Book of Souls: A Prof Croft Prequel

by Brad Magnarella

  “You do not give up, do you?”

  Her voice seemed to carry a flirtatious note of challenge. I peeked past the wooden beam to find the black eyes beneath her thick brows fixed on mine. A small smile teased her lips.

  “On some questions, no,” I said.

  “What difference does it make why I am here? Like you say, there are no texts.”

  “Maybe I just want to trust you.”

  Far away, a wolf’s howl went up. Flor looked from the sound to me, eyebrow cocked. “I saved you from them, didn’t I?’

  I opened my mouth, then closed it. She had a point.

  With a cool dusky wind circling the courtyard, we set the final beam in place. Flor dusted off her hands and came forward until our legs were almost touching. “What is it you really want, Everson?”

  I didn’t realize I had been bracing my ribs on the right side until her hand slid under my sweat-damp shirt and over the ache. For someone who behaved with such dispassion in the face of danger, her palm blazed with heat. My body stiffened, then molded against her touch.

  “I work for collectors,” she said with a sigh. “A group with an interest in ancient texts and artifacts.”

  “Like a museum?” I asked, struggling to keep her face in focus. God, she felt good.

  “No, they are private collectors.” Her palm shifted to another sore spot. “They read the same article as you, James, and Bertrand. They hired me to see if the texts were here and to keep anyone from taking them.”

  I fought for a little analytical distance. Her secrecy, her military-grade rifle, her composure—and, yes, her terminal good looks. They all seemed consistent with someone who contracted out her services to the highest bidders. Which explained why she had been so concerned about Bertrand arriving here first.

  “Were you supposed to take the texts?” I asked pointedly.

  “I was only to keep them safe until the group could negotiate with the Romanian government for their purchase.”

  “Purchase?” Given their rarity, the texts would have cost a fortune. “Who is this group?”

  “I am paid to do a job, not ask questions.” She pressed closer. “Are you happy now?”

  “Almost.” I leaned toward her lips, a man anticipating his first taste of water after a six-month drought. I half expected a recoil and sharp slap, but Flor’s eyelids softened. Her chin tilted upward.

  “Well, I daresay the wolves will have a devil of a time getting through that.”

  Flor and I jerked apart. A moment later, James appeared along the walkway, a pickaxe slung over one shoulder. Awesome timing, mate. He arrived beside us and looked the barricade up and down, nodding his approval. But when he turned to face us, his eyes were absent their usual joviality.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  He seemed to will his mouth into a smile. “Couldn’t be better, mate.” He clapped my shoulder with a little too much enthusiasm. “Hard work breaking up those gargoyles, but it’s done.”

  Great. He had seen our near kiss, and now he was jealous. As if there wasn’t already enough tension among the four of us.

  “Where is Bertrand?” Flor asked.

  We all peered around. A moment later, the Frenchman appeared at the far end of the courtyard. He had done away with his crutches and was limp-hopping toward us, a sweaty sweep of hair dangling over his eyes.

  “Where are they?” he demanded. “Where are the texts?”

  “We told you,” James said. “The library and vault were empty when we arrived.”

  “That is a lie!” He arrived in front of us, the muscles around his eyes trembling with anger. “You took them!” He pointed at Flor but swept his arm back and forth to implicate all of us.

  I stepped forward. “You need to calm down, bud. No one took anything.”

  “But they are here,” he said. “I can feel them.”

  Flor waved a dismissive hand. “You are crazy.”

  His eyes jerked around until they locked on our packs, which we’d set beside a pillar. He hopped over and began tugging at the zippers of Flor’s pack. “We will see who is crazy.”

  James seized the scruff of his jacket. “It’s not polite to root through other people’s belongings, mate.”

  Bertrand flailed his arms around, catching James in the mouth. James recoiled, the back of a hand to his lower lip, then held out both fists in a classic boxer’s stance. Before I could intervene, Flor was behind Bertrand, a black pistol jammed against the back of his head.

  “Let go of my pack.”

  I rushed up, palms showing. “Hey, hey, hey. Let’s all just take a few deep breaths here. Bertrand, put her pack down.” From his stooped-over position, Bertrand grunted and released the pack. “Okay. Now Flor. Let’s put the gun away, shall we?” Her lip curled, but she stepped back, clicking on the safety and holstering the pistol in the back of her pants.

  I lowered my hands carefully, as though any sudden movement could shatter the fragile peace.

  “I am not sharing my food with him,” Flor declared.

  “Neither am I.” James glared down at Bertrand. “The mad bastard bloodied my lip.”

  “I do not want the food of rogues,” Bertrand spat back. “It will probably be poisoned.”

  “Guys, look,” I said. “Like it or not, we’re stuck with one another until we make it back to the village. We’re going to have to figure out a way to get along. I mean, it would be a shame to have survived the wolves and gargoyles only to end up killing each other.” I chuckled at my own joke, but no one else joined in.

  “But I know you have the texts,” Bertrand said to us through clenched teeth.

  “Here,” Flor snapped. She unzipped her pack and, its mouth open for all to see, shoveled her hand around the contents: wads of clothes, a gas stove, metallic packets of food. “There, do you see? No texts, you crazy man.”

  Bertrand’s lips pressed together.

  To further dispel the tension, I opened my pack, too. While doing my own digging, my fingers encountered something cold and metallic. I withdrew a cone-shaped bullet, one that must have punctured my pack when Flor was shooting downstairs. I held it up in front of my face. Was that silver?

  Flor’s hand closed around it. “I am sorry about that.”

  “What about his pack?” Bertrand asked, cutting his eyes to James.

  “Sorry, mate, but you don’t get anything from me by throwing tantrums.”

  Flor sighed at the absurdity of what Bertrand was asking. “Do you think I would have let James take anything? Besides, I already checked.”

  James stared at her. “You did what?”

  Bertrand pulled at his chin, no doubt recalling the sensation of a pistol against the back of his head. At last, he gave a single nod. “Fine.” He straightened and tugged his jacket straight. “But that does not change the fact that the texts are here. We will continue our search in the morning.”

  With that, he limped off to a prayer cell he’d apparently claimed for his quarters.

  “Did he say ‘we’?” James asked, glancing at the blood on the back of his hand. His bottom lip was beginning to pouch out where Bertrand had struck him. “Since when are we a team?”

  I snorted. “Since he realized we’re his best chance of finding whatever he’s looking for.”

  Flor hoisted her pack onto a shoulder and hefted her titanium case. “If he wants to stay, it is his funeral. I am leaving in the morning.”

  “Right, well you can count me in,” James said.

  I felt their gazes cut to me. But my own eyes were on the flickering light in the doorway Bertrand had disappeared through. They are here. I can feel them. The Frenchman had looked fit for a Parisian asylum, and yet … I felt something, too. The feeling was hard to explain—an insistent tapping at the base of my skull, an electric tingling over the hairs of my body—but what I sought was here, resonating with some part of me, beckoning.

  “Everson?” Flor said.

  I blinked from Bertrand’s
flickering doorway to the cold reason in Flor’s eyes. I hesitated slightly before nodding.

  “Yeah. I’ll go in the morning too.”

  12

  I zipped my jacket to my throat as I scuffed a slow patrol around the courtyard. James, Flor, and I had split the night into three shifts—as much to keep tabs on Bertrand as the monastery—and I had the midnight to three a.m. Except for the whistle of cold wind, Dohalsca was silent. No wolves at the door, no gargoyles in the library.

  As I walked, my thoughts drifted like the membranes of mist wrapping the stone pillars.

  I wondered about the pull of the monastery, about my conviction that the texts were here somewhere. And that energy in the vault? The last time I had felt anything like it had been in Grandpa’s study.

  Grandpa had never talked about that night again. In fact, scarcely a week after he sliced—and then apparently healed—my finger, the old East Manhattan townhouse he had owned for decades, went on the market. A month later, we moved into a house in a boring suburb on Long Island.

  Nana explained that Grandpa wanted to slow down, to cut back on his work. “We’re both getting a little too old for the bustling city,” she said. “And the schools are better out here.”

  Grandpa did seem to be home more. And I noticed early on that he left the door to his new study unlocked, often open. But it was a plain study, without a mysterious trunk or even bookcases. Just a desk with a typewriter, surrounded by a few metal filing cabinets. I never heard chanting or chilling voices from that study. Never experienced any strange energies. Gone, too, was much of the fascination and fear I used to feel in the man’s presence.

  Maybe I was just growing up.

  The summer before I left for college, I came home from a date one night around midnight. I snapped on the living room light, surprised to find Grandpa in the easy chair beside the front window, wearing one of his dark linen suits, long legs crossed. He had never waited up for me before, but I didn’t get that was what he was doing. He blinked sedately in the sudden light.

  “Oh, hey,” I said.

  He nodded and said quietly, “Everson.”

  He brought his far hand from the side of the chair to his lap, and I saw he was palming a snifter of cognac. He swirled it gently, then took a sip. I had never known him to drink.

  “Well, I’m gonna head up to bed,” I said.

  I had just reached the staircase when he spoke through his thick accent. “You are intent on returning to the city.”

  I twisted to face him. “Huh?” He so rarely remarked on my life, it took a moment to process his words. “I mean, yeah. Midtown College is one of the few with advanced programs in mythology studies. And I’ll be on scholarship, which will offset the cost of—”

  “You like the myths,” he interrupted.

  “Well, myths, iconography, symbols, ritual practices. Yeah.”

  “Why is that?”

  Grandpa had always seemed distant. But it was the distance of one whose mind was other places. Maybe it was the tilt of his head now, but something looked different about him, as though he were more fully inside himself. I released the banister and took a step toward him.

  “Because mythology speaks to something deeper,” I said. “Something not quite seen. Like a huge ocean beneath a thin mantle.” I watched Grandpa regarding me, a tuning-fork like resonance seeming to ring between our eyes. And was that a small smile on his lips? “Sometimes I feel that if I could, I don’t know, learn the language of myth, I could access that place.”

  Grandpa’s chuckle sounded hollow and knowing. He set the snifter on an end table, beside an old framed photo of his daughter, my mother, and beckoned with a pair of fingers. “Come here, Everson.”

  As I drew nearer, he held up both hands, palms showing, then moved one hand over the back of the other in an elegant gesture. When he showed me his palms again, a necklace and round pendant were in his right one.

  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 into panic. The curse of Dohalsca 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 extraordinarily well preserved. I opened it to the first hand-written page—stunning 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 startled 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 o
ne of its kind.”

  I looked from Bertrand 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,” Bertrand 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 the man was a phony or not, 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 fact 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.