Page 294 of Shadowblood Souls
Two figures are moving around between the gleaming stainless-steel appliances and counters. Both the woman and the man are dressed in plain clothes, aprons tied over them, no jewelry or weapons.
And if that wasn’t enough to suggest that they don’t fit with the house’s main residents, they’re in the middle of unloading a dishwasher. They must be part of the household staff that Clancy mentioned.
I’m about to move on in the hopes that we can ignore them completely when a man walks into the kitchen from the back door, his confident stride and posher clothes marking him as a target rather than a servant. Shit.
We don’t have time to retreat to an easy hiding place. And maybe it’d be stupid to try to continue our assault with the kitchen staff here anyway, when they could potentially wander into the other rooms and stumble on a body at any moment.
At least this way, we control when and how they find out.
Jacob focuses on the man, who’s already ambled halfway across the kitchen. As the faint, fatal crack sounds, I hustle into the room.
The kitchen staff spin around, the woman letting out a gasp of surprise at the sight of one of her employers toppling. I press my hands to both of their mouths.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper in as low a tone as I can manage. “We just want to stop them from taking more kids. Get out of here, and don’t come back.”
They both nod, wide-eyed. The man rushes out through the back door first.
The woman treads after him and steps out into the night. But she’s only made it a few steps into the lawn before she whirls around and screams out a warning in that language I don’t know.
Fucking hell. My claws spring from my fingers again, but I have more vital things to do than get revenge on her for her betrayal.
Heavy footsteps pound toward us—some from the hall and others up from a basement staircase I hadn’t even noticed. Someone else is yelling now.
There’s an oof and a bang from the hall. Jacob dashes into the kitchen after me.
Two men charge in from the other direction at the same moment, guns in their hands. I swing around, but I’m not close enough to strike either of them in time.
One smacks into the wall with a heave of Jacob’s invisible power. He throws himself at me, tackling me to the ground just as the second gun fires.
We roll across the floor behind a storage cart. Nerves jangling, I squirm out from under Jacob just in time to see the gunman barging toward our momentary shelter.
He aims his pistol at Jake, who hasn’t quite righted himself yet, and this time I am close enough.
I launch myself at our attacker, my knee slamming into his elbow to send his shot wide, my claws snatching at his throat.With a hiss of breath, I tear the entire front of his neck right off of his body.
At another thud, my head jerks up. A woman who ran into the room, clutching a rifle, is just slumping to the ground, her head seeping blood against the wall from where Jacob cracked it open.
My gaze drops to the man who’s just collapsed in front of me.
Slicked-back gray hair. A craggy face with harsh full lips above the gouged-out throat.
My heart leaps.
“It’s him,” I murmur to Jacob. “We got him. The main boss.”
Jacob is staring at me as if he hasn’t quite heard me. A shudder runs through his body.
His head jerks around, but no other footsteps reach our ears. That isn’t enough of a guarantee that we’re done, though.
I open my mouth and let a tiny shriek reverberate out of me, even softer than the ones I’ve practiced. Just enough to quiver through the walls, seeking out a target to latch on to.
In the middle of my adrenaline high, I don’t know if I could have reined it in as well as I did in the controlled environment back on the island. Maybe I’d have ended up tearing into any body it touched.
But I don’t have to find out. It flows through the whole house and catches nothing.
I gulp in a relieved breath. “That’s it. We got them all.”
“Then let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jacob rasps.
