Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,182

to, because maybe this was friendship for an incubus. Especially one who had just gotten his power back and was having “issues,” as he put it!

Well, maybe I was having issues, too! Because one minute, there we were in a passionate embrace, practically melting the snow off the mountainside, and the next, he was lecturing me like it was our first mission together and I didn’t know anything! Like he hadn’t listened to me about Adra when I pointed out that maybe running off with a guy who’d recently killed you wasn’t the best plan. Or about the gods when I said, hey, you know what, maybe we ought to find out some more about the people we’re fighting. Or anything else!

I knew it was fear and spent adrenaline making me freak out, but it wasn’t just that. I’d been complaining that I never saw Pritkin, that we’d spent the last two weeks mostly apart. But now that we were together, I didn’t know how this was supposed to work.

I’d had exactly one relationship before, with a master vampire who was more like a force of nature. Mircea had just swept in and handled everything. We’d rarely discussed our relationship at all.

I’d just somehow ended up in a luxury hotel suite surrounded by his guys, with a credit card I hadn’t asked for and didn’t use because it felt weird, sitting around waiting for his call. Like one of the many mistresses he’d had through the years, but not like anybody permanent. Not like a wife.

Because he already had one of those, and nobody was allowed to take her place.

So I’d never really had a chance to find out how a normal relationship worked.

But I didn’t think this was it!

“I’m your partner, not your boyfriend, a word I hate in any—” Pritkin paused, and his head tilted. “Wait. Am I?”

“How the hell would I know?” I demanded, in a vicious whisper, because that thing was still too close. “When do we ever talk? About anything? Caleb’s always there, or Tami’s coming by with some more goddamned soup, or you’re running off half-dead to do some crazy errand for Jonas, or we’re both about to die!” I gestured around. “Even at the top of the world, something is always trying to kill us!”

Pritkin just looked at me some more, an odd expression on his face. I jerked away, waving my arms like a madwoman to dissipate the camo bubble. Outside, the sun was glaringly bright, but the snow was still coming down fast and hard. We needed to get this done.

I stomped over to the little bastards in the bag. They were called spriggans, and there were three of them, small, round, bumpy creatures that could hunch down and give decent impressions of rocks when they wanted. Which was why they were here.

Human tech didn’t work so well in Faerie, especially if you want it to beam info back to earth, so the spriggans were a work-around. They’d long been used by the dark fey as spies on their enemies. Put one or more where you wanted, and have a vargr—a sort of fey seer—peer through their eyes and tell you what was going on.

Of course, vargrs could do that with birds, too, but they were being shot down left and right by the Svarestri whenever they got too close. Besides, birds gave a brief snapshot of a scene before wheeling off again, and we needed constant eyes on the ground—or, more appropriately, the pass—to make sure our work crews didn’t get a surprise. Hence, the asshole contingent.

Luckily, Pritkin and I didn’t have to worry about their attitude problems. We just had to get the living cameras into place, along with some supplies, without anybody noticing. And then get ourselves out.

Which was going to be the hard part, I thought, glancing back down the mountain. We had to get back to the portal after this was done, a feat that would have daunted Edmund freaking Hillary, except for the Pythian ability to shift through space. It wasn’t as impressive as time manipulation, but it was a hell of a lot easier.

At least, it was when I hadn’t already done a spatial shift and a time stoppage practically back to back! And even a brief time bubble was expensive, powerwise. I needed to refuel.

“Do you have any granola—” I asked, starting to turn, before something caught my eye.

Because it didn’t look like Pritkin had conjured up a snowstorm after all. He’d conjured