Page 85 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

But Zeus did.

Mother might have slain the great king of the gods, but she hadn’t gotten all of him. Wiley old Zeus had become suspicious about her frequent hunting trips into the hells and the power she was amassing. He had, therefore, persuaded a demon lord to carry part of his soul into those realms, where Mother’s gift for traveling between worlds allowed her to easily go but where he and the other gods had struggled.

And what he’d discovered there, too late, was that she’d found a way to make war on them all—and to win.

He couldn’t save himself from her wrath, but that small piece of his power, disguised in the demon lord he’d overwhelmed, had endured. He leeched off the creature’s power until he found Aeslinn, a more willing puppet, and jumped ship. And began trying to recreate Mother’s success, only with the incubi grandson this time.

Ruth had been paid to trap his prize for him, but one of Aeslinn’s functionaries had changed the order at the last minute, knowing what would happen if his lord obtained all that power. So, Pritkin had become her target instead. And she’d almost succeeded where far more powerful enemies had failed, by serving him poison after he helped her get home following an attack by some street thugs.

But the demon lord who had carried Zeus all those years also knew of his plans and got there in the nick of time. He proposed a different outcome to her: watch Pritkin, get close to him, and only kill him if one of Zeus’s operatives found him again. He had plans that involved the incubi and wanted Pritkin alive—and soon, so did Ruth.

After a while, she realized that no matter what she was offered as payment, it was nothing to what she could gain from Pritkin himself. So, she, too, had tried to emulate my mother and use an incubus to magnify her power. And had died for it.

Once Pritkin found out all of this, and his incubus helped save me from Zeus and then the fey camp, I’d thought they would mend their relationship. And work together as they’d been meant to all along. Reintegrating into one man of unimaginable power and far more peace. Only apparently not.

But perhaps I had one card left to play.

“What if I could give you more power?” I asked idly. “Like a lot more?”

The incubus cracked an eye at me because that was the one word that always got their attention.

“Won’t work,” he said flatly.

“What won’t?”

“Waiting for the Pythian energy to return and using my abilities to magnify it, thus breaking Zeus’s damned spell and getting us out of here in one fell swoop.”

I blinked at him. “Why not?”

“You know damned well why not! Every time we do that, it gets out of control. We burnt a pub down—”

“We burnt a god down!”

It was true—or close enough. We’d helped defeat Ares by engaging in the same activity that had drained Pritkin’s wife. But I was not a half-demon with barely any strength; I was a half-goddess with the added boost of the Pythian power.

And for the first time, Pritkin’s incubus had been able to feast.

First on my power, and when he was sated, he had magnified and expanded what he’d taken a hundredfold and fed it back to me. And then fed again on that, over and over, in a cycle of creation that had left the two of us glowing like a star. And feeling like we were about to be ripped apart because Pritkin hadn’t known how to handle it.

But his incubus did.

I was sure he did because he’d eaten the life essence of hundreds of fey without a burp! Like he’d helped me to send all that glowing power we’d made in Wales into the battle with Ares, directing it to rip open a portal in space-time and release another god onto the field. He was a Prince of the Incubi; he was born for this!

“This room is sealed, Cassie, not just warded,” he said harshly. “It means the wards are ancient, to the point that they’ve seeped into its very bones. If we call up that kind of power, there’s nowhere to send it if it gets away from me. The wards could reflect it back and immolate us both!”

“Or it could save us both, as it did in London—”

“In London, we had Mircea’s help. His family took the load, dispersed it among themselves, and acted as a safety valve. And in any case, you were locked in a battle with the king of the gods; there was nothing to lose. There is here!”

“Yes, there’s you!”

But the chin stayed mulish, the eyes closed again defiantly, and the head went back. Saying without uttering a word that he wasn’t budging on this. He wouldn’t risk my life trying to make more power, and he wouldn’t give what he already had to a man he didn’t trust.

And the fact that the man was him made no difference at all!

The incubus wouldn’t rely on someone who had imprisoned him all those years, and Pritkin wouldn’t trust the demon who probably reminded him too much of his father. That also explained why he didn’t want to acknowledge his maybe nephew, for fear that Rosier would come for his namesake if he knew and drag him off to the same hell that Pritkin had endured.

And I didn’t know what to do about any of it.

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