Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

But then a gentle hand touched my arm.

“It is your choice, of course,” Rhea said, and this time, her eyes were dry. “But for my part, I would like to stay.”

And yeah, I thought. That’s what everyone always forgot about her. She looked soft and sweet, but while the sweetness was definitely there, she wasn’t soft. She wasn’t soft at all. There was all of her mother’s steel in that spine, and some of her father’s, too.

Hell, she was probably stronger than me, and she had a right to stay if she wanted to.

“Okay,” I told her. “Just don’t expect it to be pretty.”

Rhea nodded, and we re-emerged from our hidey hole into a still deserted foyer. It was a large, marble space designed to be impressive, and it succeeded. There was old world paneling on the walls, a breathtaking staircase with gorgeous old wrought ironwork leading up, and chandeliers that were both massive and yet tasteful at the same time.

It also smelled—a lot.

I wrinkled up my nose. I’d been too busy being yelled at by Agnes to notice earlier, but the Pythian Court smelled like wet dog. Or possibly a lot of wet dogs, because that was some stench. Maybe that’s what had Agnes’s panties in a bunch: we’d shown up on housecleaning day.

“Is something wrong?” Rhea asked.

“You don’t smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“I don’t know. But it’s nasty.”

And then Agnes was back, shifting in with a vengeance, because she didn’t like being fooled. For my part, I didn’t like being gassed. What the hell was that?

I leaned forward and sniffed her. Nope.

She reared back, and then flushed angrily and got in my face. “Get out!”

“Why?”

“We’re busy!”

“Doing what?” I asked, because I didn’t see anything important going on.

And then I found out what.

“Auuuggghhh!” somebody screamed. It might have been me. Make that probably was me, because something huge and fanged had just knocked me over and was bearing me to the ground.

I heard Rhea yell, heard Agnes curse, heard the blood roar in my ears. And then I threw the creature off me, all eight or nine hundred pounds of it, but not by using the Pythian power. That takes concentration and right then, I didn’t have any.

I did, however, have something else.

Son of a bitch! I thought, and my attacker—huge, fur covered, and snarling—went flying.

And since it looked like Lover’s Knot did work, even when the component parts were in different centuries, that was a literal statement. A body the size of a compact car hit the wall and hit hard, but didn’t crash through. The Pythian Court had seen its fair share of shit through the years, and they built sturdy.

Instead, the creature bounced off, taking a large amount of wood and plaster along with it, and stood there for a second, shaking its great, shaggy head and giving me my first good look at it. I guessed it was a Were, with possibly the last part of that word being wolf, although it was hard to tell. It was massive, plus I only got a split-second glimpse, because even stunned it moved like lightning.

All I saw was a huge mass of brown fur, evil yellow eyes, and what looked like foot long fangs coming at me.

And then I was crouching, ready to take it, stick thin arms and all, because physical strength doesn’t matter if you’re a vamp. Or borrowing the power of one, and a first-level master at that. Challenge was suddenly singing in my veins and blood lust was flooding my senses, rich and meaty in my throat and on my tongue, delicious.

No wonder Mircea liked combat!

He wasn’t the only one. The creature came for me in a blur of speed that I shouldn’t have been able to see at all, because human eyes don’t work like that. But vampire ones do.

I grabbed it halfway through its leap, in a liquid motion that I barely had to think about, and sent it rocketing in the other direction. Across the hall and into the grand staircase, where it crashed, turned on a dime and sprang back at me. Which brought a quick smile to my lips.