Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,183

up a windstorm, which had picked up snow from one part of the mountain and dumped it on another. Including the snow that had been covering something sprawled beneath a nearby boulder.

Something wearing a dragon-hide coat.

It was bright green and shimmering softly under the brilliant sun, like a spill of emeralds. But it didn’t feel like them. It felt like sharp-edged silk, something almost liquid it was so fine, running through my fingers like water when I tugged on it, trying to see—

Oh God.

I stumbled back a step, because the head . . . wasn’t there. A ragged, blackened stump of a neck and a frozen bloody pool were all that was left. Until I spotted the missing piece a yard or so off, wedged between some rocks.

It hadn’t decomposed, being so high up. But it looked like it had been pecked at by birds or gnawed on by animals—maybe both. The eyes were gone—thankfully—and so was a lot of the soft tissue.

But the cracked and blackened teeth were still the same.

I stared into that frozen rictus, and a wave of dizziness hit me. Because that . . . was impossible. The remains looked like they had been here for days, maybe weeks, before the snow covered them up. But I’d been talking to Tristram just last night, and in a place that checked people for glamouries before they came in. He couldn’t have been anyone else—

Unless that someone else was a nine-hundred-year-old mage with the equivalent of a master’s powers. I’d even thought it myself: what if Jonathan had developed new abilities over all those years? Like being able to morph his looks without the need for glamouries?

It would explain how he’d been able to elude both the Circle and senate for so long, and how I could have been talking to him last night when—

When he’d suggested coming up here. When he’d sworn that he couldn’t get past Aeslinn’s security to spy on the pass. When he’d insisted that he needed me and my power to do it instead—

Holy shit.

I jumped back to my feet and spun around, a warning on my lips.

Only to find myself face-to-face with someone, but it wasn’t Jonathan.

It wasn’t Pritkin, either. He was where I’d left him, with an out-flung arm and a half-open mouth, caught in the middle of a spell. One he’d never had a chance to finish because somebody had frozen him, like I’d done to the little creatures in the bag.

Probably the dark-haired woman standing in front of me.

“Hi!” Jo said brightly, and stabbed me.

Chapter Forty-two

The only thing that saved me was my Michelin Man jacket, stuffed with a hundred ducks’ worth of down, and the matching padded overalls I was wearing underneath. I guess Jo hadn’t been expecting that. Like I hadn’t expected to feel the blade pierce my flesh, a sharp, burning pain; or to see my white suit flood bright red; or to smell my own blood on the air as the world tilted from shock—

And then I was reaching for my power and pushing back against time, although it felt like moving a mountain, like moving the whole world. Because this wasn’t my world, and every action in Faerie took ten times the strength. And that was without a knife sticking out of my ribs!

But I wasn’t dying here, not at anyone’s hands, and especially not hers.

I felt it when my power surged around me, when time slowed and then stopped, leaving the vicious satisfaction frozen on Jo’s face. The narrowed eyes glittered; the dark hair flowed out like a frozen banner behind her; the lips snarled, baring teeth almost as sharp as a vampire’s. But that wasn’t what had me staring.

What had me staring was that she looked exactly the same as always.

Jo was a necromancer, whose freed spirit jumped bodies with ease, and so death for her was a little different than for most people. But I hadn’t expected to see her like this, like nothing had ever happened. Stupid, stupid!

Spirits manifest bodies in Faerie, as I knew from some of Billy Joe’s adventures. I should have expected her to end up here, sooner or later, where my power couldn’t track her. Especially since she’d been working with the goddamned Svarestri!

Like I should have expected her to pull herself out of my spell within seconds, because she was an adept, too.

There was no transition, as I’d seen with the few others who had the power to break through a time stoppage. No