Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,53

a moment, then dropped my arm to grasp his chin, moving it this way and that, the dark eyes narrowed. Caedmon put up with it, because genius trumps titles, and because he was probably vain as shit. Anyone who looked like that had to be.

“Hm, perhaps not. I will see to it,” Rafe promised.

Caedmon smiled winningly, and I swear, it was like the sun coming out. “Excellent! And once you’re done here, perhaps you might visit my palace. I have a wall in my solarium simply calling out for—”

“Stop trying to poach Rafe!” I said, taking his arm again, before I remembered who I was talking to. But Caedmon only laughed.

“That is exactly what I am doing,” he admitted. “I would steal him away permanently if I could.”

“I prefer it here,” Rafe told him dryly. “But we can talk about a painting—although not in a solarium. The sun would fade it.”

“Which would be a shame,” Caedmon agreed. “Perhaps you could—”

I stopped listening. There was a strange undercurrent in this new palace that I didn’t like. Not between the two men, who appeared to be getting along famously, but with the little knots of people here and there. The gallery, which is what I guessed the huge corridor was going to be, wasn’t even finished, yet there were people everywhere. And most of them seemed a little intense for art lovers.

And now most of them were looking at us.

“What’s going on?” I asked Rafe, who was one of the only vamps I knew who might tell me the truth.

And, yes, something weird was happening, because he glanced around first instead of just answering. “Come,” he said. “Let me show you my current project—and my personal favorite. It’s this way.”

And before I could stop him, he’d taken off down the hall, leaving two clueless demigods looking at each other. And then hurrying to catch up when Rafe turned around and snapped his fingers impatiently. Because I don’t care who you are, you don’t argue with genius.

Chapter Twelve

A hundred corridors seemed to branch off the main hall, although a lot of them were still under construction. I passed one covered by a tarp that had come loose and was blowing in the wind, showing only open air outside—and a huge tent city crowding the house and dotting the nearby hillsides. It looked like thousands of people were sheltering out there.

“The army,” Caedmon told me, as we hurried past, because the Rafe train wasn’t stopping. “The invasion is imminent.”

“How imminent?” Because I hadn’t heard anything.

“That is still being determined. There are a few impediments.”

I wanted to ask what kind, but didn’t get a chance. A bunch of workmen zoomed by with vampire speed and almost took me along with them, but Caedmon twirled me out of the way at the last second. It looked like a dance move and felt like one, too, as the corridor swirled around me. Then we were off again, a little farther up the hall, through a massive set of doors and into what I guessed was a waiting room.

It was a large space, but there had to be a few hundred people piled on sofas and propping up walls, or gazing at the room’s centerpiece, a gorgeous, golden . . . thing . . . that I didn’t even have a name for.

It sort of looked like an astrolabe, one of those old-fashioned devices that people once used to determine eclipses, with rings within rings. But it was huge, easily filling a quarter of the extended ceiling, maybe a couple of stories high at the top. And there was no sun at the center.

In fact, there was no sun at all. Just two planets whirling around each other in a crazy dance like the one Caedmon and I had just executed. Sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, but always turning, turning, turning.

And every time they did, every rotation they made, other things turned with them. The most eye-catching were the thousand or so golden strands, like threads on a loom, that moved over and beside and underneath the planets. How they didn’t get caught up in snarls and knots, I didn’t know, because they were crossing and crisscrossing all the time, in no discernible pattern that I could see. But they were beautiful, nonetheless: a woven metallic cat’s cradle dancing around and between the two worlds like—

Like ley lines, I thought, finally realizing what I was looking at.

“That’s earth and Faerie, isn’t it?” I asked Caedmon, who was