Book of Souls: A Prof Croft Prequel Read online

  Book of Souls

  A Prof Croft Prequel

  Brad Magnarella

  © 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by Damonza.com

  Table of Contents

  Prof Croft Series

  Description

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

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  Books by Brad Magnarella

  The Prof Croft Series

  BOOK OF SOULS

  DEMON MOON

  *MORE TO COME*

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  Description

  How did Everson Croft discover his powers?

  Let’s go back to the night I turned thirteen, the night Grandpa filleted my finger with his cane sword.

  I can’t say what terrified me more, the cold anger in his eyes or the crazy things in his locked study. A talking trunk. Squirming coats. A bookshelf whose titles shifted before my eyes. And one chilling title in particular: Book of Souls.

  Ten years later, and I’m en route to a Romanian monastery, in search of that lost book. But I’m not the only one. Three others have beaten me to the local village: two researchers and…

  Well, I’m not sure who Flor is, other than Spanish, secretive, and sexier than a summer dress.

  Can I trust her—or any of them? I don’t know, but we’ve got werewolves on our scent, not to mention an ancient curse hanging over the remote ruins.

  Getting there and back is going to require serious cooperation.

  Or serious magic.

  Book of Souls is a short prequel that can be read before or after Demon Moon (Prof Croft, Book 1)

  1

  Heart thumping hard and high in my chest, I sealed the door onto a pulsating blackness, turned, and snapped on my flashlight. Through a suspension of dust, bookcases loomed from the too-close walls. At the far end of the room, a large steamer trunk and antique desk leaned in and out of the shadows, the desk featuring an old lamp with a blood-red shade and brass pull chain.

  As I stepped from the door, the fear that had been balling up my insides began to let out, allowing a euphoric excitement to seep in. An entire life lived in this house, thirteen years to the day, and I had never been inside Grandpa’s attic study. I was in unchartered territory.

  Even better, forbidden territory.

  I ran my beam over the titles on the bookshelves. An old encyclopedia set, row after row of books on insurance and insurance law. Boring titles, but my proximity to them made the hair on my arms tingle straight. Maybe it was because I knew almost nothing about my grandfather, a man who was rarely home, who rarely spoke even when he was. A man whose dour eyes and foreign accent scared the hell out of my friends—and me, if I was being honest.

  I trained my beam on his trunk. A large, battered container of black wood and metal that looked for all the world like a treasure chest. I undid both hasps and worked my fingernails around the edge of the central lock, surprised when the spring-loaded latch fell open.

  A shot of anticipation jiggled my bladder. I clamped the flashlight between shoulder and cheek, placed my hands on the front of the lid … and hesitated. As freaky as it sounded, the trunk felt alive. And it wasn’t just the warmth of the pliant wood. A force was moving through my hands, a steady rising and falling, like breathing. And was that a heart beat?

  My own heart lurched as I spun from the trunk. No, not a heart beat—footsteps, on the attic stairs. Their steady cadence accompanied by wooden taps now, growing louder.

  Shit. Grandpa.

  I replaced the hatch, refastened the hasps, and shot my beam around the study. A closet! In five jerky steps I was plunging into a line of hanging coats, pulling the folding door closed behind me. A beat later, just as I snapped off my light, the study door creaked open and then closed again.

  A heavy silence followed, wherein I was sure Grandpa could sense my presence.

  He uttered one of his strange words: “Serrare.” Pressure built in my ears as the floorboards clicked and a dangling bulb flooded the room with weak light. I stiffened in my crouch. Grandpa’s tall figure entered my view through the seam above the closet door’s middle hinge, his back to me. I released my breath and blinked to moisten my eyes.

  Though the man usually carried himself like a ruler, his shoulders sloped now, as though bearing a large load. He set his cane and fedora on the desk and, sighing, ran a hand through his thinning hair. The silver ring with the dragon gleamed dully on his middle finger.

  I once asked Nana why Grandpa was so quiet. What I was really asking, of course, was why he paid me so little heed. Nana seemed to understand, her lips creasing into a tender smile. “When your grandfather was a young man,” she explained, “he fought in a long war. An awful war. He saw many terrible things. Some people never recover from that kind of experience.”

  “Do you mean World War Two?” I asked.

  She didn’t nod, only repeated, “An awful war.”

  From the closet, I watched Grandpa pace in front of his desk. Seeming to arrive at some resolve, he straightened and turned to the nearest bookcase.

  “Svelare,” he said. Another strange word, spoken with depth and resonance.

  A charge stirred the air, and the bookcase … rippled. In the time it took for me to lean closer to the door seam, the books became other books. No more encyclopedias or insurance manuals. Humming quietly, Grandpa skipped his fingers across folios and old leather bindings. I was studying Latin in school and could translate several of the titles—but, man, were they weird.

  Grandpa’s fingers stopped at an especially large tome, Book of Souls, and drew it out.

  Motes of light fluttered from the spreading pages. He waved at them absently until they dissipated. Turning slowly, the book open at his chest, he traced a finger across the page, lips moving. Maybe from staring at Grandpa for so long without blinking, an amethyst hue seemed to take shape around him. I squeezed my eyes closed and opened them again, but the hue remained.

  When a hard knock sounded, I tried to angle my view toward the study door. Nana? But with the second bout of knocking, I realized it wasn’t coming from the door. It was coming from Grandpa’s steamer trunk.

  I stopped breathing. Holy hell, someone’s in there.

  “Yes, what is it?” Grandpa answered distractedly.

  Though I couldn’t make out the words coming from the trunk, the voice had a sniveling quality.

  “Mm-hmm,” Grandpa said, still absorbed in his book.

  The voice said something else.

  Grandpa’s finger stopped moving. The aura of light surrounding him tightened. He raised his face until his gaze lined up with mine. The book clapped closed. I tried to draw back, but Grandpa uttered something, and the coats began to shove against me. What the…? I glimpsed him swapping the book for his walking cane. A tornado of thoughts jerked my frightened eyes around, but there was nowhere to hide.

  All in one moment, the door opened, the coats thrust me out, a hand seized my wrist, and a steel blade flashed, biting deep into my first finger.

  2


  Ten years later

  “You are fool.”

  I raised my eyes from the thin scar on my finger, twisting slightly on the wooden bench to face the cart driver. For the last two hours, the Romanian man had been silent, even when I made a few stabs at conversation in Slovak. He shook the horses’ dripping reins, a peasant’s hat hiding the top half of a face that stared at the muddy road ahead. I’d assumed the man was reticent, not given to conversation. But had he just called me a fool?

  I cleared my throat. “Come again?”

  The cart’s wheels jounced through another brown puddle as rain continued to patter over my hooded jacket. For miles we’d traversed nothing but fields and poor farmland, but up ahead I could make out the first houses of a village proper, weathered plaster affairs with red-tiled roofs. Perhaps in anticipation of food or rest, the pair of horses snorted and sped their clopping pace. After traveling non-stop for the last twenty-four hours, on planes, trains, and now a cart, I knew the feeling.

  Just when I thought the driver had fallen back into his silence, he spoke again. “You come for curiosity.”

  “Sort of.” I eyed him carefully—where had I heard all of this before? “I’m headed to the ruins of an old monastery. Dolhasca. Supposed to be a two-day’s hike from the village. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  I had managed to acquire a survey map of the area, onto which I’d plotted my best estimate of the monastery’s location, but I was hoping to find someone to give me clearer directions—or better yet, to guide me.

  “Why?” he asked, pronouncing it vy?

  “Research. I’m a doctoral student. Dolhasca’s founding monks are supposed to have transcribed some lost texts. I want to see if I can locate them. They may shed light on early European beliefs.”

  It was the same explanation I had given while applying for my research grant, but it was only half the truth. The other half was that, after years of searching, I believed I was close to locating a book that would explain who my grandfather had been, besides an insurance man.

  “That is why you are fool,” he said.

  “And why is that, exactly?”

  “The journey.” He looked over to where the valley rose into dark forested hills, the white-capped Carpathian Mountains jutting beyond. “It will be your death.”

  I’d been warned that this region of Romania was still rife with superstition, but wow.

  “Let me guess … evil spirits?” I scoffed. The pit of hunger in my stomach, not to mention my sore butt, had lowered my tolerance for nonsense. I was going full smartass. “Ogres? Witches?”

  “Wolves,” he replied.

  “Oh.” I let out an embarrassed laugh. “Well, we have those too, and they’re not man eaters.”

  “Then your wolves are not like ours.”

  I eyed the forest. “What makes yours so special?”

  Even as I asked, a cold foreboding prickled through me. Beyond the water dripping from the brim of the man’s hat, sober gray eyes fixed on mine. He palmed his sodden hat, lifted it from his head, and turned so the muted light caught his disfigured profile. The four scar lines began at his right temple—ridges through his matted black hair—and raked across his cheek. I had assumed the cloudiness of his right eye was the result of cataracts, but now I saw how the topmost scar ended at the split eyelid.

  “A wolf did that?” I asked.

  He replaced his hat. “I was young fool. I did not believe stories.”

  I swallowed. All right, maybe I needed to rethink my approach. “Are there any villagers who moonlight as armed escorts?”

  “None will go into forest.”

  The cart’s axles groaned as we arrived in the muddy village square. Though we were no longer in the countryside, a smell of wet beasts and turned-up earth permeated the damp air. The horses clopped past a stucco church and a couple of store fronts until the driver drew back on the reins. We came to a snorting stop in front of the village’s lone pension—four bedrooms with breakfast provided, if the entry in my guidebook was to be believed.

  The driver climbed down and plodded around to the back of the cart. I joined him from the other side, water squelching through my hiking shoes. I eyed his battered rubber boots in envy. He threw a tarp to one side, and from between stacks of crates pulled out my traveling backpack, which he set on the steps of the pension.

  I counted out several bills. “Thanks for the ride.”

  As he accepted the money and pressed it into a shirt pocket, I noticed the dull ring on his third finger, a familiar figure embossed in the thick face: a rearing dragon.

  “Y-your ring,” I stammered. “My grandfather had one just like it. Where did you get it?”

  He looked down on the ring briefly and without interest. “A street seller.” Climbing back up to his seat, he took the reins in hand, but hesitated mid snap. “Do not be fool,” he said, peering down on me. “The journey is not for mortals. It will not forgive curiosity or covetousness. Tell your friends this.”

  “Friends?”

  He raised his gray eyes to the pension.

  “You are not only foreigner here.”

  3

  I encountered foreigner number one just beyond the pension’s entrance, in a sitting room. The young man, with a stylish tousle of blond hair and cheery blue eyes, looked to be about my age. He sat in a corner chair facing the room, a glass of dark wine in hand, as though waiting for someone to join him in drink and conversation.

  “Lovely weather, eh mate?” he said in a pleasant English accent.

  I wiped my shoes on the mat and dropped my pack beside the door. I was interested in food, a bath, and a bed, in that order. There was no room on my immediate itinerary for chit-chat.

  “Name’s James.” He pushed up a sweater sleeve and crossed the room with his hand extended.

  I dried my hands on the sides of my pants and accepted his hearty shake. “Everson Croft.”

  “Let me guess. You’re also on the hunt for the fabled manuscripts of Dolhasca?”

  I stopped unzipping my jacket and looked up at him.

  He laughed as though we’d just shared in a particularly clever joke. “I read the article in the Historical Journal, too. I’m a fifth year at Oxford. European History.”

  “Midtown College in New York,” I replied. “Mythology.”

  “Sharp minds think alike, eh?” He clapped my shoulder.

  “Guess so,” I muttered.

  He switched to an old form of Latin. “The manuscripts are said to be in archaic Latin.”

  I nodded and answered in kind. “So I’ve heard.”

  He beamed at me, as though I’d passed some test. “Well go on,” he said. “Shed your jacket, grab a towel. I’ll ready you a glass of the local spirit. Not vintage, mind you, but it gets the job done.”

  At least he wasn’t treating me like a rival. Academics could be petty that way. Take the new chairman of my history department, Professor Snodgrass. Now there was a piece of work. I sank into the couch and accepted the wine. James raised his glass brightly and we both sipped. To my surprise, the hit of alcohol, coupled with the soft cushion, soothed my travel pains and the irritability that went with them. James adjusted the white collar of a shirt that poked from his too-green sweater. He could have been a golfer taking a break from the links.

  “So how long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Since Monday. I was hoping to set out for the monastery yesterday, but the weather’s been bloody dreadful.” He sighed and gazed out a window running with rain water. Distant lightning paled his face in twin flashes.

  “You sound confident in the monastery’s location.”

  “Well, I have technology to thank for that.” As he dug in his pocket, the ensuing thunder rolled in, shaking the walls. James held up what looked like a small two-way radio, a rubber antenna poking from the top. “Using a satellite map program, I was able to pick out what looked like the ruins. That gave me a GPS location. According to this device, the monastery is
approximately 48 kilometers north by northwest from our current position.” He held the device toward me. “Care to take a look?”

  “No, no.” I leaned away and showed my palms. “I have a way of breaking that stuff.”

  It was true. Technology never failed to get pissy in my presence. The last time I’d tried to use a library computer, the screen blacked out and smoke drifted from the keyboard. Seconds later, the entire college network crashed. Fortunately, I was a whiz on my mechanical typewriter.

  James shrugged and returned the GPS device to his pocket.

  “But, hey…” I went to retrieve my pack. “Would you mind looking over my maps and telling me if I’m in the proximity?”

  “What in God’s name for?” James asked. “Now that you’re here, we can make the journey together.”

  I returned to the couch. “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Two heads are better than one. I’d enjoy the company, besides.”

  “Well cheers to that.” I raised my glass, and we drank again, my worries over the monastery’s location resolved. But with the next flashes of lightning, I recalled the driver’s scars, the pale ridges of tissue shining through his damp hair. The wolf’s claws must have flayed the poor bastard to his skull.

  “Something the matter?” James asked.

  “In your few days here, has anyone tried to warn you about going into the forest?”

  “Other than everyone I’ve talked to?” James smiled and waved a hand. “We’re in the old country, mate. Good people, the very salt of the earth, but simple minds. Where there are unexplored wilds, there must be monsters, right?”

  “I get your point. But I’d feel better if we had an escort. There have been wolf attacks.”

  James examined his held-up glass with an unconcerned air. “I’ve already asked around. No one’s interested, I’m afraid. It seems there are only four of us willing to venture into those wilds.”

  The driver had mentioned foreigners, plural. “Who are the other two?”