Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

She stopped abruptly, and I could tell that she was fighting back tears.

“You really think that’s the only reason she brought you back?” I asked, after a moment.

“Why else?”

“Because you’re beautiful? And brilliant? And powerful . . . and her daughter?”

Rhea had been staring at the bedspread, but at that she looked up, and seemed startled, as if she’d never heard herself described that way. But then her face fell. “She never said those things to me. She didn’t feel that way—”

“You don’t know that.”

Her hand crept up to her face, where the slap mark still burned. “I think I know that,” she whispered.

I decided to hell with it, crawled across the bed, and put an arm around her, like I’d been wanting to do for the past half hour. “That slap wasn’t meant for you,” I told her. “It was meant for me.”

“What?” She looked up.

“Agnes doesn’t like me. When I was here the first time, we had a training exercise together and . . . I won.”

“Well, of course you did,” Rhea said staunchly, which was absurd. Agnes’s knowledge of the power was way better than mine, and her control—including split second timing—was like none I’d ever seen.

Well, except for maybe mom’s.

“If you consider ageing the ballroom out of existence and killing my substitute body in the process to be winning,” I agreed. “Which I guess Agnes does, because she’s hated me ever since, and tonight she took it out on you.”

“She’s jealous,” Rhea said. “She was always the best by far out of Lady Herophile’s acolytes.”

“I’m not an acolyte.”

“No, you’re a Pythia. One not much older than she is now.” Rhea shot me a look, and I was relieved to see that she seemed a little better, even cracking a smile. “She’s very competitive. It likely bothers her to have someone better at anything than she is training here, even if it’s only for a while.”

“Well, she won’t remember any of it, after I’m done,” I said. Gertie was going to erase her memory. She had to; Agnes would have been appalled to find out that, someday, she was going to play a big part in my life.

Very big.

And then I thought of something else. I glanced at Rhea, who was so like her mother in so many ways. Same looks, same magical ability, same natural stubbornness . . .

I wondered if she was competitive, too.

Something must have showed on my face, because Rhea began to look alarmed. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” Just that no one else had been able to get through to her, and . . . well, I thought that Agnes owed her daughter some training. If nothing else, it would allow Rhea to throw her mother around the room a little.

Might be cathartic.

“I don’t like the way you say nothing,” Rhea told me worriedly.

I grinned. “You need to learn to trust your Pythia.”

“I do trust you, it’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

She swallowed, and then came out with it. “You have a very unorthodox way of looking at things!”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure Gertie will sort me out, sooner or later.”

“Gertie’s not much better!”