Page 513 of Shadowblood Souls
There could be dozens of beings watching us from beneath the trees without us having a clue.
We’ve already traded powers a few times while Rollick watches. Without speaking, Andreas looks toward me. He meets my gaze with a softly reassuring smile as I feel the quiver of one of my shadowblood powers coursing out of me.
He turns his head with a jostle of his dark brown curls and fixes his gray eyes on a butterfly fluttering through the clearing. Before my heart can even finish skipping a beat, the insect plummets to the ground.
Rollick is watching more intently now. My most brutal talent, the vicious banshee shriek that can rend bodies apart with its hunger for pain, has always worried the shadowkind the most. And it’s developed new dimensions too.
“You didn’t make a sound,” the demon says to Andreas as Drey passes my power back to me with a little jolt.
Across from me, Jacob’s mouth forms a tight smirk. He’s always appreciated my powers, as terrifying as they might be. “She can scream just in her head now. Which I guess means any of the rest of us can too.”
Beside him, Griffin nods. “We haven’t found any power wecan’tborrow from each other.”
It’s still a little strange seeing the twins side by side after four years of believing Griffin was dead. They’re mirror images of each other in so many ways, but time has shaped them a little differently.
The sharp angles of Griffin’s face look a little softer than Jacob’s harder edges. His golden-blond hair drifts shaggier around his face, while Jacob keeps his shorter strands swept back from his forehead.
I notice those minor details because I know them both so well. A stranger would still mix them up.
Rollick taps a finger against his mouth. If he’s disturbed by the progression of my talent, it doesn’t show in his languid voice. “This is all very interesting. I can’t say in all my centuries that I’ve ever heard of shadowkindtradingpowers.”
Dominic lifts his head where he’s standing next to me, his short auburn ponytail swishing across the collar of his long-sleeved tee. His two slim tentacles, a more orange hue than his olive-brown skin, protrude from two notches cut in that collar just below his shoulders.
“We aren’t shadowkind,” he points out in his usual quietly thoughtful tone. “The guardians made something totally new with us. It’s not the only way the six of us are connected.”
My hand rises automatically to the top of my chest, where a line of five thumbprint-sized splotches decorate my collarbone like a tattooed necklace. The marks connect me to all of my men, each blooming the first time our shadows merged alongside our bodies.
It was when the last of the guys and I had sex, with the forming of the final mark, that the connections between us opened wide enough that we could exchange powers as well as our simple awareness of each other’s presence.
“We’re blood,” I say. That motto got us through our childhood of imprisonment and torturous experiments. It’s kept us going through our escapes that’ve so far either failed or been far too temporary.
And it’s true. We are blood—the only people on the planet quite like us, bound not only by our shared heritage but by all the years we’ve had only each other to count on.
But we aren’t the only shadowbloods in the world. The guardians made more after us, if with weaker talents.
I don’t think I could share my powers with anyone other than these five men. There’s something a little more that binds the six of us together.
Of course, there’s no telling what else might be possible now that our most powerful enemy has started making shadowbloods of his own.
The memory of receiving the news of Balthazar’s latest scheme yesterday tugs at my nerves. I’ve been craving answers since that moment, but Rollick insisted that we put more distance between us and our former captor’s last known location before further discussions.
None of our previous jailers—Balthazar or the guardians—should be able to track us here. When the guardians hunted us down before, it was with the help of Griffin’s locating skill. The times when he refused, we could evade their notice even without the support of a very powerful demon.
By the time we arrived at Rollick’s Spanish estate last night, the six of us were exhausted. And he wanted to have his people question Toni, the woman who turned against her employer in the end to help us, before he listened to any more stories about Balthazar’s plans.
I shift my weight from one foot to another, unable to completely tamp down my growing impatience. “You have a pretty good idea of what we can do now. It doesn’t really matterhow, does it? We have to figure out what Balthazar is going to do next—and stop him.”
“Patience, little banshee,” Rollick says in the droll tone that’s sometimes reassuring but I’m currently finding infuriating.
As he opens his mouth to say something else, a shorter figure comes charging through the trees of the country estate’s vast grounds.
Zian springs to my side faster than anyone would expect from a man of his bulk, his fingers curling as if to form his wolf-man claws and his muscles tensing defensively beneath his peachy-brown skin. But before he can even growl, he must recognize the bouncing blond curls, like I just have.
“Hey, shadowbloods!” Pearl comes to a stop at the edge of the clearing and beams at all of us. She has a large canvas sack clutched against her curvy body. “Are you done showing off for the boss? I’ve got new clothes for you.”
We’ve been stuck in the same smoky-smelling clothes since yesterday. Despite my restlessness, my spirits lift. “Thank you.”
The curvy succubus waves her hand toward the house. “Come on. It’ll be easier to sort through them on the table on the back lawn. I don’t know how well those doofuses followed my instructions…Ishould have gone to collect these.”
