.”

“Seen anyone strange in the building?” I peered past him into the hazy room of head-bangers, the pink-haired singer/screamer—Blade, I presumed—standing on the hearth of a bricked-over fireplace. I decided to rephrase the question. “Anyone who looks like they don’t belong?”

Behind all of his ink, the punk’s face was surprisingly soft, almost boyish, but it hardened as I stepped more fully into the generator-powered light. I followed his gaze down to where my tweed jacket and dark knit tie peeked from the parting flaps of my trench coat. Beneath his own jacket, he was wearing a bandolier of shotgun shells.

“You a narc or something?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Just looking for someone.”

His eyes fell further to my walking cane, which, not to polish my own brass, was at definite odds with someone six feet tall and in his apparent prime. My hairline had receded slightly, but still… Tattoo Face frowned studiously, as though still undecided if he could trust me.

“I help people,” I added.

After another moment, he nodded. “Strange guy showed up a couple of weeks ago. Hauled a big trunk upstairs.” He raised his eyes. “Unit right above ours. Talks to himself. Same things, over and over.”

I sprinted back to the stairwell, not bothering with the usual pretense of a trick knee to explain the cane. Tattoo Face seemed not to notice.

“Blade’s on till two!” he shouted after me.

I raised a hand in thanks for the reminder, but I was still mulling the talks to himself part. The over and over sounded like chanting.

Add them up and I’d found my conjurer.

3

On the sixth floor, the demon stink was back. And gut-rottingly potent. I called more light to my cane and advanced on the door at hallway’s end, weathered floorboards creaking underfoot.

The knob turned in my grasp, but one or more bolts were engaged. Crouching, I sniffed near the dark door space and immediately regretted the decision. “Holy hell,” I whispered against my coat sleeve. The sickly-sweet scent burned all the way up to my brain, like ammonia.

Drawing the sword from my cane, I pointed it at the door and uttered, “Vigore.”

A force shot down the length of the blade and snapped the bolts. The door blew inward. With another incantation, the light from my staff slid into a curved shield. I crouched, ready for anything, but except for the vibrating coming from one floor down, the space beyond the door was still and silent.

I tested the threshold with the tip of my sword. It broke the plane cleanly, which meant no warding spells.

Odd…

I entered, sword and glowing staff held forward. The unit was a restored tenement that, like many in the East Village, had been written off in the Crash’s rumbling wake and left to die. Shadows climbed and fell over a newspaper-littered living room. I crept past sticks of curb-side furniture and a spill of canned goods before ducking beneath a line of hanging boxer briefs, still damp.

Hardly the evil-sorcerer sanctum I’d imagined.

I stuck my light into one of the doorless bedrooms, the silence tense against my eardrums. A thin roll-up mattress lay slipshod on a metal bed frame, dirty sheets puddled around its legs. A cracked window framed the bombed-out ruin of a neighboring building. When a pipe coughed, I wheeled, my gaze falling to a crowded plank-and-cinderblock bookcase.

In the light of my staff, I scanned book spines that might as well have read “Amateur Conjurer.” Abrahamic texts, including a Bible, gave way to dime-store spell books and darker tomes, but without organization. Spaghetti shots in the dark. Someone looking for power or answers.

So where had the demon come from? More crucially, where had it gone?

In the neighboring bedroom, I flinched as my gaze met my own hazel eyes in a mirror on the near wall. Gonna give myself a fricking heart attack. Opposite the mirror, an oblong table held a scatter of spell-cooking implements. A Bunsen burner stood on one end, its line snaking to a