Page 488 of Shadowblood Souls
I tense automatically. “What?”
“I…” He pauses, his lips pressing flat as if he’s realized he shouldn’t say whatever he was about to. “It’s nothing. I just started thinking it might be good to get a little more fresh air and exercise first.”
It’s not the best excuse ever, which only makes me more convinced that something else is going on. When he tips his head to beckon us, we all follow him.
Andreas stays next to me, letting one arm drop to sling around my waist. Jacob falls into step at my other side with a familiar murderous air.
I think it’d probably be best for everyone if Balthazar’s employees avoid making any appearances while he’s in this mood.
Zian ambles across the lawn and between the hedges and planters. By the time we’re halfway to our destination, I hear ittoo—a faintly cajoling voice like the one that drew me in a couple of days ago.
“Shadowbloods, over here.”
Zian comes to a stop by the outer wall. After resting his hands on it for a few moments as if he’s taking in the view, he bends to scoop up a rock from the ground.
It’s smooth like the one I found before, but gray rather than black with a speckling of mica. I guess the exact type of stone doesn’t matter for Rollick’s purposes.
Zee looks down at it with a thoughtful expression and then raises his eyebrows at us. I shake my head—as soon as he picked it up, I couldn’t hear anything from it.
“This should be okay,” he says, and passes it to me.
The second my fingers close around the warmed surface, Rollick’s voice drifts into my senses. He told me before that the magic would make the message only audible to beings with shadowkind essence. Apparently we have to be touching the source too.
“Little banshee and friends,” he says in greeting. “We want you out of there fast, but we’re still working out our best approach. Your new keeper built his fortress well. If you know anything that could help us get access, let us know. Otherwise we may have to resort to simply burning everything up there to the ground… and I’m sure you’d rather we didn’t risk barbequing any of you shadowbloods in the process. Tap the stone five times in a row, and it’ll absorb whatever you say after. Then toss it over the wall. We’ll find it. I’ll wait.”
When his voice fades, I pass the stone to Andreas so he can listen next. As the guys take the message in one by one, my thoughts spin even faster.
Your new keeper has built his fortress well… help us get access.Rollick’s people must have figured out aboutthe protective metals built into the mountainside like Matteo mentioned.
Matteo also said there was some route shadowkind could use, but Balthazar controls that. And we have no idea what it is. What good will the information do our rescuers?
How the hell does he think they can burn everything down if they can’t even get up here? I don’t know how we could avoid a blaze so huge they could reach us with it from a distance.
Escape lies just beyond that wall… and I have no idea how we’ll ever pull it off. We don’t have an answer for Rollick yet, that’s for sure.
Even if I could come up with a plan, should we trust anything that comes from my mind?
The mind of our captor’s daughter.
Twenty-Eight
Griffin
While they were conditioning my emotions out of me, the guardians put me through torture I can’t even describe. But even the worst of that agony doesn’t hold a candle to pain that splinters through my chest as I watch Riva shuffle from the table where we’ve just had lunch.
I can feel her trying to hold herself together—the tangled stands of hope and doubt, conviction and uncertainty, that drag her down as she grapples with them. Every time a clearer emotion shines through, a glimpse of the woman I know, something in her shies away from it as if afraid to lean too far in any one direction.
I might be able to sense all that from the inside out, but her struggle shows on the outside too. All of my friends take in her deflated energy and tentative movements with worry hazing their eyes.
It’s worse than when her anger consumed her. At least then she was focused, determined, even if there was an unnervingly brutal quality to it.
Balthazar’s news has torn a hole in her spirits like nothing else our captors have done before.
I know how hard she’s found it to accept her vicious talent. Her humanity was a shield against seeing herself as totally monstrous.
But now that side of her is tainted too. There’s nothing in herself that she can use as a compass to decide what’s right, no part of her that’s uncorrupted.
At least, that’s how she sees it. To my eyes, there’s nothing of Balthazar in her, nothing potent enough to dull the shine of the woman she’s made herself into.
