Book of Souls: A Prof Croft Prequel Read online

“Well, there’s a Flor from Spain.” He lowered his voice. “A treat for the eyes, but beware her tongue. I believe I still have a few welts from our little disagreement this morning at breakfast.” He chuckled as he rubbed his upper arm. “The other is Bertrand, a prominent French academic. Not particularly friendly, though.”

  “A real United Nations,” I remarked, to which James chuckled again. “And they’re trying to reach Dolhasca, too?”

  He nodded. “But we’ve all been pinned down by the weather. We have that and the monastery in common, if nothing else.”

  “What if we all set out together?” I asked. “The stronger our numbers, the less likely any wolves would be to mess with us, right?”

  “Sounds like perfectly good reasoning to me, but you’ll need to convince the others. Their interest in the monastery seems nothing short of mercenary.” He pronounced the word as though the concept were far beneath him.

  “Maybe we can all meet for dinner this evening,” I said. “Talk it over.”

  “Splendid. I’ll arrange it. There’s a restaurant on the corner.” James bussed my empty glass. “But you should go up and get some rest, my friend. You look positively knackered.”

  I did as James suggested, finding the pension owner, an elderly woman, who showed me to a simple room on the second floor. After washing up, I lay on the single bed, the day’s motion swimming through my exhausted body. It was hard to believe I was less than thirty miles from the Book of Souls—a title that vanished from Grandpa’s collection with his death. A title research had shown me should never have existed in the twentieth century.

  But then to read of it last month in the Historical Journal, the author believing that Dolhasca’s founding monks had transcribed reams of lost texts and tomes, among them the Book of Souls. I closed my eyes. To think that in two days time I could be holding the same book I had seen in Grandpa’s hands ten years earlier. My thoughts began to drift on that thought.

  I was nearly asleep when, in the far distance, a wolf’s cry went up.

  4

  Bertrand shook his head emphatically, eyes closed. “No.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I planned a solo expedition,” he replied in a stuffy French accent, “and a solo expedition it will remain.”

  The middle-aged man sitting across from me was tall and lean with a sour face and eyelids that fluttered when he voiced an objection, which was often. James had been right about the “not particularly friendly” bit. More to the point, the man was a dick.

  “And we are after the same manuscripts, no?” he continued. “Why would I want to share my findings with a group of amateurs.” He returned to his stewed rabbit with prim stabs of his fork and knife.

  We had convened for dinner about an hour after I’d lain down. Thanks to the wolf howls, which had grown into a nightmare chorus, I hadn’t slept a wink. Tiredness and anger now growled inside me. Before I could respond to Bertrand’s “amateur” dig, James clapped his hands once.

  “Well,” he said cheerily. “Party of three, then?”

  We all turned to Flor. With her sultry eyes, pouting lips, and sheen of neck-length black hair, she was hard not to jaw-drop over. But I saw what James meant about her mercenary quality. It wasn’t just in her black tank top and cargo pants, but also in the flat, almost groaning way she spoke.

  “I am of the same mind as Bertrand,” she said, dropping a gnawed bone onto her plate. “As much as I hate to admit it.”

  I looked around in exasperation. The restaurant was an older couple’s home, three tables pushed into a dining room and adorned with sooty plastic flowers. In a back kitchen, pots clinked and water gurgled. Despite that we had the room to ourselves, I lowered my voice.

  “Look,” I said. “What I’m proposing will entail some compromise, yes. But it gives us the best chance of reaching Dolhasca. Attempt it alone and there’s a great chance we’ll not only fail to find the monastery, but end up in bloody pieces.”

  Bertrand sniffed. “It sounds like the American is afraid.”

  Heat flashed over my face. “And you sound like a—”

  “I asked around after our chat earlier,” James interrupted. “Everson’s concerns about the wolves are to be taken seriously. The history of the region is dotted with attacks on villagers, some of them fatal. Even the hunters don’t dare venture into the deep forest anymore. The roaming packs have little fear of humans, it seems. And they are especially aggressive at night.” Like everything else, he delivered the dire news with an almost buoyant air.

  “Tales,” Bertrand decided.

  “And what makes you the expert?” I was struggling to not rise and smack the haughty look from his face.

  Bertrand touched his napkin to his lips and took another half minute to chew and swallow. “I was educated at your Harvard University, an overpriced, overrated institution, if ever there was. I completed my doctoral work at the Sorbonne in Paris, where I have been a full professor ever since. My publications are extensive—perhaps you’ve read my tome on medieval philosophy? I have won two book awards, and am presently up for a third. And I am constantly being asked to lecture at prestigious universities and conferences.” He looked pointedly at James. “Last month I turned down an invitation from Oxford.”

  “Thanks for the curriculum vitae,” I said, “but I missed the part where you slayed wild animals.”

  Bertrand went to work on his potatoes, as though he hadn’t heard.

  “Maybe the American is right,” Flor said. “Maybe we should stick together until we reach the monastery.”

  I pushed my upturned palms toward her. “Thank you.”

  “But once there,” she continued, “we will need to decide how to apportion the spoils.”

  Apportion? Spoils? I drew my hands back. “We’re not looters, for God’s sake. We’re researchers.” A slanting look in Flor’s eyes made me hesitate. “Wait, you are a researcher, aren’t you?”

  “I was just testing you,” Flor said. “And what I am is none of your business.”

  Ouch. “Well, if we’re going to join forces. I think James and I need to know what you’re doing here.”

  “Good luck, my friend.” James chuckled. “Flor and I have danced around the question a few times this week, haven’t we, love?”

  Flor narrowed her eyes at him.

  I decided not to press her, lest she change her mind about joining our party. Sharp-tongued or not, I didn’t like the thought of her attempting the journey alone. Plus, her presence strengthened our numbers.

  “All right,” I said. “So that’s three. Bertrand? Last chance.”

  He snorted and pushed himself back from his half-finished plate. “I would just as soon join the Three Stooges.” He slapped a pair of bills on the table and, donning his slicker and rain hat, strode from the restaurant. It wasn’t until he was gone that I saw he had underpaid.

  James looked from the closing door to Flor and me. “So,” he said with a happy sigh. “What time shall we be off?”

  “The weather is scheduled to improve around noon tomorrow,” Flor said. “We should reach the monastery late the following day. If you two do not slow me down.”

  I slid James a sidelong smirk. “Yeah, we’ll try to keep up.”

  He grinned back. “Well, I do like the sound of only spending one night in the forest each way.”

  “And I have an idea for some wolf repellent,” I said.

  5

  Flor came down to the breakfast table the next morning as James and I were finishing up. Her grunted response to our greetings suggested she wasn’t a morning person. Nonetheless, her stray hair and sleepy face played strange games with my imagination. I coughed into my fist.

  “The Frenchman is gone,” she stated, ripping a chunk of bread from the loaf and slathering it with butter.

  “Gone for a walk?” I asked. “Or gone gone.”

  “He has taken everything with him.” The chunk disappeared into her mouth, and she chewed morosely.


  “I heard him moving about early this morning,” James said. “It seems he’s set out on his own, the poor sod.”

  “Yeah, to beat us there,” I grumbled. “Let’s just hope we don’t arrive to a fortified monastery.” Though I wouldn’t have put something like that past Bertrand, worry for his safety moved through me. I reminded myself that we had warned him, that he was a grown man.

  As for our safety…

  “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, standing from the table. “The pension owner gave me kitchen privileges for the next hour, and there’s something I need to cook.”

  “Then it looks like I’ll have this lovely fount of conversation all to myself,” James said, cutting his sparkling eyes to Flor. She stopped chewing long enough to glower at him.

  Geez. Even that look on her was amazing.

  I stumbled into a few chairs as I left the room.

  Since I was a young boy, my head barely as high as Nana’s hip, cooking had fascinated me. Combining disparate ingredients. Getting the proportions just right. Adding energy in the form of heat. All to end up with something whose whole was greater—or at least tastier—than the sum of its parts. And Nana’s meals were some of the tastiest I’d ever had.

  That process, that alchemy I supposed you could call it, still impressed me.

  I placed a cast-iron pot of water onto the gas stove. From the refrigerator, I pulled out a large bag of Romanian hot peppers I’d picked up at the local grocer. I pounded the pale-green peppers with the flat side of a butcher knife, releasing the juice and seeds, and scraped the mess into the pot. Finding the pension’s black pepper, I ground liberally into the steaming mixture.

  James arrived twenty minutes later, as I was funneling the final dregs of the pepper spray between three spray bottles.

  “Ah, your wolf repellent, I presume?”

  “I made it extra strong, so be extra careful.” I screwed on the plastic nozzles and handed him a bottle. “It so much as touches your skin, you’ll think you’re under a fire-ant attack, so you definitely don’t want to get any in your eyes. A wolf’s eyes are fine.”

  Flor appeared from behind James and claimed her bottle. She smirked as she wrapped her fingers around the plastic trigger. “They are cute,” she remarked.

  “Cute?” I’d been hoping for badass. “Just watch where you point it.”

  Her lips straightened as she lowered the bottle to her side. “We need to set out.”

  “But it’s still dreadful,” James said, lowering his head to the window to be sure.

  Flor’s dark eyes fixed on mine. “What you said about Bertrand wanting to reach the monastery before us. It disturbs me.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  She peered over a shoulder, as though the man might be standing behind her, and then stepped close enough for me to feel her heat.

  “Because he is not who he claims to be.”

  We set out an hour later, tromping up a muddy road that led from the village into the foothills. Families paused in their field work to stare at us through the gray rain, their wan faces impossible to read. At a final farmhouse, I caught an elderly woman making the sign of the cross before withdrawing from her dark window and closing the shutters.

  Okay. That wasn’t creepy or anything.

  I jogged every few paces to keep up with Flor, and I noticed James doing the same. In her black combat boots, Flor seemed intent on taking the forest by bloody conquest. In addition to her backpack, she had set out with a titanium suitcase, declining James’s and my repeated offers to carry it for her. When we’d asked what was inside, she had given the one-word answer, “Equipment.”

  “So,” I breathed, when I’d pulled even with her again. “Are you going to tell us about Bertrand now, or what?”

  “He is a fraud,” she said.

  “Really? In what way?”

  “What he told you last night?” She lowered her eyelids to half mast and affected a French accent. “ ‘I am star professor. I am coveted speaker. I am genius.’ It is all bullshit.”

  James laughed. “Not bad. And how did you discover that delightful gem?”

  “Google,” she said.

  “Google?” I peered back down toward the remote village. “Was there an internet cafe I missed?”

  “I have a satellite phone. I had someone look into his claims.”

  “Well,” James said. “A spy after my own heart.”

  Flor ignored the comment, which gave me private pleasure. While James and I might not have been academic rivals, I sensed a growing competition between us for Flor’s attention. A competition I was determined to win. “Bertrand teaches in Paris,” she said. “But at what they call a primaire.”

  “Wait,” I said. “He’s an elementary school teacher?”

  “So, his talk about Harvard and the Sorbonne?” James chimed in. “The book awards?”

  “His only publication is a personal web page,” Flor replied. “Pure drivel.”

  I snorted, unable to believe the man’s audacity. So what was he doing here? Trying to garner recognition? Shooting to become the academic celebrity he’d already invented for himself?

  “Wow,” I remarked, “and he had the nerve to call us amateurs.”

  “That settles that, I suppose,” James said. “But what about us, love?”

  Flor’s face whipped toward him. “What about you?”

  “Well, surely you didn’t stop with our good man Bertrand.”

  It took me a moment to understand what James was suggesting. Flor had her contact look into us as well.

  “Do not worry,” she snapped. “Your stories check out. So far.”

  And yours? I wanted to ask. But the road narrowed suddenly, the encroaching trees pressing us into a single file. Flor took the lead, while I fell to the rear. Almost immediately, the temperature dropped several degrees, and the air thickened with humidity. A strange lassitude overcame me. But while I labored with each step, the other two marched ahead.

  “Hey, American,” Flor called through the foliage. “Move your ass. We have many kilometers to cover.”

  James turned around and tipped me a wink.

  6

  The first wolf call arrived late that afternoon, a long, chilling cry.

  Flor and James stopped to listen, allowing me time to catch up. I stood on shaky legs, my gaze wandering the seams in the trees. The forest we were ascending through had grown darker and more knotted with each mile, until it looked like something out of a Grimm’s fairytale. My eyes darted toward the distant sound of snapping twigs. I thought I caught something duck behind a black tree, but the forest had been playing tricks on my eyes all afternoon.

  “Sounded like quite a big one,” James said of the cry. “Assertive, too.”

  “Yes, but it is far away,” Flor said. “Kilometers. We need to keep going. Bertrand had a four-hour head start.”

  James consulted his GPS device. “We’re making decent time, in any case.”

  “It could be better,” Flor remarked, narrowing her eyes at me.

  Her shirt hiked up as she turned, and I caught myself gawking at the glistening show of skin and shifting muscles above her right hip. I was going on six months since my last girlfriend kicked me to the curb, and the yearning for that kind of companionship was starting to feel like a clinical condition. Maybe when I returned to New York I’d look into getting a cat. Something uncomplicated.

  “How you holding up, mate?” James asked, slowing to match my pace.

  “Fine.” In fact, I was exhausted. “Hey, you’ve been talking to her most of the day,” I said in a lowered voice and with a shot of envy. “Any insights into her motive for wanting to go to the monastery? Or why she’s so hell bent on getting there ahead of Bertrand?”

  “I’m afraid not. And if you intend on taking up the question with her again, I advise you to step carefully. She’s a bit of a minefield, that one.”

  “So I’ve noticed.” My gaze locked onto the titanium case swinging from her
arm.

  Before I could wonder aloud about its contents, James said, “The folklore in these parts should interest someone in your line of study. Did you know they have a version of a werewolf called a pricolici?”

  I ventured a glance at the dark forest behind us. “Is now really the time?”

  “Ooh, dreadful creatures,” he went on. “Fast, powerful, smart as humans, but nigh impossible to kill. And they don’t abide by the moon cycles as far as their wolf forms go. That’s a constant condition. As far as their temperaments?” He gave a knowing laugh. “The waxing moon is supposed to make them more blood thirsty. And I do believe we’re coming on a full moon this week.”

  When another cycle of howling started, James’s eyes gleamed as though the wolves had just made his point for him.

  “Thanks for that info,” I muttered.

  While James trotted to catch up to Flor, I glanced around again, my anxiety needle trembling in the orange. Not that I believed in werewolves, or needed to—actual wolves were worrying enough. Then again, if magic could exist in our world, why not monsters? Because whatever I had witnessed from my grandfather’s closet had looked an awful lot like magic.

  Magic I wasn’t supposed to have seen.

  I stared at Grandpa’s face, shock icing over my own. His hazel-blue eyes studied the blood welling from my finger, the lines around his mouth turning down. One hand clamped my wrist, but I was more concerned by his other hand. The one gripping a sword that, only seconds before, had been his walking cane. A sword that he had just drawn across my finger faster than I could blink.

  The wound began to sting, then burn, pulling a murmur from my lips.

  His eyes snapped to mine. Hard Germanic eyes. “You should not hide up here.”

  With those thick, accented words, the attic room seemed to take form again, everything returning from some gray haze. The antique desk, the crowded bookshelves, the old steamer trunk. Though I couldn’t see the closet I had been crouched inside, I could smell the stuffy coats behind me.