Page 69 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“Abomination” fell seriously short in Pritkin’s case.

So, prince or not, he’d been left to struggle and hopefully die on Earth. And the few times he’d made his way here through the years, being eager—at first—to learn about his fey heritage, had not gone well. It looked like nothing had changed.

“Enchanted,” he said briefly.

“What?”

“The walls. And the window. And the door. This is one of the storerooms for the stables, but they’ve held fey here before. The entire room is warded.”

“But what about demons? Or mages?” I squatted down and poked him. “You must have something!”

That won me a vivid green look. “And Pythias?” he said pointedly.

I sat down on my metal ass. “I’m tapped out. Even if the portal gods favor me, I’m going nowhere for at least a day.”

“Then that is a problem.”

I felt my suspicions rising. He sounded entirely too Zen for Pritkin, who was not known for his patience or his ability to sleep in the middle of a crisis. Yet he appeared to be dozing off again.

“And you’re perfectly fine with this because?” I demanded.

“I’m . . . conflicted.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that, in here, you’re likely to survive. Bodil isn’t entirely benign, but she isn’t likely to murder us. She was the one who helped us get away from that massacre in the deep.”

“She helped us?” She’d looked more likely to stick a knife in us to me.

“Her people did,” Pritkin clarified, his eyes still closed, and I wondered if that was what that ominous-looking cloud had been, some of Bodil’s black-robed guards. “Rhosier called them, but they didn’t have time to check with her first.” His lips twisted. “Probably just as well.”

“A cook called the guards of a noble house?” I asked, not understanding anything. And when he didn’t answer, I poked him again.

Damn it, wake up!

Pritkin sighed and sat up, realizing that I wasn’t going to let him sleep. “She hit me with an extra dose of Somnolence,” he said, rubbing a hand over his face. “It’s starting to wear off but keeps trying to pull me back under.”

“Can’t you do something to negate it?” Counterspells were drilled into war mages until they were almost automatic. I’d have expected him to have used one already.

He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and then shook his head as if trying to clear it. “No. You’re not the only one who’s tapped out.”

I felt my eyes widen. “But . . . all that energy, all that magic that you took from a whole camp full of fey—”

“Gone. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”

“But there were hundreds of fey—”

“And hundreds more harrying me the whole way here and ever since I arrived. It’s gone, Cassie. I used the last of it, along with most of my own magic, in the fight in the kitchen.”

His head slumped back against the rock again, and I sat there for a second, feeling stunned. Pritkin didn’t run out of magic. The demon blood he so deplored had made him far stronger than any war mage I’d ever met.

Even on a bad day, he was a tank.

But it looked like the tank . . . was pooped.

And then the rest of what he’d said hit me. “Wait. Wait. You were chasing down a couple dozen fey on your own while practically out of magic?” He cracked an eye and just looked at me. “Why?”

“You know why.”

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