Page 58 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“It’s the path for an upcoming challenge! That,” she gestured furiously back the way we’d come, “is the passageway into the city from Fountain Court. But this is not and they’re not finished with it yet. It isn’t stable!”

No kidding, I thought, poking my head and shoulders out of the hole that Pinkie had obligingly made. Enid popped up beside me, breathing hard because, yeah. It was ripe down there.

But it was terrifying up here, with us racing along wobbling corridors that resembled less the transparent, glass-like structure of the main tunnel’s wards and more the Jello-like consistency of Pinkie’s flesh. They were also moving the same way, with disturbing ripples as we passed.

They looked like they were about to collapse onto our heads—along with thousands of gallons of water—just any moment now. Yet a glance behind showed that it was too late to turn around. A boiling mass of hate was headed our way, and even though Pritkin was still picking off stragglers from behind, the rest—

Were almost on top of us.

“Do something!” The redhead yelled, practically in my ear.

“Why do people keep telling me that?”

“You’re the goddess!”

“Why does that only get brought up in times like these?” I snarled, and then I shut up. Because I’d noticed that these walls were not only unsteady, they were porous.

I didn’t know if that was because they weren’t finished yet or if the Challenge was supposed to involve drowning, which seemed to be a theme around here. Either way, Pinkie was sloshing through water a couple of feet deep that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Which turned the crazy course from rollercoaster to the world’s most diabolical water slide, with Pinkie less running and more sliding desperately down rollercoaster-worthy angles and taking us with him!

And then I got a phone call.

I didn’t notice immediately as we were falling down a ski-slope-like drop, which was also twisting us around like a corkscrew. But the cursing in my ear was too familiar to ignore. “Pritkin?”

“Can you . . . damn it . . . me!”

It sounded like he was breaking up, which would have made sense except for one smallthing: I had no phone.

“How are you doing this?” I asked as a fey, who appeared to have lost his surfboard, went slip-sliding beside us on his back and got zapped by a half-crazed kitchen maid for his trouble.

A burst of static that threatened my eardrum gave me a clue, even before Pritkin’s voice came again. “Tapped into . . . translator! Now answer the bloody. . .”

“What?” I said, holding my ear to hear better and being cut off anyway because a bunch of fish hit me out of nowhere, along with a ton of water from the rapidly disintegrating sides of the slide.

“Get out! Get the . . . out!” Pritkin was screaming, and I was gasping and coughing, and Enid was trying to get up a shield to act as a makeshift umbrella, but she must not have been able to concentrate well enough because it kept going down, deluging us again.

I didn’t know what Pritkin expected me to do, as I wasn’t even sure which way was up. I was awake now, thanks to getting slapped repeatedly in the face by all that cold water, but could barely see anything, as nobody had put lights down here. The only illumination was coming from the dazzling spellfire exploding around us. It wasn’t hitting us very often, but that was probably because the fey couldn’t see shit, either, and because of the track, which remained the water slide from hell!

Out of other ideas, I reached for my power, even knowing it was futile. And it was. There wasn’t so much as a twinge of magic under my fingertips, either because the portal was turned away at the moment or because I was flat out of the energy needed to channel it.

Either way, we were screwed.

So, I used the only weapon I had left, sending my ghostly knives back to torment the fey some more, and it seemed to help. Maybe because they couldn’t half see, making them easy targets, as the water was spurting in everywhere now, to the point that Pinkie was swimming instead of running. That was good as he was faster in the water than on land and bad because we were all about to drown, so none of this mattered!

That must have been what Enid decided because she suddenly let loose on the fey behind us with a storm of magic that had less fury than desperation. It was impressive, to the point that she might have been a war mage in another life had she not been born a slave to the fey. And she wasn’t about to go out with even a shred of magic left, as she let it all loose in a glimmering cloud around her, grabbing and binding pieces of it to spells as she went, like an archer pulling arrows from a quiver.

I’d never seen it used that way, not even by the Earthly covens, and for a second, I just stared around at the suffusion in the air. It engulfed us like a haze, following its mistress along the crazy, twisting course like a sparkling, beautiful, magical mist. I held out a hand, still half out of it mentally, and watched it glimmer on my fingertips, like something else I’d seen once, something familiar. . .

And then it sank into my skin, a little piece of power, causing a pulse to go through me.

No, not just magic, I realized; it was her life force because that was what human magic was. That was what set them apart from everyone else. Their bodies made magic, the substance that the gods lived off of, and the very thing that I’d recently discovered I could absorb in the same way that my mother once had—

So, I ate some more, pulling it out of the air as I once had back in my court in Vegas, where a strange-looking goat creature had shed enough power to fuel a small star. This wasn’t nearly that potent, as the gods had tinkered with him to become something powerful enough to slake even their thirst, but it was something. Something that might save our lives if my power would return, if I could take in enough of her energy to use it, and if I didn’t get fried in place before either of those things happened!

I ducked again, feeling heat radiate past me as someone cast blind. They must have; none of us could see a damned thing with the darkness and the water falling and gushing and splashing everywhere, like a midnight ride through the rapids on a furious river. But they threw anyway, probably just hoping to hit something—

And they did.

Just not us.

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