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

As I cleared the alley, an idea struck me: Canal Street, just north of here. A branch of the defunct Broadway line ran beneath it.

I veered right. Seconds later, the golem’s smashing footfalls fell in behind me.

Pumping my cane like a relay baton, I remembered an account of a dark sorcerer using golems to protect his spell-casting sanctum. That had to be it. Someone knew last night’s shrieker summoning had been thwarted. Looking to avoid a repeat, he had not only arranged for tonight’s twin summonings at opposite ends of the city, but placed a golem at the closer one, perhaps as a component of the shrieker spell, for any wizards who might come sniffing around. My stepping over the conjurer’s threshold had probably triggered the animation.

But how had the person known I was closer to Chinatown than to Harlem? Unless he knew where I lived. I thought of the brunette woman Tabitha had seen watching my building.

Did the woman play a role in this? Was she the sorcerer?

I snuck a peek over my shoulder and regretted it. The thing was less than a half block away and gaining, its clunky strides literally eating up concrete. But I’d reached Canal Street. I took a hard right and began squinting ahead for…

There!

I aimed my sword toward the subway vent that took up half the sidewalk. With a shouted Word, I blew it from its foundation. Tight-roping the ledge between the sudden hole and a storefront, I gathered more energy to my prism, hoping to hell the golem would play follow-the-leader.

When I turned, it was. Sort of.

Instead of veering around the hole, the golem had chosen to stretch a clunky leg across. I aimed my sword at its front foot.

“Vigore!”

As foot touched sidewalk, the golem’s leg erupted at the shin. With a surprised moan, the rest of the golem plummeted from view—only for stony fingers to reappear and seize the ledge. But a second Word demolished its hand, and I watched the golem crash-bang down into the foul-smelling void.

Head still ringing, I stooped over to catch my breath. Then I replaced the steel grating over the hole and hemmed the mess in with some nearby construction barricades that littered the city. Far below, the retching, rumbling battle was already underway. Ghouls versus golem.

With any luck, my new friend would land a few solid shots before being torn apart. In any case, it was on its own.

I had a ride uptown to catch.

15

As it turned out, I hadn’t needed a hunting spell to locate the site of the second summoning. The small army of police cruisers did the job for me.

“This you, buddy?” the cabbie muttered as he pulled over. “Christ.”

He hadn’t been too happy about the address. Following the Crash, Hamilton Heights had fallen as hard as any neighborhood and was neck-and-neck with the South Bronx for most homicidal.

“You mind waiting?” I asked. “I won’t be long.”

The man’s pouchy eyes jerked from building to building as though bullets were going to fly from them at any second. “Sorry, pal,” he said, shaking his head at the extra twenty I held out. “I’m as hard up as anyone but not that hard up.”

As the cab U-turned and took off back south, I hurried toward the crime scene, an unadorned brick apartment building, twenty-odd stories high. Several residents had gathered out front as police appeared and disappeared through the building’s entrance. I eased up to the edge of the crowd and stood behind an older couple, both in thick night robes.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Flash got himself killed,” the man said without turning.

“Murder?”

“Big old messy one,” the woman said.

“Someone tore into Flash good,” the man took up again. “Super found him after we complained of some ungodly screaming from his unit.”

I imagined a similar scene to the one in Chinatown.

“Did they catch the guy?” I asked.

“Nun-uh.” The man cocked his head up. “Broke out through the window, must’ve went down the fire escape.”

“Either that or had wings,” the woman put in, “cause the man live twelve stories up.”

Yeah, nastiest wings you ever saw, lady. Which meant we had two shriekers on the loose.

“What sort of work did Flash do?” I needed to find some sort of connection between the conjurers, a common cause. That the couple seemed to know the latest victim was to my good fortune—not something I fell into very often.

But instead of popping off another response, they turned around for the first time. Beyond their glasses, I watched squinting suspicions take hold. So long, fortune. Not only was I foreign to the neighborhood, but my face was freshly banged up. I followed the man’s gaze to my gloves, both bloodstained from patting down the Chinatown conjurer.

“O-officer!” the man called over a shoulder as he backed his wife away. “Officer!”

“Now wait a minute,” I said, showing a palm.

Bad move. Now the woman could see the blood. She responded with a piercing scream.

That would get someone’s attention. Lowering my head into the shadow of my hunched-up collar, I wheeled and strolled south, Mr. Nonchalant himself. I kept an ear trained on the excitement of voices behind me. When I picked out “white man” and “killer,” I decided to speed my pace.

To an all out sprint.

“Stop!” a woman’s voice called.

Sorry, Officer, but being nabbed for a probation violation is bad enough. Being nabbed with the blood of another stiff on my hands, and without a good explanation of how it got there? Yeah, not gonna happen.

I rounded the corner of the building as a pair of cracks sounded behind me.

Of course, you could just shoot me dead.

For the second time that night, I was in full flight mode. I narrowed my sights on a south-facing entrance to the same apartment building. But instead of ducking inside, I pressed my back to the ninety-degree angle the jutting entrance made with the building’s brick siding.

Holding my cane at chin level, I whispered a