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

Grandpa’s fingers stopped at an especially large tome, Book of Souls, and drew it out.

Motes of light fluttered from the spreading pages. He waved at them absently until they dissipated. Turning slowly, the book open at his chest, he traced a finger across the page, lips moving. Maybe from staring at Grandpa for so long without blinking, a purple hue took shape around him. I squeezed my eyes closed and opened them again, but the effect remained.

When a hard knock sounded, I tried to angle my view toward the study door. Nana? But with the second bout of knocking, I realized it wasn’t coming from the door. It was coming from Grandpa’s steamer trunk.

Holy hell, someone’s in there.

“Yes, what is it?” Grandpa answered distractedly.

Though I couldn’t make out the words coming from the trunk, the voice had a sniveling quality.

“Mm-hmm,” Grandpa said, still absorbed in his book.

The voice said something else.

Grandpa’s finger stopped moving. The aura of light surrounding him tightened. He raised his face until his gaze lined up with mine. The book clapped closed.

My bladder jiggled again, this time in horror. When I tried to draw back, Grandpa uttered something and the coats began shoving against me. What the…! Through the seam in the door, I saw him swapping the book for his walking cane. My eyes jerked around, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

All in one moment, the door opened, the coats thrust me out, his hand seized my wrist, and a steel blade flashed, biting deep into my first finger.

2

Ten years later

“You are fool.”

I raised my eyes from the thin scar on my finger, twisting on the wooden bench to face the cart driver. For the last two hours, the Romanian man had been silent, even when I made a few stabs at conversation in Slovak. He shook the horses’ dripping reins, a peasant’s hat hiding the top half of a face that stared at the muddy road ahead. I’d assumed the man was reticent, not given to conversation. But had he just called me a fool?

I cleared my throat. “Come again?”

The cart’s wheels jounced through another brown puddle as rain continued to patter over my hooded jacket. For miles we’d traversed nothing but fields and poor farmland, but up ahead I could make out the first houses of a village proper, weathered plaster affairs with red-tiled roofs. Perhaps in anticipation of food or rest, the pair of horses snorted and sped their clopping pace. After traveling non-stop for the last twenty-four hours, on planes, trains, and now a cart, I knew the feeling.

Just when I thought the driver had fallen back into his silence, he spoke again. “You come for curiosity.”

“Sort of.” I eyed him carefully—where had I heard all of this before? “I’m headed to the ruins of an old monastery. Dolhasca. Supposed to be a two-day’s hike from the village. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

I had managed to acquire a survey map of the area, onto which I’d plotted my best estimate of the monastery’s location, but I was hoping to find someone to give me clearer directions—or better yet, to guide me.

“Why?” he asked, pronouncing it vy?

“Research. I’m a doctoral student. Dolhasca’s founding monks are supposed to have transcribed some lost texts. I want to see if I can locate them. They may shed light on early European beliefs.”

It was the same explanation I had given while applying for my research grant, but it was only half the truth. The other half was that, after years of searching, I believed I was close to locating a book that would explain who my grandfather had been, besides an insurance man.

“That is why you are fool,” he said.

“And why is that, exactly?”

“The journey.” He looked over to where the valley rose into dark forested hills, the white-capped Carpathian Mountains jutting beyond. “It will be your death.”

I’d been warned that this region of Romania was still rife with superstition, but wow.

“Let me guess … evil spirits?” I scoffed. The pit of hunger in my stomach, not to mention my sore butt, had lowered my tolerance for nonsense. I was going full smartass. “Ogres? Witches?”

“Wolves,” he replied.

“Oh.” I let out an embarrassed laugh. “Well, we have wolves too, and they’re not man eaters.”

“Then your wolves are not like ours.”

I eyed the forest. “What makes yours so special?”

Even as I asked, a cold foreboding prickled through me. Beyond the water dripping from the brim of the man’s hat, sober gray eyes fixed on mine. He palmed his sodden hat, lifted it from his head, and turned so the muted light caught his disfigured profile. The four scar lines began at his right temple—ridges through his matted black hair—and raked across his cheek. I had assumed the cloudiness of his right eye was the result of cataracts, but now I saw how the topmost scar ended at the split eyelid.

“A wolf did that?” I asked.

He replaced his hat. “I was young fool. I did not believe stories.”

I swallowed. All right, maybe I needed to rethink my approach. “Are there any villagers who moonlight as armed escorts?”

“None will go into forest.”

The cart’s axles groaned as we arrived in the muddy village square. Though we were no longer in the countryside, a smell of wet beasts and turned-up earth filled the damp air. The horses clopped past a stucco church and a couple of store fronts until the driver drew back on the reins. We came to a snorting stop in front of the village’s lone pension—four bedrooms with breakfast provided, if the entry in my guidebook was to be believed.

The driver climbed down and plodded around to the back of the cart. I joined him from the other side, water squelching through my hiking shoes. I eyed his battered rubber boots in envy. He threw a tarp to one side, and from between stacks of crates pulled out my traveling backpack, which he