Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

Try to help someone, I thought furiously, getting back to my feet and shaking out my bloody skirts. And this is what you get for it. When we got back, I swore to God—

Well, actually, I didn’t know what to swear. I’d never figured out any method of dealing with Mircea that actually worked. Except for letting him have his way, and that was not happening here!

I held out a hand toward the now tiny figure of the fleeing vamp, because masters can haul ass when they choose, and concentrated. Standing almost right in front of a portal, my power still worked, something I guessed Mircea hadn’t thought about. And I knew a few tricks, too.

I grabbed him metaphysically and pulled, trying to shift him back to me. It should have worked, as I’d been able to shift without touching someone for a while now. And I’d been getting a lot of practice with my taskmaster of a teacher, a purple haired martinet whose sarcastic voice I could almost hear in my head.

“What’s the matter, girl? Still thinking about weight? The Pythian power doesn’t care about such things!”

Which was a load of horse apples, because shifting something like a pencil and shifting the Empire freaking State building were two entirely different things. But a hundred-and-eighty-pound asshole should be doable. Only he wasn’t coming.

Because he was fighting me.

“Son of a bitch!” I yelled, and that was another mistake. The effort of speaking caused my concentration to wobble, which was enough for Mircea’s spell to grab me. And to send me flying at him instead.

I hit hard, and we both went down, but at least there was no bloody horse carcass this time.

There was something worse.

“What is that?” Mircea demanded, looking up at the sides of the very tall canyon. Where somebody, probably centuries ago, had made some elaborate carvings in the rock. Dozens of them, ranked along both sides of the walls, maybe ten stories tall and looking like stone sentinels.

Their faces were cracked and parts were missing, with noses being in especially short supply. And some kind of vine, brown and lifeless now, had once flourished here, eating through gray stone armor and carved flesh alike. But most of the statues were still intact, and their weapons—massive swords, huge spears and heavy maces—seemed to have weathered the centuries just fine.

Of course they had, I thought, as a cascade of small pebbles started to rain down on us.

“What is it?” the bastard at my side demanded. “What’s happening?”

“Faerie,” I breathed, and grabbed him. “Run.”

“What? Why?”

“That’s why,” I yelled, as a giant leg burst out of the rock, sending a spray of hard little shards slamming into us. Because these were Svarestri lands, and their element was earth and all its various components. And they could do an alarming number of things with it.

Like that, I thought, as the canyon around us cracked and morphed and changed. And the huge sentinels that had been looking like ancient stone carvings a second ago, became an ancient stone army instead. One with spears the size of fir trees and boots as big as—

“Shit!” I yelled, and reached for my power.

And found nothing. Maybe because I was tired, and holding concentration is hard when massive boots are slamming down all around you. Or maybe because we were too far away from the portal, which I couldn’t even see anymore.

Not that I would have been able to, anyway. The heavy dust cloud raised by all those crashing limbs had blinded me, and the stabbing spears had me seriously disoriented. Not to mention freaked out, especially by the sound, which was beyond deafening. It ricocheted around my skull, making it hard to think, and the dust made it all but impossible to breathe.

But Mircea didn’t need oxygen, and his arm was about my waist, threatening to bisect me every time he jumped us out of the way. Which was constantly, his vampire senses somehow keeping us just ahead of the living avalanche. But he only had to falter once and we were toast.

&nbs

p; This wasn’t going to work!

And then I felt it: the glimmering stream of my power, like a literal lifeline, pouring through the portal. Like it was reaching for me, too. I grabbed hold of it, wrapped my hand around it, and then slung it about our bodies for good measure.

“Hold on!” I told Mircea, who had just slammed us back into one of the indentations in the cliff made by the now missing sentinels.

“For what?” he yelled. “I can’t shift!”

“But I can!”

“How?”

“Because I’m Pythia,” I snarled, and proved it.