Page 502 of Shadowblood Souls
They gleam with the sheen of steel. The one at the right and the second door at the left have keypad locks like the manhole cover.
The first door on the left is just a solid slab of metal, not even a handle protruding from its smooth surface.
“Where do we go?” Riva asks into the sudden silence.
“Not up,” Jacob says grimly, turning toward the pair of doors. He motions to me. “Try the code.”
I hustle over and tap the same sequence of numbers into the keypad on the second door. It gives a hostile beep and a flash of orange light.
Andreas swears under his breath. “I doubt it’s safe to stay right here.”
Zian peers around us. “But as long as we’reinthe hill, not going past the line of the walls, our manacles shouldn’t knock us out, right?”
Riva glances back toward the upper door and exhales roughly. “As long as no one activates them manually.”
We can’t afford to wait around and find out if that’ll happen.
I motion toward the lower doors. “We’ll have to break one open.” My mind whips through the possibilities. “The one without the extra lock. We just want to put some distance between us and the house—no point in messing with anything especially defended that might set off the security system.”
Really, anything down here could be dangerous, but we might as well do our best not to trigger our doom.
Zian shoves at the smooth door, but it doesn’t budge. Then he narrows his eyes at the shiny surface.
A searing red line traces across the top of the metal. But after a moment, he shakes his head. “It’s really thick. I don’t know if I can cut all the way through. I can’t even see the other side—it’s all dark.”
My pulse kicks up a notch. “You’ll be able to if you power up. I could?—”
I stop myself, realizing there’s a simpler solution. One that means handing over my talent rather than playing the hero myself.
But then, that’s always been my main role in our group anyway—a supporting one. I’ve gotten us through an awful lot that way.
I reach toward Zian. “Take my energy-absorbing power!”
It’s as if he pulls it and I push it toward him at the same moment. With an unnerving tingle, my frame feels somehow lighter.
Zian hesitates, then grasps one of the saplings I brought along. His hand clenches around the narrow trunk, and his eyes flare.
The young tree withers in his grasp, and the metal whines with the slice of his brutal vision.
As I watch him, a different sort of lightness rises up inside me. He’s taking the supernatural skill I’ve loathed, the one that made me feel like a monster, and using it to save our skins.
The tree dies, but the rest of us live. Can I really say that’s a bad trade-off?
The steel warps and bends. The chunk Zian is cutting out of it sags open.
He flings my power back into me, and we scramble through the opening.
I remain at the back of the pack, dragging the second sapling. I’m just heaving it through the rough hole when the door at the upper end of the room flies open.
“There they are!” a figure in a military-style helmet shouts, his gun pointing straight at me.
There’s no room for the others to maneuver. Instinctively, I snatch through the energies around me to grab at Jacob’s and then wrench my arm upward.
Half a dozen purple spines fly from my forearm like porcupine quills… only deadly. They sink into our attacker’s throat and chest before he can pull the trigger.
Then Riva is beside me, her hand on my waist, her gaze searching the room. Three more armed men thump through the doorway toward us—and topple one after the next with a spasm of their limbs before they hit the ground.
She cut them down in the space of a few thuds of my pulse, her eyes narrowed but no sound leaving her lips.
