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

“Would’ve been nice if you’d exercised that bit of judgment outside,” I muttered.

By warning James, my former mentor had put me in a bind. No matter what I told him, James was now biased against me. Just like Chicory biased you against the Front, the voice whispered in my head. If the potion I’d drunk that morning had worked, I was hearing my own voice. If not, I could well be hearing the Whisperer’s corrupting words. I squeezed my beer bottle in frustration. Never mind James trusting me—could I trust myself?

“Before you started firing bolts at me,” I said, “you suggested you’d met someone higher up in the Order.”

“Naw. I just wanted my money back.” He froze with his bottle halfway to his mouth. “Shit. Does that mean you’re gonna kill me now?”

“No,” I said.

“Good.” James took his swallow. “How about I ask you a few questions, then?”

I checked my watch. I still had a couple hours before I needed to be at the airport.

“Shoot,” I told him.

“What do you really do?”

“Same thing as you,” I said tiredly. “Stop amateur conjurers, blow up nether creatures, close holes to their worlds. Oh, and get threatened by the Order. I cover Manhattan. I helped the mayor’s eradication campaign last month. You might have read about me in the papers?”

“Eradication who?”

“Don’t follow the news, huh?”

He shook his head and took another swig. “So why does Chicory think you’re working for an evil wizard?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time. Not like I can hustle now.”

I looked over at him. Something in his hunched posture spoke to sincerity. Maybe he’d been lonely for the company of another magic-user, someone he could talk to. I doubted he’d told his life story to anyone else—or at least anyone who wouldn’t have laughed him out of the room. In any case, it wasn’t as if I’d be giving away any secrets. I had nothing to lose.

“It’s going to sound insane,” I said.

“Hey, I dig insane.”

“All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” In a lowered voice, I began. I told him about my mother’s suspicious death, the silence from the Order, and how my consulting Lady Bastet had led to her murder.

“So that’s why someone offed her,” James said. “I’d wondered about that.”

I nodded, going on to tell him about my own investigation, which had gotten me a warning from Marlow, or at least someone pretending to be him; my session in the scrying globe, where I experienced my mother’s murder at the mage’s hands; and then what Chicory had told me about Marlow taking up Lich’s work to bring forth the Whisperer.

“No one ever told me about any Whisperer,” James said.

“According to Chicory, that info isn’t shared with novice practitioners.” I wondered now if that info was shared with anyone, save in cases where a magic-user came too close to the truth.

“Always did feel like I was at the kid’s table,” he said.

“Don’t take it personally. I was right there beside you, bib and all.”

“So why were you told all this stuff?”

“Because Marlow’s my father.”

“No shit?” James said.

“Yeah.” That much I knew to be true. Both Chicory and Connell had said so. I told James about being sent to the Refuge, allegedly to destroy Lich’s book, and what had actually happened—from battling Marlow to being sent back here to investigate the Front’s claims for myself.

James’s sunglasses remained fixed on me as I spoke. When I finished, he said, “So … Chicory’s history?”

“That remains to be seen. Either he’s dead, or he’ll return in four days. Well, three days now.”

“So you wait and see,” James said. “That would settle that question, right?”

“If Connell is telling the truth, Chicory will be coming for me. I know too much now. Were I to alert the magic-using community, he’d be deprived of the power he needs to sustain himself and the portal to the Whisperer. Plus, he’d be looking at a much larger resistance.” I thought of the hundreds of files I’d given to Vega. Convincing those magic-users would be another matter, of course.

“What if this dude Connell is lying?” James asked.

“That’s what I have three days to find out.”

James blew out his breath as though to say, Sucks to be you, bro.

“What do you think?” I asked pointedly.

“What do I think?” He set down his bottle and studied me for a moment. “I think if you’re on the bad side of this, you don’t know it.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I play cards, five card stud mostly. There my magic only really helps when I’m the dealer, so I’ve had to learn to read people, pick out their tells. For the past hour, you haven’t shown me a one. Which suggests that everything you’ve said either happened, or you believe it happened.”

“So you understand my dilemma.”

“Yeah, you’re either looking at a bluff or a double bluff.”

“What does that mean to us non-card-playing types?”

“It all goes back to the mystic’s murder,” he explained. “The perpetrator made it look like a wolf attack, right? With a simple bluff, he would’ve done that to hide his involvement—in which case the killer is Marlow. But with a double bluff, he’d have done that to make you think the second bluff about Marlow was the truth. In which case the killer is Chicory.”

I nodded. I couldn’t have put it more succinctly myself.

“The anti-hunting spell that earned you those claw marks from your cat,” he said, “what you saw in the scrying globe … Any advanced magic-user could have put those together.”

I nodded some more, glad now I’d shared my story with James. I hadn’t learned anything new, no, but the back and forth was helping to bring the essential questions into relief.

“Mind sharing your plan?” James asked. “I mean, besides shaking down guys like me?”

I rotated my bottle on the bar, wondering how far I could trust him. James had been warned I was coming. He’d been ordered to stop me. He had failed, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try again. The man