Page 168 of Shadowblood Souls
I immediately know she’s shadowkind. Even if I didn’t have any special sensitivity, she’d look unearthly with her statuesque height, her sharp cheekbones and jawline, and the feral grace to her movements.
“Rollick will see you now,” she says, briskly and simply, and turns as if expecting us to follow.
There isn’t a whole lot else we can do. With a wary glance at each other, we trail behind the woman past the bar and through the rest of the club to a door that blends into the dark gray walls.
She unlocks the door with a press of her hand and leads us up a flight of stairs and down a short hallway to another room. When she’s opened that door, she ushers us in ahead of her.
We step into a large but sparsely furnished office. A thick crimson rug covers most of the floor, leading to an old-fashioned wooden desk with a leather chair behind it. A matching liquor cabinet stands nearby, and that’s it.
Well, other than the man who’s getting up from the leather chair as we file in.
Like the other creatures that call themselves shadowkind that I’ve met so far, this man’s outward appearance is totally human. Extraordinarily handsome human, like one of my soap-opera hunks stepped right out of the screen with lighting effects and makeup intact, but not monstrous in any way.
Our escort shuts the door behind us, standing with her back to it as if to block us for making an escape.
The man ambles closer. The bright glow from the light fixture gleams off his tawny hair.
He smiles, but it’s a measured smile, like he isn’t sure how much warmth he wants to offer us yet. He’s as tall and muscular as Jacob, which doesn’t mean much against my or Zian’s supernatural strength—but who knows how much powerhe’shiding.
When he stops, still about five feet away from us, a waft of that power tingles over my skin. He’s giving off enough don’t-fuck-with-me vibes to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“So,” he says in a silky drawl, “a purple dude in Toronto told you to come looking for me.”
He’s quoting my words back at me. I feel it’s my job to respond. “He said that you… you might be able to do something for us. That you help out shadowkind who are ‘odd.’”
The man who must be Rollick arches his eyebrows. “But you’re not shadowkind, are you?”
“We’re hybrids,” Jacob says tersely. “We have powers.”
Dominic clears his throat. “We were brought up by human experimenters who I’m sure knew a lot less about living with those powers than actual shadowkind would. We just want to get a better idea how to handle that side of our nature.”
Andreas nods. “That’s all we were looking for. A little guidance. Not trying to make trouble or get in anyone’s way.”
Rollick crosses his arms over his chest. “And these experimenters are the ones responsible for your hybrid state?”
“Yeah,” Zian says, and hesitates. “I don’t think— Have there been other hybrids before that you know of?”
Good question. The shadowkind guy didn’t sound particularly surprised by the idea that we could exist at all.
“Not like that,” Rollick replies in a bland tone that doesn’t really answer anything. He studies us in silence for a long moment. “I don’t run tutoring sessions.”
He seems to be entertaining the idea of helping us, though. If the purple floater sent us here to be decimated, wouldn’t the guy in front of us be getting on with that already?
“We just want to make sure that we’re not disturbing regular people by accident,” I say. “And to figure out if we can stop the people who made us from tracking us down. Things like that. Maybe you were born knowing it, but we have no idea what we’re doing.”
Rollick chuckles. “You obviously have a lot to learn, starting with the fact that shadowkind aren’t born.”
He rubs his jaw and then adds, “Well. It could certainly be interesting seeing what you’ve made of yourselves so far and where you could go with it. And I’d rather not have beings of any type running amok drawing attention to our existence.”
“Does that mean you can give us a hand?” Zian ventures.
The unsettling man eyes us for yet another stretch of apparent contemplation. My skin starts to itch.
Then he swipes his hands together as if washing them of the dilemma. “Let’s see what you can do, and I’ll set you up in the hotel for a few days while I decide what I make of it.”
My flare of hope is shaken by a jolt of nerves. A few days in one spot?
Andreas has clearly been struck by the same concern. “We appreciate the generosity, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to stay in any one place for very long. The people hunting us down managed to track us to Toronto in about a day.”
