Page 533 of Shadowblood Souls
I turn my attention inward again and let my finger fall to the map. The side of the tip brushes the bump I marked to indicate the base.
My pulse hitches. “He’s practically inside.”
Andreas raises his head. “Time to move out, Tink?”
“Let me just… Let me just make sure he’s staying there.” I wouldn’t put it past the psychopath to suspect we were tracking him and fly by overhead just to confuse us.
We can’t make any mistakes with this plan. And our time to pull it off properly will be so limited.
It all comes down to the six of us and Sorsha, really. After further examination, the shadowkind decided it was too risky to try to carve a path through the protective metals embedded in the rock around the base. Especially when the associate Rollick was hoping would contribute never turned up.
I hope that’s not a bad omen. Rollick assured me that he never explained exactly what he needed the shadowkind he reached out to for, that there’s no way he could have betrayed our intentions to anyone, but the reminder that even his connections are fallible leaves a queasy sensation in my gut.
In the end, it all comes down to surprise. Balthazar can’t know we’re coming. And ripping up the mountainside is the kind of thing that’s awfully hard to hide.
We’ve got plenty of power of our own—partly thanks to our former captor. I smile grimly to myself.
I’m looking forward to demonstrating the results of his efforts on the man himself.
The next fall of my finger lands directly on the bump. I wait a minute, counting out the seconds in my head, and reach my mind toward my sense of Balthazar again.
Still right on the base. He isn’t going any farther—at least not immediately.
I push to my feet, my pulse drumming behind my sternum. “All right. Let’s do this.”
We tramp up the slope to the small plateau where we set up our inconspicuous camp. At the sight of me, my other guys hurry over to join us. No one says a word, but anticipation laces the cool air.
Rollick and Sorsha come over as well. The demon studies my expression. “I take it that it’s time.”
I swallow past the nervous lump in my throat, my hand rising instinctively to where my cat-and-yarn charm is tucked behind my coat. “Yeah.”
“Well, you know the plan. We’ll be here to lend whatever help we can.”
Andreas looks us over. “Does everyone have what they need? We’ll want to get moving as soon as I’m finished.”
The guys incline their heads all around our loose circle. Drey reaches for Dominic first.
Thanks to the procedures Balthazar put us through, Andreas can turn other people invisible as well as himself. But the effect only lasts so long—and he’s stretching his strength to the limit working his power on all seven of us.
When we tried it out back at the Spanish mansion, the invisibility held for less than an hour. We hoped that swapping the power between us so we could each work it on ourselves might make it more potent, but we quickly discovered that as soon as Andreas passed it on to anyone else, his own invisibility faded.
So we’re stuck with a time limit on our concealment. And we worked out who Drey should erase first based on who can most easily fall back without screwing up the plan.
He works quickly through our group, moving to me and Sorsha last. She’s got the most firepower—literally—out of all of us, and I’m the swiftest and fastest killer.
I’ve returned Griffin’s locating skill to him because I don’t have any map of the base to use it on. But he has his own methods of finding Balthazar now that the man is close.
His soft voice carries from the seemingly empty space where he’s standing. “I can feel him down there—the same kind of impressions I got from him in the villa. He’s tense but pleased about something… in an unnerving way.”
“Probably plotting how many people he’s going to send his army to murder next,” I mutter as my body fades from view.
Andreas gives my arm a quick caress as he lets go of me, and we set off.
The six of us shadowbloods can keep track of each other through our awareness of our powers. Sorsha follows along with a faint tendril of warmth she wraps around my invisible wrist.
We clamber quietly down the slope past the ledge where I tracked Balthazar’s movements. Past a surveillance camera that’s got nothing to see and motion sensors reliant on visuals.
But those aren’t the only security measures Balthazar has taken against beings who aren’t affected by silver and iron. Closer to the base entrance lies a ring of pressure sensors.
