Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“Tricky?”

“It’s under restricted access. Do you have top secret clearance, by any chance?”

“I . . . don’t know.”

“They didn’t tell you when you were hired?”

“I . . . wasn’t exactly hired. I’m, uh, I’m the Pythia.”

Her eyes opened wide, allowing me to see that they were almost the same color as her cat’s. “Why, what a pleasure! I heard, of course, that we had a new one. Should I curtsey?”

“Please don’t.”

She smiled. “It must get old, doesn’t it?”

“Unbelievably.”

“Well, let’s not worry about that, then.” She leaned in. “It’s just as well. I have no trouble getting down these days, but getting back up is problematic.”

I smiled, because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Let’s just get you verified, and then we’ll see about that spell,” she said.

Verification turned out to involve more spells—of course. I don’t know what else I’d expected. And they weren’t done by the kindly little librarian, either. No fewer than six large war mages arrived within minutes, surrounded me in a back area of the facility, and applied a series of incantations, some so strong that they felt like they burned my skin.

“Ow!” I told a huge Asian guy, who was being a little less than careful with his magic.

He didn’t even look at me. “Inconclusive,” he said, and stood back.

A tall black guy came forward who I guessed was the leader. He had been standing back from the others, legs planted and arms crossed, glowering at me. That would have been more of a concern, but the stance was war mage standard. I was pretty sure they taught it in training.

He reminded me of Caleb, a friend who was also in the Corps, but he didn’t look very friendly. And neither was the spell he hit me with. Something slapped me, not just in the face but all over my body, like a million tiny pinpricks slamming into me at once, causing me to cry out.

And then to get really pissed off.

All I wanted was a damned library card!

. “Agreed,” he said—to the other guy—before finally addressing me. “You have a strong enchantment on you. What is it?”

“None of your damned business,” I said, because I wasn’t feeling real cooperative. And because admitting that I was in Lover’s Knot with a master vampire wasn’t going to go down well.

Of course, neither did that.

“Take her,” he barked, and the war mages closed in, almost as one.

Or they did until I shifted outside the circle, behind the leader. “Cut it out,” I told him, and he whirled on me.

“How did you—grab her!”

That started an absurd few moments of me shifting here, there and everywhere, staying just ahead of the reaching hands and lunging bodies of half a dozen mages. Until I finally got sick of it and shifted to the top of a stack. And then just sat there, watching them bumble around below, searching for someone who was no longer there.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” Emma Lantham said, eyeing me.

“Ma’am!” The leading mage said. “Please stand back! We have a potential dark mage incursion—”

“No, we don’t.”

“—and are sealing off this section until we find her. Benson! Sato!” the leader looked at two members of his team. “I need a perimeter around the library, make sure nothing gets through. Including anything under an invisibility spell!”