Brave the Tempest

Chapter One
          The small pouf was a little overly excited. It was jade green velvet, and a bit worn in the center, where years of feet had left a permanent divot. But the gold silk tassels at the corners were still fat and sassy, and the little round feet were polished to a high shine.
          Not to mention the personality, which was, um, happy.
          “I think it’s trying to hump your leg,” Billy told me.
          “It is not!”
          “Okay,” he said, eyeing the little thing warily. It was currently up on its back two feet, jumping up and down like an overly emotional puppy. Probably because nobody used poufs these days and it wanted out of the small shop we were in.
          “It’s jumping,” I told him. “It’s excited.”
          “Oh, it’s excited all right.”
          “Billy!” I whispered, and glanced around. “There are children in here!”
          Normally, that wouldn’t have mattered, since Billy Joe had been among the life-challenged for something like a century and a half now, and ghosts didn’t have to watch what they said. But the children in question were part of the Pythian Court and were all seers of one variety or another. Not that all of them could see Billy—gifts differ—but some could, and more could hear him.
          “I’m just saying, maybe a perverted footstool ain’t the best thing to have around the palace.”
          I frowned. Our current living arrangements were a sore spot. “It’s not a palace. We don’t live in a palace. It’s a penthouse—”
          “Which covers a whole floor and is full of marble and shit.”
          “—and I told the girls they could pick out their own stuff.”
          It was the least I could do, considering that their former furniture had gone up in a fireball, like their former house. Now that had been a palace, an old charmer of a mansion in London full of priceless antiques and crystal chandeliers, a fit home for the Pythian Court. Unlike a still mostly empty penthouse in a tacky Vegas hotel.
          Some days—all right, most days—I wondered if I’d ever get the hang of this Pythia stuff. “Chief Seer of the supernatural world” sounded like a great title, until you saw the job description. Not that I had.
          I think they were afraid to show it to me.
          My name is Cassie Palmer, and I’d been Pythia for four months. Four very long months. You’d think by now that I’d have some kind of a grip, and I did—sort of. I was still alive, which lately felt like an accomplishment in itself. But elegant? Imposing? One of the awesome Pythias of legend who decided the fates of kings and never blinked?
          I caught sight of myself in a large standing mirror that wasn’t standing so much as mincing by, reflecting back a wobbly image of a young blonde with flyaway curls, worried blue eyes, and a T-shirt and jeans combo. The T-shirt was pretty cool, being red with black crossed swords on the front and a caption that read, “As You Can See, the Assassins Failed.” But there was a spaghetti sauce stain from lunch on the jeans. I tried to pull down the tee to hide it, but it wasn’t long enough and bounced back up.
          I sighed. The little pouf humped my leg some more. There was probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but I didn’t get a chance to look for it.
          Because a small girl of maybe five had come up and started tugging on Billy’s jeans.
          He jumped—not surprisingly, since the “jeans” were just a projection. It was all Billy, like the red ruffled shirt and the cowboy hat that completed the ensemble, and the cigarettes he smoked because lung cancer wasn’t an issue for him anymore. So she’d basically just grabbed part of his spirit and started tugging on it, which, yeah.
          I’d probably jump, too.
          But Billy was surprisingly good with kids, maybe because he’d come from a large Irish family back in the day. Or maybe because it was fun to have someone to interact with besides me. He went down on one knee to see what the child was trying to show him.
          “Emily, right?” Billy said, and she nodded. There were so many kids around these days, I kept getting their names confused, but he always knew.
          “For you.” She held up a book so big that she needed two hands to lift it.
          “For me?” Billy smiled and ruffled her hair. Some of it even moved, so he was exerting some power. “And why would you want me to have that, sweetheart?”
          “Look.” She tried putting the massive tome down on the pouf, but the little thing was going ballistic. It didn’t seem to like the book, maybe because it was a rival in the get-out-of-dodge camp, and the pouf was going home with us, goddamn it. Or maybe it was something else, I thought, getting a bad feeling suddenly.
          “Uh, Emily—” I began, but it was too late. She must have worked the heavy buckles on the sides open before she came over, so all she had to do was drop the thing on the floor and flip up the cover—
          “Oh, shit!” I said, earning me a disapproving glance.
          “Rhea says you have to say ‘poo,’” Emily told me seriously.
          “Oh, poo!” I said, and pulled her behind me, because that—
          Was a seriously messed-up book.
          “Ghost,” Emily said happily, peering around my legs.
          “Yes, there’s a ghost in there,” I agreed, looking around for something—anything—to use to shut the damned thing. I couldn’t use my hands, because the boiling mass of magic—dark, by the feel of it—swirling around in there was not a good thing to touch. Not for anyone, but especially not for me.
          Touch clairvoyance is a bitch, and while I wasn’t sensitive enough for everything to trigger it like some poor people, that . . .
Would probably do it.
          “Oh, poo!” I said, a little more forcefully, because the ghost had just noticed us. What looked like black smoke started to leak out of the book’s pages, and Billy predictably freaked. Vengeful ghosts were not something to play around with.
          “Shut it! Shut it!”
          “With what?” There was nothing within reach.
          “With your shoe! Take off your shoe!”
          “I’m trying!” And I was. But instead of my usual Keds, I’d decided to be fancy today and was wearing cute little open-toed sandals with a buckled strap. One that was stubbornly not. Coming. Off.
          “Just rip it!” Billy yelled.
          “It’s elastic!” I told him, hopping around on one foot.
          “If it’s elastic, then just pull it off!”
          “It’s tough elastic!”
          And then somebody slammed the book closed for us.
          I looked up, shoe in hand, to see the shop owner holding a heavy wooden walking stick. He had muttonchops, jowls, small, piercing blue eyes, and incongruously pink cheeks that would have been perfect on Santa, only he didn’t look like Santa. He looked like what he was: a guy who ran a magical secondhand shop and intended to make a sale.
          “Gaylord!” he told me, on a little explosion of air.
          “Uh. What?”
          “Gaylord. That’s what we call him. He’s a rotter.” He bent over the book and buckled the buckles. “I can show you some much finer tomes, Lady, including several first editions.”
          “What’s wrong with that one?” I asked, because I’d never seen anything like it. I knew ghosts could haunt things as well as places—I was wearing proof of that around my neck—but that . . . hadn’t felt like a haunting.
          At least, not a normal one.
          “Oh, nothing,” he said, waving it away. “They get like that when you leave them in too long.”
          “Leave them in . . . where?”
          He looked at me through little half-moon spectacles that, again, would have looked good on Santa. Only the eyes behind them weren’t nearly so nice. And neither was the oily smile that he clearly thought was charming.
          “Sorcerers sometimes imprison ghosts in books, to use their souls to power an enchantment,” he informed me. “They typically let them free after a while, once they no longer need a perfect lock or an unbreakable cypher or what have you. But sometimes they forget.”
          I swallowed hard and stared at the book. “You’re saying that somebody didn’t let Gaylord . . . out?”
          “No. The mage died, y’see, quite unexpectedly, and his relatives inherited the house. Only they had no use for the contents and sold the lot to me. Some good items—most went fast, as the better sort usually does. But Gaylord here—”
          “But if the sorcerer died,” I interrupted, because I didn’t care about his stock issues. “Shouldn’t that have broken the enchantment?”
          “For a regular spell, certainly,” he agreed. “Once there was no more magic being funneled into it. But Gaylord isn’t a spell. He’s a power source, bound to the book with no one to set him free, since the only one who could have done it is dead.”
          I stared. “That’s horrible!”
          “Yes, indeed,” the shop owner agreed. “Ruins the resale value.”
          Billy Joe whispered something rude and stared at the book, probably remembering his time in a necklace at the bottom of the Mississippi.
          Even unbound ghosts could only go so far from their resting places. For most, that was a graveyard, where the life energy shed by visitors kept the hungry ghosts going. But for some, like Billy, it was an enchanted item, like a talisman, that collected enough power to let a ghost survive. Although survival kind of loses its luster when you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, buried underneath a river.
          Billy had been lucky; some fishermen had trawled up the gaudy ruby necklace he lived in, which had eventually ended up in the magical junk shop where I’d stumbled across it. But what if they hadn’t? And what if, instead of being able to explore the area for fifty miles or so around his home—his usual range when I wasn’t topping him up—Billy had been trapped inside, all alone, for who knew how long? Only to slowly realize that the person who had put him there was dead, and that he’d never get out?
          I felt a hard shiver go down my spine.
          I guessed Billy did, too, because he rippled all over, just once, like a gust of wind had blown through him.
          “Cassie—”
          “I’ll take it,” I told the salesman, who had started toward a large bookcase, the tome under his arm, but at that he turned around.
          And, suddenly, I was looking at Santa Claus after all. The man was positively beaming. “Oh, of course, of course. So useful for . . . any number of things. I’ll add it to the pile, shall I?”
          He looked at the counter, which a delighted bunch of little girls had already piled high. I nodded, and he started off again, only to have me call him back a second time. Because the pouf was losing its tiny cotton mind.
          “And that,” I said. What the hell. I’d gift it to one of my bodyguards if it was too much of a nuisance.
          “Excellent choice,” the salesman said, his eyes gleaming, and hurried off before I changed my mind.
          “Thanks,” Billy told me quietly.
          I nodded and bent down to pat the little hassock, which started running around in circles excitedly, as if it somehow knew it had found a home.
          “Lady?” That was Rhea, my acolyte.
          Rhea was in jeans today, too, having been persuaded—not that it had taken a lot of talking—to give up the white, Victorian-looking dresses that the Pythian Court had worn for more than a century. I’d been told they were an improvement on what had gone before, but found that hard to believe. The girls were now dressed in shorts, because Vegas in the summer is scorching, and various brightly colored tees with cartoon characters on them, because they were kids.
          Rhea, on the other hand, was nineteen, and could choose her own clothes. And, somehow, she’d continued to look serene and otherworldly despite the lack of traditional attire. Her long, dark hair was in a messy chignon today, and her jeans had been paired with a soft blue lace shirt with a high neck.
          If you didn’t know her, you’d never guess that the neckline was to cover the scars from a recent “accident” in which she’d been held captive while a dark mage tried to blackmail me with her life. So Rhea had taken what she’d thought was her only option. And my timid, soft-voiced, sweet-faced acolyte who wouldn’t hurt a fly had cut her own throat on his knife blade to ensure that he didn’t have anything left to bargain with.
          Yeah.
          People aren’t always what they seem.
          Only, at the moment, Rhea was looking a little less timid and a little more outraged, which probably meant that something was up with the kids. She was the type who would never stand up for herself, but was a lioness in defense of the talented tots who made up the court. She had, after all, been one herself once.
          “What is—oh.” I stopped, after glancing behind her. Because of course. “Hilde?”
          Rhea nodded, looking over her shoulder at my not-at-all timid, frequently-made-other-people-timid acolyte Hildegarde.
          Hilde was . . . something else.
          The exact opposite of Rhea’s soft motherliness, Hilde could have been a Valkyrie in another existence. Admittedly, the cap of silver white curls and the wrinkles—not many, despite her almost two centuries, because the body was, um, sturdy, and filled them out—might have worked against her, but the ’tude would have gotten her in anyway. Hilde was a force of freaking nature.
          She’d joined the Pythian Court only recently, coming out of retirement to return to the organization she’d belonged to many, many years ago, before her sister was chosen as Pythia instead of her. Gertie had gone on to have an illustrious career and to train my predecessor, Agnes. Hilde, on the other hand, had eventually gotten married, popped out a couple of kids, and had several careers of her own. And then retired, never mentioning to a soul along the way, including her three husbands, that she’d never really left the court at all.
          She’d become a fail-safe, one of only two currently living, who were former acolytes selected by the Pythias to take over the court in case of emergency. And since an emergency might include an attack on the court and anybody supporting it, the fail-safes’ existence had to be kept quiet. Nobody knew who they were or even that they existed at all until needed, and it was up to the fail-safes themselves to decide when that might be.
          Since the whole supernatural world was currently at war, and the Pythian Court in London had recently blown up, and the hotel and casino we were currently calling home had been attacked by an army of dark mages, Hildegarde had finally decided—you know, this looks a lot like an emergency.
          And unlike Abigail, the other fail-safe appointed by Agnes, Hilde no longer had young kids, or even young grandkids, to go home to when the immediate threat was over. I suspected that she’d been a little bored, messing about with her garden when she’d always led a very busy life. And then we came along, a court, as she saw it, in serious need of straightening out. Hildegarde had found her calling.
          I still wasn’t sure if I was happy about that or not.
          But I was pretty damned sure that Rhea wasn’t. I doubted that Hilde had noticed, because Hilde rarely noticed anything less subtle than a bat to the head, but Rhea was not on board with some of the changes she’d been making around the court. Not on board at all.
          “What now?” I sighed.
          “I am sorry, Lady,” Rhea said, dropping a curtsy. And damned if she didn’t make it look elegant even in jeans. “But I think you should hear this.”
          “Hear what?” I asked, only to have Hilde’s booming laughter float across the room from where she was holding forth over a display case.
          I looked at Billy; he looked back at me. “You’re Pythia, kid,” he reminded me.
          As if I could forget.
          I pulled up my big girl panties and went off to see what had Rhea looking flushed and bothered.
          “No! You do not age the knife,” Hilde was saying to a cluster of the older girls while waving around a wicked-looking weapon. “It is metal. It will take a very long time—and thus a great deal of your energy—to do it any harm.”
          “Then what do you do?” One of the oldest, who was maybe twelve, asked. Her name was Belvia, because magical families hadn’t gotten the memo about modern names, but everybody called her Belle. Some of the other girls looked scared or intimidated, which wasn’t surprising, considering the array of weapons in front of them and everything they’d been through lately, but she was grimly determined.
          I felt my own face fall into a frown.
          No kid should have to look like that.
          But Hildegarde regarded her approvingly. “You age the hand holding the knife.” She thought about it. “Unless it’s fey, in which case you’re probably better off aging the knife. Those bastards live forever.”
          “Hilde,” I said brightly. “Can I see you for a minute?”
          Hilde didn’t curtsy, but she agreed affably enough. “When I come back, we’ll discuss magical restraints and how to get out of them,” she promised the girls.
          I led her out of the shop, to the cracked sidewalk in front where several of my vamp bodyguards were trying to look unobtrusive. Armani suits and Gucci loafers were working against them, as were the chiseled, model-worthy profiles. Mircea—the master vampire who’d loaned them to me—normally worked in diplomacy, and he’d discovered centuries ago that his own good looks were a useful tool. So, he often Changed handsome men.
          I’d once asked him why he bothered, when a glamourie could make anybody look good. He’d just laughed and said yes, but that men who were attractive from birth knew it and had a confidence that was virtually impossible to teach. They also ventured in where angels feared to tread, because they were used to getting away with things.
          I’d also asked him why he never Changed women, but didn’t get an answer there. As the one-time diplomat to the North American Vampire Senate, Mircea’s secrets had secrets. I’d found out the hard way that I actually preferred when I didn’t know what he was up to.
          The guards smiled at me, and one stubbed out a cigarette before they disappeared inside. Not that it mattered; they could hear us perfectly well from there or from a couple blocks away. But that sort of thing was intended to put people at ease.
          They shouldn’t have bothered; Hilde struck me as the type who’d never been ill at ease in her life—and who never let anyone else take the lead.
          “You’re going to tell me the initiates are too young,” she began, before I could get a word out.
          “Because they are! And they’ve just been through a trauma—”
          “Exactly so.” She looked at me kindly, but with resolve. “It’s been made very clear that our enemies will not take their youth into consideration, other than to view them as easy targets. They have to be able to defend themselves.”
          “We have to defend them. It’s our job—”
          “And what are we to use to accomplish this job, hm?” she demanded, her head tilting. “There’s you—and you’re always away, battling gods; there’s me, and while I am certainly formidable, I’m not as young as I used to be; there’s a bunch of vampires, God help us, who’re good enough for the simple things, I’ll grant you, but—”
          “They helped!” I said, remembering the Battle on the Drag, as it had come to be known, the recent assault on our home base by several hundred dark mages.
          “Yes, they did,” Hilde agreed. “But it was your ability with the Pythian power that saved the day. We must have more adepts.”
          “We have Rhea—”
Hilde harrumphed. I stared. I’d never heard anyone actually do that before.
          “Something might be made of that girl eventually, it’s true, if she has anything of her parents in her,” Hilde said. “But right now, she’s almost as ignorant as the rest of ’em. They need training, not coddling.”
          She sounded like somebody else I knew. John Pritkin was a war mage who had helped to protect me when I stumbled into this crazy new life—well, eventually. Our first meeting had not gone well, and neither had a bunch of subsequent ones. But when he finally figured out that I was serious—that, untrained as I was, I was trying, goddamn it—he got on board.
          And when Pritkin gets on board, he really gets on board. The guy doesn’t know what half measures are. Which had resulted in me hating my life more than I already did when he put me through a training regimen that would have done a marine proud.
          Not everyone had agreed with that approach. Mircea, for one, preferred the wrap-her-in-cotton-balls-and-sit-a-ton-of-vamps-on-her method, which, to be fair, had helped me out more than once. But Pritkin’s training had increased my self-esteem and my belief that I could maybe, possibly, eventually, kind of do this, and had allowed me to save myself.
          So I understood where Hilde was coming from, I really did. But there was one crucial difference. I was an adult and a Pythia, while the girls . . .
          I looked back through the shop window and didn’t see warriors. I saw kids playing with toys and running around, finding new treasures with which to decorate their currently spartan bedrooms to make them their own. And laughing and talking in spite of everything, especially the little ones, because they were resilient, as children tend to be.
          But there was a limit to what anyone could take.
          And, suddenly, a huge surge of protectiveness swept over me.
          I’d had to be an adult before I was ready, and it had left me with more scars than I could name. I passionately wanted these little girls to be able to be kids, as I never had. To live for just a few years free of worry, to be able to laugh and run and play, instead of looking over their shoulders every few minutes, lying awake at night riddled with fear, and walking on eggshells.
          War or no bloody war.
          I turned back around and realized that Hilde was watching me, and that her eyes had softened. “You’ve a good heart,” she told me. “But you can’t protect everyone all the time. Neither can I.”
          “No,” I admitted. “I can’t. Which is why we need help.”


 
Chapter Two


          “You’re sure this is it?” I asked as Hilde paid the cabbie. We were supposed to be here to see about getting some coven girls for the court, but I didn’t see any—or much of anything else. Unless you counted miles of unforgiving desert and a merciless sun beating down like it had forgotten summer was over.
          “It’s here,” a pink-haired witch said, and piled out of the front seat of the cab.
          Her name was Saffy, short for Saphronia, which she hated, maybe because I’d never seen a name less suited to its owner. There was nothing old-fashioned about her. She had blond roots under short pink hair, a septum ring, and a half sleeve of tats, at least two of which were magical, because I occasionally saw them moving. She’d been inside the shop helping with the kids, instead of outside with the vamps keeping an eye on the local junkies, but that was by choice.
          Saffy was a badass.
          She’d proven that recently by helping to save the court during the Battle on the Drag. She and a handful of other witches had shown up and taken on a whole army of dark mages, at least long enough for me, Rhea, and some reporters who’d been caught in the cross fire to get out. The local coven leaders had afterward lent her little posse to my court, because, as they put it, I obviously needed some competent help.
          That hadn’t gone over well with the Silver Circle, the world’s leading magical organization, which traditionally guarded the Pythian Court. Or with Mircea’s vamps, who had protested both the mage and witch additions to the household. But they hadn’t protested as loudly as I’d expected.
          I think the attack had rattled even them.
          Despite her badass demeanor, Saffy had proven really good with the kids. She made their crayon drawings move, delighting the younger girls, and helped some of the older ones put rinses of various colors on their hair. She’d also let Belle wear her punked-out leather vest back to the hotel while we came out here, leaving her in a tank top, jeans, a wrist full of charms, and some biker boots.
          And black nail polish on the finger she was currently poking at the air with.
          “I can wait,” the taxi driver offered, watching her worriedly. And then glancing around at the sparse scrub and some vultures on a hill, looking at us hopefully from atop their latest carcass.
          “No, no, that’s fine,” Hilde assured him. “We’re going hiking.”
          The man took in Hilde’s smart crepe de chine flowered dress, sensible low-heeled shoes, and old lady support hose. She had a purse that matched the shoes, in bright, candy apple pink, and a little pearl brooch that kept the ruffled bosom on the dress properly in place. She did not have a hat, but looked like the kind of woman who should have a hat, or at least an Ascot-worthy fascinator.
          “What?” the man said.
          Hilde sighed and waved a hand at him, and his concerned eyes went blank. “Go back to work and forget about us,” she told him shortly, and the man obligingly drove off, the cab bumping a little on the rocky soil because we’d left the blacktop behind a few minutes ago.
          “Is that what everyone does?” I asked, worried about the man’s suddenly slack-jawed, bespelled face. If every witch who needed a ride zapped him, I had to wonder what the long-term effects might be. But Saffy didn’t seem concerned.
          “Most of us don’t take taxis,” she assured me, still poking at the air.
          “What do you take?”
          “A portal from town.”
          “Then why didn’t we do that?”
          That got me a look I didn’t understand from black-rimmed eyes. “Because none of them would recognize you. They’re spelled to keep out unknowns. It’s a security thing, like changing the location on a regular basis.”
          “Changing?” I frowned.
          Portals had to be licensed out the wazoo, and the license had to include the location, from fixed point A to fixed point B, because allowing people to just appear anywhere they wanted would make law enforcement impossible. And that was even more true since the war. Unless . . .
          “Saffy, we are talking about legal portals, right?”
          “‘Legal’ by whose definition?”
          “Saffy—”
          That won me another look. “If you’re going to rep the whole magical community, you have to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around the Silver Circle,” she told me. “No matter what they think!”
          “I know that; that’s why we’re here.”
          “You think you know, but you were born into a world the Circle controls—”
          “I was born into a world the vampires control,” I corrected her, because I hadn’t been one of the clairvoyants identified early and popped into the Pythian Court for training. Instead, a greedy mob boss of a vampire had co-opted me into his shabby little court and used my gift as a way to make him more of the money he craved.
It hadn’t been a fun life for a kid.
          Of course, it hadn’t been a fun life for anyone else, either.
          Tony was a dick.
          “That’s rather like an agnostic saying they were born into a secular family when they live in the United States,” Hilde said, because she’d never met an argument she didn’t like. “Perhaps their parents didn’t take them to church, but the culture of Christianity pervaded their upbringing whether they realized it or not. Everything from the holidays they celebrate to the curse words they use revolves around the Judeo-Christian religions.”
          “I’m not sure I get the point,” I told her. I also wasn’t sure we’d come to the right place, and sweat was starting to drip down my back.
          “The point,” she told me, “is that the Circle won their war with the covens centuries ago and have been able to shape the overall magical culture ever since. And while I’m sure the effect was less pervasive at a vampire’s court, if it had to do with magic, it was likely still done the Circle’s way.”
          Saffy nodded angrily. “They did their best to erase coven practices, like they tried to erase the covens themselves. But it didn’t work!”
          “I know that—”
          She cut me off. “No, you think you know. Now you really do.”
          And before I could ask what she meant, reality bent around us, the desert colors all slurred together, and the heat was replaced by a wash of cool air, deep and dark and mountain-chilled.
          Maybe because we were suddenly standing in what looked a lot like the inside of a mountain. A huge, hollowed-out one, leaving a sprawling, cave-like area with dark, reddish brown walls rising up to a massive dome far overhead, like a mighty stone cathedral. It should have been impressive; it should have been breathtaking.
          But mine was already being stolen by something else.
          “What . . . is this?” I asked, spinning slowly around.
          I was looking in all directions, because we’d just materialized inside a huge circle of portals.
          Some were on the ground nearby, thrum thrum thrumming hard enough to make my whole body shake. Others hovered in midair or overhead, forming a spotted dome half the size of a football field and multiple stories high. One through which people—and things, and things that might be people—were hurrying, and sometimes flying, at an alarming rate.
          Something came at me in a rush of huge, bat-like wings, but Saffy jerked me to the side before I saw it clearly. And before I ended up as road kill, although I barely noticed. I was too busy gawping like a tourist, because I’d seen portals before, and even been in a few. But nothing like this.
          Nothing even close to this.
          It was the Grand Central Station of portals, I thought, in awe.
          They were all different colors: one electric blue; another neon green; one pink enough to rival Hilde’s handbag; another a brilliant, sunny yellow; there was a purple so rich it looked like it was laced with glitter, a white so bright it hurt my eyes, and an ebony so dark that no light seemed to escape it at all, like a black hole had opened up inside the room.
          There had to be thirty of them, maybe more. I couldn’t tell because, while some were at least two stories tall, others were as small as my doubled fists, just tiny things, and hard to spot in all the moving light. It cascaded down from the largest as if through stained glass, increasing the cathedral-like feel of the place. And throwing a moving, watery rainbow onto the crowd, while the combined energy field vibrated the rock beneath our feet.
          But the fact that the portals were literally powerful enough to move a mountain wasn’t the most impressive thing about them. That would be the fact that they were fritzing and sparking with tiny, lightning-like filaments, sometimes fighting with each other, and occasionally arcing away to blow off this person’s hat or to shock that person’s backside. The wind generated by all that energy was also blowing people’s hair and stuff around, causing them to clutch their belongings tightly as they plowed ahead.
          I could see it all, because the portals were just giant, 2-D, semitransparent circles hanging in the air, instead of being projected against anything. Passengers entered them from the interior of the circle and exited from the opposite side, often at the same time. That sometimes made it appear as if a man went in and a woman came out, causing me to do a few double takes.
          And then to do another when a portal—roughly human height and bright green—suddenly winked out, causing a fey-looking woman barreling ahead and carrying a load of packages to hit a large . . . something . . . that had just emerged from the other side.
She went down, her packages scattering everywhere, while the large shaggy something, with a head the size and shape of a buffalo’s, turned to regard her in surprise. And then to help her up with a giant paw and assist her in picking up her belongings. She shoved bright purple hair out of her face and thanked him prettily.
          I just stood there and blinked at them.
          “May I have your attention, please.” The announcement cut through the cacophony, loud enough to make me jump. “May I have your attention, please. We are sorry to announce that service to Lalaquaie, Avery, and the Green Mountains has been disrupted. This is due to a roaming party having been sighted in the area. Management apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.”
          A groan went through the space, and a bunch of people broke off from the crowd and went grumbling back out of the circle of light, looking like travelers who had just missed their train.
          Which is basically what they were, I realized.
          It really was Grand Central, or at least the magical, highly illegal, the-Circle-would-shit-a-brick-if-they-saw-this equivalent.
          “Where are they getting all the power?” I yelled at Saffy, while it blew my hair in my face. “I didn’t think there was a ley line sink anywhere near here!”
          That was the only thing I knew of that could fuel something like this. The ley lines, usually used for quick transport by people with the stomach for it, were rivers of magical power that flowed around the earth. Their source was debated, but one thing was sure: when a number of them crossed at the same point, they created pools of energy that were a coveted resource in the magical world. But the only place like that nearby was on the other side of Vegas, not to mention being in the Circle’s hands.
          Saffy said something, but I couldn’t hear her. It was deafening this close. She must have thought so, too, because she was already tugging me away, out of the cathedral-like central space, and
into . . .
          “What is this?” I asked, stumbling forward slightly, because the floor was uneven and I was too busy staring around to pay attention. The portal light was still bright here, but no longer blinding. Allowing me to see that the main travel hub bisected a long, rock-cut corridor lined with shops, cafés, restaurants, and—
          “What’s that?” I said. And hurried across the crowded causeway to a shop framed by large, glowing crystal formations in bright pink and yellow, where dwarves were hammering out something on giant anvils.
          The anvils were huge, as were the hammers they were using. But scattered around the cave-like shop, behind force fields covering depressions in the rock, were the most exquisite, delicate creations imaginable. Gorgeous necklaces in quivering gold flakes that scintillated fascinatingly when you breathed on them. Daggers of chased silver set with what had to be talisman jewels, because they boiled with enough power to raise the hair on my arms, and I wasn’t even that close. Chalices covered with runes that flashed different colors as various sorts of people passed by, one of which had an almost human-looking eye that opened and blinked at me when I accidentally brushed the pedestal it was on.
          I reached out, unthinking, to steady it, and Hilde grabbed my arm. “You bond with it, you buy the nasty thing,” she warned me, as a dwarf rubbed his hands on his apron and came hurrying over.
But the cup righted itself on its own, and I was already caught in wonder by the next shop in line.
          “Oh, wow,” I murmured, running over to stare through the huge, force field–like front window, behind which a trio of animated mannequins was slowly turning.
          They were interesting enough on their own—with scarlet lips that stretched into smiles when they noticed my interest and bright, jewel-like eyes that completely failed to look human, but I was more captivated by what they were wearing.
          “What is that?” I breathed, watching as the exquisite evening dress one of them had on, a light, floaty, silken thing, like flower petals made into cloth, suddenly changed—into scale-like armor that cascaded down the full length of it, turning it into a battle dress to match the shield that folded out from the purse she’d been carrying.
          Goddamn, I could use one of those!
          But I hardly had time to take it in before a little graffitied crab was waving its pincers at me from a nearby rock wall. It was bright red and blended in a little too well with the stone. But the movement caught my eye, and its urgency made me follow it from the front of the sushi place it had been decorating, across the bumpy floor, and over to the other side of the huge, mall-like space.
          Where I was promptly distracted by a magical tattoo parlor where powerful tats were being applied to several clients. And by a candy store, where a kid had just dropped a package, releasing a cloud of buzzing taffy bees. And by a bookstore full of animated ladders that zipped around overstuffed shelves five stories high and advertised book binding in “properly sourced dragon hide—certificates upon request.” And by a florist, where gorgeous flowers spilled out of the shop and into the walkway in colorful profusion.
          The scent was almost overpowering this close, because I didn’t know these fragrances. And because the baskets of dried herbs inside were adding their perfume to the fresh flowers piled around the door. But despite that, a group of bright pink blooms were so sweet that I couldn’t resist moving in for a—
          Saffy grabbed my arm. “Don’t sniff those. Unless you like fur.”
          “What?”
          But then I noticed that my little red guide was waiting for me, just up ahead, where—
          “Oh my God!”
          “It’s like shopping with a sugared-up toddler,” someone said behind me, but I was already off, heading for a large force field of the kind that subbed for window glass around here, but this wasn’t covering a window. It stretched from the bumpy floor to the rocky overhang of a ceiling, several stories up, and curved as if flowing around a corner. Only there was no bend here, just a wedge-shaped protrusion out into the corridor, one that was filled with—
          No.
          It couldn’t be.
          I ran up and pushed a finger against the field, which bounced around like jelly. Or like what it was, a huge slab of water jutting out from the stone like an aquarium. But it wasn’t an aquarium, because inside weren’t fish but—
          “Oh my God!”
          “Can you do something?” somebody asked.
          “You’re the one who brought her here with no buildup. I told you—”
          I wasn’t listening. I was pressing my hands and face against the surface of the barrier, passionately wishing the kids were here to see this. We have to bring them, I thought, staring at a bunch of tiny yellow fish—because there were fish in there, after all, zipping by in the light of more of those weird crystal formations. The crystals were blue and yellow this time, and spiking out from rocky promontories and occasionally the floor, sending what looked like sunlight filtered through water cascading everywhere. Enough that I could see flickers of silver tails, larger than any fish would have, flashing in and out of stalactite-like formations in front of what appeared to be an extensive cave system.
          But I didn’t care about the caves. I cared about—
          There! Right there!
          I leaned in, trying to get a better look, sure I was seeing things. Because it couldn’t be what I thought it was. It couldn’t—
My face suddenly slipped inside the wedge.
          Oh, shit, I thought, and tried to back out. But before I could manage it, the rest of me was sucked in, too. Leaving me stunned from the sudden shock of cold water, like jumping into a November pool.
          It was close to freezing, but the lack of air was more of a motivator. I started thrashing against the skin of the ward and panicking when it refused to let me through, before I remembered that I could just shift out. Spatial shifting was a perk of an office that desperately needed a few, and it had gotten me out of sticky situations in the past.
          But not this one.
          Because my power didn’t work.
          And, okay, now I was panicking. And staring at Hilde’s horrified, slightly distorted face outside the ward, only she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at something behind me.
          I spun around in the water, almost dropping the damned book I’d been lugging around, because Saffy had said she knew someone who might be able to disenchant it. And then clutching it to my chest, because the whole not-being-able-to-breathe thing had just been complicated by the arrival of—
          Well, call them what they are, I thought, staring in awe in spite of everything.
          Because they were mermaids.
          Or mer-something, I corrected, noticing the finely muscled torsos dipping low to thick, scale-covered tails. Even with long, filmy hair that floated out behind them like smoke, huge colorless eyes, and weird, almost transparent filaments wafting from the sides of their necks and faces, they didn’t look remotely female. They were also either vaguely blue, or maybe that was the light.
          I couldn’t really tell and didn’t care because I was drowning, and because they currently had strange-looking spears pointed at me menacingly.
          One of them, wearing a neckpiece of glowing crystals in some kind of metal, struck out with his weapon and stabbed violently at my chest. Or, I realized a second later, at the huge bound volume I was holding in front of it. I didn’t think he’d missed, since he was all of a few yards away, and then I really didn’t when bright, yellow-white glints of light started spearing outward from the book.
          I would have dropped it, but I was afraid he’d miss and hit me. Because he was stabbing it again and again, causing cracks like lightning to run all over it and shedding more of that terrible light. To the point that I couldn’t look at it anymore, I couldn’t look at them, I couldn’t look at anything with my eyes scrunched up in pain.
          Which is why I didn’t see what was coming.
          But I heard it when a sound tore through the eerie quiet, like a hundred whales all deciding to signal at once. And I felt it when something slammed into me, hard as a fist. It was just a current under the water, but it threw me and the book I was still clutching back at the ward, pressing us against it so hard that I opened my mouth to scream before forgetting that I couldn’t, sure that every bone in my body was about to break.
          But the ward broke first.
          Suddenly, I was hitting the ground outside along with what felt like half an ocean’s worth of water, leaving me gasping and heaving and coughing until I thought my lungs would come up. Which is why it took me a moment to notice several things: the ward was back in place, and half a dozen mermen were on the other side, staring at me with their huge, colorless eyes. Hilde and Saffy were standing in front of me, trying to give me a chance to recover while holding back what looked like a mass stampede of people. And the book—
          Was going insane.
          I finally gasped in some air and scrambled back a few paces, getting my feet under me in the process. And getting away from where the tome was writhing and jumping and spilling a searchlight’s worth of radiance everywhere. It was strobing the faces of the panicked people flowing around us, who were running away from—
          What the hell were they running away from?
          I couldn’t see with all that light in my eyes, and with taller people and things flowing around me. And it was so loud in here, with people screaming and the loudspeaker blaring and my ears still half full of water, that I also couldn’t hear what Saffy was yelling at me. Until my ears popped and her voice got through.
          “—of here! Did you hear me?” she screamed, grabbing and shaking me.
          “No,” I said, and threw up some more water.
          But then the light shifted and the crowd parted for a second, and I was able to see past her shoulder. More specifically, I was able to see a bunch of light fey pouring through one of the portals down the hall, a big one. Along with what looked like—
          “What the hell is that?” I yelled.
          “Time to go!” Saffy said, a wand in either fist.
          But there was no time to go. No time to process the few dozen impossible things that had just happened and were still happening, because one of said things was about to run us down. The silver-haired light fey soldiers streaming out of the portal were attacking people with the weird spears they liked to use, which could deliver anything from cattle-prod-like encouragement to fry-you-where-you-stand bolts, but that wasn’t the main problem.
          No, the main problem was the elephant-like thing that a bunch of them were riding, and that had just torn its way through the portal. It was enormous, at least five times the size of the earthly animal, and suddenly made the huge space seem a lot smaller and more claustrophobic. And when it bellowed, the very air seemed to shake.
          Or maybe that was all the screams that suddenly joined in, like a chorus following the lead singer, because the thing was about to charge. Make that was charging, right down the rock-cut corridor, giving people very few places to go. Especially us, because the only “shop” within reach was full of mermen, who were still floating there, enjoying the show.
          Only they weren’t looking at the crazed, mutant elephant, I realized. They were looking at—
          “You have got to be kidding me!” I screamed, as something finished shredding the book and boiled out into the air. And, unlike in evil Santa’s shop, I got a good look at it.
          “That’s not a ghost!” Hilde yelled.
          No shit, I thought, staring upward.
          At the giant column of black smoke that had already filled the space above us, looking like an oil fire, except oil fires don’t have glowing red eyes. Ones that turned on me menacingly a second later, as what I guess was a head stopped churning around the ceiling and dropped down in a sinuous, almost snakelike gesture.     Right in my face.
          I just stood there, trying to think where my power could send it, assuming I had any right now, which I wasn’t sure of, because I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything but stark raving terror. Which wasn’t helped by the latest screeching bellow the damned charging elephant I’d somehow managed to forget about let out.
          I screamed, because that’s what you do when you’re trapped between a powerful, pissed-off demon and ten tons of charging fury, wondering which will kill you first.
          It looked like it was going to be the elephant, which was almost on top of us now, roaring and blowing and slinging people out of the way, left and right, with its huge tusks—
          And then trying to stop on a dime when it was suddenly confronted with an even bigger, even madder, even more destructive force that, for some reason, was now grabbing the feys’ huge ride and—
          “Oh God!” I yelled, right before Saffy tackled me and flung us both back against the merpeople’s ward, causing several of them to rear back in alarm.
          But this time, we didn’t go through. This time, we stayed put, Hilde and Saffy warding like mad, putting a shield in front of us and several other people who had ducked inside, that I’d have defied anything to get through.
          Including the elephant thing’s guts, which were spraying all over the place, like bloody rain. Some people were still screaming, and others were just standing there, covered in blood and watching in shock as not-a-ghost sliced and diced the ride and then started on the fey. And then the whole long concourse of traumatized shoppers gasped when the mighty group of fey warriors turned tail and ran like all the demons of hell were after them.
          Or, you know, one really big one.
          Only he wasn’t giving chase. He was coming back over to me. And bending down to get those freaky eyes on my level. And looking at me expectantly.
          “Sh-Sh-Sh-Shadowland?” I finally managed to say, naming the nearest hell region, and the easiest one to shift him to.
          The great smoky head inclined.
          “You got it,” I said.
          And the next second, he was gone.

 

   

Look for Brave the Tempest
on August 6, 2019!