ThePerfectPoison
THIRTY-SIX
SHE WAITED SEVERAL MINUTES BEFORE SHE WRIGGLED out from beneath his heavy weight. He stirred a little but he did not open his eyes. She touched the pulse at his throat. The strong, steady beat reassured her. He was cooler now, too.
She got to her feet and began to dress. The gray light of dawn lit the windows. She knew she should go home but she dared not leave Caleb until he awoke. She settled down into the chair in front of the fire and waited.
Eventually he opened his eyes. She was relieved to see no sign of the psychical heat.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Nearly five. I’m glad I sent Shute home after he brought us here. I would hate to think of him having spent the night in the carriage waiting for me.”
Caleb sat up and swung his legs to the floor. “No need to be concerned. In the polite world it is nothing to return home at dawn after a ball. Your neighbors will hardly notice.”
“You are obviously unacquainted with my neighbors.”
He got to his feet and looked down, evidently surprised to discover that he was still wearing most of his clothes. He grimaced and fastened his trousers.
“Do you really give a damn about your neighbors?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Didn’t think so.” He finished adjusting his clothes and looked at her. “I apologize for my lack of finesse, Lucinda. Did I . . . ?”
“You did not hurt me,” she said gently. “You would never hurt me.”
He exhaled heavily. “It was like a sudden fever. I cannot explain it.”
“I have been thinking about it. I believe the explanation lies in whatever you did to that madman last night.”
He went very still. “I told you, I don’t know what I did to him.”
“But you are absolutely certain that you somehow caused his death with your talent.”
“There is no doubt about it.” His jaw hardened. “I . . . felt it when it happened.”
“Did you think about killing him before you did it? Did you somehow will his death?”
“Such a thing is impossible. One cannot will another’s death.”
“It appears he was doing something very much like that to you.”
“No, he did not will my death.” Caleb rubbed the back of his neck. “He used his enhanced talent in some fashion to disrupt my aura. Everything that happened last night can be explained by psychical physics, not sorcery.”
“Tell me exactly how it occurred.”
Caleb lowered his hand. “I knew I was being murdered. I also knew that if I died he would go after you. I could not allow that to happen. I could barely move, not even to pick up the gun that I had dropped. Some instinct told me that my only hope was to call on the full force of my talent. I think I had some notion of trying to use it as a sort of shield against the currents of his energy.”
“In other words, you tried to fight fire with fire?”
“I suppose that was the general idea. But when my senses flared to their fullest extent, I suddenly knew what to do. It was like reaching into the heart of a storm, Lucinda. It felt as if I had seized a fistful of chaos. In some way I cannot explain, I managed to hurl the energy at that man, disrupting his aura. He died instantly. What’s more, I knew, even as I did it, that he would die.”
She thought about that for a while.
Caleb waited.
“Hmm,” she said finally.
Caleb scowled. “What the devil is that supposed to mean?”
“Well, it sounds to me as though you managed to channel your talent in such a way that it could be used as a weapon.”
“Believe it or not, I figured that much out all by myself,” he said grimly. “The questions are, how did I do it and why didn’t I know I could do it until the moment was upon me?”
“I don’t have all the answers but I could hazard a guess.”
“What is that?”
“I suspect that the reason you didn’t know you could manipulate the energy of your talent in such a way until that moment was that you’ve never been engaged in a life-or-death struggle where there were no other weapons available.” She spread her hands. “You were at death’s door. Your instincts took over.”
He contemplated the dying fire. “It is a strange thing to know that one is capable of killing in such a fashion.”
“I think what really worries you is that, in that moment, you did not feel in control of yourself or your talent. You relied entirely on instinct and intuition rather than logic and reason.”
There was a long silence. When he looked up from the fire, his expression was one of solemn wonder.
“As I have noted before, you are a very insightful woman, Lucinda.”
She gestured at the maze of bookshelves that surrounded them. “You told me that there have been other instances of powerful talents who could kill with their psychical energy.”
“Yes, but the records of such individuals in the Society are so rare as to be the stuff of myth and legend.”
She smiled. “You are a Jones, sir. A direct descendant of Sylvester the Alchemist. That makes you the stuff of myth and legend.”
“But I do not possess any of those unusual talents. My gift is merely a very keen sense of intuition combined with a knack for spotting patterns. How can such an ability be made to act as a weapon?”
“I do not know,” she said. “But power is power, regardless of how it is channeled, and you possess a great deal of it.”
He thought about that for a long while.
“You are right,” he said eventually. “It is an incomplete explanation but it will have to do. We will keep this information to ourselves, Lucinda. Do you understand? I do not want even the members of my family to find out what really happened last night.”
“In other words, this newly discovered ability of yours is going to become a deep, dark Jones agency secret?”
“You may as well become accustomed to keeping secrets,” he said. “Something tells me that the agency will accumulate a great many in the years ahead.”
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