Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,104

back at me and nodded. “And these stones—they are in the form of a faerie ring, a common pattern used to build a ward around an area to keep something inside safe—or in this case, to trap it.”

I frowned. “So the mage knew fey magic?”

“Or was fey himself.”

“But why would that matter?”

“Magic is about knowledge, Cassie,” he said, repeating Adra’s words. “Knowledge that the Ancient Horror didn’t have.”

“Yes, but—”

“Think of it like a Chinese finger trap. You’ve seen them before? They’re common as party favors.”

“The kind you stick your fingers in the ends of, and then can’t pull them out?”

He nodded. “You are far more powerful than the trap, which is usually made of flimsy bamboo. But unless you know the secret—to push inward instead of the natural instinct to pull your fingers apart—it can hold you for a very long time.”

“Then you’re saying the demon was tricked?”

“Not . . . precisely. I can’t imagine a scenario in which a mage—any mage—summoned an Ancient Horror on purpose. Even if he was mad enough to try, most of their names have been lost to time. More likely, he called it up by accident.”

“A syllable off, you know,” Adra agreed, taking some snuff. “It happened to me once.”

“A mage summoned you by accident?” I said.

He nodded. “Well, I assume it was by accident. He seemed quite surprised.” He sneezed prettily. “For a moment.”

I didn’t ask him to elaborate.

“But the mage in this case was lucky,” Pritkin continued. “The monster he summoned had no familiarity with the kind of magic he was using.”

Adra ignored the implied insult, maybe because Pritkin had actually helped out, and sat back in his chair. He looked thoughtful. “The Ancient Horrors were imprisoned millennia ago, in some cases before we encountered the fey, and thus know little about them. This one doubtless tried to escape using every means at his disposal—ones that would have worked easily against human or demonic magic—but which left the fey spells untouched.”

We sat in silence for a minute, thinking—or at least I was—about the awfulness of being trapped for so long, when he had the power to escape all the time. He just hadn’t known it. And then I thought of something else.

“I wonder if that’s what happened to the other one?”

Chapter Twenty-four

I shifted back into my suite at Dante’s an hour later, walked out onto my balcony, stripped off my robe, and face-planted onto my nice, soft chaise.

I just stayed there for a while, breathing and feeling the sun sink into my skin. I needed to get up and get some sunscreen, or I was going to burn. But right then, I didn’t care. Right then, I had bigger things to worry about.

Pritkin looked at me, and then he licked his lips. “What . . .” He stopped for a moment, and the vein was back, I noticed, pound, pound, pounding away at his temple. He tried again. “What other one?”

“Uh,” I said.

“The one she helped to slaughter yesterday at the consul’s home,” Adra said helpfully, because I guess there wasn’t much he didn’t know.

Pritkin looked at me some more.

“I didn’t know it was an Ancient Horror!” I told him. “I don’t even know it now!”

“Oh, it was,” Adra put in helpfully, as the book disappeared. And in its place—

Goddamn, it was ugly! I’d been so terrified that I hadn’t had a chance to fully take it in before, but it really was a horror. Half of its head seemed to be razor sharp teeth, like some anime villain come to life, and the slitted eyes, slitted nostrils, and misshapen, bony claws didn’t help.

“You fought that?” Pritkin asked, staring at the model Adra had conjured up.

I was just glad the creature didn’t have anything beside it to show scale. It was bad enough as it was. If he saw it next to a person—

Like that, I thought, as a tiny man appeared, looking around the desk in confusion. Before stopping, like somebody in a horror flick, and slowly, slowly, slowly . . . looking up. Right before being impaled on one of those huge claws.

Well, shit.

“Kulullû!” somebody screamed, accompanied by a lot of splashing. “Kulullû! Kulullû!”

I jumped and looked over at the aquarium, only to see that the water was sloshing over the sides and tiny scuba guy had gotten a friend. I couldn’t tell much about it; just that it looked small and dark, more like an eel than a fish. But it didn’t matter.

I’d heard that voice before.

“He