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

up, as though someone meant to collect it later, but the line of laundry and spill of canned goods—the signs of habitation—were gone. My one hope was that the conjurer had been robbed while he slept, but he wasn’t in his bedroom. Only the spring metal frame and a scatter of books remained.

Balls.

I checked the other rooms to confirm his absence. The table in his makeshift laboratory remained, as well as the mirror, which lay shattered on the floor, but the spell items were missing, probably packed into his trunk and hauled away. I returned to the main room and paced the newspaper-strewn floor in thought.

Had the conjurer left of his own initiative, or been taken? If the second, there was a good chance the mysterious spell supplier had been involved. Finding the conjurer could mean finding the supplier. There were ways to track the conjurer, but they all involved magic, dammit.

At that thought, a low humming shook through the floor and into my shoes. The sensation was followed by the muted cry of guitars.

Maybe someone had witnessed his departure.

It took a minute for the guitars to die down and shouted voices to decide someone was knocking at the door. The generator idled down next until I could hear a series of bolts being worked. When the door cracked open, a shotgun barrel appeared beneath a squinting eye. The eye widened in surprise.

“Mr. Wednesday Night!” Tattoo Face exclaimed. The door opened until his giant frame was standing over me. “We were wondering if you’d come back!” He leaned his pump-action shotgun against the doorframe and clapped my shoulder with enough enthusiasm to send me into a sideways stagger. “Got another gig tonight, and everyone wants you there.”

I braced myself against the wall. “Really?”

“Talk about a show stealer,” Blade said, coming up beside him, a rail in comparison. She looked me up and down, her neon-pink smirk reminding me what she’d said the other morning about a strip tease.

Thanks, Thelonious.

“Much as I’d, ah, love to come,” I stammered, my face warming like a furnace, “I’ve got a load of work. I was actually stopping by to ask if you knew anything about your upstairs neighbor.”

“What about him?” Tattoo Face said.

“Well, it looks like he cleared out. Probably in the last day or so. Know where he might’ve gone?”

Blade shrugged. “People come and go all the time. Sort of the character of the neighborhood.”

“Did he have any recent visitors?’

Tattoo Face worked his lips in thought. “None that I know of.”

“Guy with stringy hair and thick glasses?” someone asked.

Blade and Tattoo Face parted so that I could see the young black man with green hair and skin-tight leathers. He was sitting on a couch, fiddling with the tuning knobs on a battered electric guitar, fingers buried in a spray of wires.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s the guy,” I said.

“Bumped into him on my way in this morning. He was hauling a trunk out into the street.”

“Was he alone?”

“Far as I could tell.”

“Did you see which way he was headed?”

“Not really.” Green Hair remained fixated on his tuning project. “Screamed when he saw me. Something about the End Times. Then he dragged his trunk to the other side of the street and stared till I’d gone inside. Dude was on something. ’Course, so are most the freaks around here.”

So the conjurer had left solo.

“All right, guys,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Sure we can’t talk you into making a cameo tonight?” Tattoo Face clasped his meaty hands to his chest in a fervent plea.

Blade smirked again. “We can probably arrange to have a dancing pole brought up.”

“In that case…” I said. “Not a chance in hell.”

I duly weighed the stupidity of what I was about to do before returning to the conjurer’s apartment. Hair made a good target item, and I found several strands in the conjurer’s former bedroom. I placed them in the center of a circle of copper filings. Feather of homing pigeon or, better yet, tusk of narwhale made great catalysts, but I was fresh out.

Yeah. I was planning to cast a hunting spell right under the Order’s nose.

I took a breath before aiming the tip of my cane toward the tangle of hair. The incantation was basic. White light swelled from the cane, absorbing essence from the smoldering hair. A few minutes later, after the hair had popped into foul-smelling flames, it was done. I’d get a direction by the time I reached the street.

If an agent of the Order didn’t swoop down on me before then.

As I was about to leave the bedroom, a book among the scattered pile of them caught my eye. I lifted the Bible by its pebbly black spine and flopped it open to its back page. Sure enough, stamped in the top left corner in black ink:

St. Martin’s Cathedral: New York, NY 10006

Now that was interesting…

27

I hustled down the stairs, already putting my discovery in perspective. St. Martin’s was involved in various outreach programs for the homeless; the conjurer had likely picked up the Bible at a shelter or soup kitchen. Or maybe a parishioner had seen him on the street and handed it to him.

But call it wizard’s intuition, something about the finding nagged me.

I filed the discovery away as my shoes hit the sidewalk and the hunting spell tugged my cane south. I assumed the conjurer hadn’t gotten far, given the loaded trunk he was lugging. But blocks later, where the East Village became the Lower East Side, I began to wonder.

My cane pulled me into the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. I suddenly found myself dodging through a shantytown that spread from the bridge’s massive concrete pylons onto the sidewalk and half the street. Soot-faced residents watched from sagging boxes and tents made from sheets of industrial plastic. The intelligence in their eyes scared the hell out of me. These were the ones who had held jobs and leases but now lacked the means to even leave the city. The ones