Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,102

in case Adra didn’t get sarcasm.

“This is troubling,” he said, but his face didn’t reflect it. It had fallen into the blank, almost dead look he got when he was too busy to remember to animate it. So instead of a bad glamourie, it looked like what it really was: a mask hiding a terribly old, terribly powerful, terribly intelligent being.

Who suddenly snapped out of it and smiled charmingly at me. “Could I see this book?”

“You could, if I hadn’t left it behind,” I admitted. “The covens have it now, if they haven’t destroyed it. Which they might have. They don’t like demons, and right now, I’m not much more pop—hey!” I said, because he’d reached out a hand, only to have Pritkin jerk me away.

He’d pulled me completely out of my chair before I realized what was happening, and got between me and Adra. And he didn’t look so closed off now. He looked furious.

“You don’t touch her!”

“Ah,” Adra said, studying him, maybe because the green eyes were definitely glowing now. I’d thought that might have been a trick of the light back in his room, but in the dim little office, there was no question. He suddenly looked like what he was: a powerful demon lord in his own right.

One who was ready to throw down.

I caught his arm, because no, no, no, not again! We didn’t need a replay of last time, and I was pretty sure that that’s what we were about to have. Because Pritkin might have gotten an upgrade, but Adra wasn’t head of the demon high council for nothing. And this was his turf.

Unlike us, he had plenty of backup.

But Adra wasn’t looking angry. If anything, he looked the opposite, with a strange little smile flirting with his face. “Pit bull, indeed,” he murmured, and then glanced at me. “With your permission, of course.”

“Permission for what?”

“A different way to see.” He looked at Pritkin, who hadn’t moved, and sighed. “Sit down and stop acting like the maniac everyone believes you to be.”

Pritkin did not sit down. “I’ve been called worse than maniac through the years. But hurt her and find out how true it is!”

Adra started to look annoyed. “If I wanted to hurt you—either of you—you would be hurt. If I wanted to kill you, you would be dead. I clearly want to talk, which we cannot do if we have nothing to talk about!”

The not-sitting-down thing did not change.

Adra sighed again. “I am using the—” he began, and then went on to utter a stream of syllables that made my inner ears want to turn inside out and crawl off somewhere. Preferably somewhere that wasn’t using whatever language that was. It sounded the way the things I’d seen outside had looked, the ones I’d glimpsed behind the failing cloaking spell. My brain hadn’t been able to handle them, either, giving me a scrambled egg feeling up there, and this wasn’t helping. I was about to have to ask him to stop when he finally did anyway.

“That is all?” Pritkin demanded, having apparently been able to follow all that. “You will swear to it?”

“I assume you mean formally?” And before I could ask what that meant, a series of what sounded like bells rang out, loud enough to make me jump.

I just . . . really want to go home now, I thought, clinging to Pritkin.

“He swore a formal oath. He can’t hurt you,” Pritkin told me. “He will be using an ancient spell to allow us to see what you saw. If you agree?”

I nodded.

I wanted to get this over with.

We all sat back down. Adra reached over the desk again, to hover a finger above my right temple. “Concentrate on this book,” he told me. “See it clearly in your mind.”

And the next thing I knew, there it was, sitting in the middle of the desk, as perfect as when I first saw it, the black cover shining in the low lighting. Only that wasn’t right, was it? There should be—

Six or seven large ruptures, I thought, jumping a little as they suddenly appeared in the surface, almost before I’d finished the thought. They exploded out of the leather like someone had shot it. Only they weren’t from a gun.

Damage from the fey’s spear, I realized.

Man, he’d really done a number on it.

And then the cover grew swimmy and faint, almost blurry.

“Concentrate,” Adra told me. “See it as you first did, when it was whole.”

I tried, I really did, but