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

Zoe knew the Führer well, too—instead of distancing himself and his branch of our family as far as possible?

There was yet another odd and almost frightening coincidence in this interfamily saga. It was the last thing I glimpsed in my mind, just before grabbing a few hours of shut-eye in preparation for my date in the meadow with that flock of sheep.

Bambi had told me it was seven years ago, therefore in 1982, when this confrontation between her brother Wolfgang and my uncle Laf took place in Vienna. But it was also exactly seven years ago, 1982, when my uncle Ernest died: the very year when Sam had inherited the rune manuscript and then suddenly vanished, never to be heard from again. Until now.

In the predawn light the expanse of snow glimmered an eerie bluish white against the backdrop of dark and sinister woods. The moon still hung like an ornament in the star-spangled Prussian blue sky. The air smelled cold and dangerous, as it always did at this time of year just before dawn. It had continued snowing well into the night, and there were no fresh tracks in the meadow. I skated to the center of the open space, whipped backward on my skis, and peered into the woods.

Just then, a snowball struck me in the back with enough force to knock my cap loose and send a cold shower down my neck. When I turned, I saw a form cut briefly from the forest line; it passed for a flicker through the moonlight and then slipped back into the woods. But one upraised arm told me it was Sam, and that I should follow him. I grabbed my hat, stuffed it in my pocket, two-footed it across the pasture, and plunged in among the mesh of silvery fir and birch where I’d seen him vanish.

I stopped to listen. An owl hoot came from up a slight embankment, so I followed it deeper to where the darkness was nearly impenetrable. When I stopped again, unsure where to go next, I heard his whisper close by:

“Ariel, take this and follow me.”

I felt him take me by the wrist and place the basket of his ski pole in my hand, and he went before me in darkness. With my two poles clutched in my other hand, I followed blindly, unable to see where he was leading me. We slalomed through trees for a long while, then started our ascent to the high meadow. When at last we came out into the wide space, the sky had lightened to cobalt blue and I could almost make out Sam’s outline ahead of me.

He swung around on his skis and slipped his ski tips between mine like interlocked fingers, and he threw his arms around me just as I’d done to him on that mountain nearly eighteen years ago. He smelled of leathery tanned skin and woodsmoke. He buried his face in my loose hair and whispered,

“Thank God, Ariel. You’re alive, you’re safe—”

“No thanks to you,” I muttered against his shoulder.

Then he held me away and peered at me in the predawn darkness, the only light the milky moonglow and that strange shimmer from the snow beneath.

I hadn’t seen Sam in more than seven years. He was still so boyish then. It should have occurred to me that he might have changed in all that time. But here he stood: tall, broad-shouldered, ruggedly good-looking, with Earnest’s chiseled profile, his mother’s long dark hair tumbling about his shoulders, and the mysterious beauty of those silvery eyes that seemed to be lit from within. I realized with discomfort that this was no longer my youthful mentor and blood brother who stood before me, but an incredibly handsome man. And the surprised way Sam was looking at me just now told me that his reaction to me must be pretty much the same.

“What happened to that little stringbean with the scuffed knees who used to follow me around everywhere?” he said with a strangely awkward smile. “Good lord, hotshot—you’re a knockout!”

“You almost knocked me out with that snowball,” I said, feeling just as awkward. I actually found it hard to look at Sam until I could get used to the idea that he and I were suddenly completely grown up.

“I’m sorry,” he said, still regarding me as if I were almost a stranger. “I feel that’s all I can say to you anymore, Ariel—how truly sorry I am that all this has happened. How sorry I am that I ever got you involved.”

“Sorry doesn’t help,” I said, quoting Jersey’s line once again. But I smiled, and he smiled back. Then I knew I had to tell him at once.

“Sam,” I said, “I have something to be sorry for, too, something I’m sorrier for than I’ve ever been about anything in my life. I hope it hasn’t ruined everything for you or put us both in greater danger, but I’ve done something really stupid and foolish and awful and wrong. I left someone else alone all night with the rune manuscript—”

Sam had been looking at me with a growing expression of horror as I read out this lengthy litany of abject remorse—until I got to the specifics at the end. And then the surprise was mine.

“What rune manuscript?” said Sam.

I had this really interesting fantasy that if my heart took enough of these sudden deep plunges into my lower abdomen, it would sooner or later stop ticking altogether and just keep bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. But a few miles of Nordic skiing with Sam through the high meadows worked like a thorax message. By the time we reached the cabin, I was okay—or at least I’d regained my ability to speak.

And I’d learned the reason Sam had changed our meeting plan for today. He’d felt himself in enough danger lately to avoid hotels, so ever since his “death” he’d been sleeping in hunting cabins, duck blinds, and field lean-tos scattered all over