Page 150 of Shadowblood Souls
With all four of us in front of him, the slim man can’t really look anywhere else. He cocks his head. “Can I do something for you?”
“We’ve got a message for you from Frond,” Andreas says.
Whatever he saw in the possible-monster’s head, it delivers. The man twitches straighter, his nonchalance fading away. “About what?”
Andreas jerks his thumb toward the lounge’s back door. “I think it’s better if we discussed it with fewer people around, yeah?”
The man nods slowly, casting another wary glance over us before moving from his table. We all tramp out of the lounge and into the wide, shadowy lane out back.
There, the slim man turns to us and crosses his arms over his chest. “All right, let’s hear it.”
The words have barely left his mouth before he’s slammed back into the opposite wall by an invisible force. Jacob strides forward in the wake of his power and adds his hand to the man’s throat.
Apparently he’s decided there’s no point in even pretending this could be a friendly conversation. To be fair, he might not be wrong about that.
As we all stalk closer, Jacob fixes the monster-man with his icy stare. “We have some questions. It shouldn’t take too long if you answer quickly.”
The man sputters a choked guffaw. “Who do you think you are?” His eyes narrow, and all at once, his face goes sallow. “What the fuckareyou?”
“None of your fucking business. Now, we can?—”
Jacob isn’t even finished saying the first part of his threat when the man simply… vanishes.
One second he’s there, shoved up against the wall, and then next, Jacob is lurching forward with his hand smacking into the bricks. He whirls around with an angry grunt.
I spin on my feet, craning my neck to scan the alley, but I can’t see the slightest hint of our target.
“What the hell?” Zian says, his muscles flexing.
Andreas wets his lips, his expression tense. “It looks like the real monsters have more tricks up their sleeves than we realized.”
Eight
Riva
“You’re not welcome in here anymore,” the stately woman says from the front entrance of the lounge.
We stall on the threshold, where she cut us off. The back door had locked behind us, so we’d come around thinking maybe we could get something out of the portly man or even find the woman in the green dress after all.
Instead, our way is blocked.
Jacob lifts his chin. “Why not?”
The woman raises her own head at a haughty angle, a little taller even than Zian thanks to her heels and being up a step from the street. “We don’t allow anyone to harass our patrons. Leave before I have to take further measures.”
Oh, shit.
We retreat down the street, Dominic moving to join us. An uneasy vibe runs between all of us.
Andreas is frowning. “Someone must have looked out back while we were confronting the guy.”
“In the split-second we had him before he disintegrated,” Jacob mutters, and glances at Andreas. “He didn’t just turn invisible—not like you do anyway.”
Andreas nods. “I still have some kind of physical presence. It looked like he simply wasn’t there anymore.”
Zian makes a discontented sound. “How the hell are we supposed to get any answers out of them if they can disappear in a snap?”
Dominic has been watching and listening silently, and must be able to put enough of the pieces together to understand what happened. “Whatever skills one monster has, the others don’t necessarily have too,” he points out. “We don’t share many abilities.”
