Read Online Immortal and the Madman (The Immortal Chronicles Book 3) by Gene Doucette - Free Book Online

with it, though.  “You two!  This is our one night to actually speak to the man and you’d rather hide in the dark.  Oh, there he is!  Come on, then.”
    I looked at John, who appeared genuinely panicked at the notion of diving back into the center of that many people.  I knew if I went he would have to follow.
    “We’ll need a moment or two,” I said.
    “Ahh, you.”  Joanne pulled her hand out from under my arm.  “All right, if you won’t go to him, I will bring him to you.”
    She disappeared into the social morass, braver than either of us for doing so.
    “I’m surprised you came, John,” I said.  “I’m sure Margritte would have accepted your regrets.”
    “I considered it.  But no, I had to come.”
    “ Had to?  She insisted?”
    “No, she didn’t at all.  I fear I accepted before she formally invited me, which must have been alarming.  Yes I had to come.  Tonight is important because… oh.” He stopped himself, which he did sometimes when realizing he’d gone too far ahead.  I said what I was supposed to say next.  It was less complicated that way.
    “Why is that?” I asked.
    “Tonight is when he tells us he is a duke, of course.”
    “Of course.  You know, John, I never did tell you how old I was, and yet you act as if we had that conversation.  You didn’t need to be here to learn his title.  I take it something else is going to happen tonight?”
    “Yes, something else is going happen tonight.”  His answer ran over my question.  If anyone had been listening it would have sounded like we were running through a rehearsed script.  “I want you to promise me something, Reggie.”
    “What shall I promise?”
    “If I tell you to do something, do it immediately, without question.  Do you trust me enough to do that?”
    “I think I do, yes.  But I’d like to know what you mean.”
    I couldn’t imagine a dinner party circumstance in which it might be vitally important to accept the instructions of a future-seeing lunatic.  Perhaps, I thought, I was at risk of being scalded by tea later.
    But then Joanne had returned with the foreign guest on her arm, and I never got an answer.  “Gentlemen!” she said.  “It turns out our esteemed guest is a duke !”
    John and I feigned surprise, greeted him, and introduced ourselves.
    As Miranda observed, the duke was very young, much younger than I’d taken him for from a distance.  Younger than twenty, surely.  A prominent nose and long black hair, he was not a terrifically attractive young man, but handsome enough for a person with royal lineage to get by okay.  That is to say, money makes everyone a little bit more handsome.
    I didn’t know why he was being hidden away in Cornelius’s estate—I never really would learn—but I knew enough about hereditary monarchies to imagine ten or twelve plausible reasons.  Most of those reasons had to do with valid or invalid claims to a throne somewhere, an unsavory by-product of a system that inevitably put the lives of very young people in grave danger entirely because of their blood. 
    But then, every political system has its flaws.
    I also knew enough not to ask him for details.  Even if he knew why, I had no reason to expect him to tell me.
    “It is… a pleasure to make… to meet you both,” he said in halting English.
    “It’s our pleasure as well,” I greeted back, shaking his hand.  Then, perhaps foolishly, I tried out some German.  “ We are all sorry to see you go. ”
    His face registered genuine alarm.  He understood the language I was using, clearly, but for some reason it wasn’t okay that I knew how to speak it.
    “ I am sorry, I don’t understand, ” he said back, but in Hungarian rather than German.
    I nodded.  “My mistake, sir.”
    John stepped between us.  “I feel as if we are old friends, my lord, even though this is our first conversation.”
    The duke smiled and shook John’s hand while Joanne pulled me away.  “What did you just