Page 68 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

I blinked at her but didn’t try to lie. I wouldn’t have anyway, but it was impossible with those eyes on me. They held something, a weight, a power, or maybe just so much pent-up emotion that they were hard to meet.

“Ares killed Apollo,” I said. “Or was in the process of it when a man—a human—sent one of his own spells back at him. As you should know.”

And she should; the Green Fey had known the man in question well. Old Wales had been one of their favorite hunting grounds for slaves, where a lively magical community provided seemingly unlimited witches for their breeding program. And where a king named Arthur had been trying to stop it and failed, although he had stopped Ares.

One could argue that that was worth his legend alone.

“I did,” she said dryly. “And now he’s dead—”

“That was hundreds of years ago!”

“He was taken down by members of his court years after the battle,” Pritkin added. “You know that—”

“What I know is that I do not intend to share his fate or that of others who have helped this sweet little thing to cut a swath through her enemies and paid the price for it. Take them.”

That last was said with the same cold indifference of most of her conversation, even when furious, to the point that I was surprised when the black-robed guards swamped us.

Not again, I thought, right before the lights went out.

Chapter Twenty

I woke up on a hard, furry chest for the second time in one day, and it was still not fun. My mouth was dry, my body ached, and I felt like I’d been drugged. Or hit in the head repeatedly with a large, padded hammer.

I felt something else, too.

“Have to pee,” I gasped, and the chest underneath me moved around before my hand was placed on the side of what felt like a wooden bucket. Opening bleary eyes, I saw that, yep. Bucket. “Seriously?” I asked Pritkin, who was sharing what looked suspiciously like a cell with me.

“Fey accommodations for prisoners are not luxurious,” he confirmed.

That was an understatement. The little room was about the size of a large bathroom, which was ironic considering that it didn’t have a toilet. It did have a rocky floor to match the walls and all of it was in the local black stone, which left it dark and foreboding.

That wasn’t helped by the fact that there was only a single window set high in one wall with bars across it to provide light, but that mostly just striped the darkness. And another, smaller opening in the door, although it seemed to face a dark corridor because nothing was coming in that way at all, and nobody had left us a lantern. They hadn’t left a cot, blanket, or water source, either, just a plain, slightly damp, black room with some straw on the floor and a bucket.

Goddamn, I hated the fey.

“Prisoners or captives?” I snarled. “What’s her name kidnapped us!”

“Lady Bodil, and so it would seem.”

“What’s the point?” I demanded, stumbling to my feet and finding a corner where I could use my bucket. “Locking us up so we can’t beat her pathetic champion? Like somebody else won’t?”

“I assume that she is planning to cheat,” Pritkin said, leaning his head against the wall and closing his eyes. “And doesn’t want us interfering.”

“Obstructing a champion is supposed to be off-limits!” I said, only to have him snort derisively.

Because yeah.

Faerie.

“So, are you going to get us out?” I asked when I’d finished and walked back over. The stone walls looked pretty thick based on the amount of rock visible on the window ledge, but Pritkin had an app for that.

Or, to be more precise, a fey ability that he’d inherited from his mother, who’d stolen it from his father before imprisoning him in a tree and running off to Faerie. Where she’d been sure that her command of all four elements would cause her to be welcomed with open arms at court. Spoiler alert: it hadn’t.

She’d been a mongrel mix of human, fey, and god blood since her mother, Igraine, was Nimue’s child with a human. Nimue had wanted a leader to manage the slave trade she’d started on Earth but didn’t have confidence in any of her courtiers. So, she’d given birth to one and sent her to Earth with lofty lies about earning her place at court through her devotion to the cause.

Once there, Igraine had married another human, and their twice-mongrel daughter Morgaine was therefore considered beneath contempt at court regardless of who her grandmother was. But she’d had ambitions, and they hadn’t included dying on Earth like her mother. Ambitions that had made her an abomination as far as the fey were concerned.

To improve her status, she had co-opted their abilities by stealing them through sex magic with a demon lord. Who had stolen them in turn from the various part-fey women with whom he’d knocked boots through the years. And the half-demon child that had resulted was something the fey didn’t even have a name for.

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