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

Gug-lugal-i.

Repeating the syllables silently, I followed James up the ladder.

25

By the time we reached Brooklyn, the fires had spread. We’d had to detour twice thanks to roving mobs and entire sections of highway in flames. Our argument back in the vault felt petty now, a sentiment James seemed to share. We mostly rode in silence until I mentioned needing to stop at Vega’s to check on her son and sitter. James nodded, and I directed him through the streets of Williamsburg until he was pulling up in front of her apartment building.

I stepped from the car and squinted into the blowing smoke. The street was quiet, but I could hear the chaos mere blocks away. Vega’s son and sitter wouldn’t be safe here much longer.

“C’mon,” I said to James.

He finished casting a shield spell around his car and caught up to me at the building’s front steps. I looked up and down the steel monster of a front door. “Damn, forgot about that,” I muttered.

When James started to raise his wand, I stopped him. “Breaking the lock will get us inside, but it will also make the residents more vulnerable.”

I was considering what to do when I heard the bolts turning. A lucky break. I stepped back as the door opened and a woman wearing a crooked headscarf slipped out. I caught the door before it closed behind her.

“You should go back in,” James said to the woman. “It’s too dangerous out here.”

When the woman turned toward us, I recognized her as Tony’s sitter. “Camilla?” I said. “Where are you going?”

She gestured absently. “I go … I go…”

“Camilla,” I said, taking her by the shoulders. “Where’s Tony?”

“Tony?” Her expression was vacant, her pupils flattening like I’d seen in the eyes of the woman at the gas station. Shit. Camilla was falling under the influence of Whisperer magic.

I pulled her back into the building, shorted the magnetic lock on the glass door inside, and with James following, climbed the steps to Vega’s floor. Camilla complied, occasionally mumbling something in Spanish. I just hoped to hell she hadn’t turned violent yet. When we reached Vega’s apartment, the door was open. I handed Camilla off to James.

“Tony!” I called, making a quick circuit of the apartment. The boy was nowhere in sight. Panic pumped through me. Though I’d only met Tony twice, I felt a responsibility toward him. In part because I’d imperiled him, but largely because he was the most important thing in Vega’s world.

“Tony!” I called again.

From back in the kitchen, I could hear James trying to coax the boy’s whereabouts from Camilla, but her responses weren’t even in Spanish anymore. She was just babbling. Not good.

“Tony, it’s Everson Croft. I’m a friend of your mother’s.”

I heard a spring squeak in Vega’s bedroom and returned to find Tony’s curly head peering from underneath the bed. “Mr. Croft?” he asked. When he squirmed all the way free, I was there to lift him up.

I looked him over to make sure he was all right. “What happened?” I asked.

He cinched my neck with both arms. “She stopped making sense,” Tony whispered. “Started picking at her arms and saying strange things, screaming at nothing.” At that moment, Camilla screamed from the kitchen. Tony flinched and squeezed me tighter. “Like that,” he said.

I held him another moment before setting him on the edge of the bed. “I want you to stay here, okay?”

He nodded uncertainly. “You gonna help her, Mr. Croft?”

“I’m going to try.”

I entered the kitchen to find Camilla sitting in a chair, bound by silver cords of energy. A muzzle of energy covered her mouth, silencing her screams. “She started flipping out,” James said, “scratching herself.”

I looked at the bloody jags down both her arms. Her pupils were nearly flat lines now. I thought of the woman at the gas station again. Her eyes had looked exactly the same, but when that pothead had slung his arm around her, she’d seemed to snap out of it, her pupils dilating again. I hesitated on that image, remembering the smoke drifting from the guy’s long hair and jacket.

I suddenly remembered something James had told me.

“When Chicory last visited you,” I said to him now, “you told me he mashed his thumb between your eyes.”

“Yeah?”

“But nothing happened,” I said.

“Nothing I could feel.”

“Do you have any more of that stuff you were smoking earlier?”

“Yeah, but … you really think now’s the time?”

“Go ahead, light it up. You said you were high when Chicory stamped you, right? I think there’s something in cannabis that throws off Whisperer magic. That’s why you were never affected.” James was patting his pockets now, and I gestured for him to hurry. At last he found the half-smoked joint, lit it with his wand, and took a few uncertain puffs.

“Blow it on her,” I said.

James leaned down and released a stream of smoke that broke against Camilla’s muzzled face. We both stood back and watched. After several seconds, her face relaxed, pupils returning to their spheroid shapes. She blinked several times and looked around in confusion.

“Release her,” I said.

James flicked his wand, and the muzzle and bindings dissolved.

“Mr. Croft?” she said, rubbing a wrist. “What are you doing here?”

“What happened, Camilla?” I asked.

“I … I don’t know. I watching T.V. with Tony and then … I must fall asleep. I wake up here.”

“But you feel all right?”

“Sleepy. But yes, I feel all right.”

“Keep an eye on her,” I said to James, and picked up Vega’s phone and dialed her cell.

“Camilla?” she asked when she answered.

“No, it’s Everson,” I said. “I’m at the apartment. Tony’s fine.”

“Thank God,” she breathed. “No one was answering the phone.”

“Listen, I think we’ve found a way to control the mobs.”

“Really? How?”

“Has the Narcotics Division made any marijuana busts lately?”

“Marijuana busts?”

“And I mean big, as in bales of the stuff. You’re going to need as much as you can get your hands on.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Listen, I only have a few case studies to go on, but I