Page 108 of Hijack the Seas: Tsunami

Didn’t care.Very definitely didn’t, I thought, as a burning orange-red maw worthy of a primordial entity roared again in frustration and fury, causing the remaining feasters to jerk their heads up, and then abruptly head for the hills lest they be the next thing on the menu.

But while that helped us somewhat because nobody was running in this direction, the other half of our party was suddenly inundated with panicky gods.I sat there, my heart in my throat, and could do nothing but watch as Mircea and the rest desperately tried to find a path through the crowd and back to us.And failed.

Probably because the metaphysical space around them was being churned up like waves on the sea.Crashing ones, knocking them and their ghostly crew this way and that, like a boat trying to ride out a gale.Stray pieces of energy peppered them, power arced and snapped overhead, and godly limbs came within a hair’s breadth of smashing through them as they struggled to ride out the storm.

And as they flashed in and out of non-space, showing up for a second at a time before the ghostly horde pulled them back in.

“No,” I whispered, watching them flicker between regular, human-like coloring, which is how they looked on our side of the barrier, to the ghostly outlines they took on in the real world.And not once, but over and over again, as their ghostly host struggled to hold onto them while godly energy pulled and tugged and jerked the other way.And then my brain caught up to my horror, and I shook Hansen mercilessly.“No!”

“I know, I know!I’m telling them,” he said frantically, no longer calm because who the hell could be calm inthis?

“Go down,” Pritkin said, suddenly grabbing Bodil and causing her to hiss at him.“Tell them to go down and find a place to hide on the ground.They’re too high, almost at the eye level of those bastards.They’re going to be seen!”

Bodil nodded, recovering fast, and her vision went distant again.And she must have gotten through to Mircea, whose metal gifts were also formidable, or maybe Hansen did to the ghosts, because the brilliantly white clouds bearing the others aloft abruptly started to descend.For a second, I thought we were okay, that this was going to work, and that everything was going to be—

“No!” I screamed before Pritkin’s arm tightened in reaction, enough to cut off my air.

All I could do was watch as the group of terrified people flew straight through the middle of a running god, who had changed direction at the last second when lunged at by another.He plowed into them, and worse, he was crackling with power from the other god’s attack.It was enough not only to send them back into real space but to pulverize them when they got here!

“No!That’s them!That’s them!”Enid screamed, pointing.

And I realized—they hadn’t gone through the god, as I’d initially thought.They’d gone through the gap between his legs.And came shooting out the other side, screaming and careening straight into us, hard enough to send both our parties falling and tumbling and hitting the earth, with explosions of ghostly power going on all around us to cushion the fall.

It seemed to have worked; we didn’t die despite hitting the ground really goddamned hard from what had to be six or eight stories up.I slammed into it with only a thin ghostly cushion and my own palms shielding me, hard enough to just stay there for a second, trying to get my breath back.And wondering if my wrists were broken, only to be distracted from the pain by something else.

Something much, much worse.

I had landed face down and was now staring at the darkened ground from a few inches away.It shouldn’t have been interesting; it was just cracked dirt littered with pieces of shattered concrete and a few hardy little weeds.Yet it was.

Because it wasn’t a ghostly outline.

We were back in the real world!

The others must have been trailing some of that godly energy they’d been hit with when they crashed into us, forcing us out of non-space.I stared around, my head reeling like an accident victim who’d just had an airbag go off in her face, and realized the truth.We might have survived the fall, but that didn’t mean we weren’t about to die of something else, because the Balrog had sensed something.

And even though the ghosts recovered faster than we did and jerked us all back into the Paths in a few scant seconds, it wasn’t fast enough.

The monstrous-looking thing was on top of us, snarling and growling with arms slashing through the air as if it could sense us, and maybe it could.I didn’t know all of their abilities from my brief time as one of them, but it sensed something, being on us before the clouds had even cleared.And they cleared pretty darned fast because Billy’s buddies were freakingcowards!

The ghostly host panicked and scattered on the wind, leaving us behind, teetering on the brink of the human world so closely that I could feel some of the heat coming off the goddamned Balrog.Who was now stomping about, looking for us.He didn’t appear to know what we were, but there was power in the area, and he wasn’t leaving until he tasted it.

And Æsubrand was about to help him.

I guessed the idea was that if he was going out, it wouldn’t be flat on his back with fear clawing at his belly.Which, okay, I could sympathize, but his alternative wasn’t going to work any better.But he apparently didn’t agree, rolling back to his feet before I could form the words to stop him, gripping his spear in one hand and his sword in the other, ready to throw down.

Or, at least, he was until the young fey discovered exactly how powerful a couple of master vamps could be.Mircea and Alphonse seized him and bore him to the ground, and struggle as much as he would, he couldn’t break that hold.Not that he wasn’t trying.

Do something!I mentally hissed at Bodil, who I guessed deputized Enid because she was closer.Or maybe for another reason.

If I’d had any doubts that the silver prince was smitten, they vanished when the beautiful half-fey calmed him with a single touch.

So great, one problem solved and one big fiery motherfucker of a problem left to deal with.And this one wasn’t getting bored and leaving.This one was doing the exact opposite of that, and maybe he had some rudimentary intelligence left, after all.

Because when the frantic search turned up exactly nothing, he paused suddenly and—

He’s coming in!Bodil warned me, and yeah.Got that, I thought, as a godly paw tore a hole in non-time and came through.At approximately the same moment that I grabbed a spark of the godly energy still spritzing around like fireflies and pulled us all out, just in time to witness a fiery red and black-encrusted god the size of a casino tower vanish into nothingness.

But it was a nothingness that could still see the real world if he was close enough to the border, so I didn’t waste time.

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