Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

In any case, I hadn’t been zapped yet, for which I was grateful.

I would have been even more grateful if the tea that the secretary had had delivered for his break was still hot. It didn’t look like he’d gotten a chance to drink any—there was still a full pot—but it must have been there for a while. Even a knitted green tea cozy hadn’t been enough to hold in the heat.

It was a shame, I thought, taking off the top and peering inside. I’d like some tea. It still smelled really good, but there was nothing worse than lukewarm—

And then it got zapped, when Pritkin came back this way again, causing steam to boil out of the opening.

Well, that worked out, I thought, and poured myself a cup.

Pritkin slammed his hands down onto the table, hard enough to make the pot jump and a little Earl Gray slosh out onto the cozy. Luckil

y, I had the cup in my hands. I sipped tea, which seemed to enrage him even further, if that was possible.

“Why does he want you?” Pritkin demanded, flinging out a hand at the guy next door.

“The same reason he wanted Jo, probably.”

“Who he already has! Why does he need you as well? And did you know he was planning to capture you before you deliberately went back to confront him?”

That was a lot of questions at once, which was good. There were a few in there that I didn’t want to answer because I preferred Pritkin alive and I was pretty sure the truth would give him a heart attack. So, I chose the easy one.

“I didn’t know he was going to be there at all. I was expecting another fey—”

Aaaaand that hadn’t been the right answer, either.

“Yes! Because a fey assassin is so much better!”

I took a moment to sip tea, and to give myself a chance to come up with an answer that wasn’t an emphatic agreement, but nothing came to mind. And then Jonas pulled him off, giving me a reprieve. I still didn’t manage to come up with a reply, however, because my brain was shorted out.

I found myself watching Jonathan instead.

That was easy, since the small room was adjacent to the larger one we’d just been in, with a two-way mirror separating them. Jonathan was still slumped in his seat while the medic attended to him. The two were surrounded by no fewer than six hulking war mages, with another dozen having arrived and arrayed themselves around the room.

I wasn’t completely sure if they were there for Jonathan, who wasn’t looking up to attacking anybody right now, or Pritkin, who’d had to be dragged off him. Something that . . . hadn’t gone well. Which was probably why several more mages were awaiting the medic’s attention, and why a bright yellow light was strobing the room.

The young medic finally finished with his patient and went on to Pritkin’s battered comrades. That gave me a better view of the prisoner, although with the flashing lights and hedge of leather coats, I still couldn’t see him too well. But what I could see . . . was disturbing.

Jonathan should have looked vulnerable; most people would have in that situation, especially most people who weren’t much healthier looking than a concentration camp victim. His ribs were clearly visible, along with too-sharp elbows and knees, and ridiculously long toes which he was currently picking at. His cheeks were sunken, and his skin had an unhealthy, sallow cast to it. It did not compliment the greasy blond hair or the dark circles under his eyes.

And that wasn’t even counting the pulverized mess that Pritkin had made out of his face.

Yeah, Jonathan should have looked pretty damned pathetic.

He didn’t.

Maybe because he didn’t appear to be worried about his current predicament, which worried me. He had the air of a man waiting at a bus stop for a ride that was overdue, or somebody in line at McDonald’s wishing they’d hire more cashiers. Not frightened or apprehensive or anything that one would expect from someone in the Corps’ less-than-gentle hands, where “accidents” had been known to happen.

The Corps was on the side of the angels, but they weren’t very angelic and everybody knew it.

Yet Jonathan just sat there, looking vaguely bored.

Unlike his guardians. The war mages were tense, and one of them had a hand hovering just over his potion belt, like he was trying to decide which concoction he’d like to use to end our problem. I found myself wishing that he’d slip up, make a mistake, have a fit and do it, which said a lot about my own state of mind, I wasn’t sure why.

Okay, that was a lie; I knew exactly why.

Jonathan wasn’t looking around at the moment, or at anything other than his overgrown cuticles. And I wouldn’t have been able to see his eyes from here anyway, especially with all that hair in his face. But I could see them in my mind, almost colorless, mad as a hatter’s—and hungry.

Jonas had told me once that the crazy bastard was almost a thousand years old. That was something like five times the average lifespan for a mage, and at least four for the longest-lived ones, the kind who ended up on the news like humans did who passed a hundred. Yet Jonathan looked thirty, maybe thirty-five.