The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Read online

  I laughed. “How did you do that?”

  He brought a slender finger to his lips. “You will wake Nana.” But he was chuckling softly. “It is a simple sleight of hand.”

  He released the necklace, allowing it to slide into the sleeve of his suit, then repeated the trick, slowly. I peeked at his eyes, which seemed to glow with some memory. When his right hand circled the back of his left, his elbow flicked up so his sleeve deposited the necklace back into his palm. But the motion was so smooth, the timing so exact, I almost missed it.

  He held the necklace out. “Here. It is for you.”

  I was surprised at its weight in my hand, the pendant a large coin.

  “Iron,” Grandpa said.

  I studied the coin’s symmetrical pattern. A circle with two squares inside, one rotated like a diamond. Intersecting lines, smaller marks on the corners. It looked like some sort of alchemy symbol. And whether or not it was my imagination, a force seemed to pulse from the cold metal.

  “The necklace is an heirloom,” Grandpa said. “It is meant to protect.”

  “Thank you.” I glanced at his serious face. “But protect against what?”

  Grandpa took the necklace by the chain and placed it around my neck, the coin settling over my sternum. As the subtle pulse from the metal radiated through bone—I wasn’t imagining it now—the force became something deep and tidal, making me feel larger.

  Grandpa looked me over and nodded, as though approving the fit of a suit.

  “Wear it in the city, under your shirt.” He wasn’t asking. “And be very careful the words you speak.”

  I returned from the memory, one hand touching the place on my chest where the coin hung. My headlamp illuminated a curving wall with deep stone shelves. The atmosphere tingled with energy. I blinked twice. The hell? I had been walking as I reminisced, yes, and I vaguely remembered having made my way down some steps. But … I rotated slowly, my chest tightening at the idea.

  I had come all the way to the vault of forbidden texts?

  My heart leapt in panic. The curse of Dolhasca had led me here. I was sure of it. I was wheeling to rush back up the steps, to fresh air and space and safety, when I recognized the energy of the room. The night I had broken into Grandpa’s old study, I had felt it near the bookcases. The same bookcases whose titles had changed when Grandpa spoke that word.

  Svelare.

  The thought of it seemed to send a small shudder around the room, and I could have sworn something fluttered on the verge of my vision, deep in the bookshelves. Gone now, but it had looked as though something was trying to take form.

  I drew in my breath, hesitated on Grandpa’s warning—

  Be very careful the words you speak.

  —and released the word.

  “Svelare.”

  The syllables vibrated from my mouth, establishing a kind of tonal resonance in the vault. Deep in the shelves, oscillations. I blinked twice and shone my headlamp around. A second ago, the shelves had been empty. Now they were crowded with leather-bound books.

  Shut the fuck up.

  I reached forward and pulled one from its slot. The dark leather cover was extraordinarily well preserved. I opened it to the first hand-written page—calligraphy in old Latin. Translated, it read, Gospel of the Egyptians, an early Christian text believed lost.

  “I don’t believe this,” I whispered.

  Behind me, something scuffed over stone. I wheeled, a shout lodged in my throat. Expecting gargoyles, I was surprised to find a flash of lenses. But the lenses weren’t aimed at me. They stared around the vault.

  “They are here,” Bertrand marveled, removing his glasses as he emerged from the staircase. “By God, they are here.”

  13

  Bertrand shoved past me and pulled down a book, his lighter flickering over the pages. “Oh my, a Sappho,” he said. “Composed hundreds of years before Christ.” He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to me. “And this…” He pulled and opened a second book. “Ha-haa! Yes, this is an old Persian prayer book, translated into a liturgical Latin—the only one of its kind.”

  I looked from him to the books, stunned by the sudden appearance of both. Bertrand must have slipped from his room and followed me. I returned the book I had pulled and scanned the others. The Book of Souls would be among them, and something told me I needed to find it before Bertrand did.

  “It is a treasure,” he said of the collection. “A treasure!”

  I was reaching for another book when he seized my wrist. He pulled himself close until I could smell his sour sweat. In a thick whispered voice, he said, “We must not tell the others.”

  “You want to keep this from them?” I asked. “Besides being impossible, we agreed to share our findings.”

  “You agreed to share. Not me.”

  I yanked my arm from his grasp. “I don’t give a damn what you did or didn’t agree to. We’d both be decomposing right now if Flor and James hadn’t saved us from the wolves and gargoyles.”

  He looked from me to the books, shadows climbing over his bony face. “Fine. We tell them. But not tonight. Not until we catalogue the collection.”

  Before I could answer, he shed his pack and began digging through it. When he straightened he was holding two notepads and a pair of pens. He pushed one of each into my hands. “You begin on that side. I will start over here. Then we check each other’s work. Ensure there are no omissions.”

  Whether or not the man was a phony, Bertrand had proven his proficiency in old Greek and Latin as well as in ancient texts. And his proposal held merit. By working through the night, we could complete a catalogue by the morning, one the four of us could work from for the next several days. Plus, it would prevent anyone—including Bertrand—from making off with a text.

  I nodded, my phobia returning to sit on my chest. “All right.”

  My list grew faster than Bertrand’s, mostly because he was stopping to peruse the texts, while I was on a mission to find a single book. I hid this by working through the collection systematically. Two hours before dawn, eyes dry and strained, fingertips chaffed, I pulled down a thick tome. Even before peering on the black leather cover, its weight spoke to me. A symbol, similar to that on my coin pendant, had been burned into the leather.

  On the first page, large letters confirmed my growing certainty: Liber de Animis. Book of Souls.

  Like a child, I sat cross-legged with the book. The rest of the vault seemed to draw back, as though on tracks. Breathless, I read the first line: “Herein lie the Grimoires sacred to the Line of Michael, Defender of Souls.”

  I raised my gaze to Bertrand, who was absorbed in his own book. Holding him there, I slid the Book of Souls into a sleeve in the back of my pack where the internal frame had been. I covered the opening with a sweatshirt, then stood and pulled another book from the shelf.

  When Bertrand and I switched pads an hour later, he looked over my list and smiled companionably. “Oh, the knowledge that will come from these works, Everson. It will alter the trajectory of scholarship. Open new avenues of thought.” He squinted up the steps. “I am glad it was you who found them and not the others.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “You are green, but at least you are an academic.”

  “Well, James too,” I pointed out. “At Oxford.”

  Bertrand sniffed. “So he claims.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I asked him about a professor in his department. He talked like he knew him, but I could tell by his face he did not.”

  I thought about that. Flor had said his story checked out. Then again, she had also said Bertrand was a fraud—and yet here he was, displaying an interest and understanding of the texts that went far beyond a layman’s. As though picking up on my thoughts, Bertrand sniffed again.

  “I do not trust the Spaniard, either. I believe she means to steal these. We must watch them closely, Everson. Even a single missing text will compromise what might be gained here. The works mus
t be studied as a whole.”

  I nodded, then lifted my pack with the hidden book and turned it so the sleeve was against the wall.

  “But where did they come from?” James asked, looking from the texts to Bertrand and me. “They weren’t here yesterday. How’s this possible?”

  “How are gargoyles coming to life possible?” I replied, bristling at the suspicion in James’s voice. “Hell if I know. One minute the shelves were empty, and then they were full. In any case, Bertrand and I catalogued the collection and made lists.” I handed one each to James and Flor.

  “Why didn’t you wake us?” Flor asked, her eyes moving down the entries.

  I searched for an answer that wouldn’t sound defensive or patronizing. But before I could speak, Bertrand spat, “Because in the confusion you would have stolen what you wanted.”

  “How do we know you didn’t do the same?” Flor shot back.

  “Guys, c’mon,” I said. “We checked each other’s work.” Standing so that my legs blocked my pack, I clapped my hands, anxious to change the subject. “All right, there are a lot of books but not a lot of time. So here are the ground rules. Find the ones you’re interested in. They can be checked out two at a time and taken anywhere in the monastery. But they must be returned by the next morning to give someone else a chance to read them. Are we all agreed?”

  Seeing nothing objectionable in that, James and Flor nodded.

  I chose two books, one because it contained a legend that went into the origins of a Saint Michael, possibly the one referenced in the Book of Souls. The second was the approximate size and weight of the stolen tome in my bag.

  I left my traveling companions to their selections, climbing back up to the prayer cell where I had slept the first part of last night. There, I sat in a shadowy corner, facing the door. After listening to ensure no one was coming, I pulled the Book of Souls from my backpack and shoved the other one into its place.

  Energy hummed over the book’s binding, like a life force. The same force that had pulled me back to the vault last night.

  I opened the cover and began to read.

  14

  The sound of crying pulled me from my reading. I looked up from the book, half startled to find a room around me, so completely had I fallen into the book’s mind-bending world of prisms and power lines, spells and symbols, summonings and supernatural beings—Grandpa’s world. Mystifying and yet oddly familiar.

  Was this what Grandpa had been getting at ten years ago when he spoke of those of our blood?

  The only clues to Grandpa’s mysterious existence were the things I had observed from his closet when I was thirteen and the few odd items I found rummaging around the house after his death. A death that lacked the mystery of his life. He was struck by a car while crossing a street near our house, a no-fault case of him stepping from between two parked SUVs at the very moment a bee flew into the face of an oncoming driver. The distressed woman, on her way to pick up her son from nursery school, had the welt and stinger to prove it.

  Just one of those things.

  Among the items I found was Grandpa’s cane, his ring with the dragon, and rolled up beside some maps in the back of his closet, an old poster advertising “Asmus the Great! Master Magician!”

  The poster depicted a tuxedo-clad man with rosy cheeks reaching into a top hat. He looked like a younger version of Grandpa. Remembering the sleight-of-hand trick Grandpa had taught me, I wondered if he’d done a stint with “Barnum’s American Museum,” the advertised venue. There had been a Barnum’s Museum in the city, I would later learn—the only problem was that it had burned to the ground in 1868. Had Grandpa’s grandpa been the stage magician?

  There was no one around to ask. A month after Grandpa’s death, Nana succumbed to pneumonia, though I always suspected heartbreak to have played its part.

  The muffled crying started up again. I hid the book in my pack, swapping it for the one I’d check out, and consulted my watch. More than ten hours had passed since I’d begun reading.

  Outside my room, the gray light of dusk fell onto the courtyard. I had been dimly aware of the others coming and going throughout the day, no doubt relaying texts to and from the vault. Across the open space, the light of a small fire danced from Bertrand’s room, and I could hear his muttering voice. But the crying was coming from the room beside mine.

  I craned my neck through the doorway, surprised to find Flor facedown on her bedding in the corner of the dormitory, hair splayed over the forearm she was sobbing against.

  “Hey,” I said softly. “Everything all right?”

  She sniffled and wiped her eyes with her sleeping bag. Papers were strewn around her as though thrown in frustration.

  “No,” she said. “Everything is awful.”

  Though Bertrand’s warning about her lingered in my mind, she sounded more fragile than I had ever heard her. I hadn’t even thought fragility a part of her makeup. I lowered myself to the edge of her sleeping pad. “Well, if you tell me what’s going on, maybe I can help.”

  With a long sniff, Flor sat up and tucked her hair behind her ears. She glanced up at me with damp, red-rimmed eyes—she hadn’t been acting—then began gathering the strewn papers.

  “This is the list I was given by the collectors,” she said. “The texts I was to make sure were here. But except for a few, the names on their list do not match the names on the one you gave me.”

  “May I?” I asked. When she handed me the lists, I looked them over. “Ah, the names the collectors gave you are in orthodox Latin. Understandable. But the titles of the texts are in a Latin used by the monks, some of the words entirely different. So, let’s see…” I pulled a pen from my shirt pocket as I consulted both lists. “This matches this here.” I wrote a small letter a beside both titles. “And this one matches this.” Beside those, I penned a b.

  Flor watched me work, her body gradually conforming to the side of mine. Not an unpleasant feeling. I continued until I had accounted for all of the titles on the list she had brought with her. All save one.

  “You see?” I smiled over at her. “Nothing to be upset about.”

  “What about this one?” she asked, indicating the Book of Souls.

  “It’s not here, apparently.”

  Her glistening gaze searched my eyes before falling to my lips. In the next moment, her mouth was pressed against mine, fingers sliding into my hair. I leaned into the kiss, dizzy with her aggression, her strong, sensual taste. She broke back suddenly, hands holding the sides of my head.

  “I have wanted this since I met you.”

  I nodded dazedly, falling into her lips again. She pulled me on top of her, fingers unclasping the buttons of my shirt. I held her cheeks, her neck, squeezed the muscles of her upper back.

  “You were right, love,” a voice said.

  I sat up and twisted around to find James standing inside the doorway, a hard gleam in his eyes. As I buttoned my shirt back, I heard Flor scoot off the bedding behind me. With the shock of intrusion, I hadn’t paid attention to James’s actual words. “Ever heard of knocking,” I muttered.

  “Is that it?” Flor asked.

  When James stepped into the light, I saw he was holding the Book of Souls.

  “I imagine so,” he said. “Everson had it stuffed in his pack. He can verify it, though.”

  I looked from James to Flor, who was standing now—and pointing her pistol at me. “Is that the missing book?” she asked. Her hair was mussed from our two minutes of heaven, but her voice was ice cold.

  I stammered silently for a second, my lips still throbbing. “What in the hell is going on?”

  “I’m sorry, Everson,” she said. “We were hired to do a job.”

  “We?” My eyes flicked between them, head spinning with the unreality of what was happening. “You’re working together?”

  James gave a hard smile as he paced around me to Flor. Pulling her to his side, he kissed her crown with the familiarity of a lover. “As I said, tw
o heads are better than one.”

  “Is it the missing book?” Flor repeated.

  “Get him to tell you,” I said bitterly. “James speaks old Lat…” I stopped, remembering how he had found the inscription outside the vault of forbidden texts but not actually translated it. “You don’t, do you? You just know that one line you fed me at the pension.”

  The manuscripts are said to be in archaic Latin.

  “Past tense,” James corrected me. “I’ve already forgotten it.”

  I sighed. Who knew how long they’d been hanging out in the village, waiting for an unwitting researcher to show up and act as their translator, to ensure they would locate the correct texts. They had no doubt tried Bertrand, who rightly saw them as trouble—hence their need to impugn his character. Everson Croft on the other hand? Classic dupe. I fell for the whole damned thing, from Flor’s pretended reluctance to travel together, to her supposed Google search, to her hot damsel in distress act. My gaze moved across the papers I had notated for her.

  “I believe Flor asked you a question,” James said. “Is this the missing book?”

  I looked from the bore of Flor’s pistol to the tome in James’s hand. I remembered what I had felt while reading it, the shifting deep inside me, like wooden boxes being pushed from a trapdoor, one that opened onto the same subterranean ocean I had described to Grandpa. The book didn’t belong to them, and I sensed the powerful book felt the same way.

  “What will you do with it?” I asked.

  James chuckled. “I’ll take that as a yes.” He flipped open the book and thumbed through the pages irreverently. “We’ll be taking it, of course. Taking them all. We have very wealthy collectors in the wings. Flor wasn’t lying about that. Just about them wanting to purchase the collection from the Romanian government.”

  “Would you consider leaving that one?”