Page 534 of Shadowblood Souls
Zian lets out a quiet hiss to draw us to a halt. There’s a faint glimmer of ruddy light as he uses his vision to sever some of the wires.
Sorsha will be melting others with her phoenix fire, but she doesn’t give any visible sign of that. Only a brief waft of heat gives any indication that she’s done her work.
She clicks her tongue to indicate that she’s finished. We can’t talk at all now, not when we aren’t sure how closely Balthazar might be monitoring audio around his hideout.
Two men stand guard in the arch of the entrance carved into the mountainside. The heavy hooded parkas they wear against the mountain chill work in our favor.
As Dominic saps the life out of them from a short distance, the ruff of their hoods hides the slackening of their faces. Jacob uses his telekinesis to “walk” them back against the stone walls. He snaps off shards of rock that he jabs through their coats from behind to hold them steady.
To any watching cameras, it’ll look as if they’re simply leaning at their posts.
A quiver passes through the air as Zian accepts Jacob’s power. Getting the door open without setting off any alarms depends on him.
With Rollick’s connections, the demon was able to dig up various purchase and construction agreements and determine what sort of locks Balthazar favors. Zian spent the better part of the last two days studying their inner workings.
I can only stand there, nerves twanging, while he peers through the steel slab of the door with his X-ray sight and brings Jacob’s telekinesis to bear on the intricate pieces.
For a minute, there’s nothing but the howl of the wind beyond the doorway and a deepening chill that Sorsha can’t risk warming away when we’re this close. Then, after a muffled exhalation of relief, the door whirs open.
We hurry past it and send it sliding shut in our wake.
The hall on the other side provokes an uncomfortable twinge of familiarity. The carved stone surfaces look an awful lot like the passages that wound through the mountain at the island facility where we were held by a different former captive.
Clancy wasn’t quite as insane as Balthazar is, but he was just as eager to use us for his purposes. I can’t say any of my memories of him are remotely happy.
Griffin takes the lead, with tiny nudges of our emotions that give us a sense of where to follow him. At his mental touch, the side doors strike me as dull, the hall ahead of us more enticing.
I stride forward, tuning out the memories of being trapped—both physically and emotionally—as well as I can. Even the mineral scent in the air stirs up more recollections of our former island prison.
Another man comes striding along the hallway toward us, and we flatten ourselves against the wall to let him pass. There’s no point in causing more of a commotion than we need to if we can avoid notice completely.
We turn a corner and come to a stairwell. As quickly as possible, we slip past the door and follow Griffin’s eager signals down, two floors lower.
My mouth has gone dry. I wet my lips and try to estimate how much time has already passed. Fifteen minutes? Twenty?
How much longer do we have until our disguise falters? Andreas’s powers aren’t an exact science.
If only I had a watch… Of course, I wouldn’t be able to see it.
The thought brings a brief spark of amusement that’s quickly swallowed up by my nervousness. We dart out into the hallway Griffin indicates and trail after him to the left.
The stone-walled hallway down here is narrower than the one above, the ceiling lower. My chest constricts with the growing sense of them closing in. An image of the windowless room Clancy kept me trapped in between training sessions floats in the back of my mind.
I broke free of that place, and we’ll break out any shadowbloods trapped here too. After we’ve dealt with our most psychotic captor for the last time.
Griffin’s progress ahead of us slows. My body tenses in anticipation.
Then he stops completely, right by a plain white door that looks just like the other doors dotting the hallway. But his certainty that our target waits on the other side flows into me with his power.
Now it’s up to the rest of us to see the final part of the plan through.
Mostly, it comes down to me.
I think of Balthazar’s uncaring expression while fourteen-year-old Lindsay bled out on his villa floor. Of the plastic case that enclosed Dominic while he left my tentacled guy in a coma for weeks.
Of the rocks falling on our heads in a passage even narrower than this one, one last attempt at caging us in and preventing our escape from his beautiful prison.
A brutal vibration grips the base of my throat. I focus my mind on it and reach out to touch Jacob where I can sense him standing near me—my signal that I’m ready.
