Page 10 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“And the rest of the team?” I asked, terribly afraid that I already knew the answer.

“Nobody wished to throw their hats in the bull ring with the certain loser,” I was told.

“But you didn’t lose.”

“No.” He frowned, his good humor evaporating as quickly as it had come. “Which just makes this more dangerous. My attackers were clumsy today, assuming that numbers would be enough to overwhelm me. They’ll be more strategic next time.”

“Next time?” I repeated. “How many of these damned events are there?”

“Five all together. And they get progressively harder.” He looked at me seriously, and his head tilted. “Feel like doing that sort of thing four more times?”

“No.” I lay back on the bed, and the horror I had decided to name Pinkie curled up next to me. I absently petted it. It wasn’t like I could smell any worse.

“Then I take it you’ll be leaving?” Pritkin asked, appearing hopeful.

I frowned at him, a fact that did not go over well.

“Don’t be stupid, Cassie! You have to see what’s going on here!”

“Yes, I do, and don’t call me names.”

He blinked slightly at that. “I wasn’t. I was pointing out that you are, in fact, acting remarkably—”

“I am acting like a Pythia who wants this war over and all of us back home!” I said and shifted to get in his face since I could currently do that. But he recovered quickly; no one had ever said he wasn’t resilient.

Which was why I found my wrist captured in an iron grip and a suddenly dangerous-looking man in my face. He had just been chased through a forest by no fewer than three different hunting parties, had gotten into a fistfight with a prehistoric nightmare, and had almost drowned while sharing his limited oxygen supply with me. He should have looked like a twin to my drowned rat.

He didn’t.

The tan he’d been working on in Vegas had deepened, probably due to roaming all over the fey countryside, trying to get here. I imagined that that hadn’t been easy, as assassinating him before he arrived would have been simpler than this. But they’d missed him, and now they’d missed him again, yet all he could think about was my safety.

I wanted to kiss him, so I did. And it was nice—for half a second. Which was all I had to enjoy the hard lips, the faint scrape of stubble, and the body that felt like it had dropped some weight and put on some muscle since I’d seen him last, not that he’d needed it. But it had left him looking even more stripped down and deadly than usual, with the cheekbones more clearly defined and the jawline sharp enough to cut myself on.

Pair that with blond hair that was no longer dripping but molded to his skull as it never did usually, hard green eyes, and a grip like iron, and I was . . .

I was trying to kiss him again.

But he pulled back, clearly not in the mood, which was not normal for an incubus. But Pritkin was a war mage first and Rosier’s son second—or maybe third or fourth as he and the old man were less antagonistic these days but hardly friends. And business took precedence.

“What?” I asked.

And then wished I hadn’t as a silence spell clicked shut over our heads.

Damn it.

“Let me spell this out for you,” he said grimly. “You asked what we’re working with? Them,” he hiked a thumb at the horror twins. “That’s it. And your power is wonky and dependent on portals that can be shut down, should anyone figure out that that is the way to stop you. And whilst I absorbed a good deal of power from recent events,” I stiffened, but he didn’t go into detail, thank God, “it is limited, and I expended a good deal of it getting this far. And for some reason, I can no longer feel my connection to Mircea.”

I bit my lip. “Yeah. About that.”

“Cassie . . .” Pritkin could make a single word into a whole paragraph, maybe an entire page, I thought.

“I was going to tell you later—”

“Tell me now.” It wasn’t a request.

Which was fair, as Mircea formed the third part of our triumvirate, and without him, the spell binding us together didn’t work. Not that that mattered since Pritkin had taken it off when he and Mircea went on different errands in Faerie, not wanting to risk me. But it was easy enough to reengage in emergencies, which was what had happened because Mircea had had a crisis involving a pissed-off Athena.

Yes, that Athena. Luckily, he’d had a witch with him, who I guessed had cast Lover’s Knot at his request. Because seconds before his daughter Dorina, who had been fighting an ancient goddess on her own, was about to meet a predictable end, Mircea had absorbed some of the goddesses’ power through a smear of her blood.

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