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

29

A letter from Midtown College stood among a clutch of bills in my mailbox when I returned to my apartment building later that afternoon. I tore the envelope open with my teeth and shook open the folded letter. It was a formal notice from the board for Monday morning’s hearing, eleven a.m.

Well, good for Snodgrass.

I stuffed it into a jacket pocket, too exhausted and hurt to care, and made the four-story climb to my unit.

After Bashi’s men had thrown me back onto the same street corner they’d abducted me from, I had tried to pick up the conjurer’s trail. No dice. The hunting spell was spent, and I lacked the focus to return to the conjurer’s cleared-out apartment to create a new one. Instead, I wandered Roosevelt Park and the Bowery, squinting around and mumbling inquiries at the few people who would let me approach. No one had seen a bedraggled man lugging a trunk.

I’d lost him.

I closed and locked my apartment door, then leaned against it to get my mental bearings. In my still-concussed state, the shrieker and cathedral murder cases were starting to blur badly—and the next twenty-four hours were going to be crucial to both. I needed to concentra…

I came to in a sitting position. The loft was dark. Between my splayed-out legs, a pair of luminous green eyes stared back at me. “I thought you were dead,” Tabitha said. Though she spoke with indifference, I picked up an undercurrent of concern. Whether for my wellbeing or her own, I couldn’t tell.

“How long was I out?” I tried to make out the hands on my watch face.

“A few hours.”

“Hours?”

I gained my feet delicately, a force pounding from my brow to the back of my head. When the room steadied, I flipped the switch for the flood lights. My purpling pinky finger looked and felt like a string had been knotted around its base and left on for several days. I hung my coat on the rack, gathered the spilled mail, and shuffled toward the kitchen. Tabitha followed on my heels.

“You all right, darling?”

I couldn’t remember the last time Tabitha had asked after my health. I must have looked like hell.

“Nothing a little magic can’t fix.” I poured myself a glass of water and chugged it. I hadn’t had anything to drink since that morning. Or eat, I realized. “But first, let me get some dinner going.”

Tabitha made a sound of annoyance as she leapt onto the counter. “You’re more likely to pan sear your hand. Just get everything out of the fridge and then go take care of yourself. I’ll handle dinner.”

I blinked. “You’re going to cook?”

It was less that Tabitha had non-grasping paws than she was offering to do, well, anything. Her slitted look told me to back off. Shrugging, I pulled out a couple of New York strips, shredded onion, and some sides. I started to season the pan, but Tabitha swatted my hand and shooed me out.

I would have given anything to stay and watch, but my cat was right. I needed to put myself back together. I started in the bathroom with my pinky finger. Holding a snapped-in-half Emory board to its underside, I straightened my finger, then secured it to the splint with a yard of sports tape.

The next step was to reconstitute my prism. As sizzling sounded from the kitchen, I leaned against the sink and repeated a centering mantra. It took a good fifteen minutes for the prism to emerge from the pink fog and become something solid. The nap must have helped.

With the prism restored, I touched the cane to the back of my head and my pinky, uttering healing incantations. Energy coursed into both, taming the throbbing, knitting bone and tissue back together. It would take time, but I already felt better, clearer.

Good, because I had work to do.

After a dinner that was—I had to hand it to Tabitha—pretty stellar, I climbed the ladder to my library and lab.

The hologram in the corner was dim, which disturbed me. I’d already decided that whoever had supplied the conjurers the shrieker spell was up to something big. What, exactly, I didn’t know. But for him or her to stop now?

No, I didn’t like it at all.

Best case, the Order had addressed the matter. But apart from disciplining their own, the Order almost never acted with that kind of speed. Even if they had, they wouldn’t necessarily tell me. Which left me on the hook with Bashi. No matter how I squinted at the situation, I was going to have to track down the East Village conjurer and find out who supplied the spell.

Right now, though, the cathedral case was the more pressing. There was my job at the college, sure, and needing to get the promised info to Detective Vega by tomorrow. But there was also Father Vick. The more I thought about what Vega had told me outside the cathedral, the more certain I became that the investigative noose was drawing around his neck. If I didn’t deliver a more compelling suspect, Father Vick was going to get strung up for something he hadn’t done. And given the nature of the crime, capital punishment was not out of the question.

My best lead—all right, my only lead—was the druid cult in Central Park, who might or might not call themselves Black Earth and might or might not have any connection to Father Richard’s murder.

Slam dunk, right?

I set a portable range on my table and placed a cast-iron pot onto each of the two burners. I split a bottle of green absinthe between the pots and set the burners to medium. Given the kinds of horrors that lurked in the Park—and that the druid group was an unknown quantity—my objective was to get in and out unnoticed and to keep anyone or anything who tried to kill me from doing so.

That meant potions.

I didn’t have time to prepare the more elaborate ones I’d been planning, but I had