Page 82 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

Pritkin didn’t say anything, but his stance—wide-legged, stiff-backed, and closed off, told me the answer to my next question before I asked it. “Can you break it now that you know it’s there?”

“No.” It was stark.

“But when you rest up a bit? When you’re stronger?”

And okay, that got a reaction. “Stronger than who?” he demanded, eyes flashing. “Feltin, or the one who rides him?”

I crossed my arms. “Zeus isn’t here, Pritkin.”

The won me a laugh, and it sounded shrill. “Isn’t he? It feels rather different! Like barbed chains that bind me and dig deeper whenever I try to—”

He broke off, red-faced and furious. He knew what the problem was now, but he couldn’t throw it off. He couldn’t break it.

“I still want to run,” he told me, the words sounding forced. “To pick you up, throw you over my shoulder, and sprint for the nearest portal out of here—and I would. Even knowing—” He broke off and glared around our cell. “Even knowing what it would do, the price we’d pay, I still would. If not for these walls, Feltin and his master would get what they want. It’s been building since you came, and no matter how much I reason with myself or tell myself that it’s a lie, it grows.”

He looked at me, and his eyes were back to that startled look I’d seen before, as if whatever magic this was, he didn’t know how to counter it. For perhaps the first time in his life, he didn’t. And it terrified him.

“I can’t guarantee that I won’t do exactly that as soon as we’re free,” he said. “If it worsens, I can’t guarantee what I’ll do.”

I looked at him for a moment and felt my own eyes narrow. Because, yeah, I knew the feeling he was describing, knew it intimately, as those barbs had been inside of me once. After Zeus and I met for the first time when he was riding his other puppet, Aeslinn.

We’d battled on the Thames after the All-Father grabbed hold of one of my shifts and followed me to Gertie’s, where we’d had a colossal fight that I’d barely survived. And only because I had absorbed some of the godly aura surrounding Aeslinn and used Zeus’s own power against them. But tricking an elder god has consequences, as I’d quickly discovered.

Once he realized what I’d done, he used the remnants of his power in my body to start tearing me apart. Literally. And yes, it had felt exactly as Pritkin described—barbs in my skin, shredding it, shredding me, and the worst part had been that I couldn’t do anything about it.

But Zeus wasn’t here. I knew that as certainly as I knew my name, and not only because I’d seen him wink out when he lost whatever tenuous link he had to Feltin. But because if he had been, Pritkin wouldn’t be writhing in the grip of some curse; he would be dead. Just as I would have been in London if he and Mircea hadn’t saved me.

And not just them, because there’d been a fourth person there that night when we battled for my life, hadn’t there?

“I need to see the other guy,” I said abruptly.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Pritkin didn’t look like he knew what I meant, but someone else did. The brilliant green of the eyes, almost neon bright a moment ago, darkened, flooding with black and starlight, like a beautiful night sky. The face changed, too, not in features but in attitude, in how he carried himself, in a thousand things that told me before he spoke that I wasn’t facing the same man.

And that the man I was facing was not happy. “No.”

“I haven’t even said—”

“Oh, forgive me,” Pritkin’s incubus said with a sneer. “I was under the impression you were about to ask me to fall on my sword!”

“Not for me—”

“I would hope not. As I recall, I don’t owe you anything.”

“—but for him—”

“My dear jailer, you mean?” He lifted an eyebrow in a deliberately provocative move, then flopped onto the straw pallet with the air of a man who had no intention of ever leaving it. And he probably didn’t. Feltin’s men were out there, so the safest place for us was in here.

“You have the rest of the power that Pritkin absorbed in that camp, don’t you?” I asked, coming to the point. Because I wasn’t going to outthink Pritkin or outcharm an incubus. The truth was all I had to work with here; luckily, it was compelling.

“Bollocks,” he said succinctly and got up again as if he would like to get away from me, but there was nowhere to go. I sat down because chasing him around the little room wasn’t likely to help his mood, and it was already pretty foul. Only I didn’t know why.

“I thought things were improving,” I said. “Between the two of you—”

“So did I!”

I waited, but he didn’t say anything else.

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