Page 5 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“Go home.”

“My ass.”

“Your arse is very nice,” he said, grabbing it and giving a squeeze. “And I like it in one piece. So, get it out of here!”

“I came to help you!”

“I don’t need any help.”

“Yeah, it looks like it!”

But then he was gone because he was an asshole, and between the dark and the trees and the no-doubt cloaking spell he was using, I had no clue what—

I suddenly had an idea.

“Hey! Hey, you!” The blob looked around and then slowly up at me, the stalk-eye appearing somewhat startled. “Follow him!”

The blob did not have hands, but a tentacle stopped messing with a leaf and touched what could, very charitably, have been termed its chest. “Yes, you! Hurry! He’s getting away!”

And, okay, part of what followed was my fault. I knew that the blob, AKA one of Adra’s top operatives, was having a bit of a moment. It was in a world not its own, in a form that was its own but probably didn’t feel like it, and likely only understood English in a rudimentary way.

I should have been more specific. But I was fast losing Pritkin in a forest full of murderous fey, I had not been having fun trying to find him before this, and I didn’t know how much longer it would take to do so again—or what I’d see if I did. So, I wasn’t thinking about the blob.

Until it ate me, opening up and stuffing me inside and leaving me looking out at the world through a mass of translucent flesh, just like the unfortunate fey.

“Auggh—urp.” I opened my mouth to scream because that is what you do when a demon has just eaten you, but that was not a good move. The hollow I found myself in was large enough to accommodate me and had at least a little air. But it also had a lot of phlegm or whatever the goopy clear stuff was, and it was everywhere, including in my mouth!

I spat it out and tried not to hurl, but it smelled. Oh, God, it did! And I didn’t know how to—

We were moving.

No, we were moving.

I stopped worrying about losing my lunch because of the stench and started worrying about losing my life because of the speed. Which was absurd! We were in a forest; big trees were everywhere, and some were sapient!

Experience had proven what would happen if we hit one—

Annnnnnd we did, we hit a lot of them, but the blob didn’t seem to mind ping-ponging off the rough old bark at sixty miles an hour. Or getting lashed at by angry roots and overhanging limbs and then stung by a bunch of wasp-like insects that had had a nest in one of the branches until it smashed into us. I did mind, but not physically, since whatever receptacle encased me did not appear connected to the demon’s outer body.

It was like racing around like a gyroscope made from very stinky flesh as we tore through the trees after Pritkin. Or, at least, I guessed we did, although despite remaining relatively upright and stable, I couldn’t see much. Everything was thrashing leaves, stabbing roots, and buzzing wasps, and anything I could see past all of that was distorted by the rippling wall of flesh.

Then we hit water—a lake, a river, hell, maybe an ocean for all I knew—but it was deep, and we were diving fast.

I tried to tell the translucent submarine I was in that it wasn’t going the right way. I wanted to find Pritkin, not a watery grave, and it needed to turn around! It needed to turn around right now!

But I couldn’t scream without ingesting more terrible goo, and beating on the sides of the thing didn’t work, and trying to communicate mentally didn’t work, not that it usually did with me, but I thought that maybe a demon might be able to pick something up. But if it could, it was ignoring me. And diving ever deeper, with my frantic stares upward now showing me only a vague glimmer of sunlight on the water . . .

Before it was gone, too.

Leaving me in an eerie, dark world where everything was quiet except for my harsh breathing, and everything was disorienting as the whole world was suddenly one shade of murky blue-black.

Screw this, I was shifting, I decided. And I tried. But my power was acting up again as it did everywhere in Faerie, where I had to draw it through whatever portal I could find to Earth.

The Pythian power had been tethered there by the gods millennia ago when Apollo first gifted it to his seers at Delphi, and it couldn’t leave. Only I had discovered that that wasn’t entirely true. As long as I was near enough to a portal, I could pull some power to my location.

But it was never as strong as on Earth, and the further I got into this crazy world, the more unreliable it became, to the point of just putzing out entirely. It was like trying to find cell phone service in the mountains and never knowing when or if you’d come across a good spot. Or when you’d get cut off since some of Faerie’s portals were omnidirectional.

Running a portal was expensive, magically speaking, so having one that cycled from place to place on a set schedule was efficient. It allowed one portal to serve many destinations and saved power. But it also meant that my power could get cut off randomly as the portal I was tapping into cycled away from Earth.

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