The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) by Brad Magnarella (best business books of all time txt) 📕

“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 virulence. As its aura pulsed from me, the attacking wasps wavered and fell to the stone floor.

We stepped toward the wolf, wasp husks crunching underfoot. The Alpha backed away like a scolded house dog, whimpering and trailing urine. When his haunches hit a wall, he pressed himself flat. I—or rather, Thelonious—laughed and reached down to scratch his ear, the hair surprisingly smooth. The Alpha 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 illuminating the courtyard in swimmy waves. Wasps peppered us from all sides only to drop in a steady hail. It was like being inside an armored tank, but 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 essence, 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, wincing from my wasp stings, and squinted around. The wasps and demon were gone—as though 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. The deception, Bertrand’s summoning, Thelonious.