Book of Souls: A Prof Croft Prequel

by Brad Magnarella

  “Help me, Everson!” James shrieked above the thickening swarm. “For God’s sake, help me!”

  He tripped over a section of pillar. As he fell onto his back, the wasps descended over his blondness like a black blanket, muffling his cries. A moment later, his spastic arms collapsed out to his sides, the spent rifle clacking against stone.

  With most of Bertrand’s back to me, I left Flor’s body and began edging toward the monastery entrance. The wasps rose from James and returned to Bertrand, funneling into his mouth. There had clearly been another spell book in the collection, a dark one that Bertrand had gotten his hands on. I didn’t know how possessions worked exactly, didn’t know how much of Bertrand remained in his body. But I wasn’t planning on sticking around to find out.

  I was almost to the opening when eyes flashed from the darkness beyond, and a thick, snapping snout lunged into the space.

  “Damn!” I cried, stumbling backwards.

  Front legs squeezed through as the wolf wriggled and pushed his head in. More fanged snouts jabbed into the surrounding gaps. I shot a glance back at Bertrand. He was finger-combing the front of his hair, as though cleaning a pair of antennas. My eyes shot around the courtyard. All of the monastery’s rooms were doorless. There were no places to shut out the wolves—or Bertrand. And my pepper spray would only keep them at bay for so long.

  The Book of Souls, I thought.

  I launched into a run, toward the room where James had left it.

  Behind me, I heard the wolf burst inside with a jagged cry, his thick nails scratching over the stone, gaining speed. But a fresh buzzing was climbing over the sounds of the wolves.

  “Fly, my beauties,” Bertrand said. “Kill them.”

  Yes, please do.

  “The human, too.”

  Crap.

  I seized the side of the dormitory doorway with one hand and swung myself into Flor’s old room. The wolf overshot the door, skittering as he tried to brake. I kicked past Flor’s bag and titanium case, scooped up the Book of Souls, and pressed my back to the wall. I opened the book and began flipping to the back. Most of the book’s spells required something called a casting prism and Words of Power.

  But not summonings.

  A wasp landed on my neck, sending a molten barb through me. I crushed it with my shoulder and turned more pages. Out in the courtyard, sharp cries and yelps went up in the thickening swarm. But the swarm hadn’t reached me—or the wolf who had been on my heels. A low growl sounded from the doorway. I glanced up to find the beast stalking toward me, ears twitching in the haze of wasps, impervious to their stings. Something told me this was the alpha. Raising a leg in preparation to kick, I dropped my gaze to the page before me.

  “Thelonious,” I boomed, pushing energy into the word, making each syllable count. I didn’t know who or what I was invoking, but when the alternative was certain death, there was no time to be choosy. “I beseech you for aid,” I said in the old Latin. “I offer myself as vessel in exchange.”

  Creamy white light fluttered on the verge of my vision, then roared in, like a strong surf. I could no longer see the wolf, the wasps, the room, the book in my own hands. Just the frothy light that rolled up in layers, growing thicker. From beneath the roaring light came a slow, throbbing sound, like a bass line, the sound compelling, arousing. I could have been inside a West Village jazz club, men and women grooving and bumping bodies.

  “Yesss?” came a rich voice.

  I squinted at where the creamy light seemed to thicken around a large, inchoate form, a Buddha. It was clear, though, that this Buddha was no esthetic. Sensual forms moved around his corpulent form, attending to his needs, which seemed to include food, drink … other things.

  “Are you Thelonious?” I asked.

  “Indeed,” he replied with a pleasant bass laugh. He seemed benign, at least.

  “I need your help.”

  Though my heart beat slammed through my words, I sensed Thelonious had drawn me into some sort of parallel plane, outside space and time.

  “I’d say so.” Feminine titters accompanied the spirit’s rumbling laughter. “But I’m busy at the moment.”

  “Look, I’m only twenty-three,” I babbled. “My life’s not perfect, but I’m not ready for it to end. I live in New York—the greatest city on Earth. I love my chosen field. I’m the youngest PhD candidate in my department, and just a thesis away from graduating. I’m a, ah, a life-long Mets fan—and they’re actually doing well this year.” I was really grasping now, but if he rejected my appeal and cast me back, I was a dead man. Simple as that.

  Thelonious chuckled. “Long time since I’ve been in New York. Are there still dance halls?”

  “Oh man, a ton.”

  “And the women?”

  “Millions, and they’re all beautiful.”

  He made a noise of interest, then heaved himself up, his harem streaming away. “And you say you’re a young man?” He circled me, as though in assessment. “Learned … enjoys sport.” He stopped in front of me. “If I help you this once, you’ll give yourself as a vessel for all time?”

  I hesitated. “And what does that entail, exactly?”

  He rumbled more laughter as something like a hand descended onto my shoulder. “Nothing but good times.”

  “So we’ll be running my body like, what, a time share?”

  “When the itch for city life needs scratching, Thelonious will come calling.”

  “Otherwise, my body’s my own?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “And you won’t be doing anything illegal in here, right?”

  He released more rich laughter. “Not unless you consider loving and living crimes.”

  As the bass line and creamy lights of his world throbbed through me, I found myself nodding. Maybe an occasional visit by Thelonious would do me good, get me out of my studio apartment now and again. Given my paltry social life, it certainly couldn’t make things worse.

  “All right,” I said, not wanting to think about it too hard. “I agree to your terms. In exchange for helping me with the wolves and wasp demon, I pledge myself as your vessel, whenever the, um … itch needs scratching.” I probably should have asked for an estimate on how often that would be.

  “Right on, brother. Right on.”

  Thelonious gave me the equivalent of a soul shake, and I was back in the monastery, the Book of Souls open in my hands, one leg raised, and a huge wolf stalking me through a growing fog of wasps.

  “Kill them all!” Bertrand cried from the courtyard, his voice a phlegmy buzz now, as though he were choking on the wasps he spawned. The ensuing laughter sounded like someone coughing up a lung.

  I glanced around for my own summoned being, wincing as another wasp stung my brow.

  “Thelonious?”

  16

  The Book of Souls tumbled from my trembling hands. Three more stings seared my upper back, spreading like a deep burn. I flailed to slap the wasps away, the motion exciting the wolf. He snarled and charged.

  I cringed against the wall and kicked out. My heel caught the wolf’s jaw, harder than I’d struck anything in my life. Bone crunched, and the two-hundred pound wolf staggered backwards. He righted himself drunkenly, a rope of pink saliva hanging from his crooked mouth.

  “That’s right!” I cried, my fear swelling into anger. “There’s more where that came from.”

  Nice one, a bass voice rumbled.

  “Thelonious!”

  Either my body was growing or my share of it becoming smaller as the chuckling spirit eased all the way in. The warm, creamy light from earlier undulated through me—an ecstatic force of strength and fecundity. The swarming wasps wavered and dropped from the aura of intoxicating light.

  We stepped toward the wolf, wasp husks crunching underfoot. The wolf backed away like a scolded house dog, whimpering and trailing urine. When his haunches hit a wall, he pressed himself to the stone floor. I—or rather, Thelonious—laughed and reached down to scratch
his ear, the hair surprisingly smooth. The wolf licked our hand before succumbing to his stings.

  “Incubus!” Out in the courtyard, Bertrand stood in a black storm of wasps, arms open, clothes crawling. “Leave the human to his fate.”

  “What are you prepared to deal for him?” Thelonious asked through my mouth.

  Hey! I said. You and I are already locked into a deal!

  Ignoring me, Thelonious walked us through the storm, his creamy light swelling, illuminating the courtyard in swimmy waves. Wasps peppered us from all sides, the sound of their bodies dropping to the courtyard like a steady hail. I felt like I was experiencing it all from the inside of an armored tank, one I had no control over and that might eject me at any moment.

  “I will spare you the agony of feeling him die, incubus,” Bertrand answered. “Now leave him to me!”

  Thelonious shook his head. “Bad deal.”

  He thrust my arms forward, and I watched my hands close around Bertrand’s throat. Wasps writhed beneath his skin where I squeezed. His enormous black eyes startled, but more in insult it seemed than pain. He opened his mouth, unleashing another torrent of insects. As I tried to wince back, Thelonious only seemed to grow larger and more powerful.

  “Go back to your own joint.” He forced the possessed Frenchman to his knees. Bertrand buzz-shrieked, his arms breaking into more wasps as he beat at our hands. “You’re killing the mood here,” Thelonious said.

  In a final explosion of dying wasps, the rest of Bertrand came apart. But something grotesque remained—a huge queen wasp, curled at his core. Her sticky wings opened out and vibrated, the sudden wind pushing us back. With an angry scream, the queen rose, as though to escape the monastery through the open-air courtyard. But Thelonious jumped and seized her by a rear leg.

  Watch the stinger!

  I had hardly formed the thought when the stinger skewered my right forearm. I clenched my teeth, but the excruciating pain never came. “The sharper the thorn,” Thelonious said, pulling out the stinger and snapping it from the queen’s body. “The sweeter the fruit.”

  Um … what?

  Thelonious tossed the stinger away and dragged the queen to the courtyard floor, flipping her so her wings were pinned beneath her. The queen kicked her legs and rotated her alien head.

  Wait, you’re not planning on…

  With a rumbling purr, Thelonious brought his mouth—our mouth—down to the queens pincher jaws.

  Oh God, you are.

  I tried to recoil, to twist my head away, but an instant before our lips closed around the gnashing mandibles, Thelonious stopped and began to draw from her. The queen strained back, but her essence was leaving her, being pulled into Thelonious. Hers was a spiny, spiteful energy, full of poison, but at its center was a single, sweet drop. The feminine nectar Thelonious was after.

  When the queen fell still, Thelonious rolled us off her, contented. “That was all right,” he rumbled.

  Yeah, for you, maybe. I peeked over at the dead queen. Is this going to be par for the course?

  “Know something, young blood?” he said in a languid voice. “Believe I’m gonna enjoy this partnership.”

  Thelonious’s creamy white energy that had seemed so benign and good-time a moment before collapsed into something dense and black. I choked as it burrowed deeper into me, like a parasite, affixing itself to my soul with hundreds of piercing hooks. The shock of the binding pitched my mind into an oblivion as pitiless as the being I had just bargained with.

  17

  I cracked my eyes open onto a diffusion of pale light. I was peering at the sky above the courtyard, the sun a white smear beyond a wash of gray clouds. I pushed myself up, the places I’d been stung the night before searing, and squinted around. The wasps and demon were gone, as though they’d evaporated into mist—but not their victims. The bodies of a dozen or more large wolves lay stiff and bloated. Near the entrance, I spotted James and Flor, where they had fallen.

  I staggered to my feet, recalling all that had happened last night. James and Flor’s deception, Bertrand’s summoning, Thelonious. I could feel the incubus spirit now, a dark twining, a stain on my soul.

  “You are a fool.”

  I wheeled to find a tall man stepping from Flor’s room. Though he was without his peasant hat and no longer spoke in broken English, I recognized him by his battered rubber boots. The cart driver paced into the courtyard, The Book of Souls open in his hands.

  “I told you the journey would be your death.”

  I didn’t like his threatening tone. “Who are you?” I asked, stooping for a rock.

  He raised his disfigured face from the book. When I drew back the rock in warning, he flicked his fingers and uttered something. An invisible force hit my hand, knocking the rock away.

  “You are the grandson of Asmus Croft.” He appraised me with sober eyes, one of them cloudy from the wolf attack.

  I rubbed my hand. “You knew him?”

  “Of course.” The dragon ring on his third finger gleamed dully as he closed the book. “He was a member of the Order, a principal in the war against the Inquisition, a grand mage.”

  “A wizard?”

  The man’s statement seemed to affirm something I had known on a cellular level, and it explained so much. There was no time to marvel, though. I sensed danger around the stolid man. He had made the perilous journey through the forest, after all, and just disarmed me with a word and gesture.

  “Who are you?” I glanced around. “What are you doing here?”

  “I am called Lazlo. I am a Keeper of the Books.”

  “Keeper of…?” I quickly fit the pieces together. “So you’re the one who hid the books in the vault, who set up the spell to animate the gargoyles?” I recalled the battered looters downstairs and stepped back.

  “Books must be kept from certain hands.” He tapped his scarred temple as he strode forward. “Certain minds.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’ll leave here and never come back, never talk about the texts again. I-I’ll forget everything I saw. I promise.”

  When Lazlo arrived in front of me, I sensed a being who was much older than he appeared. And had he said something about a war against the Inquisition? Could that have been the “awful war” Nana mentioned? But the Inquisition was centuries ago. My mind seized on the poster in Grandpa’s closet, the one advertising “Asmus the Great!” at Barnum’s American Museum. The depicted stage magician hadn’t been his grandfather. It had been Grandpa himself.

  “You have read the Words,” Lazlo said. “You have spoken them. And yet here you stand, while your friends are fallen.” His gaze shifted from James to Flor, then to the pile of clothes that had belonged to Bertrand. “It means you are a magic born, like your grandfather.”

  “What?”

  “But you are still a fool. You made an accord with an ancient being, one that would have consumed a lesser soul. Such an accord might be tempered with practice, but it can never be unbound. You are marked for all time, Everson Croft.” The judgment in his tone made me shudder. “I have contacted those more knowledgeable in such matters. I am waiting to hear from them.”

  “Hear what?”

  “Whether to train you into our Order or to destroy you.”

  I once wondered what it was like for a man awaiting execution to hear whether a last-minute stay had been granted. Now I knew. It was a hard stone in the pit of my stomach. A prickling nausea. A constant disbelieving. While Lazlo took care of the bodies, I spent the day confined to my prayer cell—organizing my pack, reflecting on my life, and, yes, praying.

  Praying and wondering.

  Grandpa must have suspected I was a magic born, as Lazlo put it. But why hadn’t he said anything? Or had he? I remembered him placing the necklace with the heavy coin around my neck. Wear it in the city, under your shirt. And be very careful the words you speak.

  A warning. But against what?

  He had given me something else of his, the day before his death, though
I hadn’t recognized it at the time.

  The day was Sunday. I had ridden the train in from the city for the weekend. Nana and I attended morning Mass at the neighborhood cathedral, one that never seemed to resonate for me in the same way St. Martin’s in Manhattan had. Afterwards, when Nana had gone upstairs for her nap, Grandpa called me into his study.

  “Everson,” he said, turning toward me from his desk. His cane was propped across his long knees, the same cane he had carried since as far back as I could remember, whose hidden blade had once bitten my finger. “It seems I am having trouble opening it. Would you try?”

  A bracing fear seized me, similar to the one I had felt upon being discovered in his closet. I hadn’t seen the blade since that night, almost eight years before, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it again.

  “Yeah … sure.”

  “Hold it at the top and middle, like this.”

  I did as Grandpa said, the wood smooth and cool in my uncertain grip.

  “Now do not think about it,” he said. “Just pull.”

  The cane seemed to catch at first. No, clench. It was clenching. But after another moment, the wood warming in my hands, it released, sliding apart in a single smooth stroke. I looked at the handsome sword I held in my right hand and then at the staff in my left. I was surprised at how comforting their weight felt, like they were extensions of my arms.

  But more than that, they felt … empowering.

  “Very good,” Grandpa said, taking them back from me. He slid the sword home again, the two parts he had wanted me to separate slotting along an invisible seam. “It remembers you.”

  Remembers?

  A flash of him thumbing away my blood and running it along the sword blade came back to me. But before I could ask what he meant, Grandpa turned to his desk. “If you’ll excuse me, Everson, I have some things to tie up now.”

  Our final conversation. So little said—and yet maybe that had been the point.