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

“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,” he said.

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, his left one 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 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? Wh-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’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 rested 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