When Gods Die

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Book: Read When Gods Die for Free Online
Authors: C. S. Harris
energy as to become almost hot to the touch…. Or at least, so it had seemed to him as a child.
    “The necklace belonged to my mother,” he said simply.
    Paul Gibson raised his gaze to his friend’s face. “Something strange is going on here, Sebastian. Something that could be dangerous. For anyone involved.”
    “If you want to have nothing further to do with it, I’ll understand.”
    Gibson made a swift, impatient gesture with one hand. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the one I’m worried about. Who brought you into this?”
    “Ostensibly, the Prince. In reality? Jarvis.”
    “And you trust him?”
    Sebastian gazed down at the still, ravaged body of the woman hidden beneath the sheet. “Not at all. But someone killed Guinevere Anglessey. Someone slipped that dagger into the livid flesh of her bare back and brought her body here to drape it across that couch in a deliberately suggestive posture. Lord Jarvis’s sole intent in all this is to protect the Prince. But mine is different. I’m going to find out who killed this woman, and I’m going to see that he pays for it.”
    “Because of the necklace?”
    Sebastian shook his head. “Because if I don’t, no one else will.”
    “What does it matter to you?”
    One of Guinevere’s slim white hands peeked out from beneath the sheet, its fingers curled lightly in death. Seeing it, Sebastian was reminded of another woman, left to die on an altar’s steps, her throat viciously slashed, her body obscenely violated; and another, hunted down like an unwary quarry and subjected to the same hideous end.
    He had few illusions about the world in which he lived. He knew the shocking inequality between its privileged and its poor; he recognized the savage injustice of a legal system that could hang an eight-year-old boy for stealing a loaf of bread and yet let a king’s son get away with murder. Once, he’d been so repulsed by the raw barbarism and senseless cruelty of the wars his people fought in the name of liberty and justice that he’d been content simply to let himself drift, aimless and alone. Now that struck him as a reaction that was both self-indulgent and faintly cowardly.
    Crouching down beside what was left of the young woman named Guinevere, Sebastian tucked the sheet over that pale, vulnerable hand and said softly, “It matters.”

Chapter 9
     
    S ebastian was crossing the yard toward the Pavilion’s glass-domed, Xanadu-inspired stables when he heard someone calling his name. “Lord Devlin.”
    He turned to find the Home Secretary, Lord Portland, coming toward him across the paving. The midday sun was bright on the nobleman’s flaming red hair, but the skin of his face was pale and drawn tight as if with worry.
    “Walk with me a ways, my lord,” said Portland, turning their steps down a path that angled off across the Pavilion’s wide expanse of green lawn. “I understand you’ve agreed to help sort out the truth about last night’s peculiar incident.”
    Sebastian’s acquaintance with the Earl of Portland was slight, although in the year since Sebastian’s return from the Continent he’d attended several dinner parties and soirees in the man’s company. Like Jarvis and Hendon, Portland was profoundly conservative in his politics, dedicated to continuing the war against France and preserving England’s institutions in the face of a rising tide of demands for reform.
    Yet whatever his opinion of the reactionary quality of the man’s beliefs, Sebastian couldn’t help but respect him. The Earl of Portland was one of the few men in the government—or out of it—who refused to play the role of one of Jarvis’s pawns. But there was something distasteful, almost sordid about referring to the death of a vital young woman as a peculiar incident .
    “If you mean Lady Anglessey’s murder,” said Sebastian, “then yes.”
    “According to both the magistrate and the Prince’s doctors, the death was a suicide.”
    Sebastian raised one

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