Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer #8)
Karen Chance
Chapter One
The cherries were dancing.
They bounced around happily in front of my vision as I swam back to consciousness, plump and bright red and framed by rich green leaves. They covered almost everything in the old-fashioned bedroom, from the lamp on a nearby table, to the curtains at a tall, narrow window, to the washbasin and jug on another table across from the bed. The whole room was awash in a sea of red.
Up close, individual pieces were sort of cute. All together, and with my current blurry vision, it looked like a massacre had taken place. I stared at the hideously cheerful things for a moment, trying to remember why the sight was giving me hives. And then I groaned and dragged a pillow over my head.
My name is Cassie Palmer and, frankly, this wasn’t the worst place I’d woken up. Since becoming Pythia, the supernatural world’s chief seer and favorite punching bag, I’d opened my eyes on a vampire stronghold in Vegas, a torture-filled castle in France, a dank dungeon in Faerie, and a couch in hell. And, most recently, on a spine-contorting tree root in sixth-century Wales that I still hadn’t recovered from.
So, it could be worse, I told myself grimly.
“Are you planning to just lie there all night?” a pissy voice demanded.
Oh, look. It was worse.
I poked an eye out from under the pillow and saw what I’d expected: greasy blond hair, narrowed green eyes, a nose made for looking down on people with, and an expression that matched the voice.
And an outfit that didn’t.
As lord of the incubi, the demon race best known for suave seduction, Rosier should have been sporting a Hugh Hefner smoking jacket and silk lounge pants. Instead, he was wearing a mud-streaked homespun tunic and had dirty knees. But then, he shouldn’t have been here at all, wherever here was, although I had a pretty good idea.
And that was before I tried moving my right arm.
Handcuffs.
I was cuffed to a bed.
A bed covered in cherries.
“What happened?” I croaked, because my voice didn’t work any better than my eyes.
“Nothing,” Rosier said, glancing around disparagingly. “Believe it or not, this is perfectly normal for the Victorian age.”
“No.” I sat up and immediately regretted it when the cherries started dancing a whole lot faster. I lay back down and watched the fruit-covered wallpaper do the boogaloo. “No, I mean, what happened?”
“You came to rescue me.” The sarcasm was palpable.
I decided to stare at the ceiling for a while instead. It was white and plain, and gave my eyes a rest. And, slowly, things started coming back to me.
Rosier and I had been on a seemingly never-ending mission to save his son and my usual partner in crime, John Pritkin, from a demon curse. I didn’t know what the thing was called, but it was basically a sadist’s Benjamin Button: Pritkin’s soul had been sent careening back through the years of his life, and when it reached the end—poof. No more Pritkin. It would literally erase him from existence.
It seemed like a damn complicated way to kill someone, but then, the demon council—the bastards who had laid it—knew me. Or, rather, they knew what I could do. Being Pythia has a lot of downsides, but it does come with a certain skill set, part of which is the ability to time-travel. So the council had to get inventive if they wanted Pritkin to stay dead.
And they did.
They’d ensured that I couldn’t just go back to the moment he was cursed and save him, because his body might be there, but his soul wouldn’t. It was on an epic journey into the past, riding a reverse, erratic time stream that I couldn’t change or influence unless I caught up with it. Or got ahead of it, so Rosier could place the countercurse as soon as it showed up. Only that hadn’t been going so well, either.
So far, we’d utterly failed.
Only no, I corrected grimly, we hadn’t failed. We’d been prevented. Which also explained our current situation.
“We’re at the Pythian Court?” I rasped.
“Yes.”
“Under arrest?”
“Oh yes.”
“And I feel like this because?”
“Drugs. To prevent you from twitching your nose, or whatever you do, and getting us out of this. They hit you with a dart as soon as you showed up. Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
I pulled the pillow back over my face.
As if the problem with the curse wasn’t bad enough, there was an added complication. Namely, that I wasn’t the only Pythia. Each age had one, tasked with preserving her little corner of the timeline from dark mages and crazed cultists and anybody else with the insanity and power to risk a time spell. Most of us ignored each other out of professional courtesy, whenever duty required a trip back in time. But Gertie, my nineteenth-century counterpart, had decided to make an exception for me.
And for the denizen of hell I was dragging back through time along with me.
I guessed good little Pythias didn’t hang out with powerful demon lords.
Not that Rosier was powerful at the moment. Which was why he was just sitting there, frustrated, furious and, yes, about half-mad, because the demon council that had cursed his son had also put a block on his power.
Meaning that, other than for mumbling the countercurse, he was utterly useless.
Which was a problem since, right now, so was I.
“At least they didn’t strip you,” Rosier said, after a minute. “It wasn’t bad enough that they ran me across half the countryside—they had to take my clothes, too! There I was, barely managing to hide from the damn fey, when I was set upon by two of those cursed acolytes.”
He was talking about the white-robed Pythias-in-training every court but mine seemed to have a lot of. They received a small amount of the Pythian power, enough to allow them to learn the ropes of the office and to compete for the top spot one day. And in the meantime, they helped the boss screw over anyone who started joyriding through the centuries in bad company.
“I thought I was doing a fair job of passing myself off as a typical Celt,” he added, “when hey, presto! No cloak! And a moment after that, no trousers! And no underwear! They used some spell to strip me butt naked, in the middle of the damn road, looking for weapons I didn’t even have because of your constant nagging about the timeline. They even took my last shoe!”
“Those bitches.”
“Yes! And afterward they had the temerity to act shocked, as if they’d never seen a naked man before! I thought they were Pythian acolytes, not vestal virgins. Of course, given the outfit, I suppose I should have known—”
“I’m working on the outfit.”
“You’re not going to be doing anything if we don’t get out of here,” he told me, tugging the pillow away. And eyeing me, as if trying to decide if I’d recovered yet.