Page 24 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

A trumpet sounded somewhere behind us, or maybe a couple of them. It was deafening, probably announcing another contender who had waited to make a grand entrance. I didn’t know, didn’t care.

“You tracked him?” I said furiously, leaning over the table. “All the way here? You expect me to believe—”

“I frankly don’t care what you believe. All I know is that that fat fuck is here somewhere, and now so are you. And he has a major hate on for you. So, I figure he’ll turn up sooner or later, and as long as I stick to you—” he made a meaty fist and crashed it into the palm of his other hand, thus releasing me.

I didn’t go anywhere. Because the image of that huge fist pounding the face of the vampire I’d once called master was so seductive that, for a minute, I could almost see it. And I wanted to see it.

Antonio Gallina, better known as Tony and even better known by a series of expletives as long as my arm, was a massive piece of shit. The kind that sees a little girl who just might grow up to be a valuable seer someday and grabs her, and the fact that he had to kill said girl’s parents to make that happen. . . Well, for Tony, that was just Tuesday.

He’d also killed my governess, Eugenie, one of the only people I’d had growing up who gave a damn about me because he thought she knew where I went when I fled from him. She didn’t know anything, but again, did he care? Ripping her apart was a good way to alleviate the fury he couldn’t take out on me.

These days, I had my own fury and the power to do something about it. But Tony had done a disappearing routine before I could get my hands on him to join the other side in the war, or so I’d heard. Faerie was vast and treacherous, and searching for him could take months, even years, which I didn’t have right now. And that was assuming that it hadn’t done what it usually did with outsiders and eaten him alive.

Possibly literally.

But no, he’d survive. Snakes like that always did. If the good died young, Tony would live forever, or at least for as long as it took me to find him.

Alphonse had been watching me, those sharp dark eyes shrewd behind surprising long lashes, a strangely beautiful touch on a face that even a mother couldn’t love. But someone had once. Or had made him believe that she did.

Before Tony killed her, too, or at least helped with the process.

“Yeah, I know what it feels like,” he told me softly as we thought about Sal, Alphonse’s old flame. She’d technically been killed by one of Mircea’s vamps who was trying to protect me, but she’d only been after me on Tony’s orders. And for someone as weak as Sal, her master’s commands were little less than mind control.

She hadn’t had a choice, and so she’d died, a tragedy that I still regretted and that Alphonse. . .

Well, regret wasn’t what he knew how to do. Or grieve or process this in any other normal human way. Alphonse hadn’t been a human in centuries, and I frankly doubted he’d been normal even then.

Alphonse knew how to kill, how to hunt, and how to brutalize.

I felt a small smile curve my lips.

“Yeah,” he said, seeing it. “I want him every bit as much as you do. Maybe we can help each other out.”

“Or maybe you can die trying,” Pritkin said flatly. “This isn’t Earth—”

“I know what it is, war mage, and I die only if you lose.”

“What?” I said, jolted out of the trip down memory lane. And then said it a few more times because what?

“Oh, didn’t he tell you?” Alphonse shot Pritkin a sly glance. “That’s what traditionally happens to challengers and their retinues who fail. At least those that are still in the contest by the last round. It’s a way of making sure that the next monarch don’t have a bunch of butt-hurt wannabees around to plot against him or her.”

He ate some of the fish off my plate.

“Mhmm, nice. Too bad it’s poisoned,” he said, tapping the china with the tines of one of the weird, two-pronged forks they’d given us. “I’d decline if I were you.”

“What?”

“Poisoned?” Pritkin stood up and started toward the tables behind us, but Alphonse pulled him back.

“Save it for the Challenge. Attacking the challengers outside the arena is a quick way to get disqualified, remember?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

Alphonse looked at him calmly. “I know a lot about this stupid fight. It’s all anyone talks about around here, and my ears work good. Specially with that nice translation spell I paid a mage way more than it was worth to conjure up for me.”

“You don’t conjure—” Pritkin began automatically, but Alphonse waved him off.

“My point is, I know what I’m getting into.” He switched his gaze to me. “Do you?”

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