Page 81 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“You’re a vampire—”

“Exactly. And we’re flammable.”

She stared at him. “Then why are you holding the damned thing?”

“To see that,” he said, pointing ahead with it.

I peered through the darkness but didn’t have a vampire’s vision. But a moment later, I didn’t need it when the crazy cavalcade burst out of the side of a hill and into brackish-smelling air. It wasn’t exactly fresh, but after the suffocating tunnel, it felt that way.

Alphonse quickly extinguished the torch in the muddy ground and called back a warning for others to do the same. For a moment, all I could hear was the hissing of torches and people’s panting breaths. But I realized that I was straining for something else: the sound of pursuit, a shouted warning, an attack—

Which didn’t come.

“Where are we?” Enid demanded after a pause as if she’d been listening, too.

“On the left of the Myrgard, near the Black Tower,” Rhosier said, coming up from somewhere behind us. “You can see the old watchtower there, to the left, through the mist.”

“How? There aren’t supposed to be any tunnels here!”

“No, there aren’t.” He glanced at Alphonse. “How did you come to smell it, vampire?”

“Easy,” Alphonse said, still scanning the landscape, half of which was forested, and the rest was water sparkling under a crescent moon. “A guy I know came through it recently.”

And just like that, Pritkin and I were out, falling back into our cell with no more warning than when we’d been snatched out of it. As if Faerie was saying, now that you know what’s happening, do something! Only I didn’t.

I didn’t know anything.

But I was damned well going to.

“What’s Barne-Mora?” I asked Pritkin because it seemed the most pressing.

“Nightmare,” he croaked.

I turned to see him looking like he’d just woken up from one, with his face pale enough that the blond scruff looked dark by comparison. And then the eyes changed, from wide and shocked to livid, the green flooding them so brightly that they almost glowed in the darkness. And, okay, I thought.

That was more like it.

“A nightmare,” he repeated savagely. “With the ‘mare’ or ‘mora’ in that term a demon thought to torment people with frightening dreams. Some have confused it with a visitation from an incubus. I suppose Feltin thought it fitting to curse me with a spell named after my own kind!”

He got to his feet even though there was nowhere to go, even after he slammed a fist into whatever shield protected this place hard enough to rattle it and make the whole room shiver. And groan as if the rocks themselves had woken up and were unhappy about it. As one demonstrated by shocking the hell out of him.

“Are you okay?” I scrambled to my somewhat unsteady feet because he didn’t look okay. His hair was smoking! But he waved me off and then just stood there, vibrating because he was so furious.

“Curse you how?” I asked after a minute.

“Barne-Mora is an Old Norse curse that magnifies someone’s fears a hundredfold,” he grated out. “Making their worst nightmares stalk them in the waking world.”

“Nightmares like us losing?” I said, starting to see where this was going.

“Nightmares like me losing you!” He grabbed my upper arms as if to reassure himself that I was really there. Because the spell was still on him, wasn’t it? It had been all along, which explained a whole hell of a lot.

Like why, every time we fought, it seemed to clear his head. But as soon as he had some time alone, when no one was reminded him of the stakes, the damned curse took him again. Damn it, I knew he’d been acting weird, but I’d never thought of that.

Pritkin had always seemed immune to such things.

But not when a god was casting it, Cassie!

“Feltin cursed you,” I said. “That must have been step one, even before the attempted poisoning. That’s why I haven’t been able to get through to you, why you were so eager to walk away, even if it meant walking into the hells. You’re cursed.”

---