The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

Too late. I heard the sound of bare feet padding across the cold concrete floor. The springs squeaked as he sat on the edge of my bed. He pulled the pillow down and looked at me with those fathomless eyes. I felt his fingers brush my shoulder, and he drew me to him and kissed me.

It isn’t as if no one had ever kissed me before. But this was nothing like any kiss I knew: no meaningful sighs, biting of lips, saliva, groping, or histrionics, as too often in my less than quotable past. Instead, when our lips met, a flood of energy was unleashed, spreading from him to me and leaving me filled with a hot, liquid desire. It was as if we’d already made love, and needed to do it again. And once more.

I wondered if Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser could be siphoned off and bottled?

“Ariel, you’re so beautiful,” he said, touching my hair with his fingertips and looking at me with those cloudy indigo eyes. “Even now, when you’re covered with cuts and stitches and bruises—a disastrous wreck—I want to do things with that sublime body of yours that I’ve never done with anyone.”

“I think … I don’t think …” I blithered mindlessly. Lobotomized, no doubt, by an overdose of hormones. I tried to pull myself together enough to speak coherently. But Wolfgang put his fingertip to my lips.

“No, let me go on. Yesterday, everything went wrong between us because I tried to rush into things when I ought not. I don’t want that with you. I admire you greatly, my dear; you’re very strong and brave. Do you know that your name was once an ancient name for Jerusalem, now the holy city of three religious faiths? In its oldest form, Ariel meant ‘lioness of God.’”

“Lioness?” I said, regaining my real voice for the first time since that kiss. “That’s some reputation to live up to.”

“So is ‘Wolf,’” he told me, again with a cryptic smile.

“I get it—we’re both hunters,” I said, smiling back. “But I work solo, while your kind travel in packs.”

He released the strand of my hair he’d been playing with and regarded me with a serious expression. “I’m not hunting you, my dear. Though you still don’t trust me. I’m here to help and protect you, nothing more. Any feelings I may have for you are my problem, not yours—and they shouldn’t interfere with the goals or mission of those who sent me here.”

“You keep saying ‘those who sent you,’ but you never say who. And why hasn’t anyone told me anything about it?” I demanded with impatience. “Yesterday, you claimed you were my uncle Lafcadio’s friend, but he’s never mentioned your name to me. I think you should know I’ll be seeing him this weekend at Sun Valley. It won’t take much to learn the truth.”

“I said an acquaintance, not a friend,” said Wolfgang Hauser, turning away with no expression. He looked at his hands. Then he stood up and looked down at me where I still sat in the rumpled bedclothes. “Have you finished?”

“Not quite,” I said, warming to my theme. “How does it happen that everyone seems to have known I was getting that bloody inheritance in the first place—even before my cousin was dead?”

“I’ll tell you the answer to everything, if you really want to know,” Wolfgang said quietly. “But first I must say I fear such knowledge can be very, very dangerous.”

“Knowledge is never dangerous,” I told him, feeling my anger uncoiling. “Ignorance is dangerous. Especially ignorance of things that affect your own life. I’m sick of everyone hiding things from me, claiming it’s all for my own good! I’m sick of always being kept in the dark!”

As I said it, I suddenly realized how much I meant it. It was, at the root of things, what was wrong with my whole life. It wasn’t just fear of the unknown, of a mysterious parcel—even if the contents of that parcel might get people killed. It was ignorance itself: it was never being able to ferret out the truth. It was this compulsion for secrecy, rife through my industry, dominating even my own family—the idea that nothing could ever be done openly, that everything required conspiracy and collusion.

Thanks to Sam, I’d become a real master of this game. Thanks to Sam, I trusted no one on earth. Nor could anyone trust me.

Wolfgang was watching me with a strange expression. My sudden, passionate outburst had surprised me too. Until now, I hadn’t realized how deeply these feelings had lain buried in me—or how quickly they could rise to the surface.

“If that’s what’s required to win your trust, then I’ll always tell you whatever you want to know, regardless of the danger to either of us,” he said, with what seemed great sincerity. “For it’s vital that you trust me completely even if you don’t like the answers. The person who sent me here is also the one who asked me to give you that manuscript of runes.” He motioned to my backpack sitting on the chair. “Although you have never met her, I suppose you will recognize the name. It’s your aunt: Zoe Behn.”

I wondered about my compulsion to say “holy shit” all the time whenever anything startling or upsetting happened to me. I mean, what exactly is holy shit? Do gods or saints eliminate waste like the rest of us? And furthermore, was I so creatively bankrupt that I could think of no more imaginative exclamation to use, even within the privacy of my own mind?

But in my business, as I said, it was a way of life to make up witty sayings about waste—probably because the chore of constant cleanup after an ever expanding and ever more wasteful population living on this ever shrinking planet was in itself a pretty mind-bogglingly depressing task to confront each and every day.

So it was not unusual to be greeted, as I was by Olivier