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

For a dreadful moment he thought he would be ill. He turned away from the sight of the body.
    Someone should tell Delbridge so that the police could be summoned.
    The police. Panic tightened his chest. He could not afford to be associated with murder. The investment scheme he had worked so hard to put together was at an extremely delicate point. Very important gentlemen were about to decide whether or not to finance the project. Gossip spread quickly in the clubs.
    Worse yet, the police might think he was the one who had killed the pretty whore. How could he possibly explain his presence here in this damned gallery to the men from Scotland Yard? And then there was his shrew of a wife to consider. Helen would be furious if he dragged the family name into a murder investigation. She would be even angrier if she discovered that he had come here tonight to keep an assignation with a prostitute.
    He had to get out of here before anyone else arrived. He would go back downstairs and mingle with the guests, make certain that everyone saw him dancing with some of the women Delbridge had supplied for the evening.
    Let someone else find the body.

6
    Two hours later . . .
    DELBRIDGE PACED the long gallery, ignoring Molly Stubton’s bloody body. She was the least of his problems at the moment. He was furious. He was also very worried.
    "What the devil is wrong with the guards?” he said to Hulsey.
    Dr. Basil Hulsey shook his head and fidgeted with his spectacles. There was no telling when his fringe of graying hair had last been washed, let alone cut. The ratty tufts stuck straight out in a disgusting halo as if he had touched an electricity machine. His perpetually rumpled coat and baggy trousers hung from his skeletal frame. Beneath the coat he wore a shirt that had no doubt once been white. Now, however, it was a grayish-brown, the result of years of noxious chemical stains.
    All in all, Hulsey looked like what he was: a brilliant, eccentric scientist who had been dragged from his laboratory—a laboratory that Delbridge had paid for—in the wee hours of the morning.
    “I have no idea what ails the g-guards,” Hulsey stammered nervously. “Mr. Lancing brought them into the k-kitchen as you ordered. We both tried to wake them. Threw a bucket of cold water on them. Neither so much as stirred.”
    “I would say that they both passed out after drinking too much gin,” Lancing said. He sounded elegantly bored, his customary mood when he was not pursuing his favorite sport. “But neither reeks of drink.”
    Hulsey concentrated intently on cleaning his spectacles. He always appeared anxious when he was outside his laboratory but never more so than when he was obliged to be in the same room with Lancing. Delbridge did not blame him. It was like forcing a mouse to share a cage with a viper.
    Delbridge contemplated the creature named Lancing, concealing his own wariness of the man. Unlike Hulsey, however, he knew better than to show fear. Or perhaps he was simply more adept at hiding the instinctive response.
    He was simmering with rage, but he was well aware that he had to be careful. In the glary light cast by the nearby wall sconce, Lancing looked like an angel from a Renaissance painting. He was an exquisitely handsome man with eyes that were the blue of pale sapphires and golden hair so pale that it appeared almost white. Women were drawn to him like moths to a flame. But looks were most definitely deceiving in Lancing’s case; the man was a cold-blooded killer. He lived for the hunt and the kill, and his favored prey was human, preferably female. He was frighteningly good at the business. Indeed, nature had endowed him with a talent for pursuing and bringing down his victims that could only be described as preternatural. When his paranormal hunting senses were aroused, he could detect the psychical spore of his victim.
    His talents also endowed him with the ability to see clearly in the darkest night. When he attacked he could