Page 73 of Hijack the Seas: Tsunami

“That.”I waved a ridiculously weak hand at the horror.“You look like hell.”

“Yes, I wonder why!”he seethed and reached for me, probably to shake me, but a rusted pike slammed into the ground between us before he could.And Æsubrand’s voice came cold and clear on the night air.

“Touch her and die.”

“Touch her?”Rosier’s voice reached into the falsetto again, but for a different reason this time.“Touch her?Isavedher!I saved all of you!You wouldn’t be here, you wretched boy, without me all but draining myself to give a boost to that...to that...tothat.”He flapped a hand at me, speechless.

“You saved us?”I asked because I didn’t remember that.

“Of course I did!How else do you think you got here?”

“I don’t know.I don’t remember much.”

“Then let me help you with that,” it was acid.But then he proceeded to give me a retrospective of his whole day instead.“I was almost pulverized in Stratford by a brute who knocked me half a mile away!By the time I got back, you had vanished—with my son—and a massacre was going on, which rather hampered my efforts to search the battlefield for the two of you!

“I finally acknowledged that you must have fled through the portal I could feel thrumming away underground, but I couldn’t get to it with great hulking gods in the way—”

“Rosier,” I said, trying to get a word in, but no.

“—and as if that wasn’t enough, andit damned well was, before I could finish sorting through the mess you’d made, what happened?The earth opened up, spewing forth a bunch of madmen who began systematically slaughtering everyone in sight!Those they didn’t drag back into the ground with them, that is!”

Jonas’s boys, I thought, wincing slightly.

“And then the bastards started targeting me!” The outrage was palpable, with even the blob face going red.“I cloaked, managed to evade them, and watched as they attacked one of the gods that had been attracted by the chaos, and did I mentionthat there were more of them?

“Within minutes, six or more were messing about, half attacking the other half, and the rest of us just trying to survive while they fought it out above our heads!I followed some war mages underground, got lost in that labyrinth of theirs, was almost skewered a dozen times by some of their infernal traps, was buried twice, and finally fought my way through to a dark portal where I founda bisected god—”

I felt the monster that lived inside me perk up and ruthlessly stomped it back down.

“—still sizzling on the floor!So I opened the gateway again, hoping to find you two on the other side, and what did I find instead?”

“Um—”

“A nightmare!Bodies everywhere, some living, some not,the other half of the bloody god, now looking like a charcoal briquet, and I knew—I knew—it was you!No one—and I have lived a long time, I have lived a damned long time—but NO ONE leaves a scene like that except forCassie Bloody Palmer!”

“Do you have that water?”I asked Enid because I’d handed it back to her, but she didn’t respond, being too busy staring at Rosier in what looked like shock.I guessed demon lords were supposed to be a little more dignified.But he was screeching like a madman, reaching highs that a coloratura soprano would have envied.

Æsubrand passed over the skin and I gave it to Rosier, who drank violently, wiped his mouth violently, and looked at me more than violently, but I was too tired to find the right word for it now.“You,” he said, pointing a shaking finger at me.

“Yes, me.And I’m sorry about—”

“Don’t.”It was savage.“I looked around, but no one was there.Just a cavernous room full of bodies that might as well have had your signature on it.So, I thought, I wonder where that other portal goes?And when I stepped through, what do you think I found?”

I winced again but didn’t say anything because...yeah.

Silence was probably the way to go here.

“You trying to shift a small town’s worth of people and about to rupture yourself in the process;my sonbound up in the spell with you and about to fly apart at the seams; fey, mages,zombies, and a whole army’s worth of gods tearing the fucking building apart trying to be the first to reach you!”

I took the goatskin back and had a drink myself because I could have done without the reminder.

“And to make it even lovelier, your damned spell was too far advanced for me to have any hope of stopping it.Leaving me with two choices: either step back through the portal before anybody noticed and let you destroy yourselves, or throw everything I had at you, allowing you to drain me dry to boost your power enough to have a chance at completing it!And if you failed, to be left with no way to defend myself with half a city’s worth of godly assholes about to rip into mine!”

Well, when you put it like that, I thought and had another drink, wishing it was whiskey.Or tequila.Or anything that might blot some of that out.

I handed the skin back to Æsubrand, who looked at it with distaste, although whether because my lips had been on it or Rosier’s had, I wasn’t sure.

“Thank you,” I said to Rosier because he deserved it.Which, strangely enough, stopped the tirade when nothing else had.

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