Page 41 of Hijack the Seas: Tsunami

“No,” he said tersely.“He was too busy running from the gods you summoned up!”

“Pritkin—”

“Demigods are a fine meal these days, and those bastards went straight for you!What were youthinking, deliberately luring up thosethings—”

“We had to get to Caleb and couldn’t find you—”

“I’d have found you had you stayed put!”

I blinked at that audacity of that, and because soap was trickling into my eyes.“You’re the one who ran off.”

“And I said for you to wait for me.I would have freed Caleb and returned to you—”

I stared at him.“You didn’t say anything!And do you actually expect me to believe that you’d have left Jonas and the rest to—”

“I didn’t know about them then!”

“—die?Because we both know you’d have gone after them, too, with practically no magic and no backup—”

“Did it look like I lacked backup?”The green eyes were wild.“And you summonedgods!”

I stared at him, hands on hips, which caused me to bark my elbow on the shower’s narrow confines, but I didn’t care.“I might have acted differently if I’d known what you were planning,” I pointed out.“But you ran off without a word—”

“I told you where I was going—”

“You told me nothing!And don’t try to say that my cloak was interfering—”

“Your cloak was interfering,” the bastard insisted stubbornly.“Black and white magic don’t mix, and when you put it on—”

“Twenty minutes, Pritkin.That’s how long it took me and the witches to find those awful things, dig them up, and get them on.Twenty minutes, and I was trying to contact you the whole time, but you didn’t bother to reply—”

“I deliberately didn’t reply—”

“So you admit it!”

“I state it,” he snapped, the green eyes hard and angry.“You were with people who could have used that signal to trace me, and I didn’t want that!I wanted you safe for once while I dealt with this, but once I realized you were following me anyway—where are you going?”

“To find another damned shower!”

He hauled me back.“There aren’t any more.They had to turf a Corpsman out of this room to accommodate us.”

“Then I’ll stay dirty!”I was being ridiculous, but right then, I didn’t care.“When are you going to accept reality?”

“And what is reality?”The crossed arms weren’t a good sign, but I was too angry right then to care.

“That your job isn’t to protect me anymore.It’s to protect everybody, the whole freaking world, and you can’t do that when you only concentrate on one person!”

“Pot, kettle.”

“What?”

“You know perfectly well what,” he said, the scowl turning thunderous.“You do the same thing.You ended up in that damned fey camp trying to save me!”

And goddamnit, we were back to that again!

The camp that haunted my dreams and Pritkin’s, too, I guessed, becausehe wouldn’t freaking drop it, had belonged to Aeslynn.He was the fey king who’d been trying to bring back the gods, and I guessed he’d succeeded.Part of his plan had involved kidnapping Pritkin and holding him in one of his military encampments, and Mircea had gotten carried along for the ride, and neither had been likely to survive the experience.

So, I’d gone in after them.I’d gotten them out, but at a price, one that had involved me ending up the prisoner of a bunch of sadistic monsters for a while.In turn, Pritkin and Mircea had helped to rescue me, but the whole thing had left scars.

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