Page 136 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

I had been formulating a thought, which that comment erased. “What?”

“I can’t,” he repeated.

“But your other half can. And he will; you know he will—”

“Yes, I’m sure he would jump at the chance.” It was grim.

“—and yes, it’ll reenergize him, but not for long. I’ll be using most of the power we generate for the shift. And even if I don’t need it all—”

“Cassie—”

“—and he starts to become a problem, well, I tricked him once—”

“And won’t again. He’s not a fool. He simply made the mistake of underestimating you.”

“—and we’ll have the time to worry about it later,” I pointed out. “If we die here—”

“You won’t. I promise you—”

“You can’t promise me.” I stared at him in confusion. “You know what those things can do! And if you don’t, I can tell you stories—”

“I’ve heard the stories.”

“Then what—”

“You don’t understand,” he said, looking almost. . .

“What did you do?” I asked, feeling my stomach drop. Because shame wasn’t in his usual repertoire.

“What I had to. I needed to cross that finish line, but you were in danger. You’d just jerked Æsubrand back to you, and he—the fey aren’t like us, Cassie, or even like Alphonse. They don’t have chivalry, or if they do, it’s of a different kind. He wouldn’t see you as anything but an opponent, and one whose magic he had cause to fear—”

“Pritkin.” It was flat because this was bad. This was very bad. Pritkin didn’t do long, involved explanations. Pritkin explained things in terse, basic terms when he could be bothered to explain himself at all.

Except for now because this was bad.

“I had to be in two places at once,” he said and waited for me to get it.

Which took a second because—

No.

No!

“Cassie—”

“You—” I grabbed him by those massive biceps. “You left him there? You went and left Zeus the one guy he needs to kill us all?”

“What are you talking about?” Bodil asked because the bitch had done to us what I once had to Rhosier and pulled off our silence spell without us even noticing. “What did he do?”

“Chimera!” I all but yelled it. And Pritkin met my eyes with no defiance in them but no apologies, either.

“If I hadn’t, you’d be dead,” he said simply.

“You don’t know that!”

“And I don’t know otherwise. Neither do you. I couldn’t take that chance.”

“So you used freaking Chimera?”

---