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

like a bitch. My soul didn’t feel quite right, either. Like it had been gashed and torn. As I whispered a healing incantation, Olga slung the rope in manly loops around an arm. My gaze moved to the shotgun she had leaned against a charred length of timber.

“What was in that?” I asked.

“Rock salt,” she answered.

I nodded. Sometimes the best deterrents against evil were the most basic.

When Olga finished gathering the rope, she stuck her arm through the coil, pushed it up to her shoulder, and grabbed her shotgun. In rubber boots similar to Lazlo’s, she marched from the ruins. I took a final look around, my eyes falling at last to the cellar, where Lazlo’s remains continued to flicker. Pain and rage stormed through me. Murdered.

But by whom? Lich or Marlow?

By the time I caught up to Olga, the rain was falling harder.

“Do you have place to stay?” she asked.

A pack of lean dogs ran up to the truck as we pulled into the yard in front of Olga’s house. They began barking when they saw Olga had brought company, but when she shouted several harsh words in Romanian, they stopped and sniffed tentatively toward my crotch as I got out.

“I really appreciate this,” I said.

“There is extra room,” she replied.

Though it had stopped raining, water dripped from my pack as I grabbed it from the back of the truck, shouldered it, and followed her toward the one-story farmhouse. She lived on the outskirts of Bacau, not far from the train station. More important than a spare bed, she had a working phone.

Blocking the dogs with her body, she opened the door for me and then followed me inside, closing the door to their whines and whimpers.

“My father,” Olga said, nodding into a living room where an older man in a stained T-shirt sat in a recliner in front of a television. When he squinted over at us, I raised a hand in greeting. He took a gulp from a mug and turned his face back to the glowing screen.

“Always drunk,” Olga explained, not bothering to lower her voice. “Give me pack. Phone is in kitchen.”

I did as she said and found the wall-mounted phone. Fortunately, it was a rotary dial, like my own. I pulled James’s number from my wallet along with a phone card. After a minute of dialing, the line began to ring.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“James, it’s Everson.”

“Dude,” he said over the scratchy line. “Holy shit.”

My heart thudded. “What’s going on?”

“Alright, so I drove up to the Catskills yesterday, and the house is toast.”

“Burned down?” I asked, already knowing.

“To the foundation. Neighbors said it happened a couple of years ago. They had no idea what ’came of Elsie. I went to the local police station and asked there, but they didn’t know anything either. Not what started the fire or wherever Elsie might have gone. Her body wasn’t found among the ruins. It’s like she just dropped off the map.”

I wondered if there was a clump of toadstools in Elsie’s shape somewhere on the property, Elsie’s soul in the pit with Lazlo.

“Did anyone talk about hauntings?” I asked.

“How did you know?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Yeah, police said that not long after the fire, a couple kids drove up there to neck in a convertible. Bodies were found the next morning, both of ’em strangled, necks black and blue. Something similar happened to a hiker.”

I rubbed the spot on my neck where the tentacle had lashed me.

“They never found the perp, so rumors about angry spirits started popping up,” he continued. “When I was walking around that place, something felt off to me, foul. Couldn’t nail it down, though.”

I could hear my blood swishing in my ears. Two high-level members of the Order slain in the last few years, houses burned to the ground, murderous creatures set loose. But still the same question: Lich or Marlow?

“What did you find in Romania?” James asked.

“Same thing,” I said hollowly. “Lazlo’s house was torched. His remains were in the cellar. Something used them as a portal to attack me, shadow creatures from Dhuul’s realm. Probably the same things that killed those kids in the Catskills.”

James was lucky they hadn’t attacked him.

“What in the hell are we dealing with?” he asked.

“Whisperer shit,” I said. “Nightmares from that realm are coming through. Right now the seams are few and far between, and the shadow creatures seem to be staying in proximity to the bodies, but if whoever’s behind it completes the portal, it’s going to get really ugly. ”

“And you still don’t know whether it’s the bluff or the double bluff?”

The liquid in Arianna's vial had repelled the creatures. But was that all part of the setup to engender my trust?

“I don’t,” I admitted.

“And nothing from the Order?”

“Not a peep.”

“Maybe that’s your answer,” he offered.

“Or maybe that’s just the Order being the Order.”

“So what do we do?” James asked. “Just wait around?”

“I’m going to make another call. I’ll find you when I get back to the States.”

“I can send an update to the Order,” he offered.

“Yeah, please do.” Though I wondered if there was any point.

We hung up and I dialed Detective Vega.

“Croft,” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

“I must be out of satellite range.” I checked the pager—no signal—and put it away again. “Were you able to take a look at those files?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. For most of them, the names weren’t unique enough to be reliable identifiers. I couldn’t pull up anything on those. But on the ones that were unique, there’s nothing.”

“Nothing?” I said. “What do you mean nothing?”

“They’re not in the records databases. No addresses, phone numbers, voter registrations, utility bills, court records. There’s nothing, Croft. That’s what I’m telling you. It’s like they don’t exist.”

“They’re dead?”

“More like never born. Could this Chicory have, I don’t know, made them up?”

My lips pursed as I considered the question. I’d found my file, James’s file. His wasn’t made up … or