Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1) (3 page)

BOOK: Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)
8.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“I don’t know too many who are,” Blade said in a smoky voice. “You’re a real original.”

“What exactly did…? Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

She smiled mysteriously and propped her elbows behind her. “So, what’s your name?”

Inventing one felt like too much work. “Everson,” I replied.

“And where does Everson dwell?”

“West Village.” I jerked my head, though I had no idea which direction was which.

“Really?” Interest glinted in her dark eyes as she watched me configure my tie into a Windsor knot. “You strike me as, I don’t know, more Midtown. When you’re sober, anyway.”

“I actually—” A dreadful realization struck me. I grabbed my mechanical watch from the dresser and stared at its face. “Oh, crap.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m late.” I snatched up my coat and cane and made for the door.

“For what?” Blade was sitting up now, sheets pressed to her stark breastbone.

“My morning class.”

Her brow wrinkled. “You’re a student?”

“No,” I called back. “Professor.”

6

It was a quarter past eight when I slipped into the hallowed halls of Midtown College, the first classes of the day already underway.

I stopped off in the faculty bathroom upstairs, where I kept a spare toiletry bag, relieved to find the room empty. There hadn’t been time to go home, and I already knew by my reflection in the subway’s scratched-up window that I looked a wreck. The bathroom mirror confirmed this with even more candor.

In the space of a minute, I pulled a wet comb through my hair, washed my puffy face, and jagged a toothbrush around my mouth. I finished with a few drops of Visine in each eye. The demon gunk had evaporated from my coat, but the same couldn’t be said for the blood on my jacket collar. Rubbing it with a wet paper towel only smeared it around.

Maybe it was time to stow a spare set of clothes up here as well.

I arrived at my classroom to find Caroline Reid sitting at the head of the circular arrangement of desks, lecturing on something. Which was to say she was covering my ass again. She glanced over and caught me watching her through the door window. Her lips tensed into a smile that barely dimpled her cheeks and fell far short of her blue-green eyes.

Caroline was a brilliant scholar of urban history and affairs. Her classroom/office was adjacent to mine, which I think we both considered my blessing and her burden. More than once I’d entertained the thought of being more than friends, but I was smart enough to know
that
feeling wasn’t mutual. Besides, she was currently seeing some accountant stud—an oxymoron, I know.

Caroline stood and smoothed her coffee-brown slacks as I opened the door. “And with that, I’ll hand off to Professor Croft,” she announced.

“Much obliged, Professor Reid,” I said. “Truly.”

She looked over my stained and crumpled shirt as she approached, her own shirt a neat beige blouse, waves of golden hair shifting over the shoulders. I adjusted the knot of my tie, as if it made any difference.

“Heads up,” she whispered, when she’d drawn even. “Snodgrass is on the lookout for you again.”

My stomach sank at the mention of our department chairman, but I didn’t let it show.

“Appreciate the warning,” I whispered back. Her faint honey scent reminded me that for the last ten hours I’d inhaled nothing even remotely pleasant—and no doubt smelled the part.

“Just be careful,” she said.

“Will do. And hey, I owe you for…” I nodded toward the classroom.

“All right, but this is the last time.” She raised her slender eyebrows. “I’m serious.”

She’d been threatening to let me hang for more than a year now, but I didn’t dare point that out. Instead, I thanked her again, bowing slightly. She gave a final tight-lipped smile that said,
You’re better than this
, before stepping out. That stung. Of course she knew nothing about my second job and how close the greater East Village had come to being shrieker meat.

I exhaled as I closed the door behind her and cane-tapped toward my students.

All six of them.

In the wake of the Crash, graduate students were less willing to spend their tuition money on courses entitled
Ancient Mythology and Lore
. I couldn’t exactly fault them. There wasn’t a glut of job openings in the field, something our department chair was all too happy to point out.

But the Order seemed to believe the course might attract natural magic users who, for various reasons, had fallen through the cracks. Indeed, given the current budget crunch, the only thing keeping me employed at Midtown College were my research grants, all of them from foundations just stuffy-sounding enough to discourage scrutiny. I’d long interpreted the grants as measures of the Order’s pleasure with my work. Lately, though, the amounts had been dwindling. And teaching was my sole source of income.

“All right.” I clapped my hands once and eased into a seat still warm with Caroline’s heat. I’d left my satchel with all of my notes at home, and hadn’t the faintest what was on the syllabus for today. “How did the reading go?”

I was already checking out as I asked, contemplating last night’s demonic summoning and who might have supplied the conjurer the spell and to what end and what I would need to do to find out. It was serious business. I finally noticed the students’ puzzled faces.

“What reading?” one of them asked.

“Oh. The, ah…” I twisted around to face the chalkboard I sometimes wrote on. Whatever I’d last scrawled up there was dated September 14, and it was now late October. “Didn’t I…?”

“We’re still working on our literature reviews,” another student spoke up, sparing me further bumbling. “For our term papers?”

“Right.” I remembered now. “Excellent. And how are those going?”

I directed the question to a young woman sitting to my right. To my knowledge, no magic-born types had passed through my door, but every semester saw at least one overachiever. This semester it was Meredith Proctor.

“Me?” she asked, straightening her cat-eye glasses.

I nodded in encouragement. She was the one undergraduate student in my graduate-level course, and for good reason. She had the gift of gab and the smarts to back it up. Once she got going, I’d be able to slip back into problem-solving mode,
hmm
ing here and there in pretended interest, asking open-ended questions. It made me a less-than-exemplary professor, but there was demon magic afoot.

Meredith cleared her throat. “Actually, I found your thesis paper in the library—on the roots of medieval European beliefs?”

“Extra credit if you burned it,” I said to laughter.

“No, no, it was fascinating.” She blinked beneath her brunette bangs and leaned forward. “I was hoping you could tell us about it.”

Well, that went nowhere fast.

“Please?” she pressed.

The paper to which she was referring had been a biggie, actually, placing me on the academic map. I still took a certain pride in it, even if it had chaffed some religious denominations. “Well, as a graduate student, I’d heard stories of an abandoned monastery deep in the Carpathian Mountains. Its founding monks were rumored to have transcribed several ancient texts believed lost. For my PhD dissertation I went to Romania in search of them.” I shrugged modestly. “Lo and behold, the stories were true.”

“That is so cool,” the lone male student, a goateed beatnik, said.

The other students nodded, faces rapt. Wizards’ tales tended to have that effect. I hadn’t told them the entire truth, though. I actually went to Romania looking for a certain occult book I hoped would uncover the mystery of who my peculiar grandfather had been—and who I was. Finding the other works in the monastery’s vault of forbidden texts had been a happy accident.

Meredith raised her hand, a hint of boldness in her fluttering fingers. “I was especially intrigued by your theory of that one legend being a precursor to the stories of the seven deadly sins.”

“Ah, yes. The First Saints Legend.”

I could see by the students’ intent faces that I was going to have to give at least a Cliff’s Notes version of the legend. I began by presenting an overview of the period in which the story had its oral roots, in ancient Rome. The legend was later transcribed into Latin, deemed heretical for challenging the Biblical stories of Satan and Michael, and then lost to history.

“I read where a coalition of church leaders attacked your findings,” Meredith said.

“Well, not physically,” I replied, to another flutter of laughter. “But, yes, that’s one of the occupational hazards of scholarship in our field.”

“So what’s the legend, Prof?” the beatnik asked.

“Right.” I checked my watch. “In the earliest days, nine elemental demons were said to inhabit the world. They seeded discontent, sowed misery, and terrorized humankind. Not exactly stand-up guys. In response, the Creator sent nine saints, their virtues the antitheses of the demons’ sins.”

As I spoke, the students settled in. I felt the ley energy in the room drawing toward their circle of desks, as though listening too. I wasn’t calling that energy. A wizard’s story-telling voice, coupled with an interested—and, yes, impressionable—audience, was usually all it took.

“For hundreds of years,” I continued, “the two sides battled until there remained only three demons and three saints. They battled for a millennia more. Demons held the advantage during the dark of night, the saints during the day. Similarly, the demons gained ground in the winter months, when the world turned dark and brittle.” A subtle chill descended, and Meredith hugged her arms. “The saints did the same in the summer months, when light and life prevailed.”

Though I didn’t describe the battle in words, I could sense my students slipping out of time, experiencing the struggle on a deep limbic level. Their pupils expanded beneath hooded eyelids.

“At last, they agreed to an accord,” I said. “Both sides would retreat from the world and no more involve themselves in matters of humankind. But it was a trick. Following the agreement, the demons slew two of the saints.” Several students flinched. “The third and most powerful of the saints, Michael, escaped. He represented Faith. Through his strength and virtue, he ultimately overcame and banished the three remaining demon lords: Belphegor, Beezlebub, and, finally, the terrible demon Sathanas, who represented Wrath.”

“Sathanas was the precursor to Satan,” Meredith said in a distant monotone.

“In the traditional sense, yes,” I replied. “Saint Michael’s work wasn’t done, however. During their time in the world, the demon lords had taken many human concubines, their offspring precursors to the night creatures: vampires, werewolves, ghouls, other monstrosities. In answer, Michael wed a peasant girl, and they began a family of their own. Their sons and daughters became the progenitors of powerful lines of mages meant to balance the darkness of the night creatures.”

I wasn’t about to tell my students that I was a descendant of one such line. But it was true—on my mother’s side. Sensing I needed to wrap up, I began expelling energy from the circle.

“So, the
First Saints Legend
gave rise not just to later versions of the seven deadly sins—even though there were nine original demons—but to many of the creature and magic myths that persist to this day. Indeed, they’re all around us.”
Much more literally than you kids realize
, I thought, glancing at my watch. “Oops, we went over again.”

I clapped sharply to break the remaining energy in the circle. The students started as though coming out of trances, which they were.

“Keep working on those lit reviews,” I said as they stood and gathered notebooks and backpacks. “I have to cancel office hours tomorrow, so we’ll meet again Monday afternoon.” That would clear my schedule to follow up on last night’s summoning and learn exactly what I was dealing with.

I waited for the students to file out, Meredith’s gaze lingering on me from the hallway, then grabbed a folder of ungraded student papers from my desk, tucked it under an arm, and aimed for the door myself. I had just locked up when a prim voice sounded behind me.

“Well, if it isn’t the elusive Professor Croft.”

Recalling Caroline’s warning too late, I closed my eyes and exhaled through my nose.

“Professor Snodgrass,” I said.

“Can you can spare a minute, I wonder?”

Not really, you self-important jerk.

“Yeah, sure.”

7

With a priggish clearing of his throat, Professor Snodgrass settled behind a behemoth desk that swallowed his five-two frame, making him look like a boy playing in his father’s office. In many ways, he was. Family connections, and not scholarship, had elevated him to chairman of the history department. He adjusted his plaid bow tie, then clasped his small fingers on the desktop.

“We have a problem, Professor Croft.”

“Is that right?” I dropped into one of the ridiculously steep wingback chairs facing him.

“Several, I should say. For starters, you were late to your own class again.”

“The subway broke down.”

His right eyebrow arched. “Your colleagues had no trouble arriving on time.” He gave a pointed sniff. “They also managed to arrive without the stink of alcohol emanating from their pores.”

“That’s aftershave,” I lied again. “Purchased from a street vendor, granted.”

“And yet, you’re clearly unshaven,” he said, touching his smooth chin. I remembered my own jaw as it had appeared in the restroom mirror: steel-blue with bristles. He had me there. “And how do you explain the rumpled condition of your suit—didn’t I see you in the same one yesterday? Or the unsightly stains on your collar. We have a professional code of appearance, you know.”

I lifted a gunky shoe. “Do you think it’s cheap keeping these kickers shined?”

I wasn’t typically such a smartass. Or as much of one, anyway. My headache and underslept state had a lot to do with it. That and the fact he’d chosen the morning after a demon summoning to re-air his list of petty grievances—an event that would have reduced a man like Snodgrass to a shitting wreck.

Although Snodgrass was my boss, he had little power in the matter of hiring and firing, thank God. That responsibility rested with the college board. Whether or not they shared Snodgrass’s low opinion of my character, they certainly liked the grants I hauled in. Not to mention that my student reviews were generally stellar. That no doubt irked Snodgrass all the more. His department meetings put grown men and women to sleep, so I could only imagine what his students thought of him.

BOOK: Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)
8.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

About the Dark by helenrena
Whiter than the Lily by Alys Clare
Jodi Thomas - WM 1 by Texas Rain
Truth and Lies by Norah McClintock
Revenge by Delamar, Dana
Lord & Master by Emma Holly
Breaking Shaun by Abel, E.M.