Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1) (18 page)

I felt the moisture leave my mouth. “You mean…?”

He nodded once. “Don’t test them.”

32

I awoke early Sunday morning, having slept decently for someone who faced a deadline with an NYPD detective, another deadline with a mob boss, and a not-so-subtle threat from his mentor of being put to death if he acted on either. It probably explained the shredded feeling in my stomach.

I dressed, fixed an omelet for Tabitha, who was still snoozing, and headed out for coffee. I had some serious mulling to do.

Except for a handful of neighbors out walking their dogs, the West Village streets were quiet. The weather system that had dumped gray clouds and on-and-off rainfall over the city since last week continued to linger like a nagging cold. I wasn’t feeling so hot myself.

I hustled the three blocks through the damp to my favorite caffeine stop, Two Story Coffee, and ordered a large Colombian roast with two shots of scotch. I paid for it, along with a folded-over Sunday Edition of the
Scream
, and carried both to a soft reading chair in a corner. Being Sunday, it was too early for the regulars: various artists and practitioners of the esoteric, which the particular energy patterns in the neighborhood seemed to attract.

I took a sip of coffee and sank into the chair in thought.

It seemed all of the decent options were off the table. I was looking at
least bad
now. To avoid the Order’s wrath, I would have to back off the shrieker case, which meant hiding from Bashi and the White Hand for roughly the rest of my life. I would also have to walk away from the cathedral case—not that I had any new leads at the moment—but what would happen to Father Vick, not to mention the crucial role of St. Martin’s in the city’s balance of power?

One thing I had decided for certain was to skip my hearing at Midtown College tomorrow morning. I refused to give Snodgrass the satisfaction of watching me sink. I wasn’t sure which hurt more, though: the thought of no longer being able to research and teach the subject I loved, or of not having Caroline Reid as a colleague. Would our friendship survive? And what was she going to think of me for not fighting for my position?

I sighed and unfolded the paper across my lap. The headline that took up half the front page blew all thoughts of the college from my head.

MURDER AND MAYHEM AT ST. MARTIN’S! RECTOR BATTERED TO DEATH! PARISHIONERS ASK, “WHO’S NEXT?”

Despite the Church’s effort, the story had gotten out. Probably a blackmail job. The paper had wanted more money and the Church had balked. The article contained nothing I didn’t already know, the information attributed to a “brave source” who had requested anonymity. I snorted at the irony. I worried, though, what the story meant for Father Vick and St. Martin’s.

The cathedral’s power as a sanctuary against evil depended largely on a collective faith in, well, the cathedral’s power as a sanctuary against evil. Challenging that faith with a graphic depiction of the murder and suggestions that there could be more to come wobbled the central struts.

Maybe exactly what someone was trying to do.

The rest of the article was garbage, something the
Scream
had unabashedly mastered. At least my likeness wasn’t featured below the article.

I turned the page. Correction. At least my likeness wasn’t featured below
that
article. Because the god-awful police sketch was back, on page two. I raised my eyes to the headline—and nearly spilled my coffee.

THE EVISCERATOR STRIKES AGAIN! SOHO! CHELSEA! SPANISH HARLEM! MURRAY HILL!

My eyes rocketed up and down the columns, grabbing the relevant information, slamming it into something coherent. Four more murders since Friday night. Two men. Two women. The info on the victims was sketchy, but they had all been slain in the same manner as the Chinatown and Hamilton Heights victims—hence my reprisal as lead suspect and creep job.

I closed my eyes to a corkscrew of dizziness. Had those same shriekers reappeared to feed? I shook my head. No, these sounded like the just-summoned variety. No signs of entrance, smashed windows for exits.

“Plan for the shriekers, my ass,” I grumbled as I recalled the assurance Chicory had given me in the car last night. There were now at least six of them loose in the city, up to God knew what, and the Order wasn’t doing a goddamned thing. The thought knotted the muscles in my neck.

And why hadn’t my alarm alerted me? The model of the city should have lit up like a supernova. Cold understanding stiffened my spine. The Order had cut me off from their wards. Hence, the model’s silence the last couple of nights.

I took a large swallow of coffee, more for the alcohol than caffeine, and flipped between the two articles in thought.
Oh, 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 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 unwell,” he rasped after a moment.

“But he’s here?”

“In bed,” the old man confirmed, causing me to exhale in relief.

“Please, it will only take a minute, and it’s extremely important.”

When Cyrus stepped to one side and waved for me to enter, I hoped the gesture would be enough to temper the threshold. It was, but it might not have mattered. The force that rippled through me was less than half the strength I’d felt on Thursday, and left much of my wizarding powers intact.

Cyrus closed the door behind me and locked it.

“I know the way,” I told him, not wanting to wait on his frail lead.

I replicated the route Father Vick and I had taken the morning before, until I was crossing the inner courtyard and standing in front of the vicarage. The door was open a crack, and I could make out a slice of Father Vick’s tall figure beneath the white covers of his bed.

I knocked. “Father?”

The bed creaked as he lifted his head. “Is that Everson? Come in, come in.”

I entered and returned the door to its cracked-open state behind me. A smell like stale gauze hung thick in the room. By the time I turned back to Father Vick, my eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and I paused to take him in. True to Cyrus’s word—though paraphrasing slightly—he looked like crap. His pale red hair was thin and scattered. What I mistook for bald patches in his beard were spots that had gone white, probably less evident when his beard was combed. He blinked with boggy eyelids, but his eyes exuded the same paternal concern.

“Please, have a seat,” he said.

I pulled a chair up beside the bed. “I’m sorry to disturb you. I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“You read the article?”

I nodded.

As his head rested back on the pillow, he exhaled. “I was to have told the congregation today, in morning Mass. I spent much of the night preparing the service and in prayer.”

Holy books stood in stacks on his window-facing desk. Beside the books hung his white kerchief.

“I saw the sign out front,” I said.

“The congregation is in a panic. I … I don’t know what to do.”

As he spoke, I caught what looked like tissue paper balled into his right ear canal. His nose had bled too, bits of red crust clinging to the top of his mustache. I recalled what he’d said about channeling forces beyond us, and could only imagine the kind of strain he was under. The faith in the cathedral was similar to my mental prism—a converter of ley energy. Right now, Father Vick was having to make up the faith deficit, and it was killing him.