Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer 8)

“I’m trying!” I told him, clutching his hand while feeling like a mass of taffy being stretched in two different directions.

And then my fingers slipped out of his, and like a door slamming shut, I was suddenly somewhere else.

I was suddenly somewhere horrible.

Chapter Nine

The quiet of Mircea’s mountain retreat shattered, replaced by a mix of shouts and explosions and screams. And a weird drub, drub, drub that sounded like Dubstep and made me want to cover my

ears, only my arms didn’t seem to work. Or my eyes, I thought, staring around at a world gone red.

I blinked, but the view didn’t change, except that Carla was suddenly in my face. “We’ve got to get out of here!” She was yelling at point-blank range, but I barely heard her. Because that weird sound kept getting louder.

I finally realized that it wasn’t a drum, or crazy dance music. It was a series of powerful spells—the source of the red glow—exploding against something that bisected the drag a dozen yards away. Something wavy and indistinct, a barrier so flimsy that it looked like someone had stretched a piece of gold plastic wrap across the room.

“Thought the wards were down,” I said thickly, trying to focus eyes that were still trying to see two places at once.

“They were,” a different voice said, sounding satisfied. It took me a second to realize that it was bellowing from the little black thing scurrying across the floor like a spider, because it couldn’t fly anymore.

“Grafton—the guy from the Oracle,” Carla panted, trying to haul me up. “He used to be a war mage, like a thousand years ago.”

“I heard that.”

“You . . . got the shields back up?” I asked, attempting to help Carla, but just making things worse. My limbs were all mixed up, and nothing seemed to work right.

“Well, in truth there was nothing wrong with them,” Grafton said.

“Nothing . . .”

“Other than the null the Black Circle had sitting on the controls,” he added, talking about a mage capable of absorbing all magic within a certain radius. “We knocked him out, dragged him to another room, and—”

“Who is we?”

“A group of us—reporters, photographers, errand runners—something like forty people in all. We’ve been camped here all week.”

“The second stories of these Wild West facades have actual rooms in them,” said Crystal Gazing, who must have gotten a new avatar, because it was fluttering around my other side. “But nobody used them—until we realized that they offered a perfect vantage point.”

“It’s become rather like a shantytown,” Grafton said. “With reporters from every major paper and most minor ones bringing in bedrolls and such, refusing to leave after your last escapade. We assumed something else might happen, and wanted to be on hand—”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Carla muttered.

“—and fortunately so,” he added. “Some of us know a thing or two about wards.”

“Yeah, only now we have to hope the damn things hold together until the Circle gets here,” Carla panted. “Which, in case you haven’t noticed, isn’t going so great!”

“That’s the trouble with shielding common spaces,” Grafton agreed. “You can’t use the strongest wards, lest they mistake a guest for a threat. But the everyday variety, even expensive ones like these, will only hold so long against this sort of—”

“Will you shut up?” she demanded. “We have to move!”

She was right; one glance at the ward told me that. It was starting to look like a threadbare blanket, with obvious gaps in the golden weave. But I still couldn’t seem to get my limbs to work.

And then Carla cursed and slung her purse over her head. And grabbed me under the arms. And started dragging me back toward Augustine’s, like Françoise was already doing with Rhea.

“Augustine thinks he can get his ward back up,” Grafton explained, spidering alongside us. “We’re pulling back to the shop for an extra line of defense.”

“Good idea,” I said weakly, staring at several dozen spells that were exploding against the barrier and radiating outward, like acid dropped in water.

And at the pterodactyl-type monstrosities, physical wards from the lobby, that had swooped in and started picking up mages, only to hurl their mangled bodies at the wall. And at the taco cart and its flower-draped fake donkey, which was burning like it had been doused in gasoline. And at the Graeae, on the other side of the barrier near the lobby, who appeared to be hemming the mages in, keeping them on the drag as if waiting for the scary thing inside to slaughter them all.