Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1) (8 page)

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 square 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 couldn’t afford to let Thelonious through the door. Not tonight, and
definitely
not out here, where night hags were rumored to wander. Thelonious had chased skirts more putrid, believe me.

“All right,” I said, shaking my arms loose.

I was about to attempt a projection spell, one that would manifest a walking, talking likeness of me at the target. Besides requiring a healthy dose of energy, they were tough as hell to get right, especially over long distances. Even then, they were ephemeral. Though I’d practiced the spell countless times, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d put it into actual practice.

Let’s just say the results had been a mixed bag.

I stepped into the center of the circle and, feet together, began to chant an ancient Word that translated into
home
. As the sound vibrated in my core, I pictured the inside of my door as vividly as I could: the molding, the glass peephole, the brass knob. I imagined the feel of the shag rug under my feet, the cavernous space of the loft at my back.

With every chant, ley energy surged voltage-like through my mental prism, down my body, and into the casting circle. There it coursed along the lines of my symbol, glowing whiter, gaining strength.

Within minutes, it became a self-sustaining force.

“Oikos,”
I repeated.

A high resonance began to ring from the door keys. A moment later, the inside of my door wavered into being, a ghost image over the blacked-out park. I was taking shape in my apartment. I channeled more energy, imagining away my bulky attire, replacing it with the cottony feel of pajamas and the loose grip of tube socks.

“Oikos.”

I was putting the finishing touches on my bed-headed coif when a knock sounded.

“Mr. Croft?”

I’d managed to beat the police officers, but only just. I waited the requisite ten seconds for them to imagine me waking up, climbing out of bed, crossing the room…

A harder bout of pounding. “Mr. Croft, it’s the police.”

“Coming,” I called, my voice strange-sounding, as though I were hearing myself from the opposite end of a tunnel.

I extended a pajama-clad arm forward and twisted the bolts, the hard feel of them also seeming to arrive from a hollow distance. The two officers I’d been hiding from only a short time before appeared in the opening doorway. I blinked between them blearily.

“Mr. Croft?” the larger one asked from a lumpy boxer’s face.

“Last time I checked.” I read his name tag. “Officer Dempsey.”

The two officers took a moment to examine me, no doubt lining up my features with the stats and mug shot on their dashboard computer. The other one’s name was Dipinski, which also seemed to fit him. Something in their stares told me I wasn’t dealing with the department’s sharpest tacks. From experience, I knew that could cut either way.

“Help you with something?” I asked.

Dipinski, whose eight-point police hat barely reached the height of my chin, stepped forward. “Have you been home all night?”

“I have, in fact.” I stifled a fake yawn and gestured vaguely behind me. “Was grading papers till about ten and then conked out.”

Their eyes darted past me as though eager to find something amiss. I turned with them, mostly out of curiosity. The apartment, superimposed over the park’s boulders, was as neat as I’d left it, Tabitha curled up on her divan, dead to the world. That was one less worry, anyway.

“Well, consider this a random audit,” Dempsey said.

His partner aimed a finger up at me. “We come after eight at night and you’re
not
in, you’re in violation of your probation, bud. And then guess what? We’re going to take a little ride.”

Yeah, and had I goosed you with my cane back there, dipshit, you’d be duck-walking in those little polyester pants.

“Got it,” I said.

Dipinski glared at me as though trying to decide whether my curt response was meant as an insult. While it was true I held him in roughly the same regard as a peanut, I just needed these guys gone.

At last he lowered his finger and began to back off. That was when the image wavered.

Spent energy was leaving the spell, dammit, and I was in no position to resume incanting. Though I managed to steady the projection by force of will, Dipinski had caught the disruption. His small, freckled face pinched into a squint. Once more, the spell tried to tremble away.

“I don’t believe it!” his partner exclaimed, seeming to choke on his own breath.

I drew back before realizing he wasn’t looking at me. Following his floating finger, I found Tabitha stretching and rising to her haunches.

“Is that a …
cat
?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, struggling to hold the spell together. “Name’s Tabitha.”

“Good gawd!” The fit of laughter that seized Dempsey sounded like dry heaving.

Dipinski gave a mean smirk. “You’ve got a real chubber there, Croft.” Apparently, my plus-sized cat trumped a man flickering in and out of existence. As noted, not the sharpest tacks.

“Chubber?” Dempsey said, coming up for air. “That’s the biggest fucking cat I’ve ever seen!”

That got Dipinski giggling.

Tabitha dropped from the divan, ears pinned.

“Hey, look, fellas,” I whispered, trying to close the door enough to block her from their view and vice versa. “The cat gets a little weird around … you know … people she doesn’t know.”

Dipinski wiped an eye with a finger. “Bet that’d change if I showed up with a Christmas ham.”

Their laughter verged on hysterical now.

“You’d better bring the whole damn pig!” his large partner wheezed.

“You’ll do nicely,” Tabitha hissed from right behind me.

“All right, thanks for stopping by.” With what energy remained in my failing projection, I slammed and locked the door on the officers before Tabitha could sink her claws into them.

The image buckled and broke apart. I fell from the circle and landed seat-down in the dirt, blinking around at the sudden darkness. The scent of burnt copper hung in the cool air.

I sat a moment, waiting to see whether Thelonious would be paying our world a visit. But though the creamy light moved briefly around the edges of my thoughts, I had retained enough power to prevent him from breaking through. And expended just enough to keep my ass out of the clink.

I rose shakily, collected my singed keys, and swept the bottom of a shoe over the smoking circle. Some night. Two dead conjurers, two escaped shriekers. And I had a bad feeling that no matter what those two buffoons reported to Detective Vega, that image of me fleeing was going to remain stuck in her head. I wasn’t sure what the implications would be. Certainly nothing good. If I’d had poorer outings as a wizard, none came to mind.

I returned to the street in a sulk, too slow to hail the on-duty cab motoring past. A moment later, the light over the metro entrance turned off. Sighing, I aimed myself south and started for home.

17

“I am
so
sorry,” I said as I slipped into the seat opposite Caroline Reid at the small deli table.

She was sitting arrow straight, which was her peeved posture. I seemed to make her do that a lot. In my defense, I trudged sixty blocks last night before finally snagging a cab. Back home, I had to calm Tabitha, who had been deep into scheming Dempsey’s and Dipinski’s murders, update the Order on the shrieker situation, and then shower and treat my injuries.

By the time I crawled into bed, it was almost four a.m.

“I don’t get it, Everson,” Caroline said. “
You
arranged this meeting.”

“I know, I know, but—”

“
You
needed my help.”

“Right, and I—”

“And yet where would you be if I hadn’t called?”

The correct answer was still in bed. It wasn’t my alarm, but the brassy ring of the telephone that had awakened me, Caroline wanting to know where in God’s name I was. That had been an hour ago.

“Look …” I took a breath. “I know this is no excuse, but I had a rough night.”

“You seem to have a lot of those. And while you were out doing … whatever it is you do, I was home working on this.” She hefted up a thick manila folder and gave it a shake. “For you.”

“And I appreciate that. I really do.”

Lips compressed, she dropped the folder in front of me and stood.

“Hey, where are you going?”

“I have office hours in fifteen minutes.” She fixed her purse strap over a shoulder. “Some of us take our responsibilities seriously.”

“And I don’t?”

“No, in fact. And you lied to me.”

“Lied?”
I was honestly at a loss. “About what?”

“Your meeting with Snodgrass. I know about the hearing.”

Oh. Which meant she also knew about my probationary status.

When I didn’t say anything, she shook her head and turned to leave.