CYCLE B  |  Book 4

Glass of Enchantment

PREVIEW | Glass of Enchantment

Cheroxie's new friend Kari was spending time at Hesperia, the Tanager ranch.  Dag had invited her to work with the horses and also with two of his grandkids. 

Getting her that job had been Cheroxie's doing.  Kari needed to be out of Lucerna, where her work had led to nothing but frustration and dead ends.  She needed to recover some feelings of self-worth.

Just why she'd lost her sense of self-worth was something Cheroxie understood only partially.  One reason was the fact that Kari placed impossible demands on herself.  She needed to be living "a life that the Light would bless."  The Light was one of Kari's deities.  Others included the goddess Fortuna and demons Kari called the Furies.  Fortuna was mostly malevolent and the Furies were wholly so.  Or so Kari, speaking matter of factly, had once said.

Kari had to be the strangest person Cheroxie had ever met.  Just for starters, she was brainy and obviously well-educated, able to engage in deep and complex philosophical discussions with profs at Rayneval.  But at the same time, she had these superstitious beliefs in gods and demons.  Weird.

Kari would be back in Lucerna soon enough.  To do what?  She told Cheroxie that she intended to again throw herself into what she referred to as the Gina mysteries.  She would do so, in part, because she wanted to vex the man she'd taken to calling "the bishop": Cheroxie's boss, corporate lawyer Alan Barrington.  Alan wanted her to leave those mysteries alone.

Instead of doing so, Kari kept multiplying them.  She was eager to learn about a mystery man from Gina Vasari's past, a man the dead woman had usually referred to as either Orcus and Odysseus, obvious pseudonyms.  Kari was also seeking to understand Dr. Vasari's multiple-personality disorder, why she sometime saw herself as the Hindu god Agni or the Roman god Janus.  She was trying to learn about the work Dr. Vasari had been doing at the time she was killed and what she'd been planning for the future.  And last but not least, she wanted to identify Dr. Vasari's killer.

Cheroxie guessed that she'd soon discover that Kari was even stranger than she'd come to believe.