The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) by Brad Magnarella (best business books of all time txt) 📕

“Good mystic or bad?”

I considered the question as I retrieved my revolver. “Neutral.”

“Think she’ll be open this late?”

“Probably, but you’re going to need something warmer.” I dug into one of my duffel bags and pulled out a gray sweatshirt I had planned to sleep in. “Here.” I tried to help Vega into it, but she pulled it out of my hands and put the sweatshirt on herself, rolling up the sleeves to her wrists.

“Let’s go,” she said.

A plain sign over the sidewalk pointed down a staircase to Lady Bastet’s basement-level business. Despite Vega’s assurances that she was all right, I had her keep a hand on my shoulder as we descended. I had already seen her stumble once.

At the bottom of the steps, an old wooden door creaked open before I could knock. A striking eye with a white kohl peered out.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Lady Bastet?” Vega said, shouldering me aside. “I’m Detective Vega with the NYPD. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“And who is your handsome associate?” She spoke in an accent that was hard to place.

“That’s Everson Croft. A consultant.”

Lady Bastet opened the door until we were looking at a dark-skinned woman in a white peasant blouse. A gold band with an ankh symbol in its center held a pile of dark hair from a face whose subtle age lines enhanced her appearance. Lady Bastet smiled at me with lush lips, then seemed to tease me with her cat-green eyes to follow. It was a compelling look.

Vega shot me a consternated glance as Lady Bastet led us through a display room of Middle Eastern rugs to a back room. The space smelled of harsh incense and magic. As cats squinted at us from various perches, Lady Bastet gestured for us to sit at a stone table in the room’s center. After covering what looked like a scrying globe with a cloth, she joined us on the table’s opposite side.

“You are missing someone close to you,” she told Vega.

Vega set her jaw. “We’re investigating a series of murders, and we’d like to ask you some questions.”

“As a consultant?” Lady Bastet asked.

“As a person of interest,” Vega replied.

I half expected Lady Bastet’s eyes to widen in alarm. Instead they pinched at the corners, as though she were smiling inwardly. Perhaps our visit had livened up an otherwise dull night.

“Please,” she said, opening a hand of long nails. “Proceed.”

“I’m going to give you some names,” Vega said, “and I want you to tell me whether they mean anything to you.” She took Alexandra’s photo from the file and pushed it across the table. “This is Alexandra Mills.”

Lady Bastet lifted the photo. “She is beautiful.”

“Do you know her?”

“Beautiful and tortured,” Lady Bastet went on. “It is there in her eyes, as though something is fighting to claim her very soul. She is winning, though. At least at the time of the photo.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Vega said.

Lady Bastet placed the photo on the table and slid it back. “I am sorry. Sometimes the impressions just come.” When her gaze touched mine, she might as well have winked. “No, I do not know her.”

Vega’s shoulders slouched as she returned the photo to the file. “How about a Sonny Shoat? He runs an establishment on West Forty-second Street called Seductions.”

Lady Bastet repeated his name. “Do you have something of his I might touch?”

“I’m not asking for a reading,” Vega said, her voice thinning with frustration. “I’m just asking if you know him.”

“I do not deal with those types.”

“What types?” Vega asked.

“I think you know.”

She meant vampires, which put us in a quandary. If she didn’t know Alexandra or Sonny, why had Arnaud sent us to her? I peeked over at Vega. With her mundane line of questioning all but exhausted, I decided it was time to take a supernatural tact.

“What sorts of services do you offer?” I asked.

“Readings, divinations, communication with the deceased. Spell work, occasionally.”

“What kind of spell work?”

“That depends on what my client wants,” Lady Bastet replied. “And what they are willing to give.”

I noticed she didn’t say pay.

My eyes roamed the room in thought. The space was crowded but neat. Cats large and small crouched on shelves stocked with items like crocodile teeth, falcon feathers, and the colorful shells of scarab beetles.

I nodded toward a clutch of dried purple flowers. “I see you have wolf’s bane,” I said. “Do you ever treat clients infected with the lycanthropic virus?”

“From time to time, yes.”

“Ever encountered a werewolf-vampire hybrid?”

“Once.”

“An infant, right?” I said. “About eighteen years ago?”

Now Lady Bastet’s eyes did widen slightly. “May I ask how you know this?”

I glanced over at Vega, who had one hand turned up as though to say, Were you ever going to tell me you’d figured something out? But the pieces had snapped together in the last moment. Sonny the vampire … The creature we had encountered in the storm line … The remnants of a spell I had sensed in Alexandra’s old dormitory … Lady Bastet’s reaction to the photo.

Alexandra hadn’t worked for Sonny. Her mother had.

“Someone brought an infant to you,” I said. “A young woman, I’m guessing. She was worried about her little girl’s … makeup. She asked you to cast a spell to fix her, to make her human.”

“But I could not,” Lady Bastet said, picking up the story. “She had not been infected by a werewolf, nor had she been turned into a vampire. Those elements belonged to her by birth. As such, I could only suppress her vampire and werewolf natures, keep them from maturing.”

“Through a powerful binding spell,” I said.

“May I see the photo again? Yes,” Lady Bastet said after Vega had handed it to her. “I remember the eyes. So intelligent.” She sighed sadly. “Am I to presume the spell has been broken?”

“About two months ago,” I said. “Alexandra took a powerful street drug. Detective Vega and I happened to visit the room in which she