AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“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.
But there’s still a chunk of ice in the pit of my stomach, thinking of the opportunity we lost. Of the people we left behind.
“We weren’t totally prepared ourselves,” Griffin says softly, presumably picking up on my feelings. “We thought the shadowblood kids in the base were prisoners, hostages. But it seems that he’s managed to enhance their powers after all, maybe using the same process that’s transforming regular humans into new shadowbloods.”
We hadn’t mentioned that part to the larger group yet. At Sorsha’s side, the youthful-looking man with the blond curls, who I now know as Snap, knits his brow. “He’s made the younger ones like you who were at the same facilities stronger? They stopped your attack?”
“Yes,” I say with a heavy heart. “They got in our way when we were running after Balthazar. They definitely acted different—and one of them… Before, she could only give off a glow from her skin, nothing all that extreme. Last night, she blinded us with the light, it blazed so bright.”
Dominic nods. “One of the others had some kind of control over the air or weather. They sent a blast of wind into us. None of the shadowblood kids I met before could have pulled off an effect that strong.”
The squat, metallic-scaled demon named Steel aims a scowl at us. “Then they’re part of the problem too. We get rid of all of them.”
My stomach lurches. The protest bursts out of me automatically. “No. Theyarejust kids. We know them. They wouldn’t have wanted to hurt us—he must have forced them to step in. They had the manacles like we used to.”
They didn’t attack us right away. It’s possible they could have killed us if they’d taken us by surprise, hit us as hard as they could while we were reeling from seeing them at all.
But they didn’t. Nadia told us to leave. They only brought out their heightened abilities when I tried to shove past them.
My mind slides back to the last few conversations I had with Nadia. Her whole personality used to be bright, but she’d deflated in the villa, where Balthazar made it clear he saw her as totally expendable. But she still lit up a little when I got her talking about the kind of life she wished she could have.
Now he’s dragged her even farther away from that sort of normal. Made her more of a monster.
Although I can’t say I’m completely sure she’d see it that way. The younger shadowbloods expressed disappointment that Balthazar’s early procedures didn’t affect them like they did us—didn’t bring out new dimensions to their powers.
Nadia did tell me once that she wished she could really blaze instead of just the gentle glow she was capable of back then.
Willow, the nymph poised near Rollick, gives a soft huff and rubs at the bark embedded in her forearms. “It all amounts to the same thing. If they’re fighting for him, then you’ve got to fight against them.”
