Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,124

Mircea, in his former job as her chief diplomat, had managed to convince the other five senates that it should be her.

You’d have thought that would have won him some major brownie points, but her gaze wasn’t that of a proud mentor. It wasn’t that of a jealous rival, either, because the consul was too good to show everything she felt, and because he wasn’t one—yet. But if even I could see the way he easily commanded the room—her room—so could she.

I glanced around the large space, wondering if the guards I’d been promised were here or not. I’d recently made a deal with Adra for bodyguards for Mircea, the kind that even the consul couldn’t see. But the problem with invisible guards is, how do you know if they’re slacking off? I sure as hell hadn’t seen them in action yesterday, when we were all fighting for our lives!

And she wouldn’t need long.

I caught her eyes for a moment, and they narrowed slightly. She glanced around at the same areas I had, the dark gaze opaque and inscrutable. I wondered if mine and Mircea’s recent breakup had given her reassurance about our combined power, or if she thought it some kind of mind game—the kind that came before an attack, perhaps?

She needed him, I reminded myself, at least for now.

And when she didn’t?

I forced a neutral expression onto my face and resisted the urge to chew on my bottom lip. This was why I hated intrigue. Vamps lived for this stuff, but I always felt like I had too much to watch and not enough eyes. Tami needed staff to help with the kids, but I needed a damned spymaster, like the consul had in Marlowe. I also needed to talk to Adra again—preferably when I wasn’t half-asleep and scared out of my mind.

I needed to be sure those damned guards were here.

“Not Jonathan,” Mircea repeated, unaware of the drama. “He remains on the loose, which is why we need your help to locate him. We destroyed the flowers and equipped our army with shields—”

“I would damned well hope so!” someone said.

“—but there is every chance that more of those bullets exist. Even worse, it seems that they were merely a lure to bring our senators to Hong Kong on an investigation. The idea seems to have been to destroy the city and take as many of us as possible along with it.”

Mircea made no indication that I could see, but Jonathan’s disturbing face suddenly changed into an image of a city, sleek and modern and lying above something that looked like . . . well, that had to be a ley line vortex—a massive one. Most vortexes were tiny things, small puddles of power where a couple of lines crossed. But this one was being fed by dozens, maybe hundreds, some so large that they looked like major arteries leading into a pulsing heart of power.

I’d never seen anything like it.

The resulting sea of magical energy shone like a star, or like a supernova when the city suddenly tilted, going from horizontal to vertical like a sinking ship, upending and plowing right into the middle of it. The resulting explosion flashed bright enough to cause some of the people around the table to shield their eyes, including me. And when I looked again—

The city was gone. Just gone, without even any debris to mark where it had been. And pulsing outward from the boiling center of the vortex were rivers of magical power, thrown up by the crash and flooding the ley line system like a tsunami. One that was rapidly spreading outward—

“Oh God,” someone said, loud in the silence. While we watched three of the major centers of vampire power on earth be wiped away, like sandcastles when the tide comes in. Because the Chinese, European, and the South Asian senates were situated on the ley lines, for ease of transport.

Might want to do something about that, I thought dizzily.

“As you know,” Mircea said, his voice echoing in the stunned silence, “the city of Hong Kong is really two cities in one: the human and the supernatural, the latter of which exists in a phased state slightly outside this dimension, thanks to the magnificent engineering job done during the early years of her highness’s reign.”

Ming-de graciously inclined her head, making the tassels on her elaborate headdress swing slightly.

“This allows both cities to occupy essentially the same space at the same time, creating a truly supernatural enclave that