The Magic Circle, Katherine Neville [parable of the sower read online .TXT] 📗

without taking any extra free ski lessons. If only he weren’t so … attractive.

Forget it. He wasn’t attractive, he was charismatic: he was magical. I knew it, and so did everyone else who ever laid eyes on him. But this couldn’t be happening to me—not on top of everything else. Not now. Why in heaven’s name had the Pod decided to dish up this poison to me? I had to do something to get myself back to reality, such as it was.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Marshaling all my reserves, I stepped backward so that his hands fell from my shoulders, snapping the link. I opened my eyes.

“So what’s the question?” I asked.

“Question?” he said, momentarily confused.

“The serious question you said, only a moment ago, that you needed to ask me,” I explained.

Wolfgang Hauser shrugged his shoulders and looked a little pained. It seemed that he hadn’t thought through what kind of response he himself had really expected of me—nor what might come next in the scenario.

“You don’t trust me,” he said. “And you’re perfectly right—why should you? I follow you like an idiot through the fog, I chase you down a ski mountain and drag you to lunch. I blurt out unsolicited feelings for you that I bloody well should have kept to myself. For all this, I deeply apologize. But I do want to say one thing.…”

I waited. But I was totally unprepared for the broadside when it came.

“I am a personal acquaintance of your uncle Lafcadio Behn, from Vienna,” he informed me. “I’ve been sent here to Idaho to protect you as best I can. Before you came back from that funeral in San Francisco I flew here to be sure you’d be placed on my project—not only for your professional expertise, I admit, but because the documents you are heir to must not fall into the wrong hands. Do you understand?”

Holy Mother of God and all the saints. What was he saying?

“Ariel,” he said, “I assure you that when I took this assignment, I didn’t expect to find …” He paused and looked me in the eye for a moment. “Oh, Scheiss, how I’ve messed this up,” he said finally, and he turned away to pull his skis from the snow, so I couldn’t see his face. “Let’s just go back to town, shall we?”

This wrench in the works had altered my freshly formed plans. I tried to think up some excuse: that due to my grief, or whatever, I wanted to be alone so I could have some time to think. But now that Wolfgang and I had been so chummy over Glühwein—now that he’d disclosed his acquaintance with the black-sheep branch of my family, and had hinted at his burning passion for me, and also, I’d noticed, had eyed my backpack more than once—I felt it might seem too obvious a ploy. And although he had never actually asked me what I was doing up here, I understood that my only option was to play for time, ski down the rest of the mountain, and worry about where to stash the manuscript while I drove back alone.

By the time we’d suited up and snapped into our bindings, Wolfgang had recovered enough of his former charm and self-control to suggest that this time I follow him down the mountain. As good skiers learn early, if you can pattern your own form—the rhythmic combination of weight-shifting and pole-planting—after that of a superior skier, it will be worth more than ten thousand lessons with some instructor yelling in a foreign tongue: “Bend zee knees! Stop dragging zee poles!” I was delighted to get this education—at least, until he cut into the powder.

He dropped from the side of the groomed slope and slashed down through a grove of aspen thick with snow, slaloming in and out among the trees. It took a moment before I realized he was headed for a big bowl of sugary powder of a quality that drew tourists by the thousands each year. It was at the far end of these woods. But in all the years I’d frequented this mountain, I myself had avoided it like the plague.

Powder skiing requires a completely different approach from basic Nordic or Alpine techniques. You lean back on your haunches, as if in a rocking chair, which forces your ski tips high above the snow so they don’t bog down and stop you dead in your tracks. This takes enormous flexibility of the knees and strength in the thighs. If your tips get buried, if you stop, if you catch an edge and fall, you start sinking.

Because I’d never found that special rhythm, I felt completely helpless in the powder. But now I also had a heavy backpack adding awkward weight, which explains why I balked in the aspen grove—why I swerved instead to thread my way back to the groomed slope I’d just left.

And that was when it happened.

I had reached the edge of the wood when I knew something was wrong. I felt it coming above me long before I could hear it. There was no sound, but perhaps, like a whisper, the earth breathing a long, shuddering sigh. I think the palms of my hands, tingling with pinpricks inside the warmth of my gloves, sensed it before my conscious brain did. The moment I understood what was happening, I also understood that I had no idea what to do.

The ground was moving under my feet—not the ground itself, but rather the snow! The mountain was shedding its skin: ripping away, in one brutal slash, that five-foot-deep blanket, an accumulation of leaden snow that had taken all winter to fall. I was in an avalanche.

And then the noise began, first a rumble, then quickly a roar, as snow started churning over itself and pebbles and rocks started spinning down the mountain around me. I was speeding just along the forest hem, as fast as I could safely go without falling,