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

be sure that it wasn’t your will alone that suppressed the hallucinations? Willpower is your stock-in-trade, as it were.”
    “I was a man drowning in a well of night,” Thaddeus said quietly. “She threw me the lifeline I needed to climb back out.”
    “A colorful metaphor, but there is no need to waste such fanciful flights of the imagination on me. I prefer hard facts.”
    “I suppose you had to be there to grasp the full impact of the imagery.”
    Caleb exhaled slowly. “Then, yes, we will assume that she has the talent to work the stone.” His jaw hardened. “All the more reason why we must take it away from her as quickly as possible. Who knows what she might do with it?”
    “What, precisely, could she do with it?” Thaddeus asked.
    Caleb unfolded his arms and opened the leather-bound book again. He drew his finger down a page of close, cramped, coded writing until he found the passage he wanted.
    “Here is what Sylvester wrote,” he said. “ ‘The stone is a fearful crystal, unlike any other I have ever studied. The sorceress possesses the strange and awful ability to make it destroy a man’s most vital powers.’ ”
    Thaddeus raised his brows. “Don’t tell me Sylvester was afraid that Sybil the Virgin might render him impotent with the aurora stone.”
    “He wasn’t talking about his sexual powers. He was referring to the destruction of something he prized even more, his psychical powers.”
    “Leona did nothing like that last night. I assure you, my senses are all intact today.”
    “I will be the first to admit that our eccentric ancestor had his character flaws, but he was never wrong when he set down a warning. If he wrote that the crystal is dangerous, rest assured that it is. It is a relic of power. All power is potentially dangerous.”
    Thaddeus shrugged. “I will not argue the point any longer. As it happens, I agree with you.”
    Caleb’s brows shot up. “About time.”
    “The crystal is dangerous, but perhaps not in the way you believe. I am convinced that Leona is at risk as long as it is in her possession. Delbridge murdered two men in order to obtain it. He won’t stop at anything to recover it. If he was to find Leona, he would not hesitate to harm her in order to take the stone.”
    Caleb looked satisfied. “It is settled then. Now, on to the other matter: the dead woman you discovered in Delbridge’s house. Any possibility that he killed her?”
    “I doubt it. He seems to favor murder by poisonous vapor. This killing was decidedly messy. Could just as well have been one of the guests.” Thaddeus rested a hand on a gleaming telescope. “What is bothering me is that she died the same way the victims of the Midnight Monster died. Her throat was sliced open.”
    “Huh.” Caleb contemplated that for a moment. “Any other similarities to the Monster’s work?”
    “None I found obvious. The woman who died in that gallery was clearly not a poor streetwalker. The very fact that she was at Delbridge’s party indicates that she was a fashionable courtesan who catered to wealthy gentlemen. Until now the Monster has taken his victims from among the lowest class of prostitutes and done his work in disreputable neighborhoods, not fine mansions.”
    “Perhaps he is growing more proud and confident,” Caleb mused. “If he is a rogue hunter, as we suspect, he may be seeking to draw more attention to his prowess.”
    The hunt for the Midnight Monster had begun two months earlier after two women had died gruesome deaths. Jeremiah Spellar, a detective at Scotland Yard who possessed a paranormal degree of intuition and who was also a member of the Arcane Society, had concluded that the killer might well be a parahunter. Unbeknownst to his superiors, who were unaware of his abilities, he had contacted Gabriel Jones and warned him of the problem.
    Gabriel, inundated with his new duties as Master, had assigned the task of investigating the killings to Caleb, who had in turn called