Brave the Tempest Read online

  “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 my breath 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.