Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,4

hard way that I actually preferred when I didn’t know what he was up to.

The guards smiled at me, and one stubbed out a cigarette before they disappeared inside. Not that it mattered; they could hear us perfectly well from there or from a couple blocks away. But that sort of thing was intended to put people at ease.

They shouldn’t have bothered; Hilde struck me as the type who’d never been ill at ease in her life—and who never let anyone else take the lead.

“You’re going to tell me the initiates are too young,” she began, before I could get a word out.

“Because they are! And they’ve just been through a trauma—”

“Exactly so.” She looked at me kindly, but with resolve. “It’s been made very clear that our enemies will not take their youth into consideration, other than to view them as easy targets. They have to be able to defend themselves.”

“We have to defend them. It’s our job—”

“And what are we to use to accomplish this job, hm?” she demanded, her head tilting. “There’s you—and you’re always away, battling gods; there’s me, and while I am certainly formidable, I’m not as young as I used to be; there’s a bunch of vampires, God help us, who’re good enough for the simple things, I’ll grant you, but—”

“They helped!” I said, remembering the Battle on the Drag, as it had come to be known, the recent assault on our home base by several hundred dark mages.

“Yes, they did,” Hilde agreed. “But it was your ability with the Pythian power that saved the day. We must have more adepts.”

“We have Rhea—”

Hilde harrumphed. I stared. I’d never heard anyone actually do that before.

“Something might be made of that girl eventually, it’s true, if she has anything of her parents in her,” Hilde said. “But right now, she’s almost as ignorant as the rest of ’em. They need training, not coddling.”

She sounded like somebody else I knew. John Pritkin was a war mage who had helped to protect me when I stumbled into this crazy new life—well, eventually. Our first meeting had not gone well, and neither had a bunch of subsequent ones. But when he finally figured out that I was serious—that, untrained as I was, I was trying, goddamn it—he got on board.

And when Pritkin gets on board, he really gets on board. The guy doesn’t know what half measures are. Which had resulted in me hating my life more than I already did when he put me through a training regimen that would have done a marine proud.

Not everyone had agreed with that approach. Mircea, for one, preferred the wrap-her-in-cotton-balls-and-sit-a-ton-of-vamps-on-her method, which, to be fair, had helped me out more than once. But Pritkin’s training had increased my self-esteem and my belief that I could maybe, possibly, eventually, kind of do this, and had allowed me to save myself.

So I understood where Hilde was coming from, I really did. But there was one crucial difference. I was an adult and a Pythia, while the girls . . .

I looked back through the shop window and didn’t see warriors. I saw kids playing with toys and running around, finding new treasures with which to decorate their currently spartan bedrooms to make them their own. And laughing and talking in spite of everything, especially the little ones, because they were resilient, as children tend to be.

But there was a limit to what anyone could take.

And, suddenly, a huge surge of protectiveness swept over me.

I’d had to be an adult before I was ready, and it had left me with more scars than I could name. I passionately wanted these little girls to be able to be kids, as I never had. To live for just a few years free of worry, to be able to laugh and run and play, instead of looking over their shoulders every few minutes, lying awake at night riddled with fear, and walking on eggshells.

War or no bloody war.

I turned back around and realized that Hilde was watching me, and that her eyes had softened. “You’ve a good heart,” she told me. “But you can’t protect everyone all the time. Neither can I.”

“No,” I admitted. “I can’t. Which is why we need help.”

Chapter Two

“You’re sure this is it?” I asked as Hilde paid the cabbie. We were supposed to be here to see about getting some coven girls for the court, but I didn’t see any—or much of anything else. Unless you counted miles of unforgiving desert