Page 199 of Shadowblood Souls
He tugs at a lock of his hair, glancing toward the ocean with a nervous expression. A pang reverberates through my chest.
I know what it’s like to feel like a newbie in the world, even if not quite the same way as this guy.
“We haven’t actually gotten to experience a whole lot so far ourselves,” I say. “Most of our lives, we were locked up in one building.”
Pearl tsks her tongue. “That’s so unfair of them. You have all this amazing world to run around in and they shut you up in one tiny little part of it.”
Is that why she’s so overeager too—because she hasn’t spent much time around people? Or mortals, as the shadowkind seem to call us?
That could explain the lack of manners and personal boundaries.
Dominic must be thinking along similar lines. “Where do you go when you’re not here? I take it shadowkind don’t start out in our world?”
Pearl laughs. “Oh, no. We come into being in the shadow realm. We can only get here through rifts. Ineedto make the trip, because I’ve got to feed, but I only became, like, a year ago.”
Zian’s brow knits. “You’re only a year old?”
She motions to her curvaceous body as if putting herself on display. “We come the way we’re always going to be. No growing up. We weren’t there, and then we are.”
“Like magic,” Andreas says dryly.
Pearl claps her hands. “Yes. Just like that.”
Billy ducks his head awkwardly, his face turning ruddy beneath his light brown complexion that’s a lot like Dominic’s. “I’ve been alive for longer than that. But I can’t mingle with mortals when they’ll notice these.” He motions to his horns.
Jacob cocks his head. “Can’t you just think them away like Rollick does with his claws?”
“Oh, no,” Pearl says. “We can’t leave our shadowkind selves behind completely. Everyone’s got one thing that sticks.”
She pushes up one fluttery sleeve of her dress to reveal a band of glittering gold that winds across the normal creamyskin. “It goes right across my chest to my other arm. But I can cover it up, or people think it’s a strange tattoo.”
“Some of us can hide our sticky features better than others,” Billy says.
“Yeah.” Pearl squints at all of us. “But you five don’t seem to have any at all.” She glances at Dominic. “Well, except for you, but you said those only grew in later. That’s got to be a hybrid thing.”
Footsteps rap across the polished wooden boards toward us.
“Keeping our guests entertained?” Rollick saunters over to our end of the deck with an amused expression.
Pearl grins at him. “Someone should with those grumps around.”
The mention of the “grumps” brings back the knot in my stomach. I hesitate and then force out the question. “Why are some of them bothered by us? It seems like they’re upset that you’re helping us at all.”
Rollick pauses before he answers, which makes all my nerves twinge with apprehension. He’s trying to decide how to tell us something we won’t want to hear.
“Our community, such as it is, has some… mixed feelings about hybrids,” he says.
Zian glances down at his brawny frame. “They don’t like that we’re part human?”
“Not exactly.” Rollick appears to weigh his words again before continuing. “None of us have much experience with beings like you. Honestly, before you showed up, I was only aware of three other hybrids in the entire length of my multi-millennia existence, and two of those were almost immediately snuffed out by our de facto rulers.”
My body tenses. “They werekilled?”
Rollick spreads his hands. “I’m sure it’s difficult for you to understand from the inside. But to us, on the outside… You’rethe ultimate wild cards. You’ve already seen some of that. You have powers that can rival our own—in some cases, overwhelm most regular shadowkind—and none of the weaknesses that can keep us in check.”
“We can’t jump into the shadows like you,” Jacob points out. “We candie.”
I can tell from the edge in his voice that he’s thinking of Griffin.
