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Back Cardinal Black Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Title Page
  2. One: Into the Storm
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Two: London Calling
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Three: The Malignant Seven
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Four: Squirrels and Cats
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-One
  37. Thirty-Two
  38. Five: Revelation
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. About the Author

By the fire’s glow Matthew took stock of this individual: a slender man wearing a white suit—odd for this time of year, but there it was—and a white shirt with a black cravat around the thin neck. The man looked to be maybe in his late forties or early fifties. He had a stripe of gray hair down the middle of his head but the rest of his scalp was shaved bald. A small gray goatee was set in the center of his pointed chin, and he had a small hooked beak of a nose. But the most arresting thing about the man were his eyes; they were almost disturbingly large and slightly bulging as if they were being forced by pressure from the setting of the sockets. And their color: as golden and sparkling as the guineas in Julian’s money belt.

Matthew saw Britt leaning forward, the man’s face half in shadow and half painted orange by the fire.

Then, suddenly, it happened.

The man Britt was addressing turned his head to the left, the golden eyes still wide and quite strange-looking, and began to twist his head around in that direction. Matthew’s heart jumped; in another few seconds the man was going to break his own neck, for the head was being twisted nearly back around to his shoulder blades.

The man’s head gave a slight jerk, Matthew saw the neck’s muscles clench and relax, there was a quiet pop and to Matthew’s amazement the twisting head continued to turn … to turn … to turn … until the freakish gent was looking behind himself … and yet the head still continued to swivel. Matthew almost stepped back and seared the heels of his boots on the burning logs, for this man in white with the golden eyes had turned his head only just short of all the way around on the neck, and now as Matthew watched the man’s head began to slowly swivel back the other way … more and more … more and more … as the golden eyes glinted with firelight and Britt’s shadowy face just kept talking as if this were the most natural sight in the world.

The man’s head, turning to the right now, looked near breaking the neck once again until there was that jerking motion, the contracting and relaxing of neck muscles, and the pop of bizarre bones resetting into angles that defied the formality of the human skeleton.

And then … the weird golden eyes fixed upon Matthew and remained there, and to his horror Matthew found he could not look away.

“Help you, sir?”

Was someone’s voice actually speaking? Or was it the strange man speaking from the depths of his mind?

“Somethin’ to drink, sir?”