Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,61

first. “Why do you always do this to me?” he complained. “There I was, having a perfectly nice dream about a brew and a busty lass—”

Caedmon burst out laughing.

“Sorry,” he told everyone, from behind his hanky. “I’m just excited.”

I glared at him some more, and he waved the hanky at me for some reason. Like saying go ahead, get on with it. Yeah, I thought back, that would be nice!

“—and what do I wake up to? Bodies!” Billy looked about in disgust. “Why is it always bodies?”

Get inside, get inside, get inside, get inside.

“You could wake me up for a party sometime,” he pointed out. “Or a nice card game, or a chat, or a barbecue. I mean, I couldn’t eat the food, but it’s the thought that—” He stopped. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

Get inside, get inside, get inside, get inside, you son of a—

Billy slipped inside my skin.

“—bitch!”

“Oh, that’s nice,” he said, and it echoed in my head. Because there was one way we could silently communicate, but it required sharing a body. Something I had no problem with, since we’d only done it about a thousand times now, and because I needed help!

“Help!” I almost shrieked, and mentally grabbed him.

“Oof! What the—let go of me!”

“You have to help me! They want me to read these guys’ minds and they’re dead and I don’t know how and they’re dead!”

“Okay, okay, wait,” Billy said, extricating himself from the death grip I had on his spirit. “They want you to do what now?”

I explained. “So you have to help me!” I said when I finished. Because people were starting to shift position impatiently. It was put up or shut up time, only I didn’t have anything to put up!

Billy looked around again. “But . . . they’re dead.”

“I know they’re dead!”

“Don’t yell. I’m already in your head.”

“Fine, just tell me what to do.”

“About what?”

“What do you mean about what? You’ve done this before—”

“What? When?”

“You do it all the time! You drift through people’s heads, picking up on their thoughts—”

“Yeah, live people. Which these ain’t, in case you missed it. They’re not even whole anymore.”

And the next thing I knew, I was picking up the severed head, or rather, Billy was. The dishwater blond hair was wet against my hands, although not with blood. It felt like water.

“Beer,” Billy and I said aloud, and the officer nodded.

“He was drinking with some of these others. Or perhaps just fell into a puddle of it. We found an overturned table and spilled tankards among the bodies. But they were in one of the large dorm tents. Nobody saw what happened.”

I didn’t answer. I was trying, really hard, not to notice that I was holding a man’s head in my hands, but it wasn’t working. The blue eyes were fixed and staring, and had started to dry out. I suddenly understood why they always closed corpses’ eyes in the movies, even weighting them down with something. That blank, lifeless stare was—

I shuddered; I couldn’t help it.

It was horrible.

“Cassandra—” Mircea began, and then cut off when the consul put a hand on his arm, the bright yellow talons looking like they were sinking into the skin. She glared at me; she could afford to, since the other vamps were behind her. I gave her blank face back. This is partly your fault, bitch, I thought, and didn’t care if Caedmon heard.

Frankly, right then, I wouldn’t have cared if she had.

“Sinking into another mind is awkward,” I said curtly. “There may be some physical reactions.”

“Aye,” the officer said. “The bokor I knew fair shit himself.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Billy said. “I’m really enthused now.”

“Just do it,” I told him.

“Yeah, about that. Like I said, I know the basics for scanning living minds. But I’m not the necromancer here. Dead bodies are just dead bodies to me. Closed off. Silent.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, my gorge rising. Because I was afraid I already knew.

“I’m saying we do this together. Or not at all.”

Chapter Fourteen

Everything was blurry, with almost an underwater feel. I was walking through the tent city outside, or rather, he was. And the dead vamp was walking fast.

I saw a banner flutter overhead like a piece of seaweed caught in a gentle tide. I saw a piece of trash blow by in ultra-slow motion. I saw several human servants chatting over the top of a garbage can on wheels. They looked almost like they were frozen in time.

They weren’t; the vamp was just sped