Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,23

usefulness.

After all, we didn’t intend to negotiate with the gods.

“Tell him he can’t keep taking my guards,” I yelled, because the noise level in here had just gone up again, thanks to everybody pouring back in from the foyer. “I need the people I have. They’re trained how to handle this place—”

“—dinner, although there is a . . . tomorrow, after—”

“What? Hold on,” I yelled, and pushed my way through the crowd. I went back out to the foyer, but several vamps were still there, jumping around and trying to grab the floating packages, so I reversed course. Through the living room, across a large open space with a couple of half-moon couches, where some of the older girls had been having a lesson, judging by all the books and papers scattered about, and into the butler’s pantry next to the formal dining room, which was currently empty. Thank God!

“Are you there?” a polite voice asked.

It sounded like Mircea’s new personal assistant, who’d been brought on to help with all the extra work connected with the war, only they didn’t call him that. They called him some weird military name out of another time. “Are you Batman?” I asked, and forgot not to yell.

“Gerald, Lady,” I was informed, in a pained-sounding voice. “Please call me Gerald.”

“You know,” I told him, “if I had a job that allowed me to go by Batman, I don’t think I’d ever use any other name.”

The sigh actually got through that time.

“Do you wish me to pencil you in for tomorrow?” he asked. “Otherwise, I’m afraid the first available appointment is—”

“I don’t want an appointment. I just want to talk to Mircea.”

“I understand, but the master is—”

“Busy, yes, I know. Taking all my bodyguards for colonels or whatever in his new army. Look, he sent them to me because he said he didn’t need them. I get that times have changed, but you can’t expect Joe Vampire to handle things around here. We just had an incident with another new arrival that could have been bad—very bad—over nothing. Literally nothing! I can’t—”

Marco came in. He was still dragging the gun-happy vamp, but almost absently, like he’d forgotten that he had the guy’s throat in one catcher’s mitt–sized paw. “What. The. Hell?” he demanded.

“I’m trying to get through to Mircea now,” I told him.

“Not that.”

“Then what?”

Tami came in, her arms full of firepower, her face thunderous.

Well, shit.

“She wants our guns,” Marco said accusingly. “She said you authorized it.”

“You authorized it,” I reminded him. “You said if there was another incident—”

“From one of my guys. This wasn’t one of my guys!”

“Then what would you call him? I thought Roy—”

“Exactly! He’s one of Roy’s guys—”

“I cannot work in these conditions!” The door blew open again and Augustine was there, in all his glittery, insect-like glory. He was blond, fashionably thin—which allowed him to squeeze past Tami—and easily as tall as Marco. Only instead of the linebacker type, he was the praying mantis type, with an elongated body draped in couture bodysuits that he designed himself and stick-thin arms and legs.

And fingers, I thought, as one was waved in my face.

“You promised me peace and quiet! You also promised me some sort of guidelines, of which I’ve received exactly nothing! You promised me—”

“Here.” I cut him off, because I didn’t have time for this, and thrust the box I’d grabbed into his arms. “That’s what I want.”

“What?” He looked at it like it was something I’d dragged in on the bottom of my shoe, despite the slick gold wrapping paper the shop had swathed it in. “What is this?”

“Open it and see.”

“Cassie—” That was Tami, giving me The Look. I’d known it since childhood, and it had never boded well.

“One second,” I told the guy on the phone, who was trying to pass me off to a subordinate.

“—my assistant will set up a time—”

“I don’t want Robin, I want you!” I snarled. “Don’t you dare go anywhere!”

“Who is that?” Marco demanded.

“Batman.”

“Very funny.”

“Mircea’s batman.”

“Oh, that prick.”

“He can probably hear you—”

“Then he’s doing better than I am,” Marco said sardonically, probably because Augustine had started screaming. Again.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked, because the man had opened the package and was now standing there shrieking at the contents, I didn’t know why. It was the gorgeous battle dress I’d seen in the mall, which was currently in its metallic silver state, the tiny, delicate-looking scales flowing like water over Augustine’s long fingers.

“Where did you get this?” he screeched.