Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

Kit looked at Mircea. Mircea looked at me. Kit scowled again.

“Mircea. Is there something you want to tell me?” he demanded.

“Um,” I said, trying not to look at the cabinets, “that depends. What kind of magic did the gods use?”

“What?” Mircea asked sharply.

Kit scowled harder. “I said—”

“Not you,” Mircea told him brusquely.

And caused the curly-haired vampire to flush almost as red as his coat. “Mircea—”

“Well, what did you think it was?” I asked, a little defensively. Because Mircea wasn’t looking happy.

“An extension of your power, some new facet you were exploring. But you’re telling me the gods are involved?”

“The gods?” Kit asked, his voice going up. “Mircea, what the hell—”

“It—it was mostly demons,” I said, hoping to defuse the situation.

Annnnnnd made it worse.

“Demons?” Mircea repeated, frowning.

“Um—”

“What kind of demons?”

“Well, sort of . . . a little of all kinds. It was the demon council—”

“The council?”

Kit started to say something, but Mircea shushed him with a gesture. Kit did not look happy about that. Mircea looked even less so. But it wasn’t like he was going to be able to help me if he didn’t know the truth.

“My mother wanted to talk to the council,” I explained. “And she used this seiðr spell to do it—”

“Your mother is dead.”

“Yes, well, that’s why she needed a spell,” I said awkwardly.

In fact, she’d needed it to address the council on behalf of Pritkin. Not that she’d done much of that. In fact, she’d barely mentioned him. She’d mostly talked about the war, and how we needed to ally if we had any chance of winning this. Which was true, but not helpful, since nobody else seemed to agree.

“But the spell is on you,” Mircea pointed out. Because Mircea is not stupid.

“Yes, well, I was sort of . . . channeling . . . for her,” I explained, as little as possible.

He just looked at me.

I looked steadily back. Because, sure, Mircea, I was going to talk first. I’d lived with vampires for most of my life; give me credit for something.

“We don’t know the type. Possibly used by the gods,” Mircea told them, his eyes still on me.

“Ah yes,” the little vamp said, a smart pen going to town on the small screen, almost too fast to follow. “That does simplify . . . ah. Here it is. ‘Seiðr,’ meaning ‘a cord, string, or snare,’ a form of old Norse magic and shamanism concerned with making visionary journeys.”

“Is it dangerous?” Mircea demanded.

“To which party?”