Page 75 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“If Faerie showed us that, she had a reason,” I rasped, wishing I had some water. Or an aspirin. Or a stiff drink.

“The reason seems to be to kill you,” he whispered, but it was savage, and the hand on my arm clenched harder, just to the edge of being unpleasant. “Which this damned fool quest of hers has almost done a dozen times!”

“Yeah,” I agreed, trying to push myself to a sitting position and somehow missing the floor. But I didn’t have time to lie around, so I tried again, slower this time. And for a wonder, the room behaved itself. “But that can be fixed,” I added.

“Fixed? Fixed how?” Pritkin’s tone said he already knew he wouldn’t like the answer.

“I’m not connected to you anymore,” I reminded him. “I can’t borrow your link to Faerie, and she seems to be having trouble communicating without it. But if you put Lover’s Knot—”

“No.”

“—on us again—”

“No!”

“Why not?” I asked, confused. “You can cast it on just the two of us, and while it won’t give us access to Mircea’s power, it will help in other ways. I can borrow your link to Faerie and you—you could even use the Pythian power when it cycles around again and get us out of here!”

I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that before because, yeah! That would work. I knew it would as he’d borrowed it before, as had Mircea.

I might be too tired to channel it, but Pritkin—he was drained, but he was stronger than me, and it was a short hop. Just getting us to the other side of this damned wall might be enough!

But he looked at me as if I was crazy. “You know damned well why not! If I die, and we’re linked, so do you!”

“Pritkin, we’re in a cell. We’re not going to die—”

“We’re in Faerie, so you can’t know that!”

He abruptly got up, leaving me colder and bewildered on the floor. “I’m talking about a few minutes,” I said. “You can take it off right after. We just need long enough—”

“For that fey bitch to give us more marching orders,” he seethed, making me blink again. Because yeah, that was the idea. Faerie knew what was going on around here, who we could trust, if anyone, and who was gunning for us. She probably knew all kinds of information that could give us an edge, and she wanted us to win.

“She’ll be back anyway,” I pointed out. “She wasn’t done; she just lost her grip—”

“And if someone comes in here while we’re both mentally absent? And butchers me as they’ve been trying to do since I arrived? Tony might be after you, but the rest are after me. If we’re linked—”

And for a moment, he really did look demonic: red of face, dark of eye, and with bunched fists sparking with little tendrils of power that curled up his arms as if searching for someone to throw it at. He looked like he could eviscerate said person from here by sheer force of will, which was when I started worrying. Because sure, Pritkin was overprotective sometimes, but not like this.

He had never been like this.

“No one is coming,” I said softly as if speaking to a mad bull. “And Faerie needs us. She’s not going to let anything happen—”

“And when she doesn’t?” It was savage.

I frowned. I didn’t like trusting a vengeful goddess any more than he did, but what was the alternative? Because without her and the information she’d provided, we’d have already lost.

She had given me a lot of help getting out of Aeslinn’s camp of horrors, help that had allowed me to make it to the portal and then through it. And the information she’d provided after that had let me stop Zeus’ plans and live to tell about it. I doubted she cared for us, as we weren’t her creatures, even Pritkin, whose fey blood was thin.

But the enemy of my enemy was a friend or at least an ally, and I’d take that.

But he wouldn’t.

It was in every line of his body, in the way he was pacing when he never did, in the contour of that jaw, which, if it got any sharper, could cut something. I’d thought we’d settled this; he’d even been talking to Bodil about us replacing her champion. Which might keep the assassins off our butts in between challenges but would still leave us vulnerable in the contest itself.

That was a risk I was willing to take, and he had been, too, just a little while ago. But all of a sudden. . . It was like I was talking to a different man.

I decided to change the subject and let him calm down since I still had about a thousand questions he could answer, assuming he would.

“Okay,” I said, and he looked at me in surprise as if he’d expected an argument, one that he probably had the answers for already prepped. So I asked one that maybe he didn’t. “Why did it look like a cook was leading some kind of rebellion?”

---