Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer 8)

That cow pasture should hold two more.

Buzz Cut took back his paper and looked at it for another minute. And then up at me. And finally did something that left me blinking in surprise: he grinned. “You really kill a couple hundred mages?”

“I had a lot of help. Now, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Don’t do it,” his buddy advised.

“But it’s her, man. It’s her!” The grin was out in full force now, showing a gold tooth.

“It is not. It’s some reporter trying to sneak in, and I’m not getting my ass kicked over this,” he said, and put a meaty hand on my shoulder.

I sighed. Damn, this was going to hurt. I started to reach for my power, which felt sluggish and very unenthusiastic.

And then stopped, because I didn’t need it.

Buzz Cut knocked Mr. Clean’s hand away. “Show some respect.”

“You did not just touch me.”

“Just call someone!” Jules said—why, I didn’t know. He knew as well as I did how this was going to go down.

“Grab the baby,” I said quickly, and Jules snatched the wide-eyed innocent out of the way before a vamp fist knocked a two-foot hole in the concrete.

And then another one caved in the side of my defender’s mouth, a fact that did not keep him from getting his buddy in a headlock. He spat bloody teeth, although not the gold one luckily, and grinned at me some more. While the other vamp thrashed and snarled, and used his foot to shred a line in the concrete.

Ours used his to push the door open. “No problem,” he said indistinctly. “I got this.”

We walked through the door.

At first, I couldn’t see much, thanks to the consul’s version of emergency lighting. There were more of the standing candelabras around the edge of what felt like a big room, clustered together in threes and fours. But unlike in the hall, where the ceiling had been too low, there were also chandeliers overhead. Massive ones, dripping slippery puddles of wax onto the rough concrete floor, and almost blinding me after the darkness of the hallway. The closest one was especially dazzling, and so big that it blocked the view of most of the middle part of the ceiling—until I moved a little farther in.

And forgot to breathe.

“What the—?” Jules whispered, his hand gripping my arm. The baby had stopped, stock-still, on my other side, his mouth open, his gaze directed upward in disbelief. I didn’t know what vamp eyes saw, but to me it looked like a big black cloud hanging over the center portion of the room, with flashes of colors here and there that strained the eyes and hurt the brain. Because they weren’t supposed to exist on earth.

Like the creatures who made them.

Because the consul had herself a basement full of demons, oh yes, she did.

Chapter Thirty-five

For a moment, I froze, the tiny-mammal-when-a-hawk-flies-over response kicking in with a vengeance. Like the let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-here response that hit a split second later, the two orders crisscrossing in my brain, and giving me a good idea of why people in emergencies fall down so much. It’s not that they’re clumsy; it’s that their feet are trying to follow two different commands at the same time.

Only, this time, I didn’t fall. Maybe because Jules was still stuck in stage one and had a death grip on my arm. Or maybe because it had just dawned on me that there had been no reaction to our appearance. The cloud acted as if it hadn’t even noticed us come in—which I doubted—but if it had, it wasn’t doing anything about it.

As far as I could tell, it wasn’t doing anything at all, except hanging out.

At vampire prom.

I blinked, but I swear that was what it looked like, now that I could see it: a big concrete rectangle of a room, large enough to have held two basketball courts end to end with room to spare. Only the spare was taken up with sets of old wooden bleachers hugging the walls, to complete the high school gym vibe the place had going on. And it was crowded, with maybe three hundred elegantly dressed masters and clusters of their more plebeian-looking servants, some sitting with comical discomfort on the bleachers, others standing about with glasses in their hands.

All it needed was a lousy band and a photo line.

And maybe an exorcist, I thought, staring upward again.

“Cassie,” Jules said, turning to me, blue eyes wide.

“It’s okay,” I told him.