Book of Souls: A Prof Croft Prequel

by Brad Magnarella

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

  Like a child, I sat cross-legged with the book, the rest of the vault seeming 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 must 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. I signed out the second for no other reason than that it was the approximate size and weight of the stolen tome in my bag.

  I left the others 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 his 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 among 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 supposed 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 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 am 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, two 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.

  “Knew,” 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 help 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 are you going to 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, in fact. 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?”

  “Heavens, no.” James snapped closed the book and tucked it under an arm. “It’s the one the collectors are most interested in.”

  Heat burned in my cheeks. “So what now?”

  “We have to send you and Bertrand out, I’m afraid,” James said.

  “Feed us to the wolves,” I said numbly.

  “Messy for you, but rather tidy for us.”

  Flor huffed. “You two are talking too much. The alternative is I shoot you.”

  “How sweet,” I muttered.

  James set the Book of Souls down and lifted Flor’s rifle. It was no accident she was carrying silver ammo or that James had packed rock-salt necklaces. This was their work—looting ancient sites, some of them cursed, no doubt. “Let’s go,” James said. “We’ll pick up Bertrand on the way.”

  “Can I grab my backpack, at least?”

  “No.” Flor jabbed me in the side with the pistol, sending a spear through one of the spots she’d soothed last night. “Move your ass.”

  I stumbled into the courtyard. I considered running, but there was nowhere to run. Doing so would just get me shot. Bertrand’s and my best chance would be to do as they said and then once outside, scale a tree and wait until morning, attempt the journey down to the village then. It seemed a reasonable plan until I remembered the bear-like paws on the wolves. Something told me they would use them to climb after us.

  We arrived at Bertrand’s room and found him sitting in a corner, scribbling into the notepad on his propped-up knees. His hair jerked as he consulted open texts on either side of him.

  “Check out time,” James called.

  Bertrand’s face shot up, his eyes seeming to refocus from some distant realm. He swept his hair to one side and squinted at the pointed weapons, which glinted in the light of his small fire. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “You were right,” I told him. “They’re a couple of scoundrels. They’re going to send us out to the wolves and take the books to some collector so they can buy themselves iPods and fancy shoes.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a poor sport,” James said. “If you’d shown yourself a little more agreeable to our line of work, why, we might have asked you to join us. We’re in need of a new translator.”

  I remembered my reaction at dinner in the village when Flor suggested we split the spoils. Another test. “Why?” I growled. “What happened to your last one?”

  “We had a disagreement,” Flor said. “Now get moving. Both of you.”

  I had expected Bertrand to put up a fight, but he was on his hands and knees gathering his notepads.

  “Leave them,” Flor ordered. “They will do you no good out there.”

  “Oh, let him have them, love,” James whispered. “It’ll occupy his hands and we can get them out of here with less fuss.”

  Bertrand hobbled up beside me, notepads pressed to his chest, eyes shifting wildly. The discovery of the texts had meant everything to him. “They will not get away with this,” he spat. “I will be damned if they get away with this.”

  “Keep cool,” I whispered. “We’ll figure out something once we’re outside.”

  He ignored me, shuffling through his notepads as James and Flor prodded us into the courtyard. The barricaded entrance wasn’t entirely barricaded anymore, I saw. Stones had been moved and one of the timber beams set aside for Bertrand and me to squeeze through. The cold wind funneling into the monastery carried the cries of wolves. Not close, but not too distant, either.

  Beside me, Bertrand’s grumbling turned to hard mutters.

  “Stay cool,” I repeated distractedly, trying to remember the terrain outside the monastery. If we could find a cave in the rock face, a place to fortify ourselves, we had a slim chance of surviving the night.

  Bertrand’s muttering rose in pitch.

  “Shut up,” Flor said—which were my thoughts, as well. He was going to get us both ventilated. But when I turned, I found that he was no longer muttering for muttering’s sake. He was reading from one of his notepads. And I recognized the words. The chant was an incantation meant to summon something dark and powerful, an idea that might have seemed insane to me only a few days ago.

  “Be careful,” I whispered, remembering a warning inside the Book of Souls. “Whatever you call up you’re going to have to put back down.”

  But the atmosphere of the monastery was already ch
anging. Something was sucking out the oxygen, making it hard to breathe. And an unpleasant smell was rising. A sickly-sweet odor that stuck like barbs in my throat. The odor of whatever Bertrand was summoning, I realized.

  “The Frenchman first,” Flor said as we arrived at the entranceway. “I cannot stand the sight of him any longer.”

  Bertrand snapped straight, the notepads spilling from his arms. He remained like that, eyes large and staring, until I thought he was having a seizure. I grabbed his rigid left arm and gave it a shake.

  “Bertrand?”

  When he turned, I released him and staggered back a step. Blackness had spread over his eyes like spilled ink. And his lips were stretching from his teeth, forming a smile so large it looked agonizing.

  “You can no longer stand the sight of Bertrand?” he said to Flor in an alien voice, as though something was humming deep in his throat. “Well perhaps he can no longer stand the sight of you.”

  His smile unhinged and a droning black cloud shot from his mouth. Wasps, I realized in horror. Flor had time to scream before the wasps swarmed her face, smothering her cries.

  15

  “S-stop that.” James’s huge eyes looked from Flor’s collapsed body to Bertrand—or whatever Bertrand had become. Seeming to remember he was holding a rifle, James raised it. “Stop! Get them off her!”

  Bertrand laughed. “As you wish.”

  He waved a hand and the hundreds upon hundreds of wasps lifted from Flor and swarmed James. He screamed and stumbled backwards, rifle shots cracking as though the swarm was a being whose heart he might pierce. I crouched beside Flor, moving the limp arm from across her face. She looked nothing like the woman of only moments before. Her face had become a disfiguration of red welts, eyes a pair of glistening lines, lips a fruit that had burst in the sun.

  Oh God. I lowered her lifeless arm.

  Above me, Bertrand laughed, the sound a sick buzzing. “You dare insult a wasp demon, mother of the brood, matron of death.” I pressed a forearm to my nose, the cloying smell threatening to choke me.