Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,198

I was seeing Jo. I’d never seen anyone wield so much power, not even my mother. And that was while using Chimera, a spell that should have halved her ability to channel the Pythian energy!

It was like she’d died, but instead of becoming a ghost, she’d become a god. It should have taken a few dozen Pythias to manage what she’d done with apparent ease. And then had enough strength left to almost kill me!

Even with the Black Circle’s help, I didn’t know how she’d managed it. I had a huge amount of power, too, but my weak human body could only channel so much of it. The same limitation should have been on her even if she’d conjured herself up a new one, yet it didn’t look that way.

I was thankful for Gertie’s offer, but I didn’t think any amount of training would allow me to overcome that.

And neither did Jo.

Whatever she said, she wanted me dead. She just wanted to enjoy it first. But if she thought there was any chance she was going to lose . . .

I’d be dead already.

Although I felt kind of like it anyway, like a damned frozen corpse, because the water wasn’t helping. My skin had flushed red enough that it was visible even in the low lighting, but the ice at my center hadn’t budged. I was freezing, and I didn’t know why.

I finally sat up in the bath, my arms wrapped around myself, my teeth chattering. I was so cold I hurt, a bone-deep ache that had me wanting to tear at my skin in order to reach it, to make it stop. It was so bad that I found myself sobbing after a while, and feeling ridiculous but not caring. I finally decided to hell with it; the court had to have a healer on call, and I clearly needed one. Even if it came with another lecture from Gertie.

I started trying to crawl out of the bath, but my muscles were spasming and ignoring my commands, and the porcelain side of the tub suddenly seemed a mile high. All my thrashing did was send a wave of soapy water over the edge, hitting the hardwood floor and leaking toward the door. The one I couldn’t reach.

But I didn’t have to. Because someone was already pounding on it, something I hadn’t noticed in my distress, and when I made some sort of incoherent noise it burst open. Pritkin was standing there, silhouetted by the light leaking up the nearby stairs, his hair and the long coat he’d found somewhere dusted with snow, his face furious.

Until he saw me.

I couldn’t even say “help,” although I tried. But nothing came out except for a vague whimper. It would have been embarrassing another time, but I was way past caring. I held an arm out to him, sudsy and shaking and—

And then he was there, kneeling by the side of the tub.

He was cold, but not like the burning, horrible ache that was eating me alive. He was human-warm under all the snow, maybe more so than usual because he was breathing hard, as if he’d run all the way back here. And when his hand took mine, I felt a little of that terrible ice fade away.

But not most of it. I cried out, desperate for something, and I didn’t even know what it was. What was wrong with me?

Pritkin was saying something, but I could no longer concentrate well enough to understand him. I only knew that he got up to leave, probably to get help, and I panicked and grabbed on to his sleeve. And then something strange happened—stranger than anything on this very weird day.

Because someone else turned to look back at me.

It was Pritkin’s face, but not his eyes. These were greener, brighter, almost incandescent. They were also familiar.

I’d seen them once before, on that battlefield in Wales. Ares had been trying to rip open the sky, the wind had been howling and sparks had been flying, and two great armies had been clashing together in the distance. Yet the most riveting thing to me had been those same eyes.

Pritkin’s incubus nature, long starved and half-dead, had peered out of his face for the first time in more than a century. And it had been looking at me. I stared back at it now, wondering if it remembered what had followed, how we’d come together in desperation, just wanting to feel something at the end of the