Page 41 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

I didn’t say that, though, since I didn’t want another argument, but I didn’t need to. Pritkin was more than capable of reading my face, and his jaw had set into that mulish expression I remembered from when we first met. The one that said he hated this.

“I haven’t said I’m competing,” he reminded me. “If you stay, I’ll sit on the sidelines. I won’t participate—”

“Then I will.”

“What?”

I hadn’t wanted to do this, but he was leaving me no choice. “If you don’t challenge, I will.”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “You don’t have standing—”

“Of course I do. All the gods were related; they practically made incest a family pastime.

And Nimue was a daughter of Poseidon. The same Poseidon who was a brother to Zeus. The same Zeus who fathered Artemis, or so some legends say—”

“The legends be damned!”

“—and whether it’s true or not, no one here can dispute it. So, as Artemis’s daughter, I’m Nimue’s second cousin. Or something.”

“That close enough?” Alphonse asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t think it matters, just so long as you have some connection to the throne. Look at him. He’s Nimue’s great-grandson.”

Pritkin’s eyes narrowed. “You planned this ahead of time,” he accused.

“Of course I did.” I hadn’t had much else to do on the way here.

“And didn’t tell me.”

I frowned. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to! But I know you. I knew what you were likely to say—”

“So, you held this in reserve to blackmail me?”

Alphonse whistled through his teeth, and I felt my cheeks flush. “I’m not blackmailing you! I’m saying we need that army, and if you won’t challenge for it, I will. And if you want to leave me here to fight alone, well, I guess that’s your—”

Pritkin abruptly got up and went into the bathroom. The Brain’s eyestalk moved back and forth between him and me for a moment, and then the vaguely blue-tinted creature slowly glorped after him. Pinkie stayed with me; I didn’t know why.

I guessed octopus bought a lot of loyalty.

I sighed, but Alphonse seemed pleased. “Okay, good, he’s gone. We can talk.”

“He’ll be back. He just wants to beat up some rocks first.”

Alphonse lifted an eyebrow but didn’t comment. He’d gotten good at that at Tony’s, where a wrong word could get your tongue cut out. “Then I’ll be fast. The point I’ve been trying to make is that the fat bastard is coming for you. That was him tonight. Some of it, maybe all of it, but it was him—”

“If he’s here.”

“He’s here. You know it as well as I do. You might not know it up here yet,” he tapped my head. “But your gut knows. Don’t tell me it doesn’t.”

I didn’t say anything. But frankly, I agreed with Alphonse. Tony might have been a middle-of-the-road vamp back home, with a decent-sized court and an income to match, but here. . . He was nothing, just nothing.

I still didn’t know how he’d ended up backing the gods, but he’d served his purpose on Earth and had no more to offer them. And they didn’t stay loyal to dead weight. So, whatever they’d promised, he was now uncertain about receiving it.

Probably protection; the fat man had always been paranoid. And now there was a less-than-zero chance that his future depended on offering them something big. Something that they hadn’t been able to get on their own.

Something like my head.

“Yeah, you know,” Alphonse said, watching me. “That’s good. It saves time. So, can we stop arguing about whether he’s behind this and start talking about how to use it?”

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