Home > Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer #8)(16)

Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer #8)(16)
Author: Karen Chance

“Rhea . . .” I said pleadingly.

And then the hound gave another bellow, like every piece of metal tearing everywhere in the world, like a knife through the brain, like a physical pain. I jerked my head up to see the creature floundering, sliding on the slick surface of the drag. It took me a second to realize that the mages it had crushed under its claws had stuck there, forming screaming, bleeding pads that had bunched under its feet, causing it to slip whenever it tried to move.

And seriously hampering it.

Like the spells the outlying mages were starting to throw, which sizzled against its horny hide like the strokes of a lash. Or the potion bomb one tossed, which succeeded in blowing a chunk out of its shoulder. Or the mage that had become stuck to its slavering maw, sticking there like glue and blocking its main weapon.

Until it bit the struggling man in two.

And I guessed Augustine’s potion hadn’t gotten everywhere, after all. Because it managed to swallow the middle bit just fine. And to bellow at the room out of its trophy-lined mouth, making even some of the hardened dark mages stop and stare.

Which they were still doing when it crunched their partners under its feet, grinding them into the already gory floor, getting itself some traction. And then leaping for the main group, which was still holding formation, hurtling its massive body right through the middle. And sending a broad swath of men crashing into the far wall of the drag, like a freight train had just derailed and rolled over them.

I had a vague impression thereafter of screaming, panicked mages, some fused to the thing’s hide, others crushed against the wall, including some that stuck there like macabre artwork, writhing in place or slowly sliding down toward the mass of bodies at the bottom.

But it didn’t hold my attention.

Because the leader had grabbed the first of a group of fleeing men and started slinging them into another cluster nearby. “Form up! Form up!”

“We can’t take that thing!” one of the men said. “Our best spells barely touch it!”

“You don’t have to take it! Take her!” He flung an arm in my direction. “Who do you think is controlling it?”

And suddenly, our little group was facing a combined spell like the one that had almost destroyed Augustine’s, and that should have incinerated us on the spot.

Except for one small thing.

Or make that three small things.

Because the real Graeae had just joined the party.

There was a loud, ululating cry, and the sister named Enyo somersaulted over our group, transforming in the process into a twelve-foot Amazon with four-inch talons, a mass of cascading gray hair and slitted yellow eyes. And a club, which she used like a baseball bat to send the spell boiling right back at the mages. Who threw themselves to the side, scattering like pins in a bowling alley, trying to get out of the way.

Some even managed it.

For a second, I was staring at the surreal sight of a massive hound, its hide now covered in a carpet of squirming mages, rampaging back and forth down the length of the drag. Of Enyo plowing into the fight with her club, sending more mages literally flying on all sides. Of a mass of magical microphones circling overhead, screaming abuse.

And of Rhea staring at the ceiling, the entire breast of her gown stained bright red, her eyes going glassy.

“I can’t heal this,” Carla told me, her hands red, her voice panicked. “It’s too severe. The best I can do is slow it down, but it’s not going to make a difference in a minute. We have to have a healer. . . .”

She trailed off, because yeah.

I didn’t see any doctors in the room.

“Can you shift her?” she almost begged, for the life of a girl she’d just met. But it probably didn’t feel that way.

Battle does that to you.

“No,” I said, my voice barely recognizable. “I won’t be able to shift again for . . . a long time.”

“But there must be something you can do!” she insisted, staring at me with innocent faith. Which looked kind of weird on those hard-bitten features. “You’re Pythia.”

I stared back with nothing to say. A Pythia was supposed to be able to do something. A Pythia was supposed to be able to do anything. But it had never seemed to work that way for me.

I looked down at Rhea, lying on the floor in front of me, but I wasn’t seeing her. I was seeing a man, old and withered, his salt-and-pepper hair leaning mostly to salt, holding one age-spotted hand over a terrible stomach wound. The other had clutched mine while he tried to tell me something before he bled out, while I’d worked desperately to save him.

While I’d failed.

Because being able to make someone younger or older doesn’t mean you can heal their wounds. As I’d discovered the hard way, applying power to them merely gave you a younger corpse. I’d only managed to help one person—sort of—because his was a metaphysical disease, a curse, and making him younger had changed him enough that the curse no longer recognized him.

And even there I’d had help, help I didn’t have now.

“But that man did not belong to you,” a voice whispered in my ear, causing me to jump and look around.

The only thing I saw was Augustine, the reporter’s little girl held fast against his chest, staring out at me from behind the distant counter. And the blackened, ruined storefront. And my own bedraggled reflection in smoke-clouded glass.

And a whisper in my other ear. “While this girl is yours, part of your coven.”

I whipped my head back the other way, and stared at the reporter, who stared back at me, her eyes huge. “What is it?” she asked fearfully. “What’s wrong?”

Take your pick, I didn’t say, because she was weirded out enough.

And then so was I, when everything abruptly went dark.

Chapter Eight

I panicked, thinking I’d been hit with some kind of spell. It hadn’t hurt, but it had been just that fast, just that debilitating. Like someone had thrown a switch, only there were no afterimages. There was no anything, just darkness, deep and velvety and absolute, except for a tiny pinpoint of light from somewhere up ahead.

Framing the body of the vampire walking toward me.

He was wearing only a pair of midnight blue sleep pants in a silky fabric that hung low on his hips. His chest and feet were bare and his dark, shoulder-length hair, usually caught back in a clip, was loose on his shoulders. He looked like he’d just gotten up, but the whiskey dark eyes were as sharp as ever.

“But the girl is yours,” Mircea repeated softly, kneeling opposite me. “And you . . . are mine.”

And abruptly, the scene shifted, giving me the weirdest split vision. Half the room remained dark, with the light barely limning Mircea’s head and shoulders. But everything behind me burst into comparative brilliance—and sound and sensation: the spill of neon, the hound’s unearthly bellow, the smell of gunpowder. . . .

“Which is real?” I whispered, confused, and put out a hand to where the dividing line between the two rooms boiled like steam. But when I tried to grasp it, I felt nothing, although the darkness receded faster now, like curtains closing—

Until a hand grasped my wrist. “They both are,” Mircea said, and night bloomed around us.

He seemed to be controlling the division between our two spaces, working to get the distractions down to something I could handle. But it didn’t help all that much. Because this place was plenty distracting all on its own.

I assumed I was seeing his court in Washington State, since that was where I’d left him. He’d been injured in an attack yesterday, and it must have been something to take down a man who, although he might look like a raffish thirty-year-old, hadn’t seen double digits in five centuries. And who’d been storing up power for every single one of them.

Luckily, Lizzie had spilled the beans about her side’s plans to finish the job, and I’d gotten to him before they had. I’d thought about bringing him here, but I didn’t know anything about treating injured vampires, and doubted that my small human staff did, either. And anyway, they already had enough of those to worry about.

So I’d taken him home, where I guessed he still was.

Although it was hard to tell, when everything around him looked like I was trying to view it through somebody else’s glasses. The warm wooden floor was just a smudge of brown, except for a small patch right around his knees. The tall windows, heavily draped against the day, were just darker smears. And the designs on the intricately carved wardrobe and the expensive carpets had all been smudged away.

   
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