The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring Read Online Free PDF Page A

The hairless cranium moved a little as the head of a snake might shift before coiling to spring. The eagle-beak nose seemed to flare at the nostrils like that of an animal of prey.
    Casey went to the huge bronze main doors and tried them. Locked tight, of course. He turned, to walk back to the workroom and locker room.
    The emaciated figure in its bizarre garb slid behind a pedestal on which was a reproduced skeleton of Neanderthal man. Casey drew even with the pedestal, passed it.
    The great room seemed suddenly airless and frozen with danger. It was as if walls and ceiling leaned near to witness what was to come.
    Oblivious as he was, Casey, striding toward the locker room, paused. Behind him, the creeping white death did not pause. It came on, seeming to float rather than walk.
    Casey, with every primitive instinct uneasily alert now, started to turn.
    The move was never completed.
    The gloom suddenly held a pin prick of light, reflected from a knife blade. But the thin streak of light was not pale, steely in color, as it would have been from ordinary metal. It was a reflection from a metal such as we in the modern world do not know. It was a coppery-gold reflection.
    The reflection seemed a long streak, because it came from a knife blade flashing down.
    Down toward the man’s broad back!
    It hit with a dull, hollow punnk, the blade going deftly between ribs. Casey fell without ever knowing what had happened, as the metal ripped his heart.
    He fell, and the tall, grayish form in misty priest’s robes bent over him. The knife with queerly golden glint swept once, in a right-to-left fashion. Casey then had no throatline. His throat had been slashed square across!
    The figure with the bald skull and beaked nose lifted its left hand. On the second finger glistened a pale, pinkish stone. The left hand, ring and all, was plunged into the crimson flood coming from Casey’s throat.
    For perhaps sixty seconds that hand was held thus. Then, slowly, it was withdrawn. A sigh came from the odd figure, like the satiated sigh of a dope fiend after a shot of the drug he lived for.
    And now the ring—the Ring of Power that old Taros once had worn—had changed color.
    It had been pale, flesh pink. Now it was deep red. Ruby red. With an inner glow like that of a great ruby with a tiny light in it.
    The Ring of Power had been renewed in the life blood of a sacrificed victim. For another forty-eight hours it would give its wearer omnipotent power, and preserve its existence.
    The Ring of Power. The ring of blood!

    Richard Benson, The Avenger, was known to every police official in America. He was beginning to be known, by sight at least, to almost every patrolman and plainclothes man too.
    It was out of that knowledge, that Gunther Caine finally managed to catch up with him.
    Benson had friends in high places all over the world. It was only natural that he should have even more than usual in the nation’s capital, where affairs of great moment were constantly being hatched.
    A very good friend of Benson’s was a retired manufacturer with a mansion on Sixteenth Street near Embassy Row. The friend was in Europe at the moment, and had cabled Benson to make the place his own, whenever he chose.
    Benson had gone there from Caine’s home, with the bewildered Smitty.
    “I never knew what hit me,” repeated Smitty. “This tall, skinny shape in the priest’s robe raised both hands, as if he was calling down a curse on me. I felt as if I’d been suddenly bathed in acid or something that prickled and burned. Then I went out like water down a drain.”
    “The thing was dressed like a high priest of ancient Egypt?” said The Avenger. His colorless eyes were as glittering as diamond drills and as cold as the Antarctic.
    “That’s right,” said Smitty.
    “And it had a thin, lantern-jawed face, and was hairless?”
    “Yes.”
    “The nose?”
    “A regular bird-beak of a thing.”
    Benson stared not so much at Smitty as through him. As if