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

by Brad Magnarella

  I thought about how that could be my in, telling this James that I had taken over the consulting gig and wanted to compare notes. I could then introduce questions about the Order, see how much he knew.

  “So are you back for good?” Vega asked.

  “Only until tonight. There’s a trip I need to take.”

  “Where?”

  “Romania.”

  “Romania? What’s over there?”

  “It’s where my first mentor trained me, someone named Lazlo.”

  “Wouldn’t a phone call be easier?”

  “He doesn’t own one—or at least he didn’t ten years ago. And I have no other way of reaching him. Lives a pretty solitary lifestyle.” I thought about the farm outside the village where he’d taken me to train that summer. The old house, the barn, the muddy fields.

  “Can you trust him?” Vega asked.

  “The Front implied he wasn’t part of the conspiracy. So, either there really is an Order and he belongs to it, or there isn’t an Order and he thinks he belongs to it. Either way, he should be able to help me sort out what they told me. He’s really powerful, and he knew my grandfather.”

  Besides that, he’s the only other member of the Order I know, I thought.

  “Here,” she said, reaching into her pocket. She pulled out the pager I had used while consulting for her and placed it in my hand. It still had the iron case that protected the electronics from my aura. “I’ll call if anything important comes up. Let me know if you find anything on your end.”

  “Will do.”

  “Oh, and if you want your bathrobe back, I pulled it from evidence.”

  “Huh?” I squinted at her before remembering the robe of John the Baptist. My bath robe, which Chicory had imbued with a veiling spell, would have been laid bare when Chicory was slain. “Oh, crap.”

  “Yeah,” she said, crossing her arms. “The papers had a field day.”

  “I’ll be happy to take it off your hands,” I said sheepishly.

  “I already stuck it in a package and dropped it in the mail. It should be at your place later today.”

  “I owe you,” I said.

  “Just keep me in the loop.”

  “I will.”

  “And Croft,” she said, her eyes as stern as ever, “take care of yourself.”

  13

  I called James’s number from a payphone and spoke to a young woman named Carla. He wasn’t in, she said, not sounding especially happy about that fact. Probably why she volunteered the name of a bar where I could find him.

  Twenty minutes later, I pulled up in front of the address, just beyond where the Upper East Side disintegrated into Spanish Harlem. I crossed the graffiti-tagged sidewalk, pulled the door open, and stepped into a drift of smoke. At first glance, the bar looked empty. I then realized everyone was gathered in a room off to the left, where I could hear the sharp clacking of billiard balls. As I entered the pool hall, I realized I should have asked Carla for a description.

  In another moment, I realized I didn’t need one.

  Everyone was crowded around one table where a young black man in a battered bomber jacket and cowboy hat was cruising around the cushion, stroking in striped ball after striped ball, barely seeming to look at what he was doing. A membrane of silver magic moved around him.

  “Eight ball, corner,” he said, nodding at the far pocket.

  Murmurs sounded from the audience of twenty or so. I rose onto my tiptoes and saw why. His opponent’s solids were in the way. The shot was impossible. Lips barely moving, James slammed the cue ball into the edge of the eight ball, sending it in a spinning arc from the edge of the table, around the mass of solid balls, and into the pocket he’d indicated, dead center.

  He just used an invocation, I thought in alarm.

  Straightening, James adjusted his aviator sunglasses and grinned. “Game.”

  His opponent, a large man who had been watching with a constipated frown, removed a wad of bills from his pocket and slammed it on the table. As the loser stormed off, James coolly picked up his winnings and bounced it in his hand. Nodding as though he’d just calculated the dollar amount by its weight, he deposited the wad into a jacket pocket and looked around.

  “Who’s next?” he asked.

  The other patrons peered at one another and gave dubious shakes of their heads.

  “I’ll up it to twenty to one,” he said. “Five hundred dollar minimum. I win, I get the five. You win, you walk with ten G’s.” A rubber-banded fold of hundreds appeared in his right hand, and he waggled it back and forth.

  The chatter around the table got louder, but still no takers.

  “What about you, lanky?”

  I didn’t realize he was talking to me until heads turned. The crowd stepped apart, creating a smoky aisle between me and the table. James stood on the table’s other side, cue over one shoulder.

  He was younger than he’d looked at first glance, about my height but muscular and with the kind of carved face and lips women loved. Though he couldn’t have been older than twenty-three, twenty-four, I still couldn’t get over the audacity of the guy. A member of the Order using magic to hustle? Then again, his file was thick with infractions.

  I cleared my throat. “You’re James Wesson, right?”

  “What’s this look like?” he asked. “A meet and greet?”

  The crowd laughed, making my face burn with embarrassment.

  “I’m actually here on NYPD business,” I said, affecting an official tone. “I have a few questions I’d like to ask.”

  “Tough tits, porky. I’m working.”

  More laughter broke from the crowd. James chalked his cue and gave it a casual puff.

  “This is serious,” I said. “A matter of highest order.”

  I emphasized the last word, but if James caught the meaning, he gave no sign. Instead, he looked around as though he’d lost interest in me, just someone taking up space in his world. The crowd shouldered me back.

  “Forty to one,” he offered now.

  Whistles sounded at what the winner stood to gain.

  “I’ll take those odds.”

  A riotous cheer went up as the attention turned back to me and enthusiastic hands ushered me toward the pool table. The grin on James’s lips hardened as he sized me up. I’d whispered an invocation before accepting his challenge, hiding my wizard’s aura. I assumed a look of defiance now, someone who had just been humiliated and was determined to get even.

  James recovered his grin. “Let’s see the green.”

  I pulled out my wallet, which I’d just loaded with cash for my trip, and held it open. He nodded and rolled the cue ball to one end of the table as two guys fished balls from pockets and racked them at the other. I was reaching for one of the mounted pool sticks when James said, “Don’t bother. This’ll be quick.”

  I now understood Vega’s eye roll. The guy was an arrogant ass.

  I lowered my arm and watched him break. More specifically, I watched his lips. With the help of a whispered incantation, he sunk three solids. He strode around the table and lined up his shot. Magic fluttered across the green felt. The cue ball split two solids, knocking them into opposite side pockets. He used another force invocation for his next shot, hopping the cue ball over one of my stripes, and nudging his target into a corner pocket. With one solid remaining, he banged it off three cushions before dropping it into another corner pocket.

  The jeers started from the crowd.

  “NYPD fixing to get his ass run!” someone shouted.

  James circled the table, eyeing the eight ball in relation to my scatter of untouched stripes. Passing on a direct shot into a side pocket, he indicated the far corner and crouched over his stick. Like the final shot in the last game, it was a challenging angle with way too much traffic. James wasn’t just playing for money. He was playing for reputation.

  I was going to enjoy this.

  James snapped the cue ball into the eight, sending it on another arcing circ
uit toward the corner. Without a pool stick to hold, I had tucked my cane nonchalantly beneath one arm. Now, standing behind the corner pocket, I angled the cane’s tip down and whispered, “Protezione.”

  The shield that spread over the pocket was too thin to be visible, but too thick to allow the eight ball passage. Instead of sinking, the ball rattled around the edge of the pocket and popped out.

  A collective “oooh” pushed from the crowd.

  James straightened slowly, staring at the missed shot in disbelief. I switched my aim to the cue ball, which was still rolling idly, and changed its trajectory by a few degrees. It clunked into a corner pocket. Stepping forward, I clapped James’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  “Tough break,” I said.

  For another moment, the crowd around the table remained entranced in a questioning silence. Then, like waters breaking a dam, they shouted and clamored at once. “Holy crap, he scratched!” “James just blew twenty G’s!” It was clear they were delighting more in his loss than in my win. Their voices coalesced into a chant of “Pay up! Pay up! Pay up!”

  With a tight grin, James pulled out two of the rubber-banded billfolds from his pocket and pressed them into my hand like we were shaking around them. But instead of releasing them, he clenched and drew me up against him. I could feel the hard breaths from his nostrils.

  “What the fuck was that?” he whispered.

  “An unlucky shot, apparently.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Someone who needs to talk to you. Now.”

  He clenched my hand harder. “You cheated me.”

  “Hey, man, I was only playing your game.”

  James didn’t have an answer for that. The breaths cycling against my ear began to tremble in anger. I sensed him debating whether to hit me with an invocation, felt the charge building.

  “Do it, and the gig’s up,” I warned. “Word will get out, I’ll make sure of it. I’m guessing there are more than a few stiffs who will come looking for their money. Maybe even a few in this crowd.”

  The power around him ebbed. “I’m not telling you shit,” he whispered.

  “Tell you what, take a walk with me, and maybe you can earn back what you lost.”

  His breathing smoothed. His grip relaxed around my hand and his money. When we separated, he was grinning again. He shrugged at the crowd as though to say, Win some, lose some.

  “Gonna take a little break.” He tossed his pool cue to another player.

  The crowd broke apart and started their own games at the other tables. James strode from the pool hall ahead of me, leaving me to follow in his path. When he reached the bar, the bartender had a bottle of beer waiting for him. James grasped it wordlessly and turned toward the exit, taking a pull from the bottle as he shoved the door open with a leather boot.

  We stepped out into the sun. James leaned against the building and took another pull, then let the bottle dangle at his side between a pair of hooked fingers. I couldn’t see his eyes beyond his sunglasses..

  “You some kind of magic-user?” he finally asked.

  “Just like you,” I said. “We belong to the same organization.”

  “Never seen you before.”

  “Seems to be how the Order likes it.”

  James tipped the bottle to his lips again, face aimed at a boarded-up building across the street.

  “Do you mind telling me how it all started for you,” I said.

  “How all what started?”

  “You know, discovering your abilities. Getting noticed by the Order. Your training. Your work.”

  He pulled in his lips in thought. Despite the heat, he made no move to remove his leather jacket. Underneath, he wore a plain undershirt. A silver cross hung over his chest. His jeans were stonewashed, shredded at the knees. I knew the type: too cool for school—and definitely too cool to answer to authority. But he was having to weigh that against the itch to get his money back. Blow me off, and he could kiss his twenty grand goodbye.

  “I was in boarding school,” he said at last. “St. Mary’s, though we called it Catholic lock up.”

  “Your parents sent you?”

  He shook his head. “Never had any.”

  Another magic user who’d grown up without a mom or dad. Orphan tales were a dime a dozen, apparently. Either that, the voice in my head whispered, or Lich claimed them too. James caught me looking at him. “I don’t know their story, so don’t bother asking.”

  “You were telling me about your boarding school?” I prompted.

  “Yeah. Roomed with three other guys. We were sort of a pack.” He gave a small snort of reverie. “Around the time we were in the eighth grade, Parker smuggled in a Ouija board. I didn’t believe in that shit—I don’t think any of us did—but to ruffle the priests’ gowns, you know.”

  “Rebellion,” I said.

  “What can I say, we were little adrenaline junkies. You can only get caught smoking behind the chapel so many times before it’s time to up the stakes.”

  I nodded as James took another swallow. He was beginning to loosen up.

  “So, not really knowing what we were doing, we set up the board one night, lit some candles, put our fingers on that little plastic thingie.”

  “The planchette,” I said.

  “Yeah, whatever. At first we were just bullshitting. Will Mikey ever get laid?—crap like that. Then this feeling came over me, like I was being electrocuted. I went stiff, couldn’t breathe. And then something talked through my mouth. ‘Who’s going to die next?’ it asked. I remember the other guys laughing and tug-of-warring with the plastic thing, trying to spell out each other’s names. But I couldn’t move. I was suffocating. Felt like I was dying. All of a sudden, a force erupted through my fingers, and in three jerks, it spelled out a name: ‘B-E-N.’ And then I could breathe again. My buddies never noticed anything wrong. They were repeating the name to one another. Ben was this homely kid who lived down the hall. ‘Bedwetting Ben’ we called him, because, you know, he had that problem. The guys joked about him drowning in his own piss, but I was bothered, man. Had awful dreams that night, about leather belts and death. Next morning, the staff rousted us out of bed. We’re going to an assembly, they said. As we filed out of the dormitory, I could see an ambulance and a pair of police cars. Didn’t learn till that night they’d found Ben in the janitor’s closet. He’d cinched a belt around his neck and hung himself from the pipes.”

  A chill went through me. “What happened to you sounds like demonic possession.”

  “Ya think?” James took another sip from his bottle. “The demon hung around for a while. Didn’t take the Ouija board to call it up, either. For the next year, the feelings would just come out of the blue. I’d say something and it would happen. Always bad shit, though. Another suicide later that year. A fire in the administration wing.”

  “So you developed precognition?”

  “That’s what I thought. But then I started remembering the dreams more clearly. The one with the fire, for example. Word got around that whoever the arsonist was had set it with hymn books. When I heard that, I suddenly remembered dreaming that I’d stolen some hymn books from the chapel and was setting them around the inside of an office. Putting them under curtains and around wooden bookshelves—the things that would catch quickest. The dream was the same night of the fire. Freaked me out so bad, I told one of the teachers about being possessed. Thought I could trust him, but he got me to tell him about the dream, and from there, he and the administrators wheedled a confession out of me for the fire. Even though I still couldn’t say for sure whether I’d actually set it.”

  “No exorcism?” I asked.

  “Naw, they didn’t believe in the possession part. Guess that’s what I got for being a delinquent. They called the police, and I was taken out in cuffs. Tried and convicted in juvie and sent to a pen upstate.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Yeah, thank God I didn’t say anything about the suicides, ’cause I had
dreams about them too.” He sent down another swallow of beer. “Anyway, there was this gang in juvie, group of guys who trashed the new kid as a matter of course. I was there about a week when my turn came. We were out in the yard, and they bum-rushed me. Knocked me down, started stomping me. Then that cold feeling came over me, and I shouted a foreign word I’d never heard before.”

  “A Word of Power,” I said.

  “Felt like a stack of TNT had gone off inside me. Next thing I knew, the guys were scattered over the yard. Faces bloodied, bones broken, a couple of them throwing up. I didn’t know what the hell had happened, but the story got around. Guys steered clear of me after that.”

  I thought about how my first experience had happened around the same age. I’d been thirteen when I entered Grandpa’s study by repeating a Word I’d heard him utter. He’d suppressed my magic, though, and it wasn’t until I called up Thelonious a decade later that the magic returned with a bang. James’s latent magic must have been sparked by whatever took him over.

  “About a month later, I was told I was being released into someone’s care,” he went on. “An older woman showed up, red hair, long white coat. Elsie was her name. She drove me to a Victorian house up in the Catskills. I just figured she was some strange broad who couldn’t have kids of her own. I was looking forward to running roughshod over her, but that first night, she scared me straight. Hit me with a paralyzing bolt, then told me I was a magic born. She’d been sent to teach me how to use my gift. If I didn’t do what she said, she would deplete my magic and send me back into the system. That’s when I learned about the Order.”

  “How long did you stay with Elsie?”

  “Till I was eighteen. So, five years.”

  “You got five years of training?” I’d only received a few months under Lazlo before returning to New York and being put under Chicory’s mentorship—which hadn’t amounted to much.

  “Yeah, she taught me mental prisms, Words of Power, how to shape energy.”