Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,25

guns Tami had heaped on a counter.

“No. We’re explaining the issue and waiting on a ruling from our Pythia,” Tami said.

Great.

Somebody was squawking something out of the phone, so I put it to my ear. “Hello?”

The squawking stopped. “Hello?” It sounded tentative.

“Who is speaking, please?” I asked impatiently.

“G-Gerald?”

He sounded like he wasn’t sure, which made two of us. “Who?”

A long sigh came through the line. “Batman.”

Oh, right. “I want to speak to Mircea,” I told him.

There was a pause.

“You know,” he gritted out. “I’m not supposed to do this, but I can tell you that they’re about to take a break. If you get here in an hour or so, you might be able to catch him—”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“The new senate hall, at the consul’s home in New York—”

“Thanks, I’ll be there.”

“Cassie!” That was Tami.

“All right, this one goes home,” I said, patting Daniel on the shoulder and receiving a grateful look in return. “Guns are permitted only for the original group under Marco’s control. Newbies have to earn the right to carry, and they are only assigned outside work—in the hotel and casino, but not in the court itself—for at least a month after arrival. You guys need to work together to come up with a training regimen for them so they don’t freak out at the kind of stuff that goes on around here.”

“And what are you going to do?” Marco asked.

“Get a bath.”

Chapter Six

I was glad I had an hour, and not only because I was pooped. But because of that thing everyone does when they’re going to see an ex. You know the one I mean. Even if it’s over and you know it’s over and you don’t even want it to not be over, you’re not going to show up looking less than your best.

Like in spaghetti-stained jeans, washed-off makeup, and hair that had dried on its own after being electrocuted by a merman.

Okay, that last part was more my life than most people’s, but you get the idea. It was gild-the-lily time. And I had one hell of a place to do it in.

My old digs were downstairs, serving as housing for some of my bodyguards, because they liked being close and didn’t mind the bullet holes in the walls. I’d lived there when it was just me, but with the whole Pythian Court showing up, I’d needed more space. Something I suspected had been anticipated by a mind far older and sneakier than mine.

Strongly suspected, I thought, eyeing the Greek key designs on the tiles in my huge, basin-like tub as I drew a bath.

They matched the blue border on the white tiled floor and the mosaics of fish and weird-looking dolphins around the sink area. There were more dolphins in the mural in the attached dressing room, frolicking in a crystal blue sea visible through ivy-covered, painted columns, which looked like it had been taken from a postcard of Santorini. It hadn’t. I knew that because I knew who’d commissioned it. So it was probably the view off Alexandria or something, the way it had been two thousand years ago.

Because the mind behind my luxurious new bathroom, and the rest of this place, was no less than the consul of the North American Vampire Senate. She looked like Cleopatra if she’d had a modern makeover, maybe because she was Cleopatra with a modern makeover. Some vamps’ histories could really play with your head.

But she was still around and more powerful than ever, and sometime after I ended up Pythia against everybody’s expectations, and then further surprised them by managing not to die, she’d realized that one of two things was going to happen. I was going to end up back in Britain, where the Pythian Court had resided for a while—and thus back under the thumb of the Circle, who had their main base of operations there. Or . . . she needed to get busy.

So she had, booting me out of my old penthouse, which had stood in a fraction of this huge new space, and then gutting it along with the rest of the floor. The reason given was that her former local abode—at MAGIC, the supernatural version of a United Nations—had been an early casualty in the war. She’d therefore had no choice but to move in here and create a mansion for herself and the army of servants she supposedly needed.

But despite my blond hair, I’m not completely dumb. And I’d noticed that, once she’d finished the place,