Page 137 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“You used it—”

“I’m Pythia! I’m allowed!”

“What does this mean?” Bodil demanded, getting between us. “What is Chimera?”

“A human spell for duplicating yourself,” I told her while still staring at Pritkin. It had taken me ages to get that spell right, and he’d never even been trained for this! But when it came to magic, the guy was freaking Einstein. “Or, in this case, separating,” I added because Bodil didn’t look like she understood.

I guessed that didn’t help because she looked at Pritkin.

“I split my soul into two pieces to make two separate bodies,” he said hoarsely. “Chimera allows the use of magic as our illusion spells do not. They make it look like my duplicates are casting spells; Chimera allows me actually to do it, which I would need against Æsubrand. And it was on the spur of the moment, with no time to consider the implications—”

“What implications?”

“That my soul was already split, had been so from birth, into my incubus nature and my human one. And thus, when the spell activated—”

“You left him behind,” she whispered.

“Yes. I dove for Cassie, which is why I was taken by whatever spell Tony used, but my . . . other half . . . was across the way, having just crossed the finish line, putting him outside the spell’s reach. It, therefore, took me and left him.”

“Then . . . you literally cannot do what we ask.”

He shook his head. “Not even if I was willing to take the risk. My demon half isn’t here.”

“Then that’s how he did it,” Alphonse said groggily from the floor. “You handed Zeus the key to our world. You let the bastards in!”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Give us a minute,” I told Bodil, my lips numb, and for once, she obliged.

We walked further away from the group, none of whom seemed to know what to think about what they’d just heard. And, frankly, neither did I. With Pritkin’s family trait on his side, Zeus would be unbeatable, absolutely unbeatable.

It was something that Pritkin knew better than I did because, despite his disclaimers, he was looking sick. “I should have told you,” he said, facing the far wall. “When we were sitting by the canal. I almost did—”

“That’s when you realized.”

He nodded. “There was no time before that; everything was too confused. And once I did—”

He turned to me, and his face was terrible.

“We don’t know what happened,” I began.

He gestured around wildly when Pritkin never did. “I think we do!”

“We know Zeus brought the gods back, but not how. Your incubus is still you; he wouldn’t be easy to catch—”

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

“I’m trying to make sense of this!”

“There’s no sense to make!” It was savage. “Except for the one fact neither of us has wanted to face: I’m not up to this. I never have been—”

“Faerie thinks you are—”

“Faerie can’t even save her own world! She’s walking around in a dead girl’s corpse, clutching at straws! Recruiting any and everyone she thought might be able to help her. And somehow, against all odds, you and Mircea completed two impossible tasks. But the third. . .

“That was on me, and I failed.”

I tried to say something, but the man who never talked was talking now as if he couldn’t stop. “What you said earlier about someone who keeps going despite the struggles, the risk? That describes you, not me. Do you know what I did, the last time things were this hard? I hid away, became a hermit, then took a job blowing things up. And now—”

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