Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,219

cross. The skies were the same as before: blue-black and angry, with an occasional thread of silver lightning in the distance. No moon or stars, which had been drowned out by the ambient light from the city, or hidden by the heavy cloud cover. Everything was perfectly normal.

Except for the huge wedge of orange-red boiling away in the middle of it.

It looked like someone had decided to patch the heavens, but got the color wrong. It looked like someone had cut a piece out of a movie and glued in another movie. It looked more like a hellmouth than an actual hellmouth, because there were flames leaping, and black smoke billowing, and—

And the whole thing spearing straight down on top of the restaurant.

I shifted the table of belligerent mages, along with me and Pritkin, to the area with the wooden floor, because that was about as far as I could take so many. And because I didn’t know what would happen when that thing hit down. A second later, with a mage’s foot in my face, I found out.

There was no sound when it happened, no shuddering thud or massive explosion, no anything. Half of the formerly pristine atrium was just suddenly on fire, bisected almost exactly in two, along lines where the great wedge had come to rest. The part closest to the café was a glowing orange conflagration so hot that I thought my face was going to peel off. The other, where I’d put us down, was cold as a freezer from the frigid air coming in the big front doors all night. There was even a dusting of snow across what looked like the Rothgay’s logo set into the floor, although it was hard to see details because of all the people suddenly trampling us trying to get out of the doors—

And the damned mages trying to curse the hell out of Pritkin!

I’d have shifted them away, but then the overhead lights went out.

Maybe, I realized, because the huge patch of glass above us was about to—

Shit!

I shifted us again, right before the smoke-blackened roof—which looked like it had been burning for hours—fell in. And there was sound this time. A cracking, tinkling, crashing cacophony of it, and massively leaping flames, because of all the new oxygen that had just been let in.

But not because anything had hit the floor. I landed along with the knot of struggling men on the icy cobblestones of the street outside at the same moment that the roof should have come down, killing the crowd attempting to follow us. Instead, what looked like a couple tons of glass and iron had hit the shield Pritkin had thrown up and was somehow still maintaining, although for how long I didn’t know.

Because the damned mages were still trying to fight him!

I shifted them out; I didn’t have a choice. Although it felt like it ripped my guts out to do it. I hadn’t had a chance to recover from the last couple of days yet, and shifting multiple people was a bitch.

And it was insult to injury in this case, since we really could have used their help. Because the shoppers weren’t wasting any time. They fled, mothers with kids in hand, their frantic faces painted by flame; old people hobbling—but hobbling fast—with the help of canes; tall men ducking under the new low ceiling, their eyes huge as they stared at what was hovering in the air just above them; and everyone with the capacity popping out shields of their own. They filled the small space above their heads like multicolored soap bubbles, looking ridiculously flimsy next to Pritkin’s solid blue wall, and rubbing together as the crowd elbowed and jostled and fought and fell, all trying to fit through the big double doors at once.

Only where they were going, I wasn’t sure.

Because I’d just looked up again.

And then just stood there for a moment, staring like an idiot, because the wedge . . . wasn’t alone.

The entire sky was full of the things, hanging in the air like bright jewels. They weren’t all wedge shaped, but looked more like someone had taken a hammer to a massive pane of glass and scattered the pieces across the sky. Or maybe a window, because they seemed to show different places inside their surfaces.

The orange-red ones were the brightest, like firelit rubies, casting leaping shadows onto the frightened faces of the crowd. They were also shedding flurries of sparks, not constantly but in