Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,129

the senate always put on a show, especially when they had guests. But this was next-level, even for her. Because she wasn’t just wearing snakes, as I’d originally thought.

She was wearing cobras.

I stumbled back a few paces to get away from the three curious, flat-headed horrors who had just detached from the living sheath covering her from breast to groin and flicked their tongues out at me. Others twined around her arms like living bracelets and climbed up her legs like the straps on gladiator sandals, only she wasn’t wearing any. She’d finished the ensemble off with black snakeskin pumps so high that I didn’t know how she walked in them and black pearls so lustrous and scattered so thickly through her long, dark hair, that I couldn’t tell what was a jewel and what was the gleaming black eyes on another of her creatures.

Taken all together, the ensemble was stunning and eye-catching and horrifying and weirdly beautiful, just like its owner. Especially now, with her color high and her dark eyes flashing. It didn’t look like she’d been warned about Mircea’s little show, either.

“Of course,” he said smoothly. “But perhaps Cassie should—”

“Stay,” the consul snapped. “You used her as a strong-arm tactic; she has the right to know why.”

“I did not,” Mircea said stiffly. “I didn’t know she planned to be here.”

“Then you took advantage of the opportunity. Or perhaps this was your idea?”

And, suddenly, those flashing eyes were on me.

“What? I—no,” I said, stumbling back a bit when one of the damned snakes lunged at me. I didn’t know if they responded to their mistress’s temper, but it kind of looked like it, with more and more of them peeling off to stretch deadly, snub-nosed heads in my direction.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I’m supposed to be here! I’m Pythia—”

“Lady Phemonoe did not attend our meetings,” she pointed out.

“Well, did you invite her? Because mine got lost in the mail!” I said, trying to recover. “And anyway, we weren’t at war then! And this new senate of yours has every other damned head of—of anything—on it, and it didn’t even exist in her time!”

I was practically babbling, but damn, it was hard to think with those things reaching, reaching, reaching—

“Shit!” I said, and shifted the closest fanged horror with no destination in mind, just “away.” Which I guess my power interpreted as the other side of the senate chamber, because a tray suddenly clattered to the floor and somebody screamed. Although maybe that was down to something else.

Around here, who the hell knew?

“If your invitation was lost, as you say, then why are you here?” the consul persisted.

“I came to see Mircea!”

“About?”

I really considered telling her to go to hell. Or perhaps sending her there. And for some reason, even the thought made me feel better, because I could do it. I wouldn’t—I wasn’t that stupid—because no way would the fallout be worth it.

Besides, she’d probably enjoy it.

I turned to Mircea, since he was the one I’d come to see. “You need to stop poaching my guys,” I told him. “It’s becoming a problem.”

“Poaching?” He actually looked confused. I guess Batman hadn’t had a chance to warn him.

“You keep taking my guys,” I clarified. “The masters you sent me? My bodyguards?”

Mircea finally looked like he’d caught a clue. “Yes, there has been some necessary reshuffling—”

“No, not necessary! I need my men!”

“Cassie,” he said, in his patient voice. “Some of the men I sent you are experts at the kind of warfare considered antiquated on earth, but which is still practiced among the fey. I need their expertise. Marco, for instance—”

I felt my blood run cold all over again. “You are not taking Marco!”

Mircea blinked at me. He almost looked taken aback, maybe because I’d shouted it. “I beg your pardon?”

“You can’t have him! He’s mine!”

An eyebrow arched. Goddamn, he knew I hated that. “On the contrary, I believe that he is mine.”

It hit like a punch to the gut, and not just because I’d come to depend on my chief bodyguard. He was scary as hell to almost everyone, a six-foot-five-inch hunk of solid muscle with terrible taste in golf shirts and awful, smelly cigars. But to the little girls of my court, he was a giant teddy bear who let them crawl all over him, who cooked them cartoon character pancakes for breakfast, and who let them paint his fingernails. And when a couple of the other guards made the mistake of laughing at Marco’s new, dark