Page 80 of Hijack the Seas: Tsunami

“Oh, but you must go, only not now.Not with a compulsion riding you that you cannot control.”

“And you think what?”I asked, spreading my hands.“That I’m suddenly going to get better?This isn’t going away.Ican’t handle this!”

“No, you can’t,” he agreed.“Not alone.You need our help.Specifically, you need Mage Pritkin’s help to absorb godly energy, use it as food, and not be influenced by it.That is the great power the demon lords have that the gods do not—”

“Bollocks!”That, of course, was Pritkin.

And Mircea didn’t like it.The scar that twisted those perfect features flushed a darker shade, making me wonder how he’d gotten it.Master vamps healed almost instantly, and the fact that he couldn’t, that it looked more like something a human might wear, old and healed over, but not erased...

Told me more about how bad things had been than anything else.

But he kept his temper, which was never as reactive as Pritkin’s, not after centuries of training at vampire courts.“Demons were made to use this power,” he said.“It is how they evolved, whereas the gods did not.They stumbled into this universe, discovered the incredible advantage they had here, and promptly went mad with it.Just as Cassie almost did.”

Pritkin started to speak, but Mircea plowed ahead.“Don’t let your hatred for what you are blind you,” he urged.“Use it!Cassie needs your abilities, and there are none that can substitute.Even could we find a way to bring your father into our triumvirate, which, considering the nature of it, is highly unlikely—”

“Goddamned right!”I said because the spell linking us was based on love, and romantic love at that.And I sure as shit didn’t love Rosier!

“—it wouldn’t matter.Zeus has shut down his ability to multiply power.The All-Father almost caught him several times and, during the last, managed to hit him with a spell that all but crippled him—”

“The red smoke,” I said, and Mircea nodded.

“Yes, it boils around him now, marking him as one of Zeus’s leading enemies for anyone who would like to curry favor by bringing him down.But that wasn’t the worst of it.He can no longer feed as he once did and has been running off Adramelech’s legacy ever since.But that won’t last forever, and he cannot multiply the magic to help himself after Zeus crippled him.Our old adversary wants to consume his life and thereby his abilities, but Rosier denied him that.”

“So, if Zeus can’t have it,” I whispered.

“No one can,” Mircea said heavily.“Rosier cannot leverage his greatest gift, which means there is only one person alive with the abilities of the incubus royal line: Mage Pritkin.He could increase your power enough that you could shift to your heir, gain her knowledge, and then take yourself and your party home—”

“Ican’t—” Pritkin began, but I cut him off that time.

“Didn’t you hear me before?”I asked Mircea incredulously.“I can’t have that kind of power again!If I do, I’ll be just as bad as the gods—”

“On your own, yes.But not with his help,” Mircea said firmly, nodding at Pritkin, who exploded.

“If you would listen for half an instant instead of lecturing me about things you don’t understand—”

“But I do understand,” Mircea said and looked at me.“Answer me this.When you and Mage Pritkin made power together before, you had trouble holding onto it.Human flesh wasn’t designed for such things, and it almost burned both of you up.But not this time.Why?”

“I...don’t know,” I said slowly because all of that back in Jonas’s cavern and then in the warehouse was vague now.Almost as if it had happened to a different person, and maybe it had.

That Cassie hadn’t felt like me.That Cassie hadn’t felt like anybody I knew or wanted to know.She had been...not evil exactly, not in her mind at least.Or no more so than anybody stepping on a beetle on the sidewalk thinks of themselves as evil.

She just hadn’t cared and that coldness, that indifference, that complete lack of anything like a soul...

I shivered in remembered horror.

I never wanted that kind of power again!

“Then let me tell you,” Mircea said.“He helped you.Or rather,” he added as Pritkin tried to interrupt again.“His other half did.”

“What?”Lost in my thoughts, it took a second.

“Mage Pritkin is half demon, the species meant to use the life energy they take from others for food,” Mircea said again.“They are natural predators of it in the way that even vampires are not.But his demon grew up on Earth with no one instructing it how to use its gift.And being part of a strange hybrid of light fey and human blood, well,” he shrugged.“It didn’t have to.

“There were other ways to feed and no pressing dangers.Like a petted and pampered housecat, it might have learned to hunt eventually, for pleasure or sport, but need...no.It had all it needed.And when it required a top-up, all it had to do was push its other half toward some willing young thing—”

“Enough,” Pritkin said, sounding strangled.

He was probably thinking about his wife and the night his demon half had drained her dry.She’d been in the pay of a man opposing the gods, who had wanted a knife at Pritkin’s throat in case Zeus found him and came close to absorbing his gift.Having the All-Father able to multiply power at a whim was not something the demon world could tolerate, so Pritkin’s very existence was seen as a threat.

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