Avow had been made…

And the road to a pure karma involved keeping that vow. Though he had fallen along the way, he could make everything right again by being true to his first vow, his vrata. The Goddess had whispered to him in the night. Kali had shown him the way.

Kusum wondered at the price others had paid—and soon would have to pay—for the purification of his karma. The soiling of that karma had been no one’s fault but his own. He had freely taken a vow of Brahmacharya and for many years had held to a life of chastity and sexual continence. Until…

His mind shied away from the days that ended his life as a Brahmachari. There were sins—patakas—that stained every life. But he had committed a mahapataka, thoroughly polluting his karma. It was a catastrophic blow to his quest for moksha, the liberation from the karmic wheel. It meant he would suffer greatly before being born again as an evil man of low caste. For he had forsaken his vow of Brahmacharya in the most abominable fashion.

But the vrata to his father he would not forsake: Although the crime was more than a century in the past, all the descendants of Sir Albert Westphalen must die for it. Only two were left.

A new noise rose from below. The Mother was scraping on the hatch. She had caught the Scent and wanted to hunt.

He rose and stepped to his cabin door, then stopped, uncertain of what to do. He knew the Paton woman had received the candies. Before leaving London he had injected each piece with a few drops of the elixir and had left the wrapped and addressed parcel in the care of an embassy secretary to hold until she received word to mail it. And now it had arrived. All would be perfect.

Except for Jack.

Jack obviously knew the Westphalens. A startling coincidence but not outlandish when one considered that both the Westphalens and Kusum knew Jack through Burkes at the U.K. Mission. And Jack had apparently come into possession of the small bottle of elixir Kusum had arranged for Grace Westphalen to receive last weekend. Had it been mere chance that he had picked that particular bottle to investigate? From what little Kusum knew of Jack, he doubted it.

For all the considerable risk Jack represented—his innate intuitive abilities and his capacity and willingness to do physical damage made him a very dangerous man—Kusum was loath to see him come to harm. He was indebted to him for returning the necklace in time. More importantly, Jack was too rare a creature in the Western world—Kusum did not want to be responsible for his extinction. And finally, there was a certain kinship he felt toward the man. He sensed Repairman Jack to be an outcast in his own land, just as Kusum had been in his until recently. True, Kusum had an ever-growing following at home and now moved in the upper circles of India’s diplomatic corps as if he belonged there, but he was still an outcast in his heart. For he would never—could never—be a part of the “new India.”