Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,39

slathered it with butter and was currently making little orgasmic noises while he stuffed it in, which would have been creepy except that I did the same thing when eating Tami’s bread. Everybody did. You want magic? That stuff was magic.

“Ha!” Fred said, sitting down and pulling my tray over so he could get better access.

“Ha, what?” I asked, and stole back the end piece of the bread.

“That’s the best part,” he protested, around a mouthful of stolen food.

“I know.” I buttered it up and savored the way the crust crackled on my tongue. Just yum. “It’s still warm,” I informed him.

“You’re evil. She should have used black.”

“What?”

“Black vibes, like black magic, you know?” He nodded at the picture.

I picked it up again. “This isn’t me.”

Fred frowned around some of my cassoulet. His little fangs were out, probably to help him strip the flesh off one of the tiny chicken legs. Tami used small chickens, because she said the sauce penetrated better, and they were more tender.

Couldn’t argue with that.

“Of course it’s you,” Fred said. “Who else would it be?”

I looked at it again. “I don’t know, but I’m not that tall.”

“You are if the artist is five,” he pointed out.

“And that’s not my hair.”

Fred considered it for a minute. “You got a point there. She’s got better hair.”

He could talk, Mr. What-Comb-Over-I-Don’t-Have-a-Comb-Over. As a master vamp, he could have easily looked however he wanted to other people. Yet he continued to be the pudgy guy in the button-up shirts that strained slightly across the middle, showing a gap filled with white undershirt. And ties, when he remembered to wear them, that invariably ended up under one ear. And ill-fitting, off-the-rack suits, when even newbies to the family wore Armani.

Yet Fred was probably the easiest to relate to of all my guards. Except for right now. “I don’t look like that.”

“The kid’s five,” he repeated. “What do you expect?”

I didn’t know, but that wasn’t me. That woman was tall and strong and glowed with power. Circle hands and lopsided eyes and all, she was someone who looked forceful and imposing, surrounded by a halo of golden light. She looked like a goddess.

I put the picture down, and some of the warm feeling from lunch faded.

Fred was eyeing me up while scarfing down the rest of my meal. “It’s like Picasso, you know?”

“Why, because the eyes are off center?”

“No, because it’s not about the surface.” He picked it up. “Come on,” he said suddenly, getting to his feet.

“What?”

“I got something to show you. You can take your pie.” He looked enviously at the thick slice of lemon meringue waiting for me on my tray.

I took the pie.

Around here, you guarded your desserts or you didn’t have them for long.

Fred led the way out of the main lounge and through the secondary one with the moon-shaped couches, which provided a sort of hub where various wide hallways met. But he didn’t go down any of them. He veered off into the formal dining room, where I’d rarely been. But that obviously wasn’t true for the girls, and they’d made it their own.

The consul hadn’t been able to decide what era or style she wanted, and had kept changing her mind between rooms. This was British colonial, with dark wood everywhere, which Tami fussed about because it showed dust so easily; genuine Persian rugs on the floor, complete with frayed spots for authenticity; and paintings showing bewildered Englishmen in exotic settings. Or, at least, they had, until somebody’d covered them with drawings.

I guessed when you had a couple dozen kids, a fridge just didn’t cut it. So somebody had started scotch-taping the girls’ drawings up in here. Like, all the drawings. Some were quite good and I guess done by the older initiates, while others were just cheerful squiggles done by the youngest, which Tami—at a guess—had nonetheless proudly displayed alongside all the rest. Including some that . . .

Oh.

That looked like me.

My attention had been caught by a Cassie with a lot of blond curls and a massive head—seriously, I had more head than body—who was lurching around, chasing what I assumed were tiny dark mages in black trench coats. They were moving because the drawing had been animated—it looked like Saffy had been in here—and because the creature chasing them was terrifying. The neck supporting the giant head was just two tiny marks and totally insufficient. Meaning that it flopped about as I ran, with a large, grinning rictus of a