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

As the police officer slapped around the corner into view, the white opal in my cane absorbed the immediate light. The shadow I stood inside turned darker, more obscuring.

Slowing, the officer snapped on a flashlight and held it level with her firearm. The beam swept side to side, then shot under a pair of stripped cars leaning curbside. Ninety-nine percent of the current force would have said, “The hell with it,” backed away, lived to police another day. Hamilton Heights at night was no place for a cop to be caught alone. But it seemed my pursuer belonged to that hallowed one percent who still believed in Serving and Protecting.

Lucky me.

At that thought, the beam glared across my face. The officer began running my way.

Not officer, though—detective. As in Vega.

I felt explanations bunching up in the back of my throat, none worth a spit. To Detective Vega, I was just another degenerate in a city running over with them—not someone trying to help clean up the mess. Nothing I said would change that. Even in the dark, I could see her glossy black eyebrows creasing sharply down.

But she wasn’t hitting me with the light anymore. The beam was trained on the entrance I was hidden beside. She hurried past my spot and disappeared. I listened to a large door shake but remain locked. Detective Vega huffed out a sigh. The beam swung around, this time into the street.

My knees buckled in relief—until a pair of male officers came running up, their own flashlight beams wavering dangerously close. I stiffened straight, wondering how long I could hold the spell.

“Find him?” the larger officer asked.

“I think he went in,” Vega said from just out of sight. “Locked the door behind him.”

“Want us to do a top-to-bottom,” the other one asked, clearly uncomfortable with his own suggestion. Beside his partner, he looked like a twelve-year-old. They had chosen a spot five feet in front of me to hold their end of the meeting. If I reached out with my cane, I could have goosed either one.

“No.” Vega joined the meeting in profile. “I want you to check on one of our probationers, make sure he’s home.”

You cannot be serious.

“What’s the name?”

I closed my eyes. Please, not—

“Everson Croft,” Vega said. “The address is in the system. West Tenth, I think.”

“We’re on it.”

As the officers took off, Detective Vega gave the street another pass with her light. I’d tried to keep my cane concealed while fleeing, but I hadn’t been careful enough, it seemed. She must have seen it. At least my cane was doing a better job of concealing me at the moment.

Detective Vega lowered her light. Something in the disappointment, if not defeat, of the gesture poked me right in the sympathy center. My own night wasn’t going much better. Under different circumstances, I might have pulled her into a hug. Then again, Vega didn’t strike me as a cuddler.

Gun in hand, she stomped back toward the front of the building, a muttered threat trailing behind her.

“And if you’re not home, Croft…”

All right, sympathy time over. If I didn’t want to learn the second part of Vega’s threat, I needed to figure out how to race a speeding police cruiser one-hundred thirty blocks south.

And win.

16

I ran south for several blocks before cutting west.

I’d already eliminated the subway as an option. Too unreliable. My plan was to flag a cab, empty my wallet onto his lap, and have him turn the West Side Highway into his personal Autobahn. The police cruiser had taken off down Fredrick Douglass Boulevard a minute before, bottoming out at an intersection. I was gambling they’d hold that course, hopefully hit a traffic snag or twelve from Midtown south.

But for my plan to work, I needed a taxi. I pulled up wheezing at the edge of St. Nicholas Park, where the danger factor lessened slightly, and peered down the street to the glowing entrance of a metro stop.

Not a single cab.

“Oh, c’mon,” I shouted in frustration, “it’s not even a full moon!”

Our wooded parks had a bit of a werewolf—or blood-thirsty feral dog—problem, depending on who you talked to.

I sized up the few cars parked along the curb. Even if I could’ve hotwired one, I wouldn’t have known how to drive it. (Hey, I grew up in the city). That left hijacking the next vehicle that happened to pass. Or acting like a wizard.

Ducking tree branches, I hurried up a cement staircase into the park. The path it led to was little more than a crumbling line of pavement, quickly swallowed by a decade’s worth of overgrowth. Joggers, bikers, and strollers—not to mention the Department of Parks and Rec—had long since abandoned St. Nicholas to its new denizens: an assortment of shadow creatures and the occasional junky desperate enough to shoot up back here.

I didn’t go far, veering off path to scrabble over an eruption of boulders. Inside, I discovered a small dirt-packed clearing. As any druid would tell you, mineral-rich stones made good energy containers. I kicked aside some soiled clothing, drug needles, and what might have been a human femur and looked around. It smelled like a Porta-Potty, but the space would do for my spell.

Using the tip of my sword, I drew a man-hole sized circle in the dirt and inscribed my family symbol inside: two squares, one offset at forty-five degrees to look like a diamond. I connected the corners with four diagonal lines and scratched a sigil at each end. From inside my coat, I pulled out a tall vial of copper filings and sprinkled them along the furrows. To connect the circle to the spell target, I removed three keys from my jangling chain—one gold, one silver, one bronze—to correspond with the three locks on my door. I arranged them near the edges of the casting circle in a triangular pattern and stood back.

The spell would require energy, and lots of it. That was where I had to be extra careful. I