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

by Brad Magnarella

  “Mind sharing your plan?” James asked. “I mean, besides shaking down guys like me?”

  I rotated my bottle on the bar, wondering how far I could trust him. James had been warned I was coming. He’d been ordered to stop me. He had failed, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try again. The man was an admitted hustler. He claimed to believe me—and he’d brought up some great points—but he could also be playing me, setting me up for the next round.

  And if Chicory had gotten into his head…

  “I’d rather not,” I said. “No offense.”

  James shrugged and signaled to the bartender he was ready for another round. We drank for the next few minutes in silence, billiard balls clacking in the next room. James was halfway through his new bottle when he said, “Before he left, Chicory did this strange thing he’d never done before. Sort of mashed his thumb between my eyes. Said it was supposed to protect me from mind magic or something. You ever heard of anything like that?”

  I straightened. “Did you feel a pressure behind your eyes, in your ears?”

  James shook his head. “Nothing like that. More like a tingling that just sort of went away.”

  I considered that. “What do I look like?” I asked suddenly.

  “Huh?”

  “Just describe me.”

  Connell had claimed Lich’s magic had poisoned me, superimposing nightmare images over everything I’d observed in the Refuge. If James was seeing someone other than me, I would have my answer.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” James said, “you look like you’re about my height, dark hair. Could probably stand to gain a few pounds. You worry a lot too. Got these deep lines between your eyebrows. And I’m guessing by the episode outside you can’t read women too well. Sort of awkward around them.”

  “Alright, alright,” I said, my face growing warm. Yeah, he could see me, zits and all, which seemed to tip the scales toward Chicory’s version of events. I checked my watch. “I need to get going,” I said, pushing myself from my stool. “Thanks for talking to me.”

  “So, that’s it?”

  “I have your number. I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

  He rotated on the stool. “While you’re out, doing whatever it is you’re gonna do, is there something I could be doing?”

  I stopped. “You said your first mentor was in the Catskills?”

  “Yeah, about two, three hours upstate.”

  “Could you take a drive up there?” I asked. “Tell her what I told you? I sent a couple messages to the Order about my trip to the Refuge and Chicory’s death, but I never heard back. I don’t have a handle on what’s going on yet, but certainly the more who know, the better.”

  He stood and tossed a twenty onto the bar. “I’m on it, boss. It’s been sort of beat around here anyway. Hey, you got a number where I can reach you?”

  I pulled out the pager Vega had given me. The number was taped to the back. “Do you have something to write with?”

  “Here,” James said, taking the pager. He turned it around and read the ten numbers aloud. Then he closed his eyes and repeated them before nodding and handing it back. “It’s stored,” he said.

  “Offer you a ride?” I asked as we stepped outside.

  “Naw, I’m just a few blocks north.”

  I gripped his elbow before he could turn away. “Listen, I’m not sure what I might be getting you into, so you need to tread carefully.”

  James’s mouth leaned into a grin. “I’m not real good at that, boss.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle as I released him and we headed our separate ways.

  Maybe I had an ally in James after all.

  15

  The trip to Romania was long and sleepless. I wrestled with James’s assessment the entire way: a bluff or a double bluff. Marlow or Lich/Chicory. I had good reasons to suspect both and not enough to clear either. I had to trust that finding Lazlo would tip the balance toward one or the other.

  From the train station in Bacau, I hustled to the edge of town where I’d been told the final bus of the day would be departing for the villages in the foothills. Eleven years earlier, I’d arrived on a weekend day and had had to find a cart driver—who’d turned out to be Lazlo. After an exhausting twenty hours of travel, I hoped I was close to seeing him again.

  A cold drizzle began to fall as I approached the end of an asphalt road that turned into a rutted pair of tracks. I looked around in exasperation. No bus. Had I missed it? A car horn blew twice. I looked over at a livestock truck I had assumed abandoned. Its pale blue body was rusted, and it was leaning on one side of the road. When its lights flashed on and off, I spotted someone sitting in the driver’s seat. The window cranked down as I hustled up.

  “Has the bus to the villages left yet?” I asked in Romanian.

  “That depends,” a woman’s voice replied in accented English.

  From beneath the bill of a newsboy hat, a young woman with dark red hair and a mole over the left corner of her mouth peered back at me. Though she wore the grave face of so many in the countryside, her beauty startled me.

  “Depends on what?” I stammered.

  “If I have any riders.”

  It took me a moment to process what she was saying. “Wait, this is the bus?”

  “What were you expecting?” she asked. “A double-decker?” Without waiting for a response, she said, “You can put pack in back and ride up front with me. The weather is not expected to improve.”

  I thanked her and did as she said, dropping my pack in the open truck bed. When I slammed the passenger door and settled in, cane between my knees, the young woman put the truck in gear and bumped forward, the rain already beginning to form brown puddles in the road ahead.

  “I am Olga. Where are you going?”

  “Hi, I’m Everson. There’s a farm between here and the last village. The owner’s name is Lazlo.”

  She stopped the truck. “There is no such farm.”

  I looked over at her, but her face remained fixed on the road ahead. “There is, actually,” I said, trying to hide my irritation. “I stayed there for a summer, about ten years ago.”

  “The farm burned down five years ago,” she said.

  Horror prickled over me like a violent rash. “Burned down? What happened?”

  “There was fire.”

  “Yeah, thanks, but does anyone know what started it?”

  “No. Fire destroyed everything. House. Farm. Horses.”

  “And Lazlo?” I asked, my voice dry and husky.

  “They think he was inside house. In cellar.”

  “What do you mean think?” I asked. “Did they recover his body or didn’t they?”

  “No one will go to farm now. Ghosts have been seen.”

  “Ghosts? What ghosts?”

  “Do you want me to take you back to town?”

  “No, I want you to take me to the farm,” I answered stubbornly.

  “I can take you in morning.”

  “There’s no time,” I said, which was true. If the Front could be believed, I had roughly two days until Lich’s return—and one of those days would involve travel back to the States.

  I expected Olga to object, but she released the brake, and the truck began to rumble forward again. We rode in silence. She twisted the headlights on shortly and rain sliced through the beams. The forests and fields darkened around us. Olga snapped on the radio, and a man singing a sad ballad crackled from the speakers. I refused to believe she had the right farm, refused to believe it had burned to the ground and that Lazlo was … missing? dead?

  No, I decided. Once I show her where it is, she’ll realize she was thinking of a different farm, a different person. But I couldn’t forget what Connell had told me about Lich eliminating the most powerful wizards, sacrificing them in his effort to bring the Whisperer into our world.

  After thirty minutes that seemed longer than the flight over the Atlantic, a derelict chapel appeared among some trees. “The turnoff is up
here on the right,” I said, squinting past the headlight beams and pointing. “There. The farm is about a kilometer down that drive.”

  Olga pulled in front of the drive and idled. “This is as near as I will go.”

  I almost asked her why before remembering what she’d said about the ghosts. This was the farm she’d been thinking of.

  “Do you mind waiting for me?” I asked.

  She looked at the bills I held toward her. “One hour,” she said at last, accepting them. “Do you have light?”

  I started to nod before realizing my staff wouldn’t work as well in the rain, especially if it started coming down harder. Olga reached beneath her seat and handed me a brick-shaped flashlight. When I snapped it on, shadows sprung over Olga’s face, making her appear sinister.

  “Beware the ghosts,” she said. “You will know them by their whispers.”

  Her words sent a bone-deep chill through me. Gripping the flashlight and my cane, I stepped out of the truck and into the Romanian night.

  I made my way up the drive, rain pattering over a poncho I’d pulled from my pack and slid into. Though it had been more than a decade, I remembered every turn in the dirt drive and even some of the larger trees that bordered it. Toward the end of my training, Lazlo had challenged me to direct force invocations down the winding drive to a target without rustling the leaves. It was as hard as it sounds.

  At the final turn, I stopped and looked out over an open yard that was almost unrecognizable.

  No.

  Olga was right. The place had been decimated by fire, and judging by the weeds growing up through the heaps of charred timber, it had happened a number of years ago. I stepped forward, shining the flashlight over the ruins of the main house and then the barn. The place where Lazlo had helped me to construct my mental prism, to strengthen and hone it, push energy through it … gone.

  Even the fencing that had once penned his beloved horses, Mariana and Mihai, had burned to the ground. My heart thudded sickly in my chest.

  I turned back to where the house had once stood. Though I could see nothing through my wizard’s senses, dark energies seemed to pollute the atmosphere. Perhaps my own sense of foreboding. Far away in the mountains, wolf cries echoed.

  They think he was inside house, Olga had said. In cellar.

  I drew my sword and aimed it at the hill of ruins. “Vigore!” I shouted.

  Energy pulsed bright from the blade, overcoming the dampness to slam into the ruins and plow it back in a wave. Chunks of charred timber rained down in the fields beyond. With a second force invocation, I cleared the remaining debris from the trapdoor that led down to Lazlo’s cellar.

  I stood over the door and listened. All I could hear was the rain tapping my poncho. The door broke away when I pulled the handle—the hinges had been baked black. I set the door aside and shone the flashlight down the steps. During my time with him, Lazlo had forbidden me from going down to his lab. That had been fine by me and my phobia then, but now I had no choice.

  If Lazlo had been trapped, his remains might tell me something.

  I set the flashlight down and, with a Word, summoned a glowing shield and descended. The steps groaned underfoot. At the bottom of the steps, I grew my light out. The brightness revealed a small room overgrown with black mushrooms and mold. Similar to what I’d seen in the Refuge, the wet growth swarmed over everything: stacks of old books, shelves holding vials and spell implements, even over the remnants of a casting circle that took up most of the floor.

  In the circle’s center lay a mound. No, a body.

  Lazlo?

  The body was on its side, facing away from me. As I approached, my light illuminated wisps of dark hair, a deflated wool sweater and trousers, the last tucked into a pair of battered rubber boots. Kneeling, I set my sword down, gripped the body’s bony shoulder, and pulled it toward me. For a moment the body stuck to the ground before releasing with a wet rip.

  “Jesus!” I cried, and jumped back.

  My heart thundered in my chest as I looked at my former mentor. Or what remained of him.

  The eyes staring up at me were large toadstool-filled sockets. Dark, wet growth had erupted over the rest of his face, reminding me of the wargs. I eased forward again, staff held up. Black mold glistened in the light, making it appear as though the growth was crawling over him.

  “What in the hell happened to you?” I whispered.

  The casting circle around Lazlo was for protection. He’d been trying to defend himself. But against what? Something stronger than him, evidently—and Lazlo had been a Third Order mage. My gaze moved back to his body. Bared teeth showed through Lazlo’s decayed lips.

  If only he could talk, I thought, then stopped.

  Lazlo had had a barn cat, a tough gray tom named, well, Tom. During my final month here, I’d found Tom in a corner of the barn one day, his mouth open, tongue out. When I nudged him with my shoe, his body was as stiff as a board. I told Lazlo the bad news. He simply nodded and wrapped Tom in a towel that I assumed he would bury him in. The next day, though, while I was loading hay from the barn, a thick, purring body swiped my legs. I looked down and there was Tom: dusty gray coat, cloven right ear, and one hundred percent alive.

  I sprinted inside and told Lazlo.

  “It was not his time,” my mentor said.

  “Not his time?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “Tom wasn’t sick yesterday, Lazlo. He was dead.”

  “Yes, but that was my fault. Not his.”

  “Wait … you resurrected him?”

  “I shouldn’t have put the rat poison where he could get to it.”

  “How?” I pressed.

  The magic we’d practiced to that point had involved basic invocations. But resurrection?

  Lazlo’s lips tensed in what was the closest he ever came to smiling. “One day, Everson.” Which was his way of saying it was an advanced spell for which I didn’t have the necessary experience.

  “Well, that day’s today,” I whispered now, grimacing at the idea.

  I still lacked the experience, to be honest, but I’d read enough books in the decade since to understand how resurrection worked. For someone as long gone as Lazlo, I couldn’t hope for much, maybe a few seconds of life, but if it was enough for him to tell me who had killed him, I would be closer to understanding what was happening, who I could trust. And if Lazlo had resurrected Tom, he would have the necessary spell ingredients.

  I wheeled toward his shelves and began unstoppering old vials and sniffing their contents. Fennel … yarrow … I was looking for moschatus, a rare oil. On the top shelf, I found it. I re-stoppered the vial and began looking through his moldy collection of books until I found a familiar tome that focused on the dead. I had the same tome in my own collection. I flipped to the section on resurrection.

  The next half hour involved reconfiguring the casting circle and preparing Lazlo’s body with the moschatus oil.

  At last, I stood outside the circle.

  “Cerrare,” I said. Energy coursed through my sword and closed the circle. Consulting the book, I began incanting in an ancient tongue. Cold energies swirled throughout the room. I trembled from them as well as from a deeper dread around what I was doing. Restoring a decayed form to life, however briefly, felt wrong on so many levels. Also, except for in exceptional circumstances—and with prior approval—the Order forbade resurrections.

  What if the rule is to prevent communication with sacrificed magic-users? the voice whispered inside me. A voice I no longer suppressed. I would know something shortly.

  “Vivere!” I finished.

  I watched Lazlo’s body, a part of me hoping it would remain still, that the spell wouldn’t take hold. I was violating a law of nature, which may have been the actual reason behind the Order’s prohibition. But I steeled my mind, reminding myself that I was doing this for a magic-using community that could be in mortal danger. I doubted Lazlo would object. He—

  I broke off mid-thought and s
tiffened. Had Lazlo’s jaw just shifted?

  I leaned nearer. His bared teeth parted, releasing two scratchy words. “I … hurt.”

  “Lazlo?” I said, my own voice barely a whisper. “Lazlo, it’s Everson.”

  His body remained still for so long, I thought I’d lost him again. But then his top arm trembled as though trying to lift his wasted hand. His jaw shifted again. “Everson?”

  “Yes, Lazlo,” I said, kneeling and placing my hand over his. I tried to ignore the wet feel of the fungi and tissue. It was like he was being slowly digested. “What happened?”

  “Leave,” he said.

  “I need to know what happened to you.”

  “I’m in … the pit.”

  “The pit?”

  “In … him.”

  “Who?”

  “They’ll … take you … too.”

  A shudder passed through me. “Who? Lich? The Front?”

  His head shook, though whether in a tremor or to say he didn’t know, I couldn’t tell.

  “My hair,” he rasped. “Take it … find me.”

  I nodded quickly, cut a wisp of his dark hair with the sword, and placed it in my pocket.

  “Leave,” he repeated in what sounded like a plea. I imagined his cloudy wolf-torn eye staring into mine, though on his corpse there was only the cluster of toadstools. “They … they’re coming.”

  “Is Lich alive?” I asked.

  “Hurts,” he mumbled. The trembling in his wet hand ceased.

  “Lazlo?” I asked, giving him a light shake. But the resurrection spell was spent, the magic expired. My former mentor was a fungus-riddled corpse again, his soul returned to whatever plane it inhabited.

  In the pit? I thought. In him?

  Had Lazlo meant Lich? That would jibe with what Connell had told me—how Lich was sacrificing souls to feed his efforts as well as to sustain himself. But Lazlo could also have been cast into the pit by Marlow and consumed by Dhuul. Hence, “in the pit, in him.”

  They’ll take you too, Lazlo had said.

  Who were they?

  Above me, the rain fell harder. Wind shrieked past the doorway to the cellar. It was only when the wind died again that I realized the cellar stairs were creaking. Someone or something was descending.