Page 13 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“I know that.” It was a rasp I didn’t understand.

“Then what . . .?”

He looked at me, and his eyes were haunted. “Then what the hell can I offer you? What am I good for anymore except to put you in danger? You shouldn’t be here, Cassie! This is my fight!”

I stared at him, caught off guard. And then repeated the most absurd claim in a string of them. “What are you good for?”

Green eyes blazed into mine, and there was anger again, but it wasn’t for me. “I let you be assaulted, tortured, beaten to a bloody pulp,” he rasped. “And almost—”

“You didn’t let anything happen,” I said low and vicious, before he uttered the word that rang in both our heads.

“I didn’t prevent it, either,” he said, his jaw tight.

I glared at him, suddenly furious, because we’d discussed this once before, and I didn’t want to do it again. I didn’t want to remember the prelude to my fight with Zeus, which had been a much smaller but no less horrifying battle to escape from a camp run by his creature, Aeslinn. He was the fey king with whom we were currently at war, who had allied with the gods against his own world.

His silver-haired servants had taken me prisoner, and it was from them that I’d learned the true meaning of fear. And of the sensation of bones snapping under my skin, of limbs turning unresponsive, of breathing becoming labored when I could manage it at all, and of eyesight fading after I escaped my tormentors and dragged myself toward a portal that I couldn’t even see properly. Luckily, its brilliance had blinded the fey, too, ensuring that at least some of their boots, fists, and clubs had missed.

But not all.

Not even most.

Yet the portal had caught me right before my strength gave out, with the strangest feeling of weightlessness as my almost dead body fell away. It had been the one Faerie had made for me when I’d visited her realm in spirit form, or else what would have tumbled out the other side probably wouldn’t have lasted long. Instead, the next thing I knew, I was waking up in my mentor’s cozy court, with my whole, unbroken flesh embracing me.

I should have felt relieved and grateful. Instead, I’d been terrified, hearing those jeering, angry voices over and over in my head, feeling phantom pain that didn’t have a source anymore but was so real nonetheless, and being afraid to close my eyes in case I got caught in that nightmare all over again. It had felt obscene, like there should be a price for cheating death.

And, of course, there had been. Because the nightmares had come when I was too weary to stay awake another moment, sending me plunging back into a vortex of leering faces and grasping hands. And abject panic, as if I was right back there again, helpless, alone, and terrified, and unsure whether I’d ever see anyone I loved again.

The fight with Zeus had come later, and strangely, another trauma seemed to have partially healed the first. Maybe because, while I might not have won that contest, I hadn’t lost it, either. I had come face to face with the biggest threat of them all and lived to tell about it.

And I wasn’t sure which of us had been more beat up at the end.

The momentary victory had done wonders for my belief in myself, my training, and my competence. For so long, I had been flailing around like a drowning victim, just trying to keep my head above water and wondering if I would ever be worthy of the position I held. I didn’t worry anymore.

I was Pythia, I was a damned good one, and if I had beaten Zeus once, I could do it again. Of course, I could also die trying, but that was old news. But this, this chance, this possibility that maybe we could survive, even win . . .

That was new.

But Pritkin hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen that fight, and the look on his face reminded me a lot of the one I’d seen in my mirror before I left to face my biggest challenge ever. He didn’t know that we could do this, and the last thing he’d seen had not been positive.

He and Mircea had been linked with me when the terror and torture and savage beating happened at that horrible camp. They had helped me to escape through Pritkin’s abilities and Mircea’s mental powers, all of which we’d shared through our bond. But not before experiencing it right along with me.

I’d been so busy ever since that I hadn’t had much time to think, especially about things I’d rather forget. But I realized now: Pritkin had had nothing but time, fighting his way across a land rent by war and full of enemies. I could see him sitting by a fire in some godforsaken wood, trying to craft weapons out of the locally available flora that might keep him alive a little longer, with nothing but his thoughts for company.

Waiting on another attack and thinking—entirely too much.

“I saw what condition you were in at the end of it,” he growled. “If you hadn’t been traveling in spirit, clothed in a body that Faerie gave you, you wouldn’t have made it. You’d have come back a corpse!”

I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t argue with that.

I’d thought a few times since that being injured in battle came with one advantage: the long recovery time. I’d had a bit of that after the fight with Zeus, which had mostly involved lying in bed for a week with my head spinning. But it had given me a chance to come to some kind of grip with what had happened and how my world had changed.

But his hadn’t yet.

Mircea’s may have because the last time I saw him, he was soaked in the blood of a goddess whose head he’d just cut off, which you had to assume changed a person. But Pritkin had yet to cross his Rubicon, to evolve in the way that this war was causing all of us to, and while I’d come to help him, there was only so much I could do. Physically, because my power didn’t half work here, or emotionally because I didn’t understand what he was feeling.

But maybe there was one thing I could give him.

“Every time the nightmares came,” I said softly. “Every time I felt helpless, like I couldn’t handle another day, like the war would never end and all the hopes we’d had were just that. Just hope, just straws we clutched because what else was there? To lay down and die? I won’t do that.”

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