Page 508 of Shadowblood Souls
Thirty-Three
Riva
As we follow Rollick the rest of the way down the tunnel, questions tumble from my lips. “How did you find the secret route?” comes out first.
Rollick opens his mouth, but before he can answer, another shadowkind glimmers into being next to him. With a bounce of her glossy blond curls, Pearl beams at me.
“The people from that high house had to come down to civilization sometimes,” she says. “So I worked a little of my succubus charm…”
She sways her rounded hips suggestively and giggles. Even her laugh is pretty.
I cringe at the thought of Pearl having to get up close and personal with any of Balthazar’s men. “I’m sorry it came to that.”
She shrugs. “Hey, I’ve got to feed one way or another. I enjoy it more if it’s helping a friend at the same time!”
Her cheerful attitude seems to brighten the rocky passage more than the supernaturally conjured ball of light hoveringalongside us does. Hearing her call me a friend sends a bittersweet pang through my gut.
I wasn’t that great a friend in the last few days she knew me. I nearly killed a shadowkind who’d been a much better friend of hers—and nothing but kind to me too.
But she came to our rescue anyway.
It’s hard to phrase my next question without it sounding like a criticism. “The fire started a while ago… You were only just coming up this way now?”
Rollick’s chuckle rolls through the narrow space. “Why didn’t we get our asses up there sooner, you mean? Pearl’s little foray gave us the location of the entrance and the code to open it, but failed to uncover the fact that the hidden door was made out of layers of steel and iron so thickIcouldn’t even handle it long enough to haul it open. We had a little delay tracking down a nearby mortal who could do the job for us.”
I sense Jacob’s frown in his voice, traveling from behind me. “Someonewas up there already, right? Sending out the fire?”
Pearl claps her hands together. “Oh, you’ll meet her soon. She’s great.Shecould have opened the door for us, but of course she was busy by the time we realized.”
“She” not “They.” My eyebrows rise. “Was it just three of you on this rescue mission?”
Rollick shoots me a sideways glance tinged with obvious amusement. “Still can’t make out your sort-of brethren when they’re in the shadows, hmm?”
Oh. My gaze darts to the dark patches filling the cracks and crevices in the rocky surfaces, my pulse wobbling.
Who knows how large a force he brought along if most of his shadowkind companions are sticking to the shadows?
Not that I’d want them all to emerge right here. The tunnel feels claustrophobic enough without a bunch more bodies crammed into the tight space.
The thought of the unknown beings who’ve come with the demon brings up one more uncertainty I’m even less comfortable voicing. I grapple with it for a minute before finding an approach that doesn’t make me wince.
“What happened to the six younger shadowbloods we broke out of the facility the last time we saw you, before the guardians captured us again?”
We sent those kids off to the waiting shadowkind Rollick was leading, intending to follow them and regroup. Intending to save them.
Clancy showed us photographs of the kids sprawled in the forest as mangled corpses. But he lied to us about so many other things.
He’d have wanted to lie about that.
Rollick shows no sign that it’s even occurred to him I might think the escapees were harmed. “Oh, I ended up bringing them back to the hotel, since it’s as good a place as any to stash people who have nowhere else to go. They’ve been enjoying a lot of room service. I’m not sure how much the free food and the beach life has been helping them recover from their former captivity, but I’m reasonably sure it hasn’t traumatized them further.”
My breath rushes out of me. “So they’re all okay.”
The demon glances over at me more directly, a faint furrow of confusion marring his brow. “Of course. The hard part was you getting them out of that underground bunker slash lab slash whatever else it was.”
If I never have to tell him that there were a few weeks when I believed that the shadowkind under his watch murdered those kids, I’ll be ecstatic.
“Whathappenedto you?” Pearl asks me with typical awed dramatics. “You went back in and then you just… never came out again. We waited as long as we could—I didn’t want to leave.”
