Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,184

time to see the thick, black eyelashes flutter, or the chest rise and fall as she drew in a breath. No time for anything.

One second she was frozen, and the next I was battling for my life with a blade still stuck an inch into my flesh.

Until I used one of the moves Pritkin had showed me and twisted out of her grip, cutting myself in the process, since the knife stayed stationary. But it was a flesh wound, burning and stinging and bleeding enough to stain my suit, even through all the padding, but not mortal. And I was too busy throwing Jo to the ground and kicking her upside the jaw to care.

The sharp ice cleats on the bottom of my boot sliced open three gouges across that pretty face, but she didn’t react except to tackle me again as I lunged for Pritkin. I needed to get a hand on him to pull him out of her spell, but that wasn’t going to be easy. She didn’t try to freeze me, probably because she couldn’t, having just done the same thing to him. But she could grab my legs and send me crashing to the ground.

So I smashed her in the face with my cleats some more, causing her to cry out and let go, and allowing me to scramble ahead for a couple of yards while staring behind me—

Before having to dodge to the side, to avoid the knife quivering out of the rock where my torso had just been.

I rolled over, kicked her in the stomach as she sprang at me, heard her scream—

And then she was gone, as suddenly as she’d appeared.

I lay in the snow for a second, breathless and staring. Then I scrambled for Pritkin and jerked him out of the remnants of her spell. The one he’d almost finished breaking himself, which had me doing a double take. Jo must have realized he was almost free; that’s why she ran.

But where? And to do what? I stared around, because Jo just. Didn’t. Quit. It was her most memorable attribute.

Well, except for the hate.

“Are you all right?”

I realized that Pritkin was yelling at me. I swiped a sleeve across my face; my nose was running and I was breathing hard. And my side felt like—

I looked down.

Like someone had fucking stabbed me.

“It isn’t that bad,” I told Pritkin, who was shaking me. And then cursing, and looking around.

“Jo,” I said. And saw his eyes widen, because I’d told him about her during some of our abortive visits.

Or perhaps that look was down to something else, I thought, following his line of vision. And catching sight of what was barreling at us through the clear blue sky like a gigantic missile. Only it wasn’t a missile. Or a manlikan. Or anything else I could possibly have expected.

“What the fu—” Pritkin yelled.

And was cut off when I shifted us, trying to get out of the way of the latest impossible thing to threaten our lives. But it was coming too fast and I was still dizzy, and then it didn’t matter anyway. Because we were standing in the aisle of an old-fashioned steam train.

That’s what I’d seen screaming toward us through the skies, as crazy as that sounds, and I guess I hadn’t been hallucinating. Or, if I was, my brain was still working overtime, showing me a crowd in Gibson Girl outfits with high collars and long skirts, or three-piece suits with top hats and pipes. The latter of which were falling out of mouths that had opened in shock, because it didn’t look like they understood what the hell had just happened, either.

Neither did I; I just knew we were about to—

“Augghhhhhhhh!” The entire car screamed as one when the train hit the ground and plowed through a couple hundred feet of snow, and then kept on going. Because we weren’t on a level; we were on a small, tip-tilted plateau at the top of a mountain that dwarfed most on earth, and now we were—

“Shiiiiiiiiiiiit!” I screamed, and grabbed Pritkin.

I had a split second to see the world tilt, to see the sky skew around us, to see the ridiculously steep and rocky slope going down, down, down slide by outside a window—

And then we were falling. Or, to be more precise, we were rolling, because antique steam trains are not designed to ski down Everest! The train car started rotating, and people started tumbling—like the guy with a copy of