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

hit the glow of the candle. I lunged forward, managing to catch his wrist. Even in my sorry state, I was able to drive Malachi back. We toppled over the corner of the bed and landed hard on the floor. The candle clattered off somewhere and went out.

“Help!” Malachi cried in the darkness, trying to pry my fingers away.

Teeth clamped around one of my knuckles, and I stifled a yell. I climbed my fingers to his hand. Empty. I proceeded to pat him down as best I could, which must have felt to the kicking, writhing acolyte like a sloppy grope. Satisfied he wasn’t holding anything dangerous, I used the bed’s footboard to pull myself up. Malachi scooted back before stopping to regard my offered hand.

“Sorry,” I said, breathing hard. “I thought you had a weapon. And with everything that’s happened…”

He looked at my hand another moment, his hood fallen away from his long hair, and then let me help him to his feet. As he recovered the candle and relit it, I watched him closely, trying to make sense of his presence. In the light of the new flame, I saw what I had misinterpreted moments before.

It wasn’t possession written on Malachi’s face, but the dull lines of inebriation.

The atonement he’d mentioned apparently involved helping himself to the communion wine I smelled on his breath. The kid was one shade shy of blotto. And who could blame him? He believed he’d set in motion a chain of events that had led to Father Richard’s murder and now the disappearances. I guessed that around the time I was crashing through the threshold, he was downing his fourth or fifth chalice of St. Martin’s red. The light I’d seen was him coming to investigate the noise before ducking away. As someone who knew the cathedral better than most, he would have had plenty of hiding places to choose from.

Which meant he could help me.

“The place Higham stored the bones,” I said. “Where is it?”

“The catacombs,” Malachi answered. “But the entrance was closed off after Higham’s execution. The site was decreed a sanctum of evil. I’ve already checked it out. There’s a solid wall over the entrance.”

“Show me,” I said.

He picked up the urgency in my voice and nodded quickly. Cupping a hand around the flame, he wheeled toward the door. As I shambled after him and across the courtyard, I was afraid to look up. Afraid the demon moon had reached its zenith. Afraid I had lost Father Vick for good.

The air seemed to thin as we hurried down a stone stairwell in the corner of the cathedral, but that was my phobia at being underground kicking in. The darkness wasn’t helping. A nauseating blend of heat and cold prickled over my tightening chest. I began to wheeze.

Malachi turned his head. “Do you need to rest?”

I shook my head. As long as I could breathe, I had to keep moving. If the demon was the one I feared, we were dealing with a big-time baddie. He could not be allowed to escape, under any circumstances. Underqualified or not, I was assigning myself the task of stopping him.

Which was infuriating when I thought about it. I’d risked my neck tracking leads, taking shots in the dark, getting shot at—not to mention fire-blasted and finger-cranked—to eventually connect the dots. With the monitoring spell Chicory had thumbed into my head, the Order should have had the same information as me. And yet, where in the hell were they?

It was the kind of critique I wanted to stuff into the Elders’ flabby ears, but with the interference from the energy surrounding the church, I doubted even my thoughts were getting through.

I was truly on my own.

Fresh anxiety snuffed out my anger as the stairwell deposited us into a low-ceilinged basement. Malachi held up the candle. Light swelled through a suspension of dust and over storage trunks and mounds of covered furniture.

“It’s in the back,” he said.

I studied the stone floor as we walked. Its powdery surface was marred by prints. Some from the search team, no doubt, but perhaps not all of them. I raised my eyes to the far wall emerging from the darkness. I made out what had been an arched doorway, since filled in by uneven stone bricks and chunky mortar. The former entrance to the catacombs.

Malachi stood to one side. “See what I mean?”

I pressed both hands against the impeding wall, then tested the individual bricks. A metal ringlet, too dull to determine its age, had been bolted into one of the central bricks. I pushed and pulled on that, too. Nothing budged. I pressed an ear to the wall, but it was too dense to hear through.

“You think they’re inside?” Malachi asked in alarm, catching on.

I nodded distractedly and searched my pockets. I still had Father Vick’s card but without my wizarding power, I couldn’t locate him. None of the other spell items were worth a squat, either.

My gaze roamed the floor in thought, until I noticed something: faint lines.

I asked for the candle and knelt. The lines were abrasions left by stone. I touched them and noted the grit on my finger. I stood again and moved the candle around the door frame. The texture of the mortar here and there told me what I’d begun to suspect. The bricks were secured to one another, but no longer to the frame of the doorway. Someone had chiseled out the mortar, then hidden his work. I searched around for a handhold, a place to pull.

“Here,” Malachi said, tapping something.

Of course. The metal ringlet.

“There’s some cord over there,” he said, a step ahead of me again. Where panic was making a confusion of my own thoughts, inebriation seemed to have cooled and steadied his.

Malachi ran to an old piano, its closed lid secured with twine, and began to unknot it. I set down the Bible and cross, standing the candle on the ground beside them. The length of twine