The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

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 essential 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, Dolhasca 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 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. “Oh, 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 he looked different, 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