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

didn’t say it. I was lining up the info on her father with what Vega had told me about the sudden rise in crimes back in New York, the riot in the hospital’s psych ward…

He turned sick a week ago.

That would have been about the same time I destroyed what I thought was Lich’s book. The act should have deprived Marlow of his power. But if Connell was telling the truth, if I had instead destroyed an Elder book that had been jamming Lich’s portal, then my act would have given the portal new life.

Allowing more Whisperer magic through, I thought.

But that was assuming the spike in insanity was a result of Whisperer magic. I could just as easily be seeing a connection where none existed. Or being made to see one. I thought.

“Why did you come?” Olga asked suddenly.

I looked up, only now realizing she had been watching me for the last minute. “I told you,” I said, picking through my milky porridge with a spoon. “I wanted to check on an old friend.”

“You needed his help,” she stated.

I started to nod, then caught myself. “What makes you say that?”

“It is in your eyes.”

Something in her forwardness made the skin over my chest prickle. I thought about how she had been waiting for me in the truck yesterday, how she had appeared with a shotgun armed with salt at Lazlo’s house, how she just happened to have a spare room for me to stay in. Like James, had she been warned about my coming? Beneath the table, I gripped my cane.

“You knew I’d show up here,” I said.

“Yes,” she admitted, taking a large bite of porridge.

I scooted the chair out and stood, pulling my sword from my staff. “Who told you?”

She finished chewing, unconcerned by my weapon. “Bones.”

“Bones? Who the hell is Bones?”

I flinched when she stood, but she walked the other direction into the kitchen, where she opened a cupboard. I watched her carefully. She returned with a small leather pouch, which she held out to me. No magic stirred around it. I hesitated before I moved my sword to my staff hand and opened the pouch with two fingers. It contained a pile of small animal bones.

“Oh,” I said, feeling foolish.

She had been referring to cleromancy, or bone-reading, a folk practice as old as human settlement. One many people still dabbled in. For the reading to be accurate, though, the diviner or the divination object needed to possess magic, and I sensed none in either.

Olga sat again. “I can do reading if you want.”

“What did you see?” I asked. “In your earlier reading?”

“I was told that a man of great power would come. That he was trying to know something.”

“I don’t know about the great power part,” I mumbled.

“I saw what you did at the house,” she said. “You made fire with voice.”

She was talking about the fuoco invocation, when I’d cremated Lazlo’s remains to close the vent to Dhuul’s realm.

“The bones said I would help this man,” Olga finished.

She had already pushed our bowls and coffee mugs to one side of the table. Now she opened the pouch and upended it. The assortment of bones from what looked like a large rodent spilled over the table. Olga’s brown eyes seemed to darken a shade as she gazed down on them.

“I see confusion,” she said, her fingers hovering over a configuration of rib bones.

You’ve got that right, I thought, though she could also have overheard my conversations with James and Vega last night. I’m sure I had sounded plenty confused then.

“You are torn between difficult choices.” Her strong, country fingers moved back and forth between where the bones seemed to have landed in two roughly equal quantities. “Is it this one, or this one?”

Lich or Marlow? I thought.

“And here is your answer,” she said.

I leaned forward despite that I still felt no magic around the ceremony. Olga was pointing at a small, solitary shoulder blade that had fallen in between the two groupings of bones.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“That when you understand what this single thing means”—she tapped the shoulder blade—“one choice will fall away.” In demonstration, she swept the bones on the right side off the table into her waiting palm and returned them to the pouch. “It will no longer be both.”

No more fifty-fifty, in other words.

I eyed the shoulder blade for another moment. The shape of it seemed to tug at something in my mind, but I couldn’t say what. Anyway, what was the point? There was nothing mystical at work here.

“Great … thanks,” I said.

She nodded and swept the remaining bones into the pouch and tied it off. How desperate had I become that I was looking to a mortal with a bag of rat bones for answers?

I pulled the pager from my pocket to see if it was getting a signal. Still out of range. I pocketed it again, hoping it would pick something up at the train station. James had planned to contact the Order, and on the off chance they’d responded, I wanted to know as soon as possible. I started to imagine James waving his message over his flaming cup and then stiffened.

The cups.

I thought of my own silver cup. Narrower at the bottom, wider as you approached the rim. From the side, it looked roughly like…

“A shoulder blade,” I said.

“You understand?” Olga asked.

I stared but without seeing her. I had been told that our cups gave us access to an administrative branch of the Order. An office where communications were prioritized and then sent up the appropriate channels for decisions to be made, which were sent back down and shot to us as responses. But if there was no Order, then those same communications were more than likely going to the one person most interested in keeping tabs on us.

I thought of the gold cup I’d found in Chicory’s room.

When Olga’s face reappeared beyond my thoughts, a small smile was wrinkling the beauty mark above her lips.