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

her black hair and refastened her ponytail. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”

“Which do you want first?” I asked, closing the door to the din of the Homicide unit. I took a seat in one of the folding metal chairs that faced her desk.

“Update,” she said.

“The suspect’s name is Marlow Stokes.”

Vega jotted it down. “Contact info?”

“That I don’t know.”

She raised her eyes, pen poised above the file.

“He’s not exactly … in this world,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

I took a deep breath, reminding myself that Vega’s openness to the supernatural had come a long way in the last year. “Are you familiar with the Greenbrier Bunker?” I asked.

“That place in West Virginia? Yeah, it was a relocation center for the U.S. Congress when we thought the nukes were gonna fly. The reps would survive while the rest of us got radiated.”

“Look at you,” I said. “Miss U.S. History. Well, once upon a time, the magical order to which I belong faced a similar existential threat. They also built a bunker, but in a parallel world—a thought pocket.”

“A thought what?”

“An imagined place made real, if that makes any sense. The thought pocket was called the Refuge. From the way my mentor describes it, the Refuge was modeled on a Grecian palace. Elevated, fortified, easy to defend. Anyway, the Order got through the crisis, but the Refuge sort of hung out in this parallel space.”

“And that’s where Marlow is?”

I nodded. “He accessed the Refuge decades ago and turned its powerful defenses to his own purposes. The Elders—the ones who created the thought pocket—can’t even access it.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Vega said. “So he’s beyond our reach?”

“Maybe not. I told you that he murdered my mother, right? What I didn’t know at the time was that he might also be my father.”

Vega’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, as if I needed a Freudian complex on top of everything else,” I muttered. “To make a long story short, because of my similarity to Marlow’s makeup, I might be able to slip inside the Refuge.”

“And then what?”

“Well, I’m going to try to destroy an arcane book from which he gets his power. Once that’s done, he’ll be defenseless. My order will apprehend him and put him to death.” I nodded at the file for Lady Bastet. “If it helps you close the case, I’ll be willing to testify on the match between the residue found at the murder scene and Marlow’s brand of magic.”

“You don’t sound very hopeful,” she said.

“No? After the vampire situation, the DA’s office seems a lot more open to—”

“Not about the case,” Vega interrupted. “The whole thing.”

“What do you mean?”

She set her pen down. “I’m getting to know you, Croft. When you believe in something, you get this intense, almost maniacal, look in your eyes. And when you don’t, your eyes just sort of go dead.”

I wasn’t aware of that about myself, but now that she mentioned it, the backs of my eyes felt heavy, like they were trying to retreat into my skull. “Just a lot of unknowns right now, I guess. Whether or not he’s my father, Marlow is a powerful mage. And I’m, well, a wizard with about a decade of practice under my belt—pre-puberty in magical terms.”

“Isn’t your order helping you?”

“There is someone training me, yeah,” I said, picturing Chicory frowning down at the hopeless mess of my cane across the table. “But that sort of brings me to the request part.”

“You mean the part I’m not going to like?”

“Probably not.”

She sighed and circled a hand for me to continue.

“All right, on the off chance I’m arrested tonight…” I rubbed the back of my neck. “…can I count on you to intervene?”

She lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “Arrested for what?”

I told her about the magical robe and how it could offer me extra protection inside the Refuge. “It’ll only be for a few days,” I assured her. “And there will be a replica up in the meantime.”

“Stealing is stealing, Croft. But stealing from a church?”

“Believe me, I know how sketchy that sounds. Especially since it’s my denomination. But with Marlow trying to call forth an evil being, I don’t think the Church would disapprove. I mean, one of the reasons churches came into being was to act as a bastion against this very thing.”

“Then why not just ask them for the robe?”

“I do have an in with the Bishop of New York,” I said, thinking about the official I’d rescued from the demon Sathanus the year before, “but the request would still have to go up the chain. We’re talking weeks or months, and with no guarantee they’d agree to the request.”

“And you don’t have weeks or months.” Vega lifted the coffee from the corner of her desk, cracked the plastic tab from the lid, and took a sip. She grimaced and set the cup back down. “All right.”

I blinked. “Really?”

But I didn’t need to ask. I could tell by her expression that my reasoning had gotten through. Though the law remained important to Vega, she had seen enough to know the law had to be weighed against larger threats—ones the mundane world wouldn’t necessarily understand.

I smiled in appreciation.

“Just do me a favor,” she said.

“Sure. Anything.”

“Don’t get caught.”

4

I stood on the edge of a knot of tourists, several of them snapping photos of Grace Cathedral’s hand-carved front doors. “…modeled on the doors from its sister cathedral in Florence,” our guide was saying. I had signed up for the final church tour of the day, a one-hour in and out, though I wasn’t planning on coming out. Not with this group, anyway.

I made a small adjustment to my fake beard—a precaution so no one would recognize me as the “star” of the mayor’s recent eradication campaign—and listened as the guide finished her explanation of the doors.

“Now, if you’ll follow me, we’re going to go inside and look at the famous mural above the doorway.”

I followed the group as far