Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

It was a virtual tower of meat, cheese and spicy tomato sauce, barely held together by a golden-brown crus

t. For a moment, I just sat there and breathed heavily while mop guy—who had finally lost his wooly appendage—cut a huge slice for me and another for Pritkin. Mine had to be four inches tall and just looking at it made me happy.

I dug in.

“What makes sense?” I asked, in between bites.

“At a guess? Magic workers.”

“What?”

“Do you remember Macbeth?”

“The play?” I nodded. Pritkin and I had ended up at a very memorable performance of it once.

“When shall we three meet again?” he quoted. “In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“It’s spoken by the witches in the first act, whilst preparing to cast a spell to control Macbeth’s thoughts. But mind control spells are notoriously difficult. They usually require a trine for stability: three mages who combine their power to cast a single enchantment.”

“Then . . . you think Jonathan was planning to cast a mind control spell?” Because that wasn’t horrific at all.

“Not necessarily. Many complex spells can’t be cast by a single mage. That’s why a coven must have at least three members, or it’s not deemed worthy of the name. In any case, it sounded as if he was afraid of us casting a spell, or of being part of a trine that does so, rather than the reverse.”

I frowned. “But what spell? What takes three people?”

He shrugged. “Any number of things. Long-term mind control, as I mentioned. Large-scale illusions. The bigger offensive spells, which combine the power of multiple mages into one. Most of the greater protection wards—”

He kept talking, because he was basically a walking encyclopedia of magical knowledge, which was great and really useful. And I tried to concentrate, I really did, but my body was tired and my brain was full. It kept zoning out.

I ate pizza while Pritkin’s voice washed over me. It was soothing in a way that I couldn’t quite describe. Jonathan was a horror story that made my skin crawl, but when Pritkin talked about him, it didn’t bother me so much. I felt safer here, sitting behind some wine boxes and crates of eggplants, than I had all month.

There’d been something missing in my life lately that all the running around in the world couldn’t compensate for. Something that was shortly going to be missing again, when I went back to court and my big, cold bed, all alone, where I’d toss and turn and hope he wasn’t doing something that might get him killed. Again.

And this time, it might not be something I could fix.

I’d rather stay here and just hold him for a while. Wrap my arms around him and maybe my legs, too, and hold on. It didn’t even need to be sexual; I just wanted to feel that heartbeat under my cheek and bask in the warmth of a whole, unharmed body—preferably someplace where it would stay that way!

I was sick of worrying about him, of being separated from him. Sick of smelling nice, floral scented sheets when they should have smelled like gunpowder and magic. Sick of the Circle, which seemed determined to keep us apart, and the damned demon council, which had tried to make sure that I’d never smell that combo again—

My brain skidded to a halt.

Pritkin broke off and shot me a glance, because he doesn’t miss much. “What is it?”

It took me a minute to answer, because some things were finally making sense. Not entirely, and not a complete picture. More like a half-done puzzle with most of the center missing.

But, suddenly, there were a few more pieces on the board.

“There was one spell that Jonathan was interested in,” I said slowly. “Lover’s Knot.”

“And you know that how?”

I gave him a short version of the events in HQ’s library.

“You can see through the eyes of a cat?”

“Yeah, well, not normally.” I skipped over it, because I didn’t want to get on the subject of enhanced abilities and master vampires. “But the point is, we did use that spell once, when fighting Jo. And Jonathan did take a lot of trouble to remove it from the library—”