Page 3 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

I looked from Pritkin to the blob and back again and wondered which of us was having a senior moment. Considering that the war mage currently dripping in goo looked thirty-ish but was hundreds of years older than that, I knew who I’d put my money on. And I guessed my face showed it because he cursed some more.

“Did you or did you not ask Adramelech for help guarding Mircea?”

Mircea was the third member of the triumvirate of power we shared, a spell that connected the three of us down to the magical level and greatly expanded all our abilities. He was also my ex-lover, which was sometimes awkward as Pritkin was my current one. Or so I hoped, although he was not looking too happy with me at the moment.

“Adra? I only asked him to—”

“Stop calling him that!” Pritkin sat on a root that had conveniently grown into a nice perch, probably so that weary travelers might decide to plop down and be more easily attacked. This whole world was one huge Venus Flytrap, only it didn’t eat flies!

But Pritkin saw the smaller root that was inching toward him through the dirt like a snake, with the pointy end serving as its one fang, and shot it a look. “Try it,” he invited.

The root paused, then shivered a little before sinking back into the earth with a pissy little wiggle.

The cow chewed on.

I plopped down on the dirt because I was tired and hoped it wouldn’t eat me. “It’s his name,” I pointed out.

“You do not give the head of the Demon High Council a nickname—or a diminutive!” he added before I could protest. “And did you or did you not ask him to assign two of his best demon guards to Mircea?”

“Sure, back when I thought the consul was planning to have him killed.” AKA the good old days, when all I had to worry about was a jealous, two-thousand-year-old vampire queen instead of . . . everything. Just everything. I decided not to think about it. “But what does that have to do with—”

I stopped, a horrible thought intruding.

Pritkin just looked at me with a little smile on his face.

My eyes slid over to the blob, which was sidling toward the cow again and trying not to look like it. “Don’t eat that,” I said before I thought.

He understood me or chose that exact moment to stop and turn that one eyestalk in my direction.

“It’s not your cow.”

He did not seem to think much of this argument.

“Eat it, and I’ll kill you,” Pritkin added, at which time it plopped down again, and the eyestalk drooped despondently.

He was hideous and smelly and slimy, with a sheen of mucous-like substance that was already wetting the ground around him. But the eye had ridiculously long lashes, and the tentacles were waving about sadly and plucking up random things—a leaf, a stick, a rock—and examining them before tossing them away. I felt a surge of pity.

And that was especially true if he was one of the previously invisible demons Adra had placed as bodyguards on Mircea. They had been spirits, allowing them to watch over him more easily without anybody being the wiser. Including him because I hadn’t known how he would take my possible paranoia.

Sometimes, it was easier just not to ask.

But then he ended up in Faerie, and I guessed his bodyguards got pulled in with him? I wasn’t sure how that worked, but it would explain why this one looked so confused. Spirits manifested bodies in Faerie, something that had probably surprised Adra’s guys, who might never have had corporeal form before.

It didn’t look like this one was enjoying it.

“Is he hungry?” I asked, a little worried. “Should we find something to feed him or—”

“You are not. Going to sympathize. With that bloody thing!” Pritkin yelled.

I frowned at him. “There’s no need to yell.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you. Only the fey started shooting arrows at me and—how did you end up with the demons?” I asked because I still wasn’t clear on that point.

Pritkin took off a boot, and a gob of slime slugged its way out. “They became lost after following Mircea into Faerie, and before they could adjust—to that and to suddenly having bodies—they encountered some fey. Who immediately became hostile—”

As if they were ever anything else, I thought, being slightly pleased that something I’d done had managed to traumatize the fey for a change.

---