Page 66 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

Bodil looked at Pritkin, and he looked back. “I said that it would simplify things if she was here when we talked,” he commented, pretty mildly for him.

“You know damned well why she wasn’t!” Bodil’s hand hit the desk hard enough to make a baby bridle slide onto the floor.

“I’m not my mother,” I said, forgetting Pritkin’s advice. And immediately regretted it when her dark eyes flashed fire.

Like, literally. They went red momentarily, and I didn’t back up only because I was sitting down.

Shut up, Cassie, I told myself. Just shut the hell up.

“And I know that how?” she hissed. “From what I hear, you may as well be!”

“And what does that mean?” I asked because my mouth wasn’t obeying my brain’s frantic signaling. My mouth had woken up and chosen violence. My mouth was going to get us killed because there was no way I could shift us out of there.

Pritkin must have thought the same because his hand clenched in warning on the one I had resting on the chair arm. But to my surprise, Bodil just answered the question. “You look like a human,” she said, her eyes raking me up and down. “Soft, weak, young. Not much older than my daughter’s daughter, yet all dressed up in dragonscale like a warrior. How many years have you?”

“I’ve already told you,” Pritkin said. “That doesn’t—”

“It matters to me!” she turned on him fiercely. “What you’re asking—”

“Wait, you asked for this?” I said, looking at him. “Why?”

“Why do you think?” Green eyes blazed into mine, showing that he wasn’t as calm as he appeared. “You were almost assassinated—what? Five times in less than a day? We need protection! Bodil can guarantee our safety—”

“Outside of the challenge,” she specified.

“Which is all we could ask,” Pritkin said as if this was a done deal.

“Five?” I frowned. “It was twice—”

“It was more than that just in the damned ballroom! Not to mention that creature when we came in—”

“You can’t count the Not-Whale. That was a challenge—”

“The what?” That was Rieni, coming in with a large brown leather bag held loosely in her arms and sitting on the edge of the desk.

“The thing we fought in the first challenge,” I said, glancing at her. And then watching the bag she held, which, disturbingly, appeared to be moving. “Or when I came in, Pritkin was already here—”

“Who?” she looked confused.

“Uh, Prince Emrys, and why is that . . . squirming?”

“Babies,” she said, as if that explained anything. “And are you talking about the Cetus?”

“The what?” It was my turn to be confused and disturbed because something was peeking.

I scooted my chair back a bit.

She laughed and plopped the bag in my lap. “It’s okay. You can babysit for a while.”

“Rieni!” her grandmother—at a guess—snapped.

“It’s okay; she likes them,” the girl said, skipping out.

I was getting the impression that Rieni did whatever the hell she wanted and got away with it because the fey had children approximately once every millennium and tended to spoil them. Although the Green Fey had rigged the system with all the humans they’d imported as breeding stock. Only maybe she wasn’t half and half.

Those didn’t tend to dress so well.

“Some do,” Bodil said, sitting back in her chair and not even trying to hide that she could hear my thoughts. “And yes, I can read you—partly. One of the perks of being a half-breed,” her lips twisted.

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