Page 93 of Hijack the Seas: Tsunami

Even when the first fey spat in his face and screamed what I guessed were obscenities in his language mixed with just about every human one I’d ever heard.

“You left,” he panted, blood dripping from a bisected lip.“Youleft, and we died.I could kill you for that alone, but I’d rather you live with it.Live and remember...how you failed your people.Live and suffer...as we have suffered...as we still doevery goddamned day!”

He made a furious gesture, which these fey seemed to talk with as much as their mouths, and the five left their prince lying in the dust.They staggered off, with those who could still stand helping several who looked like they were about to face-plant any second now.But their friends supported them, as I guessed they’d been doing for the last fifty years after somehow escaping the cataclysm in Faerie.

They picked up their useless weapons as they went, but no one came back to use them.

They weren’t going to give him an honorable death in battle, I realized.

They weren’t going to give him anything at all.

“Give us a minute,” I told Pritkin softly, who looked reluctant because he didn’t know how Æsubrand was likely to react after that.But he went, perhaps because the silver prince didn’t look capable of standing, much less anything else.

But looks could be deceiving.No sooner had the fey left and the crowd, which had gathered to watch the show, dispersed than Æsubrand was back on his feet with his pike held loosely in the fingers of one hand.He stared in the direction that the retreating fey had gone, expressionless, for a long moment.

Then he sat down in the dirt and hung his head, defeat in every line of his body.

I didn’t think it was the physical kind.

“Um,” I said, biting my lip because I hated it when people asked me if I was all right.And because, in his case, the obvious answer was no.

But it brought his attention back up, and he looked at me through straggling strands of bloody hair, the pewter-colored eyes lost in bewilderment.“How did we get here?”he whispered.

I crouched down and didn’t ask what he meant because that was obvious, too.As was his distress, and clear lack of anything to help frame the moment.I glanced around, hoping for inspiration, and found it in the faded image on a gray tee hanging off one of the vendor’s racks and rippling slightly in the breeze.

“I don’t know what Apocalypse means,” it proclaimed.“But it’s not the end of the world.”

And the fact that people were still wearing stuff like that here...

God, I loved humans.

“Look,” I said quietly and pulled out my tattered tarot deck.

Pritkin had returned it to me on the roof earlier, having rescued it from one of the few remaining pieces of Augustine’s armor that had still been clinging to me after everything.

“You’re going to do a reading for me?”Æsubrand said hollowly.He’d been to Earth before, long enough to know what that was, but he didn’t appear impressed.

“Not exactly.”I dumped out the cards, which were muttering incoherently because they’d been through the wringer lately, too.And found the remains of the World card.It had gotten ripped in half during some of our adventures at Nimue’s court, and I hadn’t had time to repair it.“Do you have any tape?”I asked the vendor, who’d just been standing in the RV’s doorway, watching everything with a bunch of coats over his arm.

He nodded, dropped the coats, and went back inside.And returned with a roll of what had to be the oldest Scotch tape on record.It was yellow, peeling, and falling apart, and wouldn’t hold anything together.

I looked up at him again.“Glue?”

He went back inside once more, and I started pawing through the coats.

“They did not deserve this,” Æsubrand said, looking at the crowd again, his voice soft yet with an undercurrent of something I couldn’t name.

“No, we failed them,” I said, trying to decide between a rustic, Wild-West-looking dark brown suede with a fringe, a moth-eaten nubby black, or a pale tan sheepskin with worrying stains on it.I chose the brown and tried it on.

It was too big, but it was dark enough, and if there were bloodstains on it, they didn’t show.I decided it would do and started to pull it off when I saw him.Another ghost peering at me through the crowd, half eclipsed by passing bodies.

Only this one I knew.

But it couldn’t be, I thought, frozen in shock.I was losing it, whatever remained of my mind.IknewI was—

And then I knew it again when he was suddenly gone, in between one blink and the next, leaving my soul hurting and my stomach flipping—

And my wrist throbbing when a half-bewildered, half-angry prince grabbed it.“Do you not care?”he demanded.“You are surrounded by...by all this...you see it as I do, yet you do notcare?”

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