Page 104 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

Only to splat face-first onto a shield I hadn’t put up and didn’t think that Pritkin had, either, as he and a hulking shadow I finally recognized as Alphonse were still trying to kill each other. Until someone lit a wand, showing them that they were fighting the wrong guy. And lighting up a familiar redhead with a scarred face, who I guessed was my most recent savior because she grabbed me.

“I was in the water,” Enid said frantically. “And then I was here, but I couldn’t move! I could barely breathe and thought I was dying! That someone had spelled me—”

“Yeah, I thought the—”

“—but the paralysis vanished as suddenly as it had come, and I was on my way back to my feet when I heard—”

She broke off suddenly, terror flooding those usually staunch features, and I didn’t have to ask why. Something echoed through the night, a stuttering, haunting cry that was horribly familiar and no, no, no! I hadn’t even dealt with the current crisis yet!

But I had a new one, ready or not. And everyone else seemed to sense that, too, their heads jerking up. And freezing in place, even Æsubrand, who looked confused, probably wondering what he was feeling. Had I dared to speak, I could have told him: the same thing a mouse felt when a hawk glided overhead.

“Shhh!” I hissed, extinguishing my whip, but nobody shhhed.

Quite the contrary. Once their paralysis broke, right about the time that terrible cry petered out, they all tried to talk at once. And that was a problem—that was a big problem—because someone else was out there.

Or make that something, I thought, my spine crawling as another stuttering cry tore through the night, closer this time. I knew those sounds. They’d featured in my nightmares often enough.

“Shut up!” I hissed, and we all hunkered down. Even Æsubrand, although he was breathing hard and trying to maneuver his way over to me, probably to gut me while we hid from what was out there. Which would lead them right to us because—

“They scent blood,” Pritkin whispered before I could, probably hoping it would cause the princely idiot to pause and think for a minute, something he seemed to have trouble doing when enraged. And it might have—if it hadn’t been Pritkin speaking.

I guessed Æsubrand hadn’t noticed his chief rival before, probably being too focused on me. But he saw him now and immediately launched himself at him, a wicked-looking dagger glinting in the starlight for half a second. Until Pritkin and Alphonse took him down, although he fought like a tiger.

A seriously stupid one who was about to get us all killed!

“Muffle him!” I whispered and I guessed they did because I didn’t hear anything else.

Except for that, I thought, as several somethings from different directions gave a combined cry that echoed off the sides of the old lake bed and etched its way down my bones. I couldn’t see them as the steep embankment still blocked my view. But a recent memory gave me an image anyway.

Not of what they looked like because they could look like anything. But of what they were: eldritch monsters that everyday demons called “Ancient Horrors” because they didn’t have a better description. And because it really, really fit.

The Ancient Horrors were old demons, powerful ones, practically primordial ones who the Demon High Council had long ago locked away on some barren worlds and left to die. Only they hadn’t died. They had gotten seriously pissed off, however, and once Zeus showed up with an offer of alliance, they’d taken it gleefully.

Most recently, they’d possessed the bodies of some vamps in old Romania, where Zeus had intended for them to ravage the world’s vampire senates in the past, thus winning him the war before it started by drastically weakening our side. My court and I had denied him that, and Adra and the council’s demons had killed the Horrors he had selected for the mission. We’d already killed some of them at the battle for Issengeir, Aeslinn’s southern capital, where they’d been stuffed into the bodies of rock-like manlikans to help with the city’s defenses.

I’d hoped that, together, those battles had gotten them all.

Guessed not.

A silence spell clicked shut around us, and it must have been Bodul’s work because a second later, she was in my face. “What is that?” she demanded. “Where are we? How are we here? What did you do?”

The rapid-fire questions reminded me of the ones I’d asked her back in the stable, none of which she’d answered. I would have been more obliging, but there was no time. The predators after us sensed magic as quickly as blood, as I’d learned the hard way once.

And preferred not to learn again!

“Drop the spell,” I told her. “Do it now.”

“Are you mad?”

“No! And do what I tell you, or we’re all about to die!” And unlike Æsubrand, she appeared to be able to think past her anger because she dropped the spell. “No magic,” I whispered. “No blood. And do what I do.”

I ducked into the mud, rolling to get it over the few parts of my face, hair, and neck that were still clean and shedding scent. And then I started crawling—fast. The others followed because more and more sounds were echoing through the night, horrible, skin-ruffling noises that were like nothing on Earth.

Or in Faerie, either, I assumed, since Bodil was also taking a mud bath while we crawled. And looking around with a furtiveness that she probably hadn’t shown in a few millennia. I just crawled faster because we needed to get away from where we’d been, and we needed to do it now.

I’d no sooner had the thought than something with brilliant yellow eyes peered over the edge of the pool. I couldn’t see anything else except a shadow against the night, and I was good with that. If I never saw another of those things again—

But I was going to because one person hadn’t followed my commands. One person had stood up, his silver clothing shining in the starlight like it was made out of the stuff, and pulled out a sword. A sword that would do exactly nothing, no matter how pretty it was.

---