Page 55 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

Then Pritkin grabbed my hand while I was still trying to get back to my feet and towed me down the hall, just ahead of a rolling tide of fey, demons, and what appeared to be a bunch of the kitchen staff, all trying to fit through the door at once.

I didn’t recognize the fey from dinner, and I should have if they’d been there, as they were hard to miss. Their dark hair was stained purple in a wide swath along the bottom as if they’d dipped it in a bucket of paint, and they wore flashy purple robes over expensive-looking dragon-scale armor. But the kitchen help were a lot more familiar, still in their stained aprons and sooty loincloths.

But instead of trying to grab the redheads and flee as I’d have expected, they were actively attacking the startled-looking light fey, who didn’t seem to have expected that any more than I had. I also didn’t expect it to work because the kitchen help were armed with pots, pans, and old carving knives against people in elite-tier protection. But there were a lot of them, and they seemed unusually strong, magically speaking, just like the kitchen maid had been.

They also weren’t taking prisoners.

“Kill them! Kill the bastards!” Rhosier was yelling like a maniac, and they were damned well trying.

I saw a group of five gang up on one of our attackers as Pritkin dragged me down the hall, and recognized him as the half-asphyxiated fey who had attacked me. And whose armor now ran in a rainbow of sizzling colors. He screamed, having had to drop his shield to fit in here, as the hallway was very narrow.

It hadn’t been a great idea, as demonstrated when he collapsed to his knees, a mountain of attackers on top of him. Yet the kitchen staff were taking hits, too. I saw one of the breadbakers hit the floor and hoped she was dead by the time she did so, as a spell was literally eating her alive.

In a couple of seconds, she looked like a filleted fish, with nothing but ribs and a smoking spine still identifiable. I stared at her in horror for a second until a welt of warm, sticky blood hit me as one of the spit-turners staggered back. He collapsed, his torso slashed to pieces, even though he had had a shield up, but the fey’s blades were enchanted and had carved right through.

I slipped on someone’s blood and went down, and a forest of those enchanted blades followed me. But they were stopped inches away from my head by the ward Pritkin threw over us. Instead, the same sword that had gutted the spit-turner bounced off with all of the wielder’s momentum behind it, sending him staggering back into a group of others and spilling them to the ground.

And the spells his friends behind them threw in retaliation did the same, ricocheting off our protection and dropping half of them. It didn’t look like they’d dealt with demon armor before. Or knew what to do with it now.

But I didn’t know how long the shield would last, as Pritkin had to be drawing on some of that stolen power he’d absorbed from the fey who had kidnapped me. He’d drained them dry, carving a path for me out of that infernal camp. But he was facing what looked like a platoon and had to stretch his shield to cover two.

I should have stayed put, I thought blankly. I should have done what he said and kept my ass in the room and trusted him to know more about this place than I did. Instead, I’d been too busy trying to prove that I could be an asset and had only managed to turn myself into a major liability.

If he died because of me. . .

And he very well might because the fey were still coming.

They’d trampled their fallen underfoot and kept advancing, maybe out of courage or because they had no choice. Not with the Horror Twins pushing into the chamber behind them and unwittingly shoving everyone this way. They were stuck choosing the lesser of two evils, and I guessed that was us because they were coming and coming hard, their weapons ringing loudly on our protection as they hacked away at the ward’s surface.

And then we were jumped by three more fey coming from the other direction that neither of us had seen, being too busy looking at the ones pursuing us.

I had a wild cascade of images hit me all at once: Pritkin under a brutal assault, with his shields up but thinning quickly; Alphonse down the hall with a fey under each arm, one of whom was stabbing him in the back repeatedly with a wicked looking knife; Enid fighting several fey at once and looking terrified and exhausted and furious, all at once; and her sister, being thrown over a guard’s shoulder, her body hanging limply.

Blood was everywhere, the metallic smell of it in my nose, the sight of it splattering the walls and flying through the air to splash my shield, the warm, sticky feel of it sliding beneath my bare feet. And the fact that I could feel it against my soles meant that Pritkin’s shield was dangerously thin. He was going to kill himself protecting me, and that wasn’t the plan!

At least it wasn’t mine, but it looked like someone else’s.

I stepped through the disintegrating shield, allowing it to shink closer to his body to protect him better, and was immediately confronted by the front dozen or so fey coming from the storeroom. Who, for some reason, suddenly weren’t attacking anymore. They threw up shields instead, despite there being no room for them, why I didn’t know.

Until it hit me: they thought I’d come out from behind the shield because I was about to attack. I wasn’t; I just didn’t see any reason for us both to die when he might be able to survive without me, but the fey didn’t know that. It was a shock; the idea of being considered scary by our enemies was still new and strange, but it must have been the case.

Because when I abruptly raised a hand, they collectively flinched back.

It wasn’t a complete bluff. I had a bracelet with two ghostly daggers I’d taken off a dark mage once, which I unleashed as I had nothing else. They were usually too dangerous to use, as they didn’t always follow orders very well, if at all. But right now, that didn’t matter.

Right now, buying a couple more seconds was good enough.

My blades started sparking off the fey armor all in a line, zigzagging back and forth in front of me like the manic things they were. They couldn’t get through the shields plus armor and wouldn’t last, as Earth magic rarely did for long in Faerie. But they’d spooked the fey, who were used to the kind of magic Nimue could summon, and suddenly, there was panic all around.

The ones in front were suddenly fighting like hell with their brothers to get out of the way. They’d clearly decided that the tip of the spear gets blunted and that they’d prefer to be farther down the blade. Or out of the hallway entirely, in this case, where there was nowhere to go.

But their brothers-in-arms thought the same, and the panicked fey were getting pushed back at me like the fight behind us was hemming me in. And was growing as more soldiers had joined from that direction, leaving us caught between a rock and a death place. But then Pritkin looked around wildly, spotted me hugging the wall, and realized why his shield was still up—

And took out his fury at me on the fey.

A moment later, half a dozen fey were dead courtesy of a couple of spells that burned through them, armor and all, and took out two who were either braver or dumber than the rest and were lunging at me. But he’d had to drop his shields and use their remaining strength to do it, and it didn’t look like he could raise them again. Which was a problem since somebody had just thrown a spell that took out half the ceiling.

And suddenly, here they came, everyone still on their feet. Whether trying to dodge the rock fall, because shields were suddenly getting smashed by giant falling boulders and debris, or just panicked, I didn’t know. But it was all the same to us because we couldn’t handle that.

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