Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,139

have the strength left, because I’d just poured it all into that last, final PUSH.

I groaned and the mighty table cracked and broke and splintered. It sounded like a hundred guns going off as the great slab cleaved straight down the middle, falling into two distinct halves that hit the ground and all but disintegrated. The remaining chairs exploded in fantastic showers of gold, like brilliant fireworks in the gloom. And Ingaret’s own spell finally hit the back wall of the senate chamber and detonated, shaking the room and sending a red glow sifting through the air.

And reflecting in my eyes, or so I was told later, making me look half-angel, half-demon as I shouted: “Run!”

They ran.

Chapter Thirty-two

I woke up to the feeling of somebody watching me.

I didn’t open my eyes, having learned a few things in my time as Pythia, and let myself finish waking up first. This didn’t feel like my room at Dante’s, with the bedclothes under my hands silky rather than velvet, and it didn’t smell like it, either. More of a piney sort of musk—

This was Mircea’s room. I’d know that scent anywhere, as dark and subtle as the man himself. And suddenly it all came flooding back. Including a memory of me somehow walking out of the echoingly quiet senate chamber, Mircea on one side and the consul on the other. We cleared the heavy doors that swung shut behind us before I collapsed to my knees. And looked up at Mircea desperately.

“Can I pass out now?”

“Yes,” he’d told me, his throat working. “Yes, you’re safe now.”

That was the last thing I remembered.

But it wasn’t Mircea in the room with me. The scent of him was distant, muted. He’d been here, but he wasn’t here now, and I wasn’t a vampire. I couldn’t use my nose as another pair of eyes.

So I opened the real thing and almost jumped out of my skin, because that damned dhampir was almost on top of me!

“I knew you were bluffing,” she said, as I scrambled back and almost brained myself on the headboard.

Luckily, it was padded.

Unluckily, there didn’t seem to be anybody else in here, and shifting was . . . God, so out. My whole body felt like a sprained muscle, weak and sore and hurting, with the very idea of accessing the Pythian power ridiculous. I was on my own.

The dark eyes flashed gold for an instant, then went back to brown again. She tilted her head to look at me, and somehow, she’d moved without my seeing her, because she was once again invading my space. Although, frankly, anything within five miles would have qualified.

But even I had to admit that the lovely face was breathtaking, especially this close: the eyes with amber light boiling just beneath the brown, her power kept on a tight leash; the thick, dark lashes that were so like her father’s and didn’t require so much as a hint of mascara; the red lips that were likewise natural—or had the best, most perfect lipstick I’d ever seen. The damned woman was stunning, and it pissed me off, because I knew how I probably looked. And it wasn’t pretty.

I felt like I’d been on a ten-day bender on the cheap stuff, with my head pounding, my eyes gunky, and my vision blurry, or maybe that last one was down to the room. The bedrooms at the consul’s house didn’t have windows, for obvious reasons. And the lighting in here was even worse than it had been in the senate chamber.

A single lamp glowed on a table by the wall, just enough to highlight the crimson bedclothes and fine, dark wood furniture of the bedroom Mircea used when he was in residence. It wasn’t something he made a habit of, which probably explained why the only touch of the man was a priceless Chagall on the wall, the bright golds, reds, and blues glowing softly through the gloom. Well, almost the only thing, I thought, looking back at the woman.

“What do you want?” I asked, because if she was going to kill me, I kind of thought she’d have done it already.

I didn’t get an answer. The examination of my face continued, despite the fact that it couldn’t have been pleasant. “Good camouflage,” was the final verdict. “You could pass for completely human, except for the eyes.”

“What’s wrong with my eyes?”

“Nothing—for a seer.”

She sat back against the footboard, finally giving me some space, and lit up a blunt. The strange,