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

the same to the vicar and bishop. Extinguish two of the remaining bulwarks of faith that give the cathedral its strength. With the added power of the demon moon, he’ll get out. And when he does, he’ll have a small army of shriekers at his command. Shriekers he’s been too weak to summon himself.”

Blood pumped hard behind my eyes as I pictured the ensuing carnage. The Church had prevented it from happening in the 1800s by executing the reverend—I was all but sure of that now. Problem was, destroying the host wouldn’t banish the demon. The creature had only to lie dormant in the reverend’s remains—for two centuries, in this case—until the conditions were opportune.

I imagined an arriving demon moon would do.

I rushed back to the newspaper I’d dropped on the counter and flipped to the weather. Noting the times for moonrise and moonset, I did a quick calculation. The demon moon would be peaking in a couple of hours. I had to get to Father Vick and the bishop before that happened. I turned over the vicar’s business card in my pocket. I’d been planning to use the card for the hunting spell, but it would only lead me to the cathedral, whose threshold would then snuff out the magic.

“So where in the cathedral are they being held?” I asked aloud. From my brief conversation with the officer at the scene, it sounded as though their manhunt had yet to turn up anyone.

A second later, I answered my own question. “Wherever Reverend Higham had room enough to store those thousands of remains without anyone knowing.” Panic flashed hot inside me. “Beneath the cathedral.”

Tired of being my sounding board, Tabitha began pacing away. “Fascinating,” she muttered. A bout of knocking froze her. We both turned. The hard knocking at the door sounded a second time.

38

By the time the second bout of knocking subsided, I had a short list of candidates—none of them good guys, unfortunately.

One, it was someone from the White Hand, wanting to know who had supplied Chin the shrieker spell. The deadline was today. The damned thing of it was, I had an answer, but something told me Bashi wasn’t going to accept a two-hundred-year-dead reverend. And I couldn’t afford to be dragged into his basement and finger-cranked again. There wasn’t time.

Two, it was the NYPD, coming to arrest me for my chewed-on pencil ending up in Chin’s apartment. That would be worse. With Bashi, there was at least the chance he’d take me at my word. After all, he’d accepted that dark magic was at play. The same wouldn’t fly with Vega. I’d be looking at incarceration.

Candidate number three? Arnaud’s goons. I’d strolled into the vampire’s territory twice now after he’d warned me away. And he clearly wanted Grandpa’s ring. He wouldn’t think twice about having me killed to get it. Unlike Father Richard, I was a nobody in the city.

Finally—and the one that scared me the most—was plump little Chicory, coming to execute me for violating the Order’s mandates. Bullets I could handle. A dissolution spell? Not so much.

I waved Tabitha back as I stole up to the door. Gripping my cane, I peered through the peephole. My list of candidates erupted in smoke—it wasn’t any of them. A thin back was to the door, brown hair falling down a khaki coat, as though the person was contemplating leaving.

Malachi?

With energy crackling around my prism, ready to cast, I twisted the bolts and opened the door a crack. Fully expecting a man’s narrow face to round into view, I started to discover a woman’s instead. A young woman’s, and one I recognized from Midtown College.

“Meredith Proctor,” I said, opening the door to my overachieving student.

“Hi, Professor.” Her face looked strange, almost sinister, and then I realized I’d never seen Meredith without her glasses—or in makeup. She’d gone especially heavy on the eye shadow and lipstick. “May I come in?” she asked.

The timing couldn’t have been more horrible, but before I could give the polite version of that answer, Meredith was stepping past me. She unfastened her coat in the front and turned for me to draw it from her shoulders. It was an awkward gesture, unpracticed, and like the makeup, looked forced on someone who couldn’t have been older than nineteen.

I snuck a peek at Tabitha. Over the years, we had developed a body language for when I had visitors. Her staring eyes told me everything. This was the person who had been watching the apartment building.

“So, ah, what brings you here, Meredith?” I asked, deciding to ignore the invitation to remove her coat. I reached around her to close the door.

She turned abruptly so she was inside my arms. Thick tendrils of perfume climbed my nostrils, triggering an asthmatic cough. She managed to shrug her coat away, and it thudded to the floor. The sparkling black dress that had been hiding underneath was low-cut, high riding, and completely inappropriate for a student visiting her professor.

“I’m going dancing with friends later,” she explained, as I stooped for her coat and hung it on the rack. “Your place was on the way, so I thought I’d stop by. Hope that’s okay.”

Not rehearsed at all.

“Actually, Meredith, you’ve caught me at a bad time,” I said, trying to sound professorial. “I’m rather preoccupied.”

“That lecture on Thursday, about the First Saints Legend?” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “Wow. I just have so many questions. About your trip to Romania, your research, your published paper.”

Suspicion prickled through me at the strangeness of her voice, the timing of her visit. Aside from being a stellar student, I knew nothing about Meredith. Was she connected to the shrieker summonings, somehow? To the resurrected reverend?

I followed at a safe distance. But when she peeked back over a bare shoulder, I saw it wasn’t either of those. There was another explanation for why she’d been staking out my apartment. The trance-inducing effect of Thursday’s lecture? Well, it must have lingered—and judging from the