Page 114 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“You gonna do something?” he asked, putting me down on some fallen stones.

“Gonna try.”

“Okay.” He looked around but couldn’t find any part of us that wasn’t just as dirty as the pike. So he shook it instead, then rubbed a big palm over it to get it, if not clean, at least less filthy. I took it gingerly, hoping for a flash of something.

I wasn’t the best touch telepath out there, but sometimes, it worked.

And sometimes it didn’t. What it did not do was to shoot a skin-crawling frisson straight up my spine. Along with a sense of wrongness so dizzying that I’d have probably fallen over if I hadn’t been propped against the rocks. I dropped the pike and clamped my teeth on a scream I didn’t understand.

“You’re freaking me out right now,” Alphonse said.

“Sorry.”

He shrugged. “S’okay. I’m used to it. You were a creepy kid.”

“I was not.”

“Big, blank blue eyes, looking like they stared into a guy’s soul. And that was when you weren’t busy talking to people who weren’t there or laughing at jokes nobody told.”

“I was talking to ghosts—”

“Yeah, ‘cause that makes it so much better. You want that thing or not?”

He gestured at the pike.

“No.”

“Okay.” He threw me back over his shoulder and walked on. “You gonna tell me what you saw? ‘Cause I remember that reaction. You used to scream for no reason all the time. I thought you were going nuts ‘till Sal said you got pictures sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” I agreed, wishing he’d drop it.

He did not drop it. “She said you can touch stuff and see who owned it or what they did when they used it. So, what did you see this time?”

I shivered slightly and knew he felt it. “Nothing.”

“You wanna explain that, or do I gotta keep playing twenty questions?”

I struggled to find the right words, but it didn’t go well. It reminded me of the first few moments after I arrived here, when I’d felt a scrim across the world. As if it wanted to reject me as being wrong somehow.

That didn’t make sense as I’d been to plenty of different times and never felt that way, although I had always been a visitor who didn’t belong, like one of those stray leaves stuck to the bottom of a dark witch’s shoe. I rubbed the fingers that had been clutching the pike together and felt the grittiness of the dust again. The pang was less now but still there, and not just on the pike.

Now that I concentrated, I could feel it everywhere, in the dirt clinging to me or the breath in my lungs. There was something wrong, but it wasn’t this place. It was me.

I was the displaced thing, and this world knew it. It sounded ridiculous, but I could feel it as clearly as if I was looking at a “Don’t Enter” sign. As if I’d somehow breached a forbidden zone where I was not supposed to be.

Was it because of the Horrors? And if it was, how were they doing this? They didn’t have power over time any more than Tony did!

Not to mention that Æsubrand was right: when had demons crawled all over Faerie? Because I’d sat through a lot of deadly dull briefings in recent months, many of them about fey history, and nobody had mentioned that. And he’d probably received far more lessons growing up in a position where he might be called on to rule parts of this place someday.

So what the hell?

“Cassie?” Alphonse prompted because he was relentless.

“There’s nothing, and then there’s nothing,” I said shortly. “I didn’t get anything that would help.”

“Yeah. Just be certain you mention it when you do.”

Sure thing, I thought, trying to concentrate as I bounced along, but it was hard. Maybe because it felt like my brain was sloshing around in my skull, still trying to play catch up. And that wasn’t helped when we finally reached the stables again.

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