Page 88 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

The toes didn’t look any better than the gown. The chipped paint was in all colors of the rainbow, courtesy of my little initiates, who loved painting anyone they could find. My big, strong vamp bodyguards fled in terror when a mob of them came hunting their latest victim and still ended up with sparkly nails more often than not. But the last time they’d caught me was before my foray into Faerie, which was beginning to be a while ago.

So long that I wondered if I’d ever see them again. Like Tamsin, with her vibrant red hair, a coven hallmark. It was a Little Orphan Annie bush most of the time and long, Victorian-era sausage curls when anyone had the time to fix it up.

But what she lacked in hirsute management, she more than made up for by a precocious ability with the Pythian power. She was four and already calling it to shift things to her that she couldn’t be arsed to get for herself. Annabelle, one of my acolytes, had started to whisper that she’d be shifting herself soon, and how would we keep up with her then?

Or Betty, an old-fashioned name for an old-fashioned girl who liked having tea parties with our resident ghost, the Pythian librarian, whose hairstyle she’d recently copied. I was starting to suspect her of being a ghost magnet because there had been a lot more ghosts around my court than usual lately. And most of them hadn’t come to see me.

Or Mira, our artist, she of the epic ‘fro and the ratty pink bunny suit that she wore everywhere, although it was starting to look as bad as my gown. Rhea had given up enchanting her drawings, which Mira insisted be animated, and had started enchanting the crayons used to make them instead. Resulting in epic Cassie pics—Mira’s favorite subject—showing up everywhere.

They usually depicted me putting a beat down on one of the gods, with a couple of golden whips—which I didn’t have the power to manifest most of the time—flashing. Or facing down Ares with an emerald green thunderbolt, which she’d carefully spread some glitter on to make it clear that it was magic. Or dressed in one of Augustine’s ridiculous gowns, which she always managed to make even more outrageous. . .

I stared at my ratty-looking nails and felt tears well up in my eyes, and I didn’t care enough to brush them away.

It was too much, suddenly, that little reminder of a better world. One that I’d thought I was almost back to, with Pritkin in tow, and could put this damned land and its goddess and its stupid, endless problems behind me. I could go home. . .

Only I couldn’t, and even if I could, without an end to this, would home even be there for much longer? Would my court? Would my girls?

No. It wasn’t even a question. Zeus played the part of the avuncular All-Father, but he was a bastard. He’d hunt them down, one by one, not because he needed to; they were no threat to him. Even Rhea, the oldest, was only nineteen and half-trained. But because he’d enjoy it.

He’d killed two of the three Graea, old demigoddesses who had been acting as my protectors since I got this crazy job. Unlike everyone else, they’d known who my mother was as soon as they saw me and had signed onto team Cassie. And like Bodil had said, that didn’t improve anyone’s longevity.

He’d almost killed the previous Pythia, Agnes, and her mentor and mine, Gertie, until she sent me away in sheer self-preservation. He had killed thousands of war mages and vamps, who had been bearing the burden of this war largely alone. He’d cost me my ghost companion, Billy Joe. . .

I was sobbing in earnest now and didn’t care. I couldn’t do this! Not alone, not with Pritkin spelled and possibly dying, and everybody else off limits or lost or . . . or something. I couldn’t even say the words, that Mircea might be dead, too, and that it was my fault because I could have saved him—and I should have, even if it made him hate me!

I should have figured it out, made better decisions, done something. But I hadn’t because I wasn’t good enough for this job, and all my bravado and “badass” this and “goddess” that didn’t change that. And now I was truly alone, and I couldn’t think, didn’t know, wasn’t enough. . .

Billy’s necklace bumped my hands when I bent over and put my face in them, and I felt my breath hitch. He’d died defending and believing in me, and it had all been for nothing. Because it ended in a dank cell in Faerie that I was too stupid to get out of!

I felt arms go around me, and someone pulled me back against a hard chest. I knew it wasn’t Pritkin, or at least not the right Pritkin, but it felt so good I didn’t care. This man had said he loved me once, too, but I didn’t know what that meant to a demon.

Not enough, apparently.

We sat silently for a moment because I guessed there wasn’t much left to say.

And then there wasn’t anything because the room winked out.

“What the—what is this?” the incubus demanded.

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell whether this was another hint from Faerie or something more sinister because I hadn’t felt the transition into the Common. Of course, I hadn’t always before, but it had been a lot more abrupt since losing the link to Pritkin’s fey blood.

But this transition had been so effortless that if I’d had my eyes closed, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

I put a hand down to the cool marble floor I was sitting on, so different from the dank stone of a minute ago. It was a massive, white, polished slab with gold veining that ran halfway down the wide corridor we were in before being paired beautifully with another. And so seamlessly that it was almost impossible to tell where one began and the last finished.

There was also light here, faint but like actual moonlight, not the dim, underwater world of Nimue’s mountain. It was flooding over the marble from a window at the end of the hall, where diaphanous curtains were being tossed around by what smelled like an ocean breeze. But that was the only sign that we might be near water.

“What is this?” the incubus demanded again. He grabbed me when I didn’t answer, but it didn’t help because I still didn’t know.

But when I slowly, carefully got to my feet, they felt solid underneath me, not the hazy, not-actually-there sensation of my recent trips into the Common. Where I hadn’t even needed to walk, with Faerie towing me along like a kid dragging a balloon behind her. Only that was not nearly as reassuring as you’d expect since that meant I might not be in the Common at all, but then what was this?

Illusion? Some shift that couldn’t be happening because I was the only person in Faerie who could currently do that? A trick?

And if so, a trick by who?

I’d started to break out into a cold sweat, as the answer to that last question was obvious, when the incubus grabbed my chin. “Look at me!”

I looked and immediately crossed incubus trickery off the shortlist because he looked as spooked as I did. “What? Is. This?” he demanded and then didn’t allow me a chance to answer. “No, do you understand? I said no!”

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