Page 118 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

Bodil made another sound, and this one wasn’t the stunned horror of a moment ago. This one was pure rage, and her eyes flooded with flames so bright they stained her face crimson. She jumped at the body of her granddaughter before any of us could react or even register the movement.

But the zombie didn’t have that problem, and Bodil found herself suspended off the ground by some spell halfway through her leap. And, okay, no, I thought, staring. Zombies couldn’t do that.

A fresh zombie, just hours old, might have enough magic left in their veins for one final curse, assuming they’d been a magic worker to begin with. But not one like that. Not with Bodil fighting it, and looking like she was giving it her all, not to mention that whenever Rieni had died, it had been a while ago.

And that meant. . .

I felt my brain skitter away from the implication for a second time.

“You’re not a necromancer,” I said harshly and had those dead eyes look my way again.

“No,” the creature agreed. “Or I wasn’t once. But needs must, isn’t that what you humans say?”

This human found it challenging to say anything but decided I’d better keep her talking. We were outclassed, with our magic almost gone, and even Bodil, the most powerful among us at the moment, unable to break that hold. She was still trying, thrashing in mid-air and yelling something I couldn’t make out, probably because it was profane, and my prissy little translation spell tended to censor stuff like that.

Or maybe because it was old, specifically old spells that started shaking the room from their power, toppling the skeleton piles, and sending the barely held-together guards falling to the ground. One of them lost a head that went rolling across the floor to land at Enid’s feet, causing her to scream and kick the thing. And she kicked it hard, sending it flying against the opposite wall, where it shattered into a dozen pieces.

And yet Bodil had moved not an inch.

“Stop it!” Æsubrand yelled. “You’ll kill us all!”

“As long as I kill her, too,” Bodil hissed, looking half mad.

But then the thing-that-wasn’t-Rieni put out a hand, and Bodil froze, her lips pulled back in a snarl, and her eyes wild and burning with still leaping flames. But nothing else on her body moved. I couldn’t have done better myself.

I cleared my throat and hoped my voice wouldn’t squeak. “That’s . . . what we say.”

And I supposed that non-committal answer was good enough since the zombie swiveled those dead eyes back to me. “Yes, I like that phrase. And it is appropriate. I have had to learn many new skills in recent years, and the information I gained from you was invaluable.”

“From . . . me?”

Rieni’s head cocked as if in surprise. “Yes, I had thought you finished when Zeus’s creatures drained you of blood and left you a corpse floating in the water in that other place—what was it called? The cold one with all the ice.”

“Wales,” I whispered, a strange idea forming.

“Yes, that was it. I was bemoaning trusting you only to have you fail so easily. You did not even put up much of a fight.

“But then you did, rising from the beach where they’d dragged you and laying waste. I did not understand it at first, thinking that I must have been mistaken, that you had not been dead, after all. But the more I watched, the more convinced I was that I had been correct the first time and that this was some magic I didn’t know.

“When you finally made your way into my realm and I could see you and your thoughts clearly for the first time, I took that knowledge from you, just in case. I never intended to use it, but a weapon is a weapon. And in this war, needs must, don’t you agree?”

I swallowed, the room swimming a little. Because only one person here could have been in my head through all that. Only one had seen me defy Zeus with some of the only magic he didn’t know. And only one, with her back to the wall and her creatures dying around her, would have been able to reproduce it.

But I still had to hear it.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

“You know who I am,” she said, somewhat impatiently. “I am Faerie and have been waiting for you to arrive for some time. Come. This place is not safe, and we have much to discuss.”

***

“There is nowhere safe above ground and little beneath it,” the zombie said sometime later, chatting casually as the rest of us stumbled along behind her. “But those who share great Poseidon’s blood do not like the creatures who prowl this land any more than you do. The waves offer some protection as a result, as the beasts will not go there.”

She glanced back at me, I guessed to see if I was paying attention, allowing me to see the maggots churning slowly under the skin of her face.

Yeah, that was the problem with zombies, I thought dizzily. The magic that sustained them slowed down normal decomposition but didn’t stop it, and it looked like some serious stuff was going on inside Faerie’s avatar. I wanted to ask how long she’d been that way, when exactly we were, how the hell we’d gotten here, and a whole list of other things.

But I only swallowed thickly and didn’t say anything for fear that I might start screaming.

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