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

yes, about that, Chicory had said when I’d brought up my work on the cathedral murder last night. The Order wants you off that case, as well.

Now why would that be? I could understand their concern with an incubus-toting wizard getting mixed up with demonic beings, but what danger did Thelonious and I pose to an investigation into a rector’s murder?

Unless…

My hand went still, the paper poised between the cases.

Unless there’s a connection.

I thought back to the Bible I’d found in the East Village conjurer’s apartment. I’d written it off as incidental, but now I wasn’t so sure. Had the vagrant been linked to St. Martin’s, somehow? Ditto the Chinatown and Hamilton Heights conjurers? The four listed here in the paper? Had the same person who supplied their spells murdered the rector?

There was someone who could probably shed light on those questions—only I was forbidden from speaking to Father Vick by Detective Vega and now the Order.

I touched the place on my forehead where Chicory had mashed his thumb. He’d hit me with a binding spell, a psychic tether that created a one-way conduit for my thoughts. The pressure of the spell lingered in my brain like a subsiding headache.

A friend, I told myself—and anyone who might be eavesdropping. I’m only going to visit Father Victor as a friend. And then, because I was so fed up with the Order, If that’s a crime, we can discuss it in hell.

33

Because it was Sunday, the line for the pedestrian checkpoint on Liberty Street was nonexistent. I went through the same motions I’d gone through the last two times, showing my NYPD card and Midtown College ID, even managing to affect impatience. But the longer the guard’s impassive shades remained fixed on my ID, the more unnerved I became.

For the first time, I noticed the small black eye of a camera in the corner of his sunglasses. The camera was beaming the info on my ID to a monitor and whichever technician was talking into the guard’s earpiece. After another minute, the guard handed my ID back.

“About time,” I muttered, going to step past him.

The palm that met my chest knocked me back several steps.

“Hey, what gives?” I shouted, more in surprise than pain.

“You’re forbidden entry.”

“Why?”

“You’re on the list.”

“What list?”

“The forbidden-entry list.”

“Gee, thanks for the clarification. Can you tell me who put me on it?”

The guard crossed his thick arms to signal he was done talking. One of the perks of bearing body armor and an assault rifle. I peered past him to where the massive towers of the financial district thrust upward into a gray haze. Arnaud must have known I’d come yesterday morning. He’d put me on his naughty list, alongside the anti-capitalists and bomb-happy anarchists. He must have also included a note to have my NYPD card confiscated, because that was what the guard had done, I now realized.

Shit.

I looked up and down the length of the imposing wall before stepping up to the guard again.

“Look,” I said quietly. “Your X-ray didn’t pick up anything, right? I’m only going to St. Martin’s to meet an old friend, then I’m shooting straight home. You can call the cathedral to check. They’ll confirm it.”

The guard’s arms remained crossed, his gaze leveled above me, as though I was the annoying neighborhood kid who, if you ignored long enough, would eventually slouch off. Maybe I was in luck. Most of the other guards would have beaten me into the pavement by now.

I opened my wallet, removed my remaining big bills—over one hundred dollars—and folded them into the palm of my hand, behind my ID. Though the guard’s head didn’t move, the tension in his neck told me his eyes were observing me. He was a mercenary, after all. Money spoke.

“There must have been a mistake,” I suggested, holding out the ID with the bills concealed underneath. “Maybe you could take a second look?”

The guard remained statue stiff for long enough that I was sure it was a failed bid. But he had only been waiting for the guard off to his right to turn away, because his hand shot out like a piston and seized the ID and tightly-folded stash. He didn’t hold the ID to his shades this time. It went in and out of the front pocket of his pants, as though he were cleaning it.

“You don’t report back within one hour,” he said in a low voice, handing me back the ID sans cash, “and I’ll bag you and drag you out myself.”

I nodded earnestly. He could just as easily have pocketed the money and denied my entrance a second time, even shot me dead on the pretense of rushing the checkpoint. Now I was only at risk of being shot for failing to return by—I glanced down at my watch—ten after eleven.

“That won’t be necessary,” I assured him.

But I was sure as hell going to have to hurry.

Despite what I’d suggested to the guard, I didn’t have an appointment with Father Vick. I arrived at the steep bronze doors of the cathedral, surprised to find them closed and locked. A sign announced that Sunday Mass would not be held. Future services had been suspended “until further notice.” Maybe because the wording mirrored my cease-and-desist mandate from the Order, I feared the worst—namely Father Vick having been arrested.

I pressed a button beside the right door. A metallic buzz sounded from deep inside the cathedral. A minute passed. I was preparing to buzz again when I heard the clunking of bolts. After another moment, the right door opened, and the groundskeeper’s squinting face backed from the light.

“Cyrus,” I breathed. “It’s Everson. I met you yesterday morning? I need to have a word with Father Victor. Is he in?”

I spoke with the urgency of someone on the clock and wasn’t sure Cyrus had caught it all. Beneath his combed-over wisps of white hair, the folds of Cyrus’s palsied face alternately winced and sagged as he studied my lips. “He’s