Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer 9)

Looked like word had gotten around.

“And she’s fine. Aren’t you fine?” I asked Rhea, who had just been carted into the lounge.

“I’ll be fine when he puts me down!” she snapped, red-­faced and furious.

“I will put you down when you are back in your room,” Rico told her easily.

“You will put her down now!” the belligerent young war mage said.

“Stay out of this!” Rhea snarled.

The older war mage sized things up. “Stay out of it,” he told the younger man. And then he looked at me. “I suppose you need to deal with this?”

“Yeah. There’s coffee in the kitchen, if you don’t hex anyone.”

His mouth twisted. “We’ll try to refrain.”

They went back inside and I turned around—­and found only Marco there. “Where’d they go?”

He sighed. “To her room?”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know any more than you. Didn’t even know she’d gone.” He eyed the suitcase that Rico had dropped in the middle of the floor when he’d decided he needed two hands to control Rhea’s wiggles. “Is she leaving us?”

I scowled. “Hell if I know!”

I grabbed the case and went stomping past the half-­moon couches. And then down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. And discovered that, sure enough, Rhea was back in her room, with Rico leaning against the door frame, temporarily trapping her there.

“Move or I’ll move you!” she told him, furious.

“Without this?” Rico twirled a wand between his fingers adroitly.

“Where did you get that?”

“When I was a boy, I used to be . . . what is the English phrase? Glue-­y fingered?”

“Sticky fingered! And you had no right to take that!”

“And you had no right to sneak out in the middle of the night without so much as a word to anyone,” he shot back. “Including your Pythia.”

“I told her!” Rhea thundered. “I said—­”

“I heard what you said,” Rico interrupted. Because of course he had. He’d been in the kitchen last night when Rhea and I had had our abortive conversation. Which, with vampire hearing, was practically the same as being in the room. But I guessed Rhea hadn’t remembered that.

Because she suddenly burst into tears. But, weirdly enough, her voice still sounded furious. I couldn’t see her, being out of sight of the doorway, but her tone was eloquent when she half yelled, half sobbed: “I’m useless! Don’t you understand? I’ve always been useless!”

She said some other stuff, but it was muffled by something that was probably her head being pressed against a strong, manly chest. And, you know, maybe this wasn’t the best moment to interrupt after all. I quietly set the suitcase down by the wall and tiptoed away.

Only to find myself confronted by another one, this time in Fred’s hands, as he snuck out of his door down the hall.

He saw me at almost the same moment that I saw him, and his face went through a n

umber of contortions before settling on panic. He suddenly broke and ran, scampering for the front door like all the hounds of hell were after him. And vamps scamper fast.

But so do shifting Pythias.

“Not a chance,” I said, appearing in front of him as he reached for the door handle.