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

I peeked back at the receding Cathedral of St. Martin, a beautiful, if haunting, anomaly amid the towering edifices of mammon, and sighed. Something told me it was going to be a long next few days.

Thank God for Colombian dark roast.

11

I performed a quick check of my warding spells—all intact—before fishing out my keychain. Home was a walk-up apartment on West Tenth Street, its top floor small and square, like the top tier of a wedding cake, making it invisible from street level. Naturally, it was the floor I lived on.

I turned the three bolts, gold, silver, and bronze, stepped over my threshold, and immediately felt better. There was no greater contentment for a wizard than returning to his sheltered domicile—especially when the twelve hours I had been away felt like twelve days.

Contrary to other dimensions of my life, I took obsessive-compulsive pride in the order of my loft space. And thanks to New York’s current vacancy glut, the rent was ridiculously reasonable, even for someone on my pay grade.

Of course, that could change come Monday.

For now, though, the industrial-chic apartment was home. I took in the space: high-ceilings with exposed beams, arched, double-story windows, and large throw rugs over stained concrete floors. A plush couch and chairs huddled around a flagstone fireplace, which I kept stoked from October to April. Beyond the kitchen, a ladder climbed to a second-story library and laboratory. There was plenty of open air for magic to move about. And in those rare instances when magic escaped my hold (hey, practice before mastery), the crooked West Village grid broke up the energy before it could do any real damage.

That gas explosion on Bleeker Street last month? Wasn’t me.

As I hung my cane on the coat rack, a rattling snort sounded. On the divan beneath the west-facing window, a large mound of orange hair stirred. Ochre-green eyes slitted open followed by a yawning mouth of sharp teeth.

Damn, I’d woken the cat.

Her tail end heaved up before shifting ponderously and settling back down. I stood still and waited for her eyes to close again—they did that sometimes—but they stayed watching me.

“You smell like crap,” she said.

“And it’s nice to see you, too,” I replied.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“Hey! What did I say about the language?” It really was something I’d been trying to train out of her—without much success, obviously. Tabitha was, well, Tabitha: a succubus spirit who had been called up by an amateur and would have devoured both our loins had I not channeled her into a stray cat. Unable to decapitate the cat, per succubus-destroying protocol, I took her in. A questionable move, I’ll admit. But that was five years ago, and I still had all my parts. The Order had been none too happy, but what else was new?

Anyway, since then Tabitha had become less seductress and more harpy—and at forty pounds, a lot more harpy.

“Well?” she pressed.

“Well, things became a little more involved than anticipated.” I walked over to the kitchen, set the paper bag from the corner grocery store onto the counter, and began unloading it. “That summoning I set out for last night? It ended up being demonic. The fight left me drained, meaning Thelonious time. Ha. I’m sure you can imagine. That made me late for class, then late for a meeting with my probation officer. Well, the second was Snodgrass’s fault. The jerk.” I set the canister of coffee down harder than I meant to. “Oh, and get this—if I can’t help solve a murder by the end of the weekend, there’s a great chance I’m out of a job.”

I caught myself verging on full drama-queen. I looked at Tabitha for some sign of support, but her head had settled back onto her paws, eyes closed. At forty pounds, she was also becoming narcoleptic.

“Did you at least remember my milk?” she asked languidly.

I held up a bottle of raw goat’s milk—twenty bucks a pop—and gave it a bitter shake. Tabitha’s tastes weren’t cheap. Between that and the brandy-sautéed tuna steaks, she ate better than I did.

“And warmer this time,” she said, turning away.

“Not before you report on your tours.”

“All’s quiet,” she murmured.

In exchange for room, board, and her life, Tabitha was supposed to tour the broad ledge of the level below every two hours and report anything unusual on the street. To say her compliance was spotty was putting it nicely.

“How about that Thai restaurant going in across the way?” I asked. “Gaudy sign, huh?”

“Hideous.”

“There is no Thai restaurant.”

“It was raining. I couldn’t see very well.”

She wasn’t even trying to sound convincing.

“Yeah, last night and for like ten minutes!” I took several calming breaths. Tabitha’s no-craps-given attitude had a way of spiking my blood pressure. “Look, it’s for both of our safety. Not everyone holds me in as high esteem as you do. And anything strong enough to smash through my wards isn’t going to turn gooey at the sight of a house cat. Especially one so … galling.”

Tabitha yawned.

I placed the bottle in the fridge and closed the door. Tabitha could get into a lot of things, but not the fridge.

“No report, no milk,” I announced.

The cat didn’t stir for a full minute. At last, she sighed heavily.

“Maybe I won’t come back,” she muttered, dropping from the divan with a graceless thud. At the neighboring window, she shot me a final slitted look before shifting her rump and squeezing through the cat door.

Tabitha not coming back would do wonders for my savings, but it was only noise. Besides the pull of endless goat lactose, she didn’t have the strength to break through my wards. Not that she’d ever tried. Like a tired married couple, we’d developed a begrudging dependency on the other. She would be as disappointed to never see me again as I would to never see her.

Of course, you’d have to tear out a few nails to get either one of us to admit it.

I poured half the