Page 141 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

Was our only way out.

Chapter Forty

Pritkin had enough juice left for a bubble spell that snapped in place over my head right before we submerged and found Æsubrand already down there. He was clutching a ball of moonlight and looking stunned and fairly pie-eyed from whatever had happened while I hadn’t been looking. But he was kicking with his legs like his life depended on it, although he was going in a circle in his panic.

Pritkin grabbed him when he came around again, which made swimming difficult, but what the hell wasn’t? I started trying to help, only to stop almost immediately and stare around. Because something was wrong.

“Disorientation spell,” Pritkin gasped while struggling with Æsubrand, who was fighting him for some reason. “You have to—”

But I didn’t hear what I had to do. I suddenly couldn’t hear anything except my frantic heartbeat. And I realized that maybe Æsubrand hadn’t been stunned by the fight after all.

Disorientation, my ass.

A wave of vertigo hit me so hard and fast that it stripped everything else away, and made the “oo” sound at the end of Pritkin’s last word elongate for what sounded like forever. My head started spinning to the point that I felt nauseous, my brain fritzed like a lightning bolt had just hit it, and when the gray static cleared, I was left with no idea where I was. The ball of light and the crevasse were still visible, but they suddenly didn’t make sense anymore; nothing did, including whatever Pritkin was yelling at me.

And then it got worse.

For a moment, I thought that the Horrors must have taken the plunge, too, because it felt like the various pieces of me were no longer attached. None of them drifted off with the tide as if something had slashed a path through me, but they also didn’t seem like they belonged to me anymore. I couldn’t feel my hands; my legs may as well have been someone else’s; and my head felt like it had blown up to three times the normal size and was drifting about like a detached balloon.

Someone grabbed me around the waist, and I couldn’t fight them, even assuming that I was supposed to. I didn’t know what was happening; I didn’t know anything! Except that it was getting darker.

Somebody grabbed my face and looked into my eyes, and I could barely see him, although he couldn’t have been more than a few inches away. I didn’t know who he was; the mixed-up features weren’t in the right place, and as I stared, an ear floated off to the other side of the head. But he was telling me that the spell had been formulated against demons, that he couldn’t break it, and that I needed to breathe.

And yes, yes, I did.

I could feel my chest getting tight despite having a bubble of air right there. But my lungs couldn’t recall what to do with it, assuming they were lungs anymore. And not whatever my fingers were becoming, which—agghhhh!

I flapped them in horror, but it didn’t help; if anything, it only made things worse. They noodled out in pale, too-skinny appendages, miles long, like thick spaghetti disappearing into the distance, which didn’t make sense! But nothing did. Including the face in front of me that was now melting like hot wax and making me want to scream, only I couldn’t remember how—

And then somebody else seized me, although not in the usual way. A hand felt like it reached into my chest and fisted, which would have been enough to send me spiraling the rest of the way into a nightmare, except it didn’t hurt. And this grip, I could feel!

It was solid and real as nothing else was, making me clutch it in panicked relief. As soon as I did so, a tiny bit of sensation returned, confused and randomly firing from different parts of my body. A toe spoke up to let me know it was still down there somewhere, a bruise throbbed menacingly in my side, and my vision started to clear, only I found myself looking at nothing as I was staring off into the inky void.

And then a voice echoed through my head. “You are a great deal of trouble,” Faerie said and pulled.

All of a sudden, I could see clearly again, although what I could see wasn’t down here. It was up there, where I guess she still was, and things hadn’t improved. Bodil was running out of juice, with the ring’s light starting to stutter around her; the enemy was regrouping on the sidelines, waiting her out; a circle of bodies where the fires had almost burned down surrounded the throne and was sending up noxious smoke everywhere, which her rain was no longer thick enough to disperse; and Alphonse—

What was he doing?

He had climbed on top of the giant eruption of a throne and was now peering into the darkness. And then yelling back down at us. “I don’t see her! I don’t see her!”

“Go,” Faerie told him, her voice echoing everywhere. “I have one more trick, and once it is done, it is done. You must be well away before then.”

I didn’t know what she meant and was too busy sucking in oxygen to care—until Alphonse did a perfect dive off the back of the big chair and into the crevasse, which I hoped would treat him better than it had me. And as soon as he was gone, all hell broke loose. But this time, it wasn’t their hell.

It was ours.

Faerie did have a trick, and it was a good one. I’d seen it once before when she helped to get me out of that horrible camp. Which was why, when every intimidating creature that she or one of her children had ever seen suddenly came roaring into the room, I barely even flinched.

The demons, however, looked around in terror and confusion, wondering what this fresh attack was, before spotting the force arrayed against them. They didn’t stop to wonder where they had all come from or how so many had managed to sneak up behind them. And in their shoes, I probably wouldn’t have, either.

Because they were facing an army of ten and twelve-foot-tall trolls, scarred and wearing old, greasy hides and carrying huge clubs; a contingent of ogres that framed them on both sides, armed with crossbows and, in some cases, old blunderbuss-style firearms they must have traded with the humans for once, and modified to be even bigger and more deadly; and an assorted company of dangers that ranged from several massive dragons, gleaming in scarlet and gold, to a swarm of pixies big enough to count as a storm.

The latter group also included an enormous Kraken, peering into the cavern through the missing doors, which didn’t look so big next to its enormity, and a group of merpeople, tridents in hand, even though there wasn’t near enough water to support them. But nobody was clear-headed enough to consider that when the most cacophonous battle cry ever screamed out of their collective throats, loud enough to shake the very stone around us, and they charged as one. All of Faerie’s vanished children coming home to defend her, one last time.

The ranks of the Horrors, so relatively ordered a moment ago, broke and ran. But since there was nowhere to go, they mostly ran into each other, sinking teeth or claws or whatever they had to work with into whoever was between them and safety. The room fell into utter pandemonium, to the point that the Horrors were too busy to notice that the horde descending on them wasn’t real.

But for a minute, it didn’t have to be, as they were doing a fine job ripping themselves apart.

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