Touch of Rogue Read Online Free PDF

voice. Cobalt, the element named for an evil spirit with a lugubrious cackle to match, joined the chorus.
    Given that mix of metals, he’d lay odds the blade had magnetic properties. To test it, he picked a steel letter opener from the top drawer of the desk, careful to protect himself from direct contact with the handkerchief. No point in flooding his senses with metals to no purpose. Sure enough, the blade point chased the opener in jerky pivots when he held it close. The field was a strong one and seemed to grow in power the longer he tested it. He had to use both hands to keep the dagger from stripping the letter opener from his grasp and barely managed to yank it away before the blade whipped off the desktop in its lust to follow the opener.
    It flew across the room and buried itself in the spine of his copy of Cicero , an old tome whose ink was heavily laced with iron. The ornamental hilt quivered with the force of the blow.
    “Why in God’s name would anyone want a magnetic blade?” Jacob could envision all sorts of unforeseen outcomes in the course of a fight. A magnetic blade might become firmly attached to any susceptible metal. The hand that wielded it could lose it to a lamppost, come to that.
    Unless the purpose of this blade was more ceremonial than combative. The heavy ornamentation suggested as much, but the lethal edge was wickedly sharp. Jacob suspected Lord Cambourne hadn’t even felt it slide between his ribs till it punctured his heart.
    Jacob replaced the letter opener and retrieved the dagger. With a healthy respect for the unknown, he centered it on the desk again and brought his forefinger closer to the blade, careful not to make actual contact. The melodious tones of gold and silver peeled through his mind next, making this an odd alloy for a blade. They were too soft for weaponry, but he heard their presence in unusual abundance nonetheless.
    There was something else there as well, a rustling sibilance on the edge of sound, but Jacob couldn’t quite make it out.
    He’d have to touch it.
    He lowered his fingertips to rest on the cool surface and then jerked them back in reflex. It was iridium. A hard, almost unworkable metal he’d first encountered at Prince Albert’s Grand Exhibition a few years ago. Men of science doubted its usefulness since it was unavailable in any but the smallest of quantities and possessed such a high melting point that common metallurgical methods were ineffective.
    And yet long ago someone had discovered a means to meld it into this dagger and its five doppelgängers.
    Jacob drew a deep breath. He’d learned as much as he could this way. It was time to bond with the dagger. He removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Then he closed his eyes and laid his palm across the flat of the blade, leaning his weight on that hand to maintain contact.
    And was sucked into a cold, dark hell.
    Disembodied, he tumbled through pitch blackness, pinpoints of light wheeling around him. Then he felt himself accelerating, faster than the fleetest steam engine, tight as a silent scream. He gained a sense of heaviness, of falling toward the blue and green orb that loomed ahead.
    He shuddered into something he couldn’t see. Flames licked around him, burning off dross in a fiery rendering. He was buffeted by hot wind, the sudden noise of flame and friction deafening after the silence before. He shot across an inky sky, trailing fire. Then an empty moor rose to meet him and he slammed into the ground, leaving a trench behind him and finally coming to rest in a smoking crater.
    Jacob lifted his palm from the blade and was snapped back into his own reality. He grasped the desk with both hands to steady himself, half expecting to see smoke rising from his bare forearms, but real as it seemed, even his hand was not scorched by the vision. As expected, though, pain lanced his head.
    So the metal was sky-born.
    Offspring of a meteorite, his rational mind corrected. Still, its unusual