Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,158

Marco’s hulking shape was visible, outlined against the slightly less dark of the terrace. His cigar end flared bright red against the night, reminding me of the bonfire I’d just left.

Claude’s couture, and the remnants of the ancient spell it contained, had gone up in flames. I wasn’t sure if it was the quantity, because they’d cleaned out his warehouse as well as his shop, or if it was the magic imbued within the clothes, but it had turned into a raging inferno. Brilliant red, orange, and green flames had shot up three stories high, sending leaping fingers scratching at the star-strewn sky. Occasionally something would pop, and there would be a sizzle of silver or a flash of blue or purple, to join the other colors. Or a comet-like burst of gold would suddenly shoot out of the heart of the flame, heading for the heavens.

We’d had to stay well back from the event to avoid being skewered, although I still smelled like smoke and the acrid tinge of spent magic. I supposed it should have concerned me that they’d had a special pit on a hill in back of the consul’s, where it looked like large fires were regularly held, but it hadn’t. I’d had a little too much else on my mind.

“Heard you had a day,” Marco said, exhaling a plume that drifted skyward.

I joined him on the terrace. The night air had a bite to it—the only way you could tell that summer had finally passed us by. I briefly wondered if I’d see another, and then told myself to stop being maudlin.

“Yeah,” I said, dropping onto a seat at the table. “I had a day.”

The consul found us a short time after the fire started, bringing the off-putting man in the dragon-hide coat with her. The wind had been up and the coat had billowed out more like a cloak as they climbed toward us, the shiny surface of the scales catching and reflecting the flames. Of course, she’d wanted something.

“Also heard you got me in the divorce,” Marco said, bringing my attention back to the present.

I frowned. “There was no divorce, you know that.”

“Heard you got me in whatever there was,” he agreed easily, because you don’t play word games after two thousand years.

I’d been looking up at the stars, visible through the clear glass roof of the terrace. The light pollution wasn’t so bad up here, although it was nothing like at the consul’s, where the bonfire had been backlit by the glittering arc of the Milky Way. With the awe-inspiring sky and the barren hillside and the forest crowding the slope, dark and mysterious, it had looked like we were performing some kind of pagan ritual.

And maybe we had been. I felt different somehow, changed. Only not in a good way.

My heart hurt.

“You wanna talk about it?” Marco said, and I suddenly understood why everyone else was missing. Then I wondered if it had been Mircea who was so thoughtful, or if it was Marco’s idea. My heart clenched, and I found it hard to breathe.

“You all right?” Marco asked, looking up from tapping some ashes into a mug. Tami didn’t allow smoking around the girls and had gotten rid of all the ashtrays, so Marco and the others who enjoyed a smoke had repurposed some old coffee mugs.

“Better remember to wash that out before Tami sees,” I told him.

A flash of white teeth in the dark. “Always do.” He glanced around. “You want some light?”

“No.”

The darkness felt good.

The darkness made it easier.

I don’t know how long we sat there, but it was a while. My thoughts were drifting to a dozen places, but not lighting on any of them. But Marco didn’t hurry me. Marco never hurried. He had a stillness about him, but not like a person. More like a mountain that had always been there and always would be, ageless, eternal. Mountains didn’t hurry.

I wondered how the hell I’d ever gotten along without him.

“Lizzie died tonight,” I finally said, but no, that wasn’t right. That was a lie. “I killed her.”

Better, but still wrong.

“I executed her.”

Marco exhaled. “That’s it, then. Mircea didn’t say.”

So, it had been him. Or maybe a combination of them both. Or did I just not want to give Mircea credit where it was due?

I ran a hand through my hair and thought about pulling it out.

“You aren’t going to say anything?” I asked, after a moment.

“I could,” Marco agreed. “But you wouldn’t like it.”

I frowned