Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,173

witches went right on up to Raphael and peered curiously into his pan. And then stared in wonder as he began crafting them perfectly rendered pancake portraits of themselves, using three pans and vampire speed to expedite the process.

“You missed your calling,” I told him softly, putting a hand on his shoulder so I could whisper in his ear. “You should have been a chef.”

He laughed. “Perhaps I will take up a new profession. After so long, it may be time.”

“Lady Cassandra?” one of the mages said, and I looked up.

“You want some breakfast?” I asked.

The man—an older, gray-haired mage with skin like burnished bronze—scowled at me. I didn’t take offense; they always looked like that. “No. We want to talk to you.”

“As do we!” Evelyn said, bouncing up from a stool with jam on her chin. She gestured at the witches clustered around Rafe, some of whom were suspiciously young-looking and appeared as wide-eyed and charmed as the initiates.

“I’ll be back,” I promised, eyeing up the girls. “Finish your meal.”

She looked like she wanted to argue, because Evelyn always wanted to argue, but Zara put a hand on her arm and pulled her back down. The impressive-looking woman I’d first met at the train station, and who had afterward been part of the attack at the consul’s, was standing behind them, looking awkward and out of place. I’d noticed her outside—she was hard to miss—but she didn’t seem remotely menacing at the moment. Or all that impressive. More small and chagrined and deflated, with even the electric mass of her hair hanging dispiritedly around her face.

She also wasn’t eating, which was a shame, considering that you didn’t get a meal like this every day.

She saw me looking at her, and her face fell some more. “I—I wanted to apologize—” she began.

“Eat first, apologize after,” I told her, and looked at Tami, who had just come back in with more stools, borrowed from the bar, by the look of them.

“Juice or coffee?” Tami asked, shoving one of the stools behind the impressive woman’s knees.

“Uh. What . . . what kind of juice?”

Which was a mistake, because we only had about fifty. Good; that ought to hold her for a while, I thought. Tami started rattling them off, while I stepped outside with the mages.

“Cassie!” Marco called from the living room, before they could get a word in.

“Sorry,” I told them, and hurried across the lounge, stuffing down the rest of my breakfast.

“Is it always like this around here?” I heard one of the mages ask.

“No, you caught us before the daily crazy starts,” I said, and then wondered if I’d lied. Because Rico was striding across the living room, which wasn’t a surprise. And had Rhea thrown over one well-muscled shoulder, which was. Especially considering some of the things that were coming out of her mouth.

One of the war mages reacted, but I put an arm in front of him. “You draw weapons in my house, you never see the inside of it again,” I warned.

“But that’s the Lord Protector’s daughter!”

Looked like word had gotten around.

“And she’s fine. Aren’t you fine?” I asked Rhea, who had just been carted into the lounge.

“I’ll be fine when he puts me down!” she snapped, red-faced and furious.

“I will put you down when you are back in your room,” Rico told her easily.

“You will put her down now!” the belligerent young war mage said.

“Stay out of this!” Rhea snarled.

The older war mage sized things up. “Stay out of it,” he told the younger man. And then he looked at me. “I suppose you need to deal with this?”

“Yeah. There’s coffee in the kitchen, if you don’t hex anyone.”

His mouth twisted. “We’ll try to refrain.”

They went back inside and I turned around—and found only Marco there. “Where’d they go?”

He sighed. “To her room?”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know any more than you. Didn’t even know she’d gone.” He eyed the suitcase that Rico had dropped in the middle of the floor when he’d decided he needed two hands to control Rhea’s wiggles. “Is she leaving us?”

I scowled. “Hell if I know!”

I grabbed the case and went stomping past the half-moon couches. And then down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. And discovered that, sure enough, Rhea was back in her room, with Rico leaning against the door frame, temporarily trapping her there.

“Move or I’ll move you!” she told him, furious.

“Without this?” Rico twirled a wand between his fingers adroitly.

“Where did you get that?”

“When I was a