The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“I was following you,” I pointed out. “And I think maybe I’m just stupid!”

Sam threw back his head and laughed. “No, no. You’re not stupid,” he said. “But maybe, hotshot,” he added with his wonderful smile, “just maybe your getting yourself lost in the woods and nearly killed will be some kind of a talisman to me—my lucky rabbit’s foot.” He yanked my pigtail. “Maybe finding you will change my luck.”

And it did. That was how Sam became Grey Cloud, and how our totem spirit blessed us with the light, and how I became part Indian, by the mixing of our blood. From that night forward, it was as if a knot had been untied inside me, and my path through life would be forever straight and clear.

From that night until now, that is.

The U.S. government has been accused of wasting taxpayer dollars, but never on lavish work facilities for its employees. Especially not out here in the provinces, where every nickel that might have provided comfort in the work environment was squeezed tightly or, better yet, put back into the till. As a result, more cash had been spent on paving the six acres of parking lots surrounding our work site, where government workers parked their cars, than on constructing, furnishing, repairing, cleaning, or heating the buildings where actual humans had to work.

As I pulled into the vast parking lot just after lunchtime, patches of snow still clinging to my car, I surveyed the lots as far as the eye could see. As I’d suspected, by this late in the day the only slots left in the official employee parking areas seemed to be located in western Wyoming. And at this time of year and after a melt like this morning’s, the late afternoon wind chill could drop to sixty below; ice pebbles were already kicking against my windshield. I decided to risk a penalty and leave my car at the front of the main complex, where a small strip of official visitor parking was located. Employees were forbidden to park there, or to enter through the guest lobby. But I could usually talk a security guard there into letting me sign the logbook instead of making me hike outside all the way around the vast complex to enter through the official mantraps for employees at the rear.

I slid into one of the open spaces, pulled up my sheepskin coat, wrapped the long fringed cashmere scarf around my face, and pulled my wool ski cap down over my ears. Then I leapt from the car, locked it up, and made a dash for the glass front doors. Not a moment too soon, for the gust that came through as I stepped in nearly ripped the door off its hinges. I managed to yank it shut, then went through the next set of doors into the lobby.

I was unwrapping my scarf and wiping my windburned eyes when I saw him. He was standing at the reception desk, signing out. I froze.

I mean, how could I forget the lyrics of “Some Enchanted Evening”—“you will see a stranger …”—when Jersey used to play it over and over, that recording of herself singing it with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau onstage at the Salle Pleyel?

So here was the stranger. And while the setting was not exactly idyllic—the visitors’ lobby of the Technical Science Annex—I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was the one human being on earth who’d been created just for me. He was the gift the gods had sent me in consolation because my cousin Sam was dead. And to think I might have entered by another door instead. How subtle are the mysteries the fates have in store for us just around every corner.

He actually looked somewhat godlike—at least, like my picture-book image of a god. His dark hair swept back in abundance to his collar; he was tall and slender, with the chiseled Macedonian profile one always associates with heroes. The soft camel coat and tasseled white silk scarf he wore swung loose from his broad shoulders. He carried a pair of expensive Italian leather gloves lightly between long, graceful fingers. This was no cowboy engineer, that was for durned tootin’, as Olivier would say.

There was in his posture and demeanor something of aloof, regal composure that bordered upon arrogance. And when he turned from the security guard Bella—who was looking at him with her mouth open like a fish—and headed toward me, I saw that his eyes, beneath dark lashes, were the purest dark turquoise, and of an amazing depth. His eyes swept me, tightening for a moment, and I realized that in this getup I had the sex appeal of a polar bear.

He was coming toward me to the exit. He was leaving the building! I felt in a panic that I must do something—fall on the floor in a faint or hurl myself spread-eagled across the door. But instead I closed my eyes and inhaled him as he passed: a mixture of pine and leather and citron that left me a bit dizzy.

It may have been my imagination, but I thought he whispered something as he passed me: “enchanting,” or perhaps it was “exquisite.” Or maybe it was only “excuse me,” for it seemed I was partly blocking the exit. When I opened my eyes, he was gone.

I went to have a look at the logbook, but as I got to the reception desk, Bella, having recovered her composure, slapped a piece of paper over the open page. I looked up in surprise to find her glaring at me in non-security-guard fashion. It was more the look of an angry cat in heat.

“You’re to use the mantraps, Behn,” she informed me, pointing at the door that led back outside. “And the logbook is confidential to management.”

“All the other visitors can read the book and see who’s been here when they sign in,” I pointed out. “Why not the other employees? I’ve never