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

was an admitted hustler. He claimed to believe me—and he’d brought up some great points—but he could also be playing me, setting me up for the next round.

And if Chicory had gotten into his head…

“I’d rather not,” I said. “No offense.”

James shrugged and signaled to the bartender he was ready for another round. We drank for the next few minutes in silence, billiard balls clacking in the next room. James was halfway through his new bottle when he said, “Before he left, Chicory did this strange thing he’d never done before. Sort of mashed his thumb between my eyes. Said it was supposed to protect me from mind magic or something. You ever heard of anything like that?”

I straightened. “Did you feel a pressure behind your eyes, in your ears?”

James shook his head. “Nothing like that. More like a tingling that just sort of went away.”

I considered that. “What do I look like?” I asked suddenly.

“Huh?”

“Just describe me.”

Connell had claimed Lich’s magic had poisoned me, superimposing nightmare images over everything I’d observed in the Refuge. If James was seeing someone other than me, I would have my answer.

“Hell, I don’t know,” James said, “you look like you’re about my height, dark hair. Could probably stand to gain a few pounds. You worry a lot too. Got these deep lines between your eyebrows. And I’m guessing by the episode outside you can’t read women too well. Sort of awkward around them.”

“Alright, alright,” I said, my face growing warm. Yeah, he could see me, zits and all, which seemed to tip the scales toward Chicory’s version of events. I checked my watch. “I need to get going,” I said, pushing myself from my stool. “Thanks for talking to me.”

“So, that’s it?”

“I have your number. I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

He rotated on the stool. “While you’re out, doing whatever it is you’re gonna do, is there something I could be doing?”

I stopped. “You said your first mentor was in the Catskills?”

“Yeah, about two, three hours upstate.”

“Could you take a drive up there?” I asked. “Tell her what I told you? I sent a couple messages to the Order about my trip to the Refuge and Chicory’s death, but I never heard back. I don’t have a handle on what’s going on yet, but certainly the more who know, the better.”

He stood and tossed a twenty onto the bar. “I’m on it, boss. It’s been sort of beat around here anyway. Hey, you got a number where I can reach you?”

I pulled out the pager Vega had given me. The number was taped to the back. “Do you have something to write with?”

“Here,” James said, taking the pager. He turned it around and read the ten numbers aloud. Then he closed his eyes and repeated them before nodding and handing it back. “It’s stored,” he said.

“Offer you a ride?” I asked as we stepped outside.

“Naw, I’m just a few blocks north.”

I gripped his elbow before he could turn away. “Listen, I’m not sure what I might be getting you into, so you need to tread carefully.”

James’s mouth leaned into a grin. “I’m not real good at that, boss.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle as I released him and we headed our separate ways.

Maybe I had an ally in James after all.

15

The trip to Romania was long and sleepless. I wrestled with James’s assessment the entire way: a bluff or a double bluff. Marlow or Lich/Chicory. I had good reasons to suspect both and not enough to clear either. I had to trust that finding Lazlo would tip the balance toward one or the other.

From the train station in Bacau, I hustled to the edge of town where I’d been told the final bus of the day would be departing for the villages in the foothills. Eleven years earlier, I’d arrived on a weekend day and had had to find a cart driver—who’d turned out to be Lazlo. After an exhausting twenty hours of travel, I hoped I was close to seeing him again.

A cold drizzle began to fall as I approached the end of an asphalt road that turned into a rutted pair of tracks. I looked around in exasperation. No bus. Had I missed it? A car horn blew twice. I looked over at a livestock truck I had assumed abandoned. Its pale blue body was rusted, and it was leaning on one side of the road. When its lights flashed on and off, I spotted someone sitting in the driver’s seat. The window cranked down as I hustled up.

“Has the bus to the villages left yet?” I asked in Romanian.

“That depends,” a woman’s voice replied in accented English.

From beneath the bill of a newsboy hat, a young woman with dark red hair and a mole over the left corner of her mouth peered back at me. Though she wore the grave face of so many in the countryside, her beauty startled me.

“Depends on what?” I stammered.

“If I have any riders.”

It took me a moment to process what she was saying. “Wait, this is the bus?”

“What were you expecting?” she asked. “A double-decker?” Without waiting for a response, she said, “You can put pack in back and ride up front with me. The weather is not expected to improve.”

I thanked her and did as she said, dropping my pack in the open truck bed. When I slammed the passenger door and settled in, cane between my knees, the young woman put the truck in gear and bumped forward, the rain already beginning to form brown puddles in the road ahead.

“I am Olga. Where are you going?”

“Hi, I’m Everson. There’s a farm between here and the last village. The owner’s name is Lazlo.”

She stopped the truck. “There is no such farm.”

I looked over at her, but her face remained fixed on the road ahead. “There is, actually,” I said, trying to hide my irritation. “I stayed there for a summer, about ten years ago.”

“The farm burned down five years ago,”