Page 117 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

The stable office where Pritkin and I had been interrogated was also radically different, with what looked like another barricade thrown up in front of it, this one made primarily out of furniture. I recognized a bunch of sturdy wooden tables and a few broken bits of wood that might have been saddle holders. That seemed like a crap job of barricading for the kind of people who lived here and whose magic should have sufficed anyway.

But maybe the Green Fey hadn’t colonized this place, back whenever the heck this was? I didn’t know, but looking at the splintered wood gave me a bad feeling. It told a story of shock, unpreparedness, and desperation.

And of failure, as the barricade hadn’t held.

Suddenly, I really didn’t want to go in there. But Bodil felt differently and pushed forward, squeezing past the hanging shards and blackened stones, and we slowly followed. Annnnnd I should learn to listen to my gut, I thought, finally understanding where all the people went.

And where they’d stayed.

Pritkin, Alphonse, and I had stopped just inside the entrance, with Alphonse’s arm flung out in front of me like a parent catching a child in a fender bender. But Bodil was standing in the middle of the room with no expression on that beautiful face. I couldn’t blame her.

I didn’t know what was on mine, but it might have looked similarly blank, as I wasn’t sure what would fit the moment. Because there were bones everywhere as if we’d walked into an ossuary. Only in that case, they’d be in nice little rows and patterns, and nothing was orderly here.

The remains of the defenders were littered across the floor, piled against the walls, and blackened in chunks as if spells had eaten through flesh and bone. Or, in one memorable case, as if someone had been blasted against the wall with such force that he had remained there like a partially excavated fossil. I even thought I saw an expression of surprise on his face or what was left of it.

He was alone, but in other areas, it was impossible to tell how many dead there were, as skeletons were piled on top of skeletons. Their flesh was mostly gone now except to stain their bones, with even the smell of decay long gone other than for a mustiness in the air that I tried not to think about. But their clothes, ragged though they were, were intact, and the robes were black, like the type Bodil’s guards had worn, the ones that had given them the bat-like appearance that had so startled me when I first came here.

This had been someone’s last stand.

I took in the gouges in the walls, the marks that spell fire had left on virtually everything, and the rotting hulk of some fallen beast in a corner. It was unrecognizable now, its fur covered with a fine layer of black dust. Like the huge pile of the dead that had all but blocked a door beside the stall that Bodil had used as an office.

The black-garbed guys had made a new blockade there, out of their bodies this time, but it hadn’t been enough. It had been plowed through, too, leaving heaps of broken skeletons framing the entrance, a few still held together by rotting sinew. I stared at them, wondering what had been in there that was so important.

The only thing I remembered was that it was the door Rieni had disappeared through after saddling me with a bunch of baby seahorses. And then laughing and skipping out of the room, secure in the knowledge that there was little a fey child couldn’t get away with. Especially that child.

Which was why it seemed strangely appropriate to see her again, emerging from its shadow and stepping delicately over the bones, a slender figure clad all in black with a faint green luminescence still clinging to her. It was so appropriate that I didn’t even question it for a moment. “That was you,” I started to say, recognizing the color of the beast that had saved us at the lake by distracting the demons for a crucial few seconds.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t say anything.

Because the implication of her being here had just hit, and because Rieni . . .

Wasn’t herself.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The face was recognizable—just. The skin, a pleasing creamy brown the last time I’d seen her, was now a sickly off-white, and I didn’t think that was because of Enid’s ball of moonlight. Because Rieni also had what looked like black mold growing up one cheek and into her hairline, eating across the previous perfection like scorching.

Her clothes were also wrong, as tattered as the skeletons’ and barely clinging to her bones, and her hair was singed off on one side as if she’d dodged a spell by millimeters. But it was the eyes that really gave it away. They were as fixed, staring, and lifeless as mine had probably been when fighting Zeus as a bloody corpse.

And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Æsubrand had strode into the room on Bodil’s heels, not bothering with Alphonse’s caution, but his bravado had gone fast. He had been standing there, looking silently around like the rest of us, but now he stumbled back, making some sign in the air.

Had he been an elderly Romanian woman instead of a hunky fey prince, it would have reminded me of the evil eye. Because that was what you did when confronted with a zombie, I thought, only that was impossible! Faerie didn’t have zombies!

But that was definitely what I was seeing here, and Rieni looked like she’d been one for a while. Half of the flesh on one slender arm had rotted away, her eyes were sunken pits that clearly showed the shape of the skull underneath, and her teeth were cracked and partly missing when she suddenly grinned at us, causing her grandmother to make a little sound before going to one knee. But Rieni wasn’t looking at Bodil as I’d have expected.

She was looking at me. And coming toward me with an intent that would have had me backing up, too, except that Alphonse grabbed me and let out a roar of challenge before shoving me behind him alongside Enid. At the same moment, Pritkin moved forward, getting in between the zombie and me, but he didn’t tell me to leave.

Because where was there to go? And before we could discuss it or even form words in our half-stunned brains, the zombie caught herself and stopped, still partway across the room. I guessed our expressions had been eloquent.

She put out a soothing hand, which would have helped more if it hadn’t been connected to the mostly missing arm. I could see the tendons working in the bare spots where all the flesh had rotted away. I could see tendons. . .

“I apologize,” she said, her voice a raspy thread on the air as if the vocal cords making it were dried out and dusty, too. “It’s been so long, I almost thought you weren’t coming. And when you did, it was so sudden that I didn’t have time to choose a different avatar—not that many are left intact.”

“Avatar?” I whispered.

“I am not the girl Rieni,” the thing peering at us through her eyes said. “Her guards fought valiantly for her, dying to give her time to escape. As a result, she was one of the few survivors of the Black Day. She fled but died later when a ceiling collapsed, trapping her underneath.” She glanced down at her ruined arm. “I had to shred this to get her loose after she passed.”

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