Page 469 of Shadowblood Souls
I didn’t mean to—my power just flared out of me in my panic?—
The figure outside curses under his breath in obvious distress. But he’s well enough to hustle away, even if his footsteps sound uneven now.
I run my tongue over the back of my teeth, tasting the flavor of the brief agony I drank in. I think I might have snapped a bone or two in his feet.
Will he assume it was just random chance? That he somehow stepped wrong?
It’s not like he’s going to imagine that some monstrous girl was lurking around and psychically attacked him… right?
As I muddle through my inner turmoil, Zian’s shoulder brushes mine with a shudder. He grips my hand abruptly.
“I closed my eyes as soon as I realized—I didn’t mean to do it.”
I glance around. On the floor beneath the desk, a small scorch mark has blackened the wood.
Zee’s powers slipped away from him too. We were both so nervous.
And we have so much more power than we used to, thanks to Balthazar and Matteo’s work. We’re filled up to the brim.
Which makes it much too easy for those powers to overflow. Like Jacob’s telekinetic ability whipping random objects when he gets upset.
I close my eyes for a second, gathering my scattered emotions.
We both caught ourselves in time. We didn’t ruin the job; we didn’t get caught.
“It’ll be okay,” I murmur to Zian. “No one will be looking under there anyway… If they do, they’ll have no idea it happened tonight.”
I sense his nod. My nerves keep rattling—and the urge to shriek is still lodged in the base of my throat, where I can’t necessarily suppress it anymore.
When no footsteps return, I scramble up and reassemble the papers into their previous order. Then we hurry to the window as quickly as we can in our stealth.
We climb out and heft the glass into place. Zian melts the edges he carved out to fuse the pane back together.
If anyone looked particularly closely at the area where the glass meets the frame, it might look strange to them. But not like anything they’d expect a human being could do.
As we descend to the street with none of the exhilaration I enjoyed on the way up, my pulse thuds in a heavy rhythm.
I thought I’d finally come to terms with my powers. I believed I could control how I used them.
Has Balthazar stolen even that peace away from us?
Twenty-Three
Jacob
Iflop onto one of the stuffy armchairs, but I can’t sit there for more than a few seconds before I’m shoving myself off it again. Agitation winds through my limbs.
I glance over at Dominic and Griffin where they’re poised at the room’s card table, attempting a game of checkers I don’t think either of them is all that focused on. “Shouldn’t they be finished talking already?”
Dominic’s mouth tightens with a hint of a grimace. “We don’t know what Balthazar wanted to talk to them about.”
Riva, Andreas, and Zian got back from their overnight mission a couple of hours ago. I heard the whir of the drawbridge lowering to admit the car.
But Toni ushered them into the drawing room immediately and shooed us off when we came asking if the job had gone okay. They still haven’t emerged.
My gaze fixes on my brother. “How are they feeling? Has anything changed?”
I asked Griffin a similar question when they first returned. He told me then that both Riva and Zian were upset, with some agitation and a little fear, but not hurt. Not in an immediate panic.
