Page 48 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“I checked every vendor,” he hissed. “Every last one, and a lot of the locals who were just milling about. Guess who hadn’t seen her?”

“W-well, they’re not going to tell you, are they?” the man spluttered. “You’re an outsider. They don’t trust outsiders here.”

“A fact you didn’t bother to mention before sending me on that useless chase!”

“What useless chase?” I asked.

“I came here after our lovely meal to talk to the girl but didn’t find her. Head honcho here told me she’d run off in a panic. Only nobody saw her where he said.”

“That’s why you had all that food,” I guessed.

“Merchants talk better if you buy something,” he agreed. “And I hit up every one.”

“Perhaps they missed her?” Honcho volunteered, which was a bad move. Something he realized when the fang was back and scraping his skin this time. But he kept on babbling anyway.

I wasn’t sure he could stop at this point.

“It’s dinner time,” he said, his voice shrill. “Everybody goes to Fountain Court! It’s the cheapest place to eat. The fishermen give their unsold catch to the vendors for a song, and they sell it on to the crowds—”

“Shut up!” Alphonse hissed. “The passage from here to the city comes out right in front of them! And a fleeing, half-drowned redhead is memorable. So, she didn’t go that way—”

“She did! I swear she—”

“—and now the trail is cold, and you’re going to warm it up for me or be the main course at the next meal. With an apple in your mouth.”

Alphonse never raised his voice, but he didn’t have to. The man shot a look at a nearby spit, where some small, goat-sized animal was roasting. It didn’t have an apple, but I thought he got the idea.

“Tell me!” Alphonse said, grabbing the guy’s neck and causing his protestations to descend into incomprehensible gurgling.

I glanced around. People were still steadily working, most not even glancing this way. That could have been the heat, sapping the life out of them because the designer of this place must have been a sadist. Yet you’d think their boss possibly being dinner would raise at least an eyebrow.

But no. How often did this sort of thing happen, I wondered. ‘Cause it was looking like the answer might be daily, to the point that nobody bothered to take notice unless their workstation was close enough to risk getting sprayed by blood.

One of the workers was a young woman making meat pies at a nearby table. Pritkin had said that the Alorestri had the best food in Faerie because they pulled from both sea and land and had elements from two worlds’ cuisines in their own. I’d been looking forward to trying some local dishes but was now more interested in the person preparing them.

Everybody else was red-faced and sweating, but she looked cool as a cucumber, with her clear skin not so much as flushed. She also bore a slight resemblance to the waitress, although she was way better looking, and the other girl hadn’t been ugly. I wondered if they were related and wandered over.

And she noticed, although she quickly looked down at the filling she was spooning into the pastry. It looked good, and a platter of finished pies being loaded onto a tray for baking looked even better. My stomach, still neglected and complaining about it, grumbled fiercely, and the girl glanced up in surprise.

I grinned at her. “Missed dinner,” I said, and she looked startled before abruptly hitting the floor.

It happened so fast that, at first, I thought she’d slipped. But a check under the table showed her body in something that wasn’t a curtsey or even a bow. It was full-on prostration, and the floor was in no condition for it, being full of muddy footprints, pieces of squashed vegetable, and raw sausage.

Without thinking, I grabbed her hand to pull her back up, and she immediately started screaming.

I let her go and stepped back, but the screaming didn’t stop. It wasn’t crying or even sobbing; it was full-on, high-pitched panic, like a lamb being led toward a stump covered in blood and with a bunch of other lamb’s heads scattered around it. And I had no idea what to do with that.

“Um,” I said brilliantly as Alphonse looked over at me.

“What the hell?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Maybe we should switch spots,” he said. “You take bitch boy here and I’ll intimidate the girl.”

“I wasn’t trying to intimidate her! I just wanted to get her off the floor.”

And before I’d even finished my sentence, she scrambled up, still screaming.

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