Page 520 of Shadowblood Souls
Steel turns his cool gaze on me. “You could do that to shadowkind too, huh, shadowblood boy?”
I give him the most reassuring look I’m capable of. “I wouldn’t, though. Not when we’re helping each other.”
I pretend I don’t notice the flicker of uneasiness that stirs in him at my words. And then Toni bursts into the atrium with a ragged breath.
“It’s started,” she says. “Mr. Balthazar’s shadowblood army—they’ve launched an attack.”
Four
Riva
As our helicopter thrums through the air, I flick at the screen of the tablet Rollick lent us, careening from scene to scene of destruction. With each, my stomach knots tighter.
Some of it is amateur footage, shaky cell phone camera recordings punctuated by the startled yelps and breathless exclamations of the locals who witnessed the initial onslaught. The official news crews arrived on the scene later, after Balthazar’s new shadowbloods had already fled the scene.
I only catch glimpses of the figures in the amateur footage. No one who survived to post their videos online got close enough to the carnage to capture identifying details.
But the impact is clear enough.
In one recording, a distant form slams his fist into the side of a four-story building—and it crumples to the ground in a hail of rubble. In another, screams ring out as streaks of sizzling blue energy whip through the air to cut down the panicked locals whoweretoo close.
It wasn’t just Moscow, the first place one of Rollick’s shadowkind allies saw a news report on and alerted us about. Balthazar has already built up enough of an army that he was able to send at least a few shadowbloods to five key cities around the world.
I’m seeing broken buildings and bodies from London, New York, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires as well. He’s spreading his message across the continents and both hemispheres, looking to get as many eyes on it as possible at once.
And it is a message, quite literally. His shadowblood thugs left words seared into the sides of buildings they left standing or painted them with the blood of their victims.
The monsters are coming for you!
You can’t fight our power!
Humanity is doomed!
On and on like that, just as Toni suggested Balthazar’s strategy would be. He wants the whole world to realize that the shadowkind exist. To believe that the monsters are rising up against mortals so that people will accept his solutions for getting rid of them.
I don’t know if his extermination plan will actually work, considering how resilient the shadowkind appear to be. But I’d rather not watch and see how many get slaughtered in the fallout, even if I haven’t had the best experiences with some of them.
Rollick doesn’t deserve to be hunted down and murdered. Neither do Pearl or Billy or Sorsha’s men who’ve stood with us.
And let’s be real: Balthazar doesn’t like the shadowkind essence inside us shadowbloods either.
I’ll bet the second he thinks the full “monsters” are gone and he doesn’t need his hybrids to do his dirty work anymore, he’ll consign us to the slaughter next.
I lift my gaze from the tablet’s screen to the helicopter window, taking in the clouds streaking past below us. “How much longer until we get to London?”
Rollick gives me a baleful look from his seat at the front of the aircraft. “About ten more minutes. This is as fast as the chopper can go, little banshee. And I’m still not sure making the trip was the wisest idea in the first place.”
I was the one who first insisted that we had to help somehow, but Jacob speaks up before I need to. “Shadowbloods trashed the city. Now shadowbloods will pick up the pieces. Someone has to tell the real story.”
The demon shrugs. “The mortals may not listen to you.”
“We have to try,” I say, hugging myself. “And maybe if we see firsthand what Balthazar’s new shadowbloods did, we’ll get a better idea of what they’re capable of, their tactics—how to fight back when we go after them directly.”
Rollick nods. I thinkthatpoint is the only reason he agreed to escort us to London at all.
My search for Balthazar’s current location didn’t prove all that useful. If he’s going to be moving around all the time, how can we plan an attack properly?
We need more information, more of an edge… And I can’t stand the thought of abandoning all the people he’s hurt and terrorized when we’re more equipped to step in than anyone else could be.
