Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer 8)
“You look like a good gust of wind would blow you away,” he finally said.
“Caleb—”
“And I’ve seen that look, all right? I’ve seen it a lot. I know war mages who would have broken from some of the stuff you’ve been up to, and I strongly suspect I don’t know the half of it. Maybe Jonas sees the same thing, that you need a rest—”
“Yeah, I’ll take a few days off, hang by the pool.”
“I’m serious—”
“So am I,” I said, a little sharper than necessary. Because how did he not get this? “I take a vacation, and Pritkin will be dead and Ares will be back, because I have two rogues still alive and I don’t know where either of them is!”
“Two? I thought Lizzie—”
“Two. Jo Zirimis is the other, and she isn’t even in custody. My power is ignoring her, acting like she doesn’t exist, but she does—”
“Then why is the Black Circle targeting Lizzie?”
“Because they don’t know where Jo is, either! Nobody knows where she is—or when,” I added darkly, because one of my now deceased rogues had claimed that she was going after the same godly weapon that I was.
But if Jo was trying to shift back fifteen hundred years, she was going to be trying awhile. I was assuming that was why my power was ignoring her, that she was shifting in baby steps, ten or fifteen years at a time, whatever an acolyte’s thin stream of access would allow. And not getting anywhere. That or she was dead, too, because time travel was damn dangerous, as I ought to know. But that still left me with Lizzie to worry about, and I was worried.
“I need to know where Lizzie is, Caleb. I need to know what Jonas did with her, if she’s secure—”
“I’m sure she is—”
“Are you?” I swallowed pork. “Because I’m not. Jonas took her away, and didn’t even bother to tell me where—”
“You just said you weren’t there.”
“—or to tell anyone else! Or to wait for me to come back—”
“And do what with her? You don’t have the facilities—”
“And he does?”
“He has more than you. And maybe he thought that’s what you’d want—”
“So he asks me!”
I glared up at him, and for a minute he glared back. War mages—some war mages—tended to be fanatically loyal, especially to a guy they’d followed for decades. It was why Jonas’ crazy coup of the Silver Circle had worked; a lot of mages had chosen to follow him or to just putz around on the sidelines rather than support his corrupt successor. At the time I’d been grateful for that, since coups tended to be a lot bloodier than ours had been. But now . . .
It could be really inconvenient now.
“Jonas is in Britain,” I told him steadily. “That’s all I know. I need to know more than that.”
Caleb didn’t say anything.
“Caleb—”
“We’re getting perilously close to me crossing a line here,” he said quietly.
“You didn’t cross it when you helped me break Pritkin out of hell?”
“That was different. I’m supposed to help the Pythia. It’s part of the oath.” He winced slightly. “And the old man never specifically said not to break into a hell zone. . . .”
“So when I asked you said yes. Okay, I’m asking now.”
“Yeah, but what you’re asking now is that I give you classified information, which I don’t have, by the way. I don’t know where your acolyte is—”