The Third Circle (Arcane Society Book 04) by Amanda Quick

description, shelves crammed with books, ancient and modern, and the journals and records of the founder of the Arcane Society, he was free to indulge his unique abilities.
    Caleb possessed a paranormal talent for detecting patterns and meanings where others saw only chaos.
    There were those in the Society who whispered that he was nothing more than a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist of the first order and that his talent was actually an indication of mental instability.
    Thaddeus did not have any difficulty accepting his cousin’s unusual abilities or the brusque temperament that accompanied them. He understood as few others did. When it came to disturbing talents, none—not even Caleb’s—had quite the same unsettling effect on others as did his own powers of psychical hypnotism.
    He was well aware that most who knew of his talent secretly feared him. Who could blame them? Few wanted to take the risk of getting close to a man who was endowed with such a potentially predatory power. For that reason he, like Caleb, had few close friends.
    His talent was also the reason he had not yet married, much to his family’s chagrin. No woman of his acquaintance relished the prospect of being wed to a man who wielded his kind of power. For his part, he refused to conceal the truth from a prospective bride.
    He and Caleb were cousins of the new Master of the Arcane Society, Gabriel Jones. They were all three descended from the founder of the Society, the alchemist Sylvester Jones. Sylvester had possessed a powerful gift for what in the late seventeenth century was known as alchemy.
    Thaddeus sometimes wondered if, had the founder lived in the modern era, he would have been perceived as a brilliant scientist. One thing was certain: There was little doubt but that he would have been considered extremely eccentric in any era. In addition to manifesting a prodigious paranormal talent, he had been paranoid, reclusive and obsessed with his research. That obsession had taken him down a very dangerous path.
    Those traits, however, had not stopped him from fathering two sons with two different women, both of whom also possessed psychical talents of their own. It was not lust or love that had prompted Sylvester to produce offspring. His goal, according to his own notes, was to discover whether his talents would be passed down to his children.
    Sylvester’s experiments were successful, although not in the way he had envisioned. What he had not anticipated was the variety of abilities that appeared in his descendants. In his hubris, he had expected that they would all develop his own paranormal aptitude for alchemical intuition.
    But over the course of two centuries two things became evident: The first was that, while raw power could be and frequently was inherited by one’s offspring, the particular forms the talent took were unpredictable.
    The second outcome, which the arrogant alchemist acknowledged in his journal had come as a startling shock, was that the talented women he had chosen as his mates for the experiments had played just as big a role in the results as he had. Sylvester was flabbergasted to discover that the mothers of his children had bequeathed their own paranormal inheritances to future generations of Joneses.
    “I do not think that Leona will give up her claim to the crystal easily,” Thaddeus warned.
    “Offer her money,” Caleb said. “A lot of it. In my experience that is invariably effective.”
    Thaddeus thought about the way Leona’s eyes had glowed with a feminine heat that could only be described as passion when she had channeled power through the aurora stone. Working the crystal had thrilled her in the way another woman might be thrilled by desire. The blood burned in his veins at the memory. Something deep inside him stirred.
    “I would not count on money achieving the results you want this time,” he said.
    “Then you will have to find another way to get the crystal from her,” Caleb said, flat and