Page 501 of Shadowblood Souls
“Shit!” Toni stumbles to the side, her eyes widening. She stares at the fire and then at us with dawning understanding.
She fumbles with her phone and jabs her thumbs at the screen to compose a hasty message. As she holds it up to us, she flings her hand to point to the northeast corner of the grounds.
“Get away from the house!” she shouts. “Mr. Balthazar won’t want you hurt.”
Her phone’s screen tells us the rest:Move the solo granite vase. 5-3-9-7. Go down. I’ll try.
I’ve barely had time to read all of it before she’s dashing away into the house. Another fiery bolt warbles from some source I haven’t spotted and crashes against the front of the building.
I push the others toward the spot Toni indicated. “Come on! The whole thing’s going up.”
My heart thuds as we sprint across the courtyard and between the hedges. We have to keep up the charade that we’re only trying to stay clear of harm, not complicit in this attack, for as long as possible.
Long enough for Toni to sever Balthazar’s connection to our manacles… or for the man and anyone else who’d carry out his intentions to die.
Heat wafts against our backs. The fire hisses and roars, billowing across the villa in sizzling waves of flame.
I spot the “vase” Toni must have meant—a three-foot flowerpot of solid stone holding a shrub that’s browned with the colder weather. But as I push myself forward with a fresh burst of speed, voices ring out behind us.
“Hey, where do you think you bunch are going?”
“Stay where you are!”
Jacob whips around. The two guards charging after us trip at the same moment.
Their skulls collide hard enough to smash the bone.
Okay, there’s no coming back from that. We just have to hope that if Balthazar still has control over the metal around ourwrists, any surveillance cameras pointed this way have already melted.
The whole side of the villa has been swallowed by flames. They’re streaming down to the garden now, gorging on the grass, sizzling madly. Smoke hazes the air.
Zian slams into the flowerpot. It topples over to reveal a manhole cover that’s about two feet in diameter, with a keypad lock in the middle of it.
Through the pounding of my heartbeat, it clicks in my head that Riva said she and Zian saw the shadowkind man hanging around in this part of the grounds the first time. Does this hole lead to the secret route through the hill?
The numbers from Toni’s screen flit through my memory. I dive between Griffin and Andreas to tap the four digits in.
The lock rasps over. As Zian drops down to wrench open the cover, my gaze darts around us.
I don’t know what we’ll find down there, but there might not be anythingaliveother than us. If I’m going to be much help in whatever we face next, I’ll need fuel for my—and the others’—powers.
My hand swipes past Riva, focusing on that new, sharper quiver of energy that runs between us. With a mental tug, I borrow her supernatural strength.
Then I wrap my tentacles around two nearby saplings and wrench them out of the soil roots and all.
Andreas gapes at me and lets out a rasp of a laugh. I push Riva’s power back into her, and she leaps through the hole into the darkness below.
I jump down last, tossing my saplings ahead of me. By the time I’m sliding over the lip into the unknown space below, the flames are already crackling through the hedge that stands just a few feet from where I was poised. My nose prickles with the smoke billowing on the breeze.
A cough sputters out of me. As I plummet, I wrap the end of one of my tentacles around a handle on the inside of the cover and slam it shut above me.
My feet thump to the ground a little sooner than I dared to hope. Zian catches my elbow to steady me.
“I’m going to borrow this,” he tells me. There’s a crack as he snaps a branch off one of the saplings.
With a flick of his gaze, he lights up the jutting twigs with a fire much less intimidating than the one raging overhead. The wavering glow washes over the room we’ve found ourselves in.
The floor, walls, and ceiling all appear to be stone—other than the manhole we just dropped through and three doors around us. There’s one to my right, where the floor slopes slightly upward, and two to our left, side by side.
