Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,220

pieces across the sky. Or maybe a window, because they seemed to show different places inside their surfaces.

The orange-red ones were the brightest, like firelit rubies, casting leaping shadows onto the frightened faces of the crowd. They were also shedding flurries of sparks, not constantly but in fits and starts, like they were being carried by a breeze I couldn’t feel right now. And, in one case, an entire plank, like off the side of a house, came spinning into the night and then lay in the street, burning.

There were also some ugly yellowish ones, with a haze inside that was leaking out, wrapping them in dirty cocoons. And a group that appeared to show a cheerful blue sky, like a bright spring day, strangely eerie under the circumstances. And still more that roiled with dark gray clouds, massive bursts of lightning, and powerful gusts of wind that sent debris flying down onto the crowd, many of whom were standing around, staring up in wonder—

“Cassie!” Pritkin gritted out, bringing me back down to earth. I realized that the people streaming out of the inferno were too panicked to grasp that he was the one shielding them. Because they kept running into him, threatening his concentration.

And if it went, his shield did, too.

I got in front to attempt some crowd control, feeling the heat on my skin and the suddenly dry air in my lungs, and watching the dark silhouettes of people against all that light, trying to fit through one door, because the other was being consumed by flames. It should have kept my attention, and it did—helping people up who fell down the incongruously still icy steps and sending them to the right, because the left side of the street was a dead end. But even so, I kept stealing glimpses at the sky.

And realized that there was one more version of the strange phenomena that I hadn’t noticed at first, because it blended so well with the night. It seemed to show a cityscape, only I couldn’t see details, because there were no streetlights or house lights anywhere. It was so dark that all I could see was the brilliant arc of the Milky Way stretching overhead, coldly beautiful against the night. And a few moonbeams limning a mass of tightly packed buildings that were otherwise blanketed in darkness; I didn’t know why.

And then I found out why.

Because something came flying out of the surface, but it wasn’t a plank.

A bomb hit a building down the street, which detonated in a roar of shattering wood and flying brick. Pritkin cursed—I couldn’t hear him, I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the explosion—but I saw his lips move as I jerked my head around. He didn’t have that option, having to remain concentrated on the apothecary, but he somehow managed to jerk his shield over us as well.

And just in time.

I was left staring at a hail of burning bits shooting into the pale blue ward, like a thousand daggers stabbing for our hearts. And for those of the crowd, I realized a second later, who he was also protecting. He’d somehow managed to throw his shields all the way across the street, putting up a barrier between the explosion and the mass of now screaming and fleeing people.

It shocked me, even after what I’d seen him do on the train, because shields don’t work like that. Even war mage shields don’t. Not surprisingly, the section protecting the street was much thinner than the one in the atrium, looking like a sheet fluttering in a breeze because of how far it had to stretch. Also not surprisingly, it was getting shredded.

But shredded isn’t down, and it was somehow holding. And acting like a fisherman’s net, something that also has a lot of holes but manages to trap plenty of fish. Or bricks and burning roof tiles and larger pieces of wood in this instance.

But some of the smaller stuff made it through, although it had been slowed way down. Which meant that the flimsy shields of the regular Joes and Janes in the crowd could handle the impact—at least for those who had them. But some didn’t, being too frightened to hold concentration, because they weren’t trained for this!

I saw a middle-aged woman shriek and fall as something slammed into her leg. I saw an old man’s body bow outward as he took shrapnel in the back. I saw a small child get splattered by her father’s blood