Page 9 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

Or maybe not, because the chief flunky paused the flowery speech he had launched into to blink at me in confusion.

He was a typical fey, with high cheekbones, a tall, deceptively thin body considering that he could probably heft a tank, and—thankfully—dark brown hair. It was the silver-haired bastards that made my butt clench, although, after today, I was starting to wonder if these were any better. Frankly, it was doubtful.

But this one, dressed in some mighty fancy robes for a flunky, was at least listening, although I appeared to have confused him. “But your . . . Pythianess,” he said, frowning and stumbling a bit over the word he’d just made up. “Did you not hear? The victory banquet is in less than an hour—”

“To catch us off guard and exhausted,” Pritkin explained in English, which the flunky didn’t appear to understand because he continued blithely in his language.

“—and I can assure you, any delicacy that you could possibly—”

“Are they invited?” I asked, not bothering to be polite, considering that his people had just tried to kill me.

Luckily, my translation spell didn’t manage sarcasm well, and he failed to notice.

“They?” his eyes went around the room, carefully avoiding the repugnance along the wall. “You brought others with you?”

Pritkin was trying, not very successfully, to hide a smile.

“They,” I said impatiently. “Them. Those.” I pointed at Horror #1 and #2 and realized I hadn’t thought to ask their names.

“You think they deserve to eat?” Pritkin asked. “After the stunt they pulled?”

“Only one of them noped out,” I reminded him. “And both of them did help. I take it that getting help is not illegal?” I assumed not, as he’d have been disqualified otherwise.

“No, I’m allowed a team,” Pritkin said, grinning openly now.

“I don’t know what’s so damned funny,” I said. “We won, didn’t we?”

That won me an actual laugh.

Pritkin’s amusement seemed to take a couple of the fey back almost as much as it did me, as it was not a regular occurrence from a man known to scowl for centuries. But nothing about this day was normal! And if Gross and Nasty over there were our team, we needed them strong.

But the flunky, who had appeared as unruffled as they came on arrival, was starting to have a problem keeping up that façade. His eyes didn’t seem to want to light on the horror twins, yet his duty required them to, so it was a lot of blink, slide, blink, slide as he continually readjusted his view. And then Pritkin decided to help him out.

“Or we could just take them with us.”

“Take them . . . with you?” the head flunky whispered as if he didn’t understand.

“To the banquet,” Pritkin said helpfully, which caused one of the flunkies-in-training to gasp and the other literally to clutch his pearls.

He had a lot of them. They all had a lot of them, from the seed variety sewn onto their filmy robes to create patterns in the weave, to normal-sized ones that they wore in long ropes around their necks and threaded through their elaborate hairstyles, to one the size of a robin’s egg on the hand that the chief flunky had brought up to his throat. It was black and matched his expression, which had just about worn through the thin veneer of proper manners he had left.

He clearly didn’t think that we deserved proper manners. He thought that we smelled. And what he thought about our companions was probably best left unsaid.

So Pritkin helped him out again. “Or you could have some raw meat sent in. Venison will do.”

“Venison,” the flunky repeated as if he had never heard the term. And then he seemed to snap out of it. “Yes. Yes, we can—venison. Venison. Of course.”

“A lot of it,” Pritkin clarified, and the three of them nodded together as if their heads were on a string.

Then they fled. Probably to get a bath and change clothes, lest any of our funk persisted. I grinned for some reason.

And looked down to see that I had made a friend.

“You have a name?” I asked Horror #1, who had sidled up beside me.

It opened up a hole in the rippled skin that I guessed was supposed to be a mouth and screeched something. I winced. “I don’t think I can pronounce that.”

“Perhaps you should just give them names since we’re all in this together,” Pritkin said dryly from over by the door. He’d followed the flunkies, closed the door after them, and was doing something to it. Probably making sure that they hadn’t added a listening spell because he continued to move about afterward, checking other parts of the suite.

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