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

His fingers massaged my scalp in small circles. When a chilling breath brushed my throat, I realized in horror that I was offering it to him. Through thick eyelids, I watched his lips retract from an impossibly large jaw, the emerging fangs bunched together like a great white’s. His fingers sank in, bracing my head, while his lower face disappeared beneath my chin.

The Pact, I tried to murmur.

I could feel the skin near my Adam’s apple dimpling beneath needle-sharp points.

“The Pact,” I managed.

Arnaud hesitated.

“You and the … the Society of the Dragon,” I forged on. “You made a pact with one another… to stop warring and join forces … against … the Inquisition.”

I had discovered the story during my time in Romania, connecting it to the ring I’d found among Grandpa’s possessions. A ring that had been inert for as long as I’d possessed it, but now pulsed around my finger.

Arnaud chuckled softly. “I’m afraid the Brasov Pact does not apply to descendants. Only to those who had an immediate interest in keeping the Church from lopping our heads from our bodies. Besides, that was more than four centuries ago. I trust there’s a statute of limitation.”

I’d been struggling my right arm up until my fist was level with his heart.

A strange Word swelled in the back of my throat: “Balaur!”

It emerged like a cannon ball, as though the ring had spoken it. An angry force exploded from my right fist, and Arnaud went flying. His body cracked into the far wall of polarized glass, head whiplashing back. But when Arnaud landed, it was on fingertips and the toes of his loafers. He growled at me through shanks of white hair.

“How dare you,” he seethed, pain twisting the words.

Flaps of skin dangled from his face, as though it had been raked by a dragon’s talons. I had to remind myself that the gleaming blood wasn’t his. He hissed again as smoke rose from beneath the collar of his shirt.

“You burned me!”

“The ring burned you,” I corrected him. I was in full possession of my language and limbs again, the torpor gone from my thoughts. “Punishment for violating the Pact. So, in essence, you burned yourself.”

When Arnaud reared to spring, I brought my right fist up. His eyes shifted to the ring, and I watched the first shard of uncertainty take hold. The enchanted ring was no longer pulsing—I may have exhausted its charge with the blast—but Arnaud didn’t need to know that.

He sniffed the air for the least apprehension, but I gave him none. “Can we talk now?” I asked with an attitude of impatience.

Arnaud scowled but relaxed and slowly rose. The smoke dissipated into a haze around his head. He straightened his jacket with indignant tugs, then fixed the scarf over his shoulders. When the smoke cleared, his face was intact again, the skin restored to its waxy state.

He paced over to a small bar, his back to me. On the other side of him, glass clinked and liquid splashed. I expected him to order me out, but when he turned, he was holding two poured drinks—scotch on the rocks, from the looks of them. He set one drink down on an end table beside a chair of oxblood leather and took the chair across from it: an invitation to join him.

I did so, going over and lowering myself to the edge of the soft cushion.

Arnaud took a sip of his drink, then gave his hair a toss as he sat back, the rakish billionaire once more. He opened a hand of slender fingers toward me. “Now,” he said, as though we’d arrived at some understanding, “if you’ve come to talk, then get on with it. I’m a very busy man.”

Not knowing how long his respect for the ring would hold, I decided to shoot to the point. “There was a murder at St. Martin’s Cathedral,” I said, “sometime Wednesday night.”

“Ah, yes. Father Richard.” He made a soft tsking sound. “A tragedy.”

“Did you know him?”

“Indeed. We had an opportunity to talk last month.”

“Oh?”

“Mr. Croft,” he said with an edge of reproach, “if you insist on carrying on in this manner, with your surprised faces and little ‘oh’s, I am certain I can find a more productive use of my time. You know our history. You know my interest in the church property. Even now you’re searching for an eye tick, some tell, to determine whether I was involved in his murder. Why the artifice? Certainly a man of your bloodline can come straight to it and ask.”

“Did you have him killed?”

As he studied his drink, a smile touched the corners of his thin lips. I had played my hand clumsily, handing him back control, dammit. “There,” he said, “doesn’t that feel better?”

“Well?” I pressed.

“Why the sudden interest? The Church showed far less concern for your forebears, after all. Poisonings. Public burnings. Beheadings.” Arnaud made the tsking sound again. “Nasty, nasty business.”

“Is that why you want St. Martin’s out of the Financial District?”

The Church had come down just as hard, if not harder, on Arnaud and his contemporaries. Had magic users and vampires not aligned, both would have been cleansed from Europe. Instead, they fought back, defeating the regional enforcers of the Inquisition. Arnaud and Grandpa went their separate ways, only to eventually wash up on the same Manhattan shoreline.

I mentioned how Grandpa never joined us at Sunday Mass? He had his reasons.

“In part,” Arnaud replied at last. “But I have learned many things in my life, chief among them to not draw attention to my nature. Our kind inspires fear, yes, but also uncommon wrath.”

Arnaud stood and, his glass dangling from his long fingers, strolled to the floor-to-ceiling window that cast the room in tannic brown light. Beyond and far below, I could see the wall that separated his domain from the rest of Manhattan. The streets beyond were clogged with cars and pedestrians, great knots converging on the checkpoints. For a moment, I saw the people as