Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“And just how am I supposed to see him? No, no, don’t tell me. Just hang on.”

Billy fished around in the back pocket of his jeans and brought out a small notebook, of the kind that they definitely did not have in the Old West. Meaning that he’d materialized it out of part of his energy, just to be bitchy. You had to admire that kind of dedication.

“Let’s see. Rattling chains, howling and moaning, jumps scares—always a favorite—opening cabinet doors, flicking the lights on and off—”

“Billy.”

“—and spying on the living.” He flipped over a few pages. “Yep, that’s what I thought. Seeing through fey glamouries isn’t in my skill set! Guess I shoulda sprung for the deluxe version.”

“Billy.”

“But I didn’t. Meaning that I’d be no more use than the butt load of mages he’s already surrounded with. They’re packed in there like sardines, you said it yourself.”

“But they can’t see the fey.”

“Neither can I!”

“You don’t have to see him. You can smell him.” I reached over and picked up one of my new perfume bottles, which thankfully had survived the raid on my dressing room. “Like this.”

He scrunched up his face, but took a whiff. “Nasty,” was the verdict.

It was unfair. The concoction mostly smelled like roses crossed with lemons. A little unusual, but definitely not nasty.

“The glamourie an assassin will be under has to be fey, or HQ’s wards would detect it

“Then why can’t the mage?”

“He won’t be looking for it; you will.”

Billy gave me his stubborn face, which was a problem, because I couldn’t make him do anything. He wasn’t my slave; he was my friend. He could do me a favor or not, as he chose.

And right now, it wasn’t looking too promising.

I lay back against the pillow again and stared at the ceiling. “I have a boyfriend who’s being stalked by a fey, and an ex who’s decided that he’s Pythia, an imminent invasion and everybody yells at me—”

“Everybody doesn’t yell at you,” Billy said.

“Just in the last two days, I’ve been told off by Mircea, Hilde, Tami, Pritkin and Marco. And sort of by Rhea.”

“Rhea?”

“It was subtle. You know how she is.”

“Tops from the bottom,” Billy agreed, and I smacked him.

“Are you going to do this for me? Please? I need at least one thing marked off the list so I can sleep.”

“Hypothetically, say I was stupid enough to get talked into this. How am I supposed to warn him?”

“You know how. The same way you did last time.”

Billy had saved my butt a month ago, when he’d carried a message from me to Pritkin in the heat of battle. I’d been tied down by a rogue acolyte named Jo, who was determined to destroy the timeline for all the wrongs she felt humanity had done to her. Which was a lot, since she was a raging narcissist who basically thought she should be worshipped.

Anyway, I’d been battling for my life, which should have been easy enough. Except that she and Jonathan had become good buddies, and he’d toked her up on mass quantities of stolen power courtesy of the Black Circles reserves. She’d also fed some of it to a few thousand hungry ghosts, who most definitely will work for food, and stuffed them into rotting corpses to make herself an unkillable army. And she’d put me through an elaborate obstacle course to drain my strength before even showing up.

And did I mention that she’d been trained in the Pythian power, and I had not?

Yeah.