Page 89 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“No to what?” I asked, which was hard as he was pushing my cheeks together to the point that my lips were pursed.

“No, I am not doing this! I am not being drawn into another of your weird, metaphysical adventures! I am not!”

“Okay,” I said through duck lips. “Then how do you suggest we get out?”

“You take us out!”

“I didn’t take us here, and keep your voice down!”

“Why?”

“That’s why,” I said, dragging him through an open doorway as the sound of booted feet rang down the hall.

Chapter Twenty-Six

My attempt to hide didn’t work, as the soldiers followed us in, and there were a lot of them. First came a bunch of Nimue’s impossible-to-miss peacock guards, their distinctive armor looking even stranger outside a watery setting. And then the purple-dipped guys, with the shiny, breathtakingly expensive armor and the velvet cloaks hanging from their shoulders. And finally, Nimue herself, her long, dark hair floating around her head in defiance of gravity, as if born outwards on the tide.

Damn, I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. She didn’t seem real, with the uncanny valley effect kicking in hard whenever my eyes tried to look at her, making them want to slip off the other side. Only to come immediately back because beauty like that attracted as much as it repelled.

Her face was a pale oval without a flaw, her lips red as coral, her body clothed in what looked like liquid seafoam. It may have been that amazing fey silk or, knowing her, the real thing magicked up to swirl around her. But either way, it made all the ridiculous pretensions of her court seem like what they were—bad copies of her effortless perfection.

Yet it was the eyes that stunned.

They were blue, but that description totally misses the point. They were blue—and green and gray and all the colors of the ocean. And right now, they were angry, so much so that I could swear I saw the colors change and slur like the ones in waves that the light was shining through.

A storm was coming, only I didn’t know at who.

Until I turned my neck and saw who Nimue was looking at. She was standing on the opposite side of the room behind us, holding a baby in her arms. A baby . . .

Who I recognized immediately.

It was the hair that did it. Pritkin’s hair could lay flat as an adult if he wasn’t messing with it and his magic wasn’t surging. But if it was . . . well, I’d often wondered if that was why he favored spiky hairstyles, because they covered up what happened when he got mad.

Like that, I thought, watching as the baby’s scant blond whisps suddenly started wafting about like Nimue’s. Or like Jonas Masden’s, the most powerful mage I knew, who had white tresses that drifted about his head like a sea anemone’s tentacles. And got progressively more spiky as he became more annoyed.

The baby’s short strands were almost perpendicular because he’d recognized danger, even if he didn’t know the word for it yet.

“What is this?” the incubus asked, his voice suddenly quiet.

“Shhh,” I told him, even though I was pretty sure no one could hear us. No one had even glanced our way, and there was nowhere to hide. So, this was either the Common or—

Okay, that would be interesting.

“Morgaine,” Nimue’s voice, often as melodious as a babbling brook, was flat today.

The woman holding the baby looked up, and strangely enough, considering all the soldiers, she smiled. “I suppose I should be flattered,” she said. “You sent so many of your best soldiers to fetch me from Earth that I wondered if they were meant as an honor guard for your grandson.”

“He is no grandson of mine!”

“Great-grandson, then, if you wish to be precise. And as everyone knows, you are always precise. . .”

Amazingly, she sounded amused.

I remembered that about Pritkin’s mother, how she’d even gone into battle laughing. And how much she’d favored Nimue, especially now when dressed like a fey. But while she was beautiful, with long dark hair highlighted by a dress the color of sunlight, it wasn’t half so active as her grandmother’s, and her blue eyes were lovely enough but merely . . . blue.

You could really see the human in her, and it made me like her more.

“Give me the child,” Nimue said, never one to beat around the bush.

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