Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,72

hall.

We had the numbers, but I wasn’t at all sure that we had the advantage.

Until I heard a great HISSSSSSSSSS coming from somewhere in the air, high above me.

All the skin at the base of my neck ruffled up, my eyes got big, and I swallowed convulsively. Please let that be on our side, I thought, clinging to the floor. Please . . .

It was on our side.

Or should I say, she was.

Because a midnight viper longer than a couple of buses and thicker around than a great oak tree suddenly tore past me, almost too fast to see. Which was fine; I was completely fine with that. But fish man clearly felt otherwise. He turned from smashing the skewered vamps against the wall in time for those slitted eyes to blow wide, and then she was on him.

And I might have been wrong about the viper thing, I thought, staring. Because a second later—like a literal second—she’d wrapped him up in those giant coils and squeezed. And she squeezed hard.

His eyes bulged, his face darkened, and he thrashed hard enough to knock a hole through another wall and into what looked like a ballroom. But the consul held on, even when he morphed back into an eel, thinning and elongating his body and almost slipping out of her grasp. But Mircea, Marlowe, and Caedmon had grabbed spears off the fallen, and now they stabbed them through the beast’s tail and into the floor, pinning it in place.

Or they tried. But it thrashed so hard that it shot the weapons back out as huge, flying projectiles that turned the nearby walls—and some of the guards who had been unfortunate enough to be standing in front of them—into porcupines. One swipe of that great tail also sent Marlowe, who was both a master vamp and a senate member, slamming back through the ruined waiting room and into the office as if he were nothing.

He flew by me and crashed into the far wall, although he didn’t go through it. But he hit hard enough to shake the whole room and to send the chandelier swinging wildly overhead. But a second later he was up and snarling, his fangs out, his eyes glowing.

And a second after that, the wall behind the great beast was being riddled with holes as large as cannonballs. The blasts—from Marlowe’s master power, at a guess—blew plaster and brick and marble sheeting everywhere, causing the screams from the fleeing people to reach a crescendo. But they didn’t blow through the creature, who dodged them easily.

It really was faster than a vamp, I thought, barely believing my own eyes. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. I saw guards and even senators looking around in confusion, the way humans usually did when they saw vamps move. The only ones who seemed able to keep up with it were the consul and Caedmon, and they clearly weren’t going to be taking it down alone.

What was this thing?

I didn’t know, but a second later Marlowe was back in the fray, where Mircea had commandeered a forest of spears from arriving soldiers. And it seemed they’d learned from last time, driving them almost up to their hilts in the stone floor. The creature didn’t seem to have so easy a time throwing them off after that, any more than it did the old soldier, who had been stabbing and slicing and riding it like a bucking bronco this whole time. Or the consul, who just tightened her grip no matter what it did, matching it move for move.

It looked like a stalemate, with neither of them able to get an advantage over the other. But that was good enough, I realized, relief flooding me. All she had to do was hold it there while her men finished it off!

Only I guess the creature had figured that out, too. Because it abruptly changed form again, this time into a giant squid, with seemingly a tentacle for every attacker. They were huge, each of them almost as big around as the consul’s alter ego, but they looked like water—almost clear except for sickly pink suckers on the undersides—and flowed like it, too.

They contracted back through her coils like deflated balloons, only to expand again once free, at which point they tried to wrap her up.

The two of them fought the big battle, writhing together in a constant, mind-bending coil that felt like it was turning my brain inside out. While new, weirdly