Page 7 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

But then a hand, normal-sized and not glowing, caught mine. I jerked in surprise and looked up to see Pritkin, visible in the spectral light that some of the water creatures were giving off. He had a bubble over his head and was yelling something at me, which I thought was a bit much right now.

But suddenly, I had one, too. A bubble, that is, filled with air that I gasped in gratefully. So much so that the fact that I could now hear him bitching at me almost didn’t matter.

We took off, with me latching onto his back and him plowing through the water faster than he could run on land, and he could run pretty fast. But he could swim even faster, which was lucky as I was so disoriented that I had no idea where we freaking were. Or even which direction we were headed, although it appeared to be mostly down.

Down, down, down, to the point that I didn’t know how he could see anymore. The bioluminescent creatures had been left behind, and the murky water had swallowed up what little light they’d shed. My eyes met only blackness, and only the sensation of my fingers digging into the muscles of Pritkin’s back and shoulders kept me somewhat grounded.

Then we abruptly hit bottom, on a sandy bed that I could feel against my skin as it was stirred up by Pritkin scrabbling around as if searching for something.

Something that I guessed he didn’t find since he started cursing. And while Pritkin had many different styles of profanity, which he cheerfully used for everything from his coffee not being strong enough to sending his enemies into oblivion, this one was serious. This one meant business.

But then it stopped, he grunted with surprise, and manically started digging again. The next moment, we were on the move, plowing through the clouds of sand he’d stirred up into utter darkness. Before entering a vast cave, with torchlight glimmering on black rocks as we sloshed and then crawled out of the depths and onto a shoreline with people all around, none of whom I cared about because I was too busy collapsing into a soggy pile.

The bubble around my face burst, but there was air in the cave, so it didn’t matter. Someone was talking in a sonorous voice that echoed, but which I could barely hear over my heavy gasps. My lungs were not convinced that this air would stick around and were drawing in as much as possible while they could. But my ears finally popped, and a bunch of water ran out, allowing me to hear what was being said.

“—the statue is genuine. The winner of the first Challenge is, therefore, Prince Emrys of the Earthly Realm—”

“I protest!”

“Prince! He’s no prince of mine!

“Earthly Realm! Say rather the hell regions. He’s a demon!”

“He cheated! That damned woman is with him!”

There were a lot of similar comments, shouted at us from all sides, but ‘that damned woman’ was too tired to pay them much attention. I rolled my head over to look at Pritkin, who was also lying on his back, breathing hard and looking back at me. And picking up my sandy hand and pressing a kiss to the back of it, because he was clearly over them all, too.

“You’ve landed in it this time,” he murmured.

Chapter Three

Okay, so what are we working with here?” I asked, trying not to get distracted by the room we were in.

That was hard, as it was part of the suite that Pritkin had been allotted in the royal palace. According to him, it was garbage-tier compared to what the other heirs had received. But if this was garbage. . .

I thought back to my court in Vegas, situated in a casino designed to look like hell, and winced. I hoped I didn’t get a light fey delegation anytime soon. Because this place was stunning.

For one thing, it was underwater, or at least this part was. Which was why fish were swimming past the windows, and light shadows from the sun somewhere above were streaming in to dance on the floor, walls, and ceiling. An occasional jellyfish-like blob hit the ward keeping all that water out and stayed there, blorping gently for a while before floating off.

They were easy to see as the huge windows were floor-to-ceiling, although they didn’t look like windows. The room had an oblong shape with rounded walls, like a half-squashed balloon, and was made up of the same dark stone as the cavern where we’d come in. Now that I could see it better, I realized that the rock was striated with veins of what looked like pointy black glitter, which Pritkin said were crystalline formations within the stone.

Wards covered the fissures in the walls, leaving them looking less like windows and more like what they were: gaps in an undersea cave. The floor had a slightly uneven feel that lent credence to that view, like one giant, black river rock that a stream over untold eons had smoothed out. It glittered, too, but with pieces that looked more like the flecks within terrazzo than the pointy inside of a geode.

And that was just the bones!

It didn’t consider the furnishings, which were opulent to the extreme, including braided ropes of tiny pearls used to keep back the filmy white curtains on the platform serving as a bed. Or the massive pieces of coral that made up scattered tables and sconces, the latter holding balls of spell light instead of candles because Nimue’s court had magic literally to burn. Or the carpets scattered carelessly about in dark jewel tones that matched the rest of the room—reds for the coral, black for the rock, white for the pearls, and blue for the water—and with a nap that looked like silk but was something even finer.

Pritkin had said that the fey wove it from the secretions of certain ocean mollusks that used it to adhere themselves to rocks. Mussel spit, in other words, but it didn’t feel that way when the weavers finished with it. It caressed my abused toes in almost obscene luxury, making me feel more inadequate than I already did in my drenched rat state, with a half-burnt gown from my last adventure because dragonscale doesn’t hold up so well to real dragons.

I was also vaguely dizzy as the whole, dimly lit room subtly glittered. Between that and the constantly moving light shadows from outside, it felt like the waves were in here, too. Or, when I briefly lay on the bed, heaped with fluffy mattresses and silky furs and enough velvety pillows for ten people, that I was drifting on a raft under a star-strewn sky, to the point that I started to disassociate.

Looking at it through half-lowered lashes was not recommended.

I got up in self-defense and started pacing around the room, trying to find something to ground me. Pritkin stayed on the bed, exhausted from an ordeal that had lasted far longer than my brief participation. It had been the first in a series of challenges that had been the Alorestri’s way of choosing their next monarch until Nimue had shown up and rendered it all moot.

But she was gone now, and the locals had dug out the old scrolls recording how chieftains were selected in ancient times, and it was as bloody as you’d expect from Faerie. That would have been true even if the contest was fair, but it definitely wasn’t. Pritkin was part demon, and it seemed that everyone was ganging up on him to make sure that whoever won, at least they wouldn’t be ruled by hellspawn.

And the easiest way to do that was to kill him.

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