Page 536 of Shadowblood Souls
Nadia’s eyes flash with an unsettling light. “Go back! Get out of here!”
“I can’t,” I retort, tensing to push between her and the others. “I have to?—”
I move to spring in mid-sentence—but the young shadowbloods beat me to the punch.
It feels like a punch: the blaze of light that rushes at us with the thrust of Nadia’s arms. My vision blurs to gray, and a blast of air sends me crashing into Zian.
A rumble sounds behind us. Dominic’s voice calls out, taut and frantic. “There’s more water coming—enough to flood the tunnel!”
Hasty footsteps pound away from us. I stagger, blinking hard and seeing nothing but drifting blotches. A gush of water gathers around my feet.
Jacob swears and stumbles past me. “Zee—how close are we to the surface? Can we break through the wall?”
Zian must be as blind as I am, but apparently his X-ray vision still works well enough for him to judge. “Not far. Hit it hard!”
I fling myself after them, lending my own strength to the task. Jacob slams out his telekinetic talent and Zian batters the stone surface with both his arms and his searing eyes.
The rumble rises. The wall cracks and crumbles.
Just as the roar of the wave reaches the room, we burst out into the cold night air. I snatch at my sense of Andreas’s presence and Griffin’s. Dominic latches on to us with his tentacles.
The water rams into us from behind, sending us tumbling partway down the rocky slope in a jumble of limbs. My butt jars against a boulder.
I rub my eyes, fragmented vision returning. As I shove myself to my feet, I spin toward Griffin.
The look on his face as he pushes the drenched strands of his hair away from his eyes makes my heart sink. He turns his head toward the mountainside.
“Balthazar’s gone. He’s already too far away for me to clearly track him.”
Nine
Riva
Fang smacks his hands against the dining room table, his exhalation hissing around his protruding canines. “Let me get this straight. You had him right there in front of you, and you still didn’t manage to kill this one mortal?”
I grimace at his tone even as my own frustration sweeps through me all over again. “He was prepared—he had this device that totally shattered our concentration. We can’t use our talents if we can’t eventhink.”
Shanty tosses her dark blue waves over her shoulder and purses her lips. Her voice stays melodic even when criticizing us, which makes more sense now that I know she’s a siren. “None of you could manage to attack him at all?”
Sorsha pipes up before I have to go on defending myself. “I was there too—whatever he used, he designed it very effectively. I couldn’t focus enough to aim my fire. And after I burned down his villa in Italy, he knew to take specific precautions against my powers. This guy thinks of everything.”
I glance down the table toward Rollick, but the demon has been unusually solemn since we returned to his mansion in Spain. I’m hoping he’s just thinking over everything we told him and processing our failure rather than debating continuing to help us at all.
Even the shadowkind who supported us whole-heartedly before have faltered in their confidence.
Thorn rubs his mouth and casts a concerned look at Sorsha. “It does seem odd that he had so many measures in place. Is there some way he could have known we’d strike there?”
Lance’s unnerving violet eyes flash toward the shadowblood end of the table. “Maybe he has some tricksy way of tracking this bunch that we haven’t figured out.”
Toni, who’s been downcast since we arrived and filled her in on our futile efforts, lifts her head. “No. I saw the monitoring system he had set up. He trusted the bracelets would be more than enough.”
“I’ve checked us over for any kind of internal device,” Zian puts in, flexing his shoulders as if daring anyone to challenge his thoroughness.
Jacob braces his hands against the tabletop. “Why do you think we need your help at all? This guy is a maniac, and a fucking smart one. We barely got away from him alive, and we only did because you were helping us then too. We almost diedthistime.”
A shudder runs down my back at the memory of the rush of water. The chill that gripped me in my drenched clothes as we staggered across the mountain, all of us too busy blasting through the outer guards to worry about comfort.
Once we made it across the border of protective metals, the shadowkind closed in around us like our own personal guard and Sorsha wrapped us in fiery heat.
