Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,190

gave the paperweight a sudden, violent shove and disappeared. I watched it bump, bump, bump across the floor, alternatively obscured and revealed by the woman’s still swinging skirt. I saw it hit Gertie’s ankle, heard her curse, saw her eyes jerk up to meet mine. But I barely noticed.

I was too busy mentally screaming.

* * *

* * *

“It’s called Chimera,” Gertie said, while I sat in the midst of a mountain of blankets, clutching a large mug of tea. The storm was lashing outside, screaming like a whole army of banshees, but I could barely hear it in here. The room was warm, with a large fireplace splashing light and heat everywhere the blankets around me were thick and cozy, and the tea was almost hot enough to scald my tongue.

None of it helped.

I was still freezing.

“It has a name?” That was Pritkin. He was sitting on the edge of my sofa, across from Gertie, who was ensconced in a large, overstuffed wing chair by the fire.

She looked a lot like her sister Hilde, although with far more questionable taste. At the moment, she was wearing a crimson satin dressing gown that gleamed richly in the firelight, the same color as the cherries that littered half the furnishings in here. I swear the woman had a fetish.

“Oh, yes, indeed.”

“Then it wasn’t an accident?”

Gertie started to say something, then stopped and looked at me for some reason. “I’m not sure what it was,” she said, and sipped her own tea.

We were in her private sitting room, following a harrowing few minutes in the parlor, which had quickly filled up with acolytes, war mages, and servants, all jostling the two displaced passengers, who were still blissfully oblivious to it all. Including when Gertie did something that jerked the two Cassies back together. I didn’t understand what, because reintegration with my other half hadn’t helped with the convulsions.

It had taken Pritkin for that.

He’d been coordinating with the Circle on both ends of the time stream, first in Vegas, to help the hotel’s security contain the problem, and later here, to work with the Edwardian Circle to locate a substitute train. Once I retrieved all the passengers, Gertie and her acolytes were going to put it back on the track moments after Jo jerked the other one away, thus repairing the timeline. Which is why he’d been on hand to spell me to release my jaw, and to force a potion down my throat that stopped the seizure.

It hadn’t stopped the terrible cold, which I’d noticed after I was no longer fighting for my life, and which was still tearing through me at odd intervals, jerking my hands violently enough to send tea sloshing onto my woolen cocoon.

Like that, I thought, trying to take a sip and getting more on me than in me, while Pritkin scowled at Gertie.

It was his I-don’t-understand scowl, not one of his more fearsome varieties, but it made the green eyes flash and caused the wet crown of spikes he called hair to perk up a bit more. He’d shed the jacket of his snow suit, leaving him in a long-sleeved shirt that hugged his muscles and would have been sexy if not paired with Michelin Man pants. The fact that they were connected to suspenders, making him Farmer Michelin Man, didn’t help.

But Pritkin rarely noticed what he wore, and his personality—especially tonight—was forceful enough that nobody else did, either.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” he demanded. “If this thing has a name, then you must be familiar with it and what it does. Is it a common mistake? Because if so—”

“It isn’t a mistake.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Gertie glanced at me again. I gave her dead eyes back. I wasn’t sure what she wanted, but I was certain I didn’t have it.

“It’s a technique taught to advanced acolytes for emergency use,” she explained, after a pause. “It allows one adept to operate in multiple timelines, or in more than one place in a single timeline. It splits the soul—”

“What?”

“—into two or more pieces—”

“What?”

“—each of which can act independently. The Pythian power provides them with bodies by—”

“Wait. Wait.” Pritkin was glaring, and this time, it was one of the nastier ones. “You split her soul?”

Gertie raised an eyebrow at the tone, which wasn’t one usually used with Pythias. But that was as much of a reaction as he got. Most people found Pritkin in a mood to be intimidating, but if I’d felt better, I’d have told him