Page 78 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

Great.

“And they trust you just because you’re human?” I asked.

“They trust me because Rhosier trusts me. I put him in touch with the covens after he and I met on one of my early trips.”

And okay, that made more sense. Pritkin’s mother had died trying to stop the slave trade on Earth; I couldn’t see her son not getting involved in this somehow. He liked to pretend, even to himself, that he was a rule follower and a stickler for a sane, sensible course of action.

He lied.

He was usually more reckless than I was; he just had the power to get away with it most of the time. And helping a rogue cook smuggle kids to the humans in a reversal of the fey stealing them from us? Yeah, that sounded about right.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“The walls have ears, especially here, and it didn’t seem relevant.”

“Not relevant?” I stared at him. “When there are tens of thousands of soldiers who—my God, maybe we really don’t need the army! I mean, we already have it, right? If all those kids are being sent to the frontiers, the long-lived ones, the powerful ones, we could just—”

“Do what?” Pritkin said. “Undo hundreds of years of conditioning? Persuade them to go against every oath they ever swore? And throw in with us against literal gods?”

Okay, it didn’t sound as good when he said it.

“We have to try,” I insisted. “Give them a chance, and us, too. Trying to win this way is—” I caught myself, but not in time.

“Foolish?” And there went that damned eyebrow again. “In other words, what I’ve been telling you?”

“Then why are you here?” I said, exasperated.

“Because you asked me.” It was stark. And looking into his eyes, it was also the truth. “I owed you that much, at least, after what I put you through. And I didn’t think you were coming—”

“Yeah! Because I’d just leave you here!”

“—which was foolish on my part. But now that you’ve been here, you must see—”

Nothing. Because the world abruptly fell away again, and we went tumbling through the void. Right into the middle of—

Feltin’s office.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I didn’t recognize it at first since my body was still shuddering as if I had fallen from a height and because I’d never seen this place before, having only been allowed to kick my filthy human heels in the atrium. But I was pretty sure of the location anyway. There was an elaborate table serving as a desk, gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at the undersea world, and enough sumptuous carpets, fine paintings, gilt mosaics, and expensive spell light to do a king proud.

If there was any doubt about Feltin’s pretensions, one look at that office would have dispelled them. Not that I needed it. Because he was talking.

“What do you mean they missed them?”

It would be more accurate to say that he was yelling, although he didn’t need to; the guard with the purple-dipped hair in front of him was only about a foot away. He looked like one of those who’d attacked us, to the point that I felt my fist clenching and Pritkin’s hand on my arm tightening. But this soldier wasn’t splattered with red like the one behind him, with his shiny armor streaked like someone had thrown a bucket of paint over it.

Or had bled out in his arms, because he was looking furious.

The guy at his side, the only other occupant of the room, wasn’t looking like much of anything except half dead. His pretty complexion was burnt all along one side, making me think of Enid and how he’d match her soon if he survived. Only that didn’t seem to be likely, especially as he’d just sank to one knee.

“He needs a healer,” his blood-splattered buddy said, only to recoil slightly when Feltin got in his face.

And there was something about that movement, like a bird of prey swooping down on a mouse, that made me blink. I’d seen someone else move like that not so long ago. Someone else . . .

Who shouldn’t be here.

Or maybe I was finally losing my mind, I thought, staring at Feltin’s surfer-boy good looks. They were draped in a royal blue robe glittering with embroidery and open at the front to show off the finely sculpted lines of his chest. A pair of matching long, silky trousers, barely clinging to his hip bones, completed the look, which was topped off by a mane of rumpled blond hair that appeared to have air-dried after having agitated fingers run through it.

---