The Prof Croft Series
Books 0 - 4
Brad Magnarella
Book of Souls · Demon Moon · Blood Deal · Purge City · Death Mage
Copyright © 2016, 2017, and 2021 by Brad Magnarella
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover image by Damonza.com
Table of Contents
Book of Souls
A Prequel Novella
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Demon Moon
Book 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Blood Deal
Book 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Purge City
Book 3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Death Mage
Book 4
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
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Author’s Notes
Croftverse Catalogue
Join the Strange Brigade
The Prof Croft Series
PREQUELS
Book of Souls
Siren Call
MAIN SERIES
Demon Moon
Blood Deal
Purge City
Death Mage
Black Luck
Power Game
Druid Bond
Night Rune
MORE COMING!
Book of Souls
A Prequel Novella
1
My heart thumped hard and high in my chest as I sealed the door onto a pulsating blackness.
Turning, I snapped on my flashlight. Through a suspension of dust, bookcases loomed from the too-close walls. At the far end of the room, a large steamer trunk and an antique desk leaned in and out of the shadows, the desk featuring an old lamp with a blood-red shade and brass pull chain.
As I stepped from the door, the fear that had been balling up my insides let out, allowing a euphoric excitement to seep in. An entire life lived in this house, thirteen years to the day, and I had never been inside Grandpa’s attic study. I was in unchartered territory.
Even better, forbidden territory.
I ran my beam over the titles on the bookshelves. An old encyclopedia set, row after row of books on insurance and insurance law. Boring titles, but my proximity to them made the hair on my arms tingle straight. Maybe it was because I knew almost nothing about my grandfather, a man who was rarely home, who rarely spoke even when he was. A man whose dour eyes and foreign accent scared the hell out of my friends—and me, if I was being honest.
I trained my beam on his trunk. A large, battered container of black wood and metal that looked for all the world like a pirate’s chest. I undid both hasps and worked my fingernails around the edge of the central lock, surprised when the spring-loaded latch fell open.
A shot of anticipation jiggled my bladder. I clamped the flashlight between shoulder and cheek, placed my hands on the front of the lid … and hesitated. As freaky as it sounded, the trunk felt alive. And it wasn’t just the w
armth of the pliant wood. A force was moving through my hands, a steady rising and falling, like breathing. And was that a heart beat?
My own heart lurched as I spun from the trunk. No, not a heart beat—footsteps, on the attic stairs. Their steady cadence accompanied by wooden taps now, growing louder.
Shit. Grandpa.
I replaced the hatch, refastened the hasps, and shot my beam around the study. A closet! In five jerky steps, I was plunging into a line of hanging coats and pulling the folding door closed behind me. A beat later, just as I snapped off my light, the study door creaked open and then closed again.
A heavy silence followed. I held my breath, sure Grandpa could sense my presence.
He uttered one of his strange words: “Serrare.” Pressure built in my ears as the floorboards clicked and a dangling bulb flooded the room with weak light. I stiffened in my crouch. Grandpa’s tall figure entered my view through the seam above the closet door’s middle hinge, his back to me. I released my breath and blinked to moisten my eyes again.
Though the man usually carried himself like a ruler, his shoulders sloped now, as though bearing a large load. He set his cane and fedora on the desk and, sighing, ran a hand through his thinning hair. The silver ring with the dragon gleamed dully on his middle finger.
I once asked Nana why Grandpa was so quiet. What I was really asking, of course, was why he paid so little attention to me. Nana seemed to understand, her lips creasing into a tender smile. “When your grandfather was a young man,” she explained, “he fought in a long war. An awful war. He saw many terrible things. Some people never recover from that kind of experience.”
“Do you mean World War Two?” I asked.
She didn’t nod, only repeated, “An awful war.”
From the closet, I watched Grandpa pace in front of his desk. Seeming to arrive at a decision, he straightened and turned to the nearest bookcase.
“Svelare,” he said. Another strange word, spoken with depth and resonance.
A charge stirred the air, and the bookcase … rippled. In the time it took for me to lean closer to the door seam, the books became other books. No more encyclopedias or insurance manuals. Humming quietly, Grandpa skipped his fingers across folios and old leather bindings. I was studying Latin in school and could translate several of the titles. Man, were they weird.
Grandpa’s fingers stopped at an especially large tome, Book of Souls, and drew it out.
Motes of light fluttered from the spreading pages. He waved at them absently until they dissipated. Turning slowly, the book open at his chest, he traced a finger across the page, lips moving. Maybe from staring at Grandpa for so long without blinking, a purple hue took shape around him. I squeezed my eyes closed and opened them again, but the effect remained.
When a hard knock sounded, I tried to angle my view toward the study door. Nana? But with the second bout of knocking, I realized it wasn’t coming from the door. It was coming from Grandpa’s steamer trunk.
Holy hell, someone’s in there.
“Yes, what is it?” Grandpa answered distractedly.
Though I couldn’t make out the words coming from the trunk, the voice had a sniveling quality.
“Mm-hmm,” Grandpa said, still absorbed in his book.
The voice said something else.
Grandpa’s finger stopped moving. The aura of light surrounding him tightened. He raised his face until his gaze lined up with mine. The book clapped closed.
My bladder jiggled again, this time in horror. When I tried to draw back, Grandpa uttered something and the coats began shoving against me. What the…! Through the seam in the door, I saw him swapping the book for his walking cane. My eyes jerked around, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
All in one moment, the door opened, the coats thrust me out, his hand seized my wrist, and a steel blade flashed, biting deep into my first finger.
2
Ten years later
“You are fool.”
I raised my eyes from the thin scar on my finger, twisting on the wooden bench to face the cart driver. For the last two hours, the Romanian man had been silent, even when I made a few stabs at conversation in Slovak. He shook the horses’ dripping reins, a peasant’s hat hiding the top half of a face that stared at the muddy road ahead. I’d assumed the man was reticent, not given to conversation. But had he just called me a fool?
I cleared my throat. “Come again?”
The cart’s wheels jounced through another brown puddle as rain continued to patter over my hooded jacket. For miles we’d traversed nothing but fields and poor farmland, but up ahead I could make out the first houses of a village proper, weathered plaster affairs with red-tiled roofs. Perhaps in anticipation of food or rest, the pair of horses snorted and sped their clopping pace. After traveling non-stop for the last twenty-four hours, on planes, trains, and now a cart, I knew the feeling.
Just when I thought the driver had fallen back into his silence, he spoke again. “You come for curiosity.”
“Sort of.” I eyed him carefully—where had I heard all of this before? “I’m headed to the ruins of an old monastery. Dolhasca. Supposed to be a two-day’s hike from the village. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
I had managed to acquire a survey map of the area, onto which I’d plotted my best estimate of the monastery’s location, but I was hoping to find someone to give me clearer directions—or better yet, to guide me.
“Why?” he asked, pronouncing it vy?
“Research. I’m a doctoral student. Dolhasca’s founding monks are supposed to have transcribed some lost texts. I want to see if I can locate them. They may shed light on early European beliefs.”
It was the same explanation I had given while applying for my research grant, but it was only half the truth. The other half was that, after years of searching, I believed I was close to locating a book that would explain who my grandfather had been, besides an insurance man.
“That is why you are fool,” he said.
“And why is that, exactly?”
“The journey.” He looked over to where the valley rose into dark forested hills, the white-capped Carpathian Mountains jutting beyond. “It will be your death.”
I’d been warned that this region of Romania was still rife with superstition, but wow.
“Let me guess … evil spirits?” I scoffed. The pit of hunger in my stomach, not to mention my sore butt, had lowered my tolerance for nonsense. I was going full smartass. “Ogres? Witches?”
“Wolves,” he replied.
“Oh.” I let out an embarrassed laugh. “Well, we have wolves too, and they’re not man eaters.”
“Then your wolves are not like ours.”
I eyed the forest. “What makes yours so special?”
Even as I asked, a cold foreboding prickled through me. Beyond the water dripping from the brim of the man’s hat, sober gray eyes fixed on mine. He palmed his sodden hat, lifted it from his head, and turned so the muted light caught his disfigured profile. The four scar lines began at his right temple—ridges through his matted black hair—and raked across his cheek. I had assumed the cloudiness of his right eye was the result of cataracts, but now I saw how the topmost scar ended at the split eyelid.
“A wolf did that?” I asked.
He replaced his hat. “I was young fool. I did not believe stories.”
I swallowed. All right, maybe I needed to rethink my approach. “Are there any villagers who moonlight as armed escorts?”
“None will go into forest.”
The cart’s axles groaned as we arrived in the muddy village square. Though we were no longer in the countryside, a smell of wet beasts and turned-up earth filled the damp air. The horses clopped past a stucco church and a couple of store fronts until the driver drew back on the reins. We came to a snorting stop in front of the village’s lone pension—four bedrooms with breakfast provided, if the entry in my guidebook was to be believed.