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The pieces click together in my head. Toni was there when Balthazar revealed my full genetic heritage to me. I’d thought she seemed shaken, but I hadn’t realized why.
I’d been too busy reeling from my own feelings on the subject.
It was soon after that meeting when she approached us and said she’d try to help us escape. Her loyalties didn’t really change, though. She just realized that the woman whose values she’d attempted to uphold would have been on our side rather than her employer’s.
On my side.
A wild giggle bubbles at the base of my throat. I spent all that time horrified and frightened of my connection to Balthazar, but the same connection was what won us our freedom in the end.
“I’m sorry,” Toni says. “It shouldn’t have taken that long for me to see the truth. It shouldn’t have taken that much. I didn’tlikea lot of what I saw him doing, and I knew he’d gotten dangerously obsessed with his quest, but after Willa died, I kind of shut off a lot of my mind. I went on autopilot, being who I thought I was supposed to be.”
When her voice peters out, the guys remain silent. I feel their attention shift to me, as if my response is the one that matters most.
Maybe it does. It’s because of me that she’s here.
I sort through the whirling emotions inside me and settle on one true thing I can say. “I’m glad you came to us. Even if it took a long time, it’s better now than never.”
A hesitant smile crosses Toni’s lips. “I’d like to think so.”
She glances around at all of us again. “But whatever we’re going to do to interfere with Mr. Balthazar’s plans, we can’t take our time with it. Now that he’s confirmed his method for creating new adult shadowbloods, I don’t know how much havoc he’s going to wreak—but he’ll be working fast. And he won’t let anyone stand in his way.”
Two
Riva
As the group Rollick has called together takes seats around the long table in his Spanish mansion’s vast dining room, I can’t suppress a prickle of apprehension.
It’s not our surroundings that unnerve me. The house’s interior is reassuringly different from our previous digs, the walls the same stark white as the outer ones and the furniture sleekly modern.
My concern is more about the company we’re keeping. All of the shadowkind joining us were vetted by our demonic host… but beings working under him have attacked us before.
Some of the faces are familiar. Sorsha sits partway down the table with two of her regular companions at her sides: Thorn, the massive, crystal-knuckled man who can sprout dark angelic wings, and a tall, slim man with brilliant green eyes and golden curls, whose shadowkind powers I’m not sure of. He keeps one hand resting on Sorsha’s arm where it leans against the table as if he thinkssheneeds protection.
I’m pretty sure she could burn down the entire estate in a matter of seconds if she wanted to. Having seen what she did to Balthazar’s villa, I’m not totally surprised that most of the shadowkind are wary of hybrids.
Pearl has joined us too, perched in the chair next to Rollick with an air of delighted triumph at having earned that choice spot. The succubus was instrumental in Rollick’s scheme to rescue us, using her seductive skills to cajole the secrets of the hill’s hidden passage out of one of Balthazar’s staff.
Her friend Billy the faun isn’t around anywhere I can see, and neither is Ruse, who also tends to stick close to Sorsha. I’m guessing they’re watching from the shadows. There simply aren’t that many chairs around the table, especially with us shadowbloods and Toni taking up seven.
Rollick’s newer companions make me the most uneasy. There’s the guy whose jumble of wild curls falls across his glinting violet eyes, who’s smirking to himself as he carves lines into the tabletop with his terrifying three-inch claws.
My cat claws, barely a quarter as long, make me feel like a kitten in comparison. Those must be the one monstrous feature he can’t will away even in human guise, like all shadowkind have.
Somehow I don’t think he gets invited to many parties.
Beside him sits the bulky, stubble-haired man with a square stone jaw, which I know reflects his shadowkind nature. He can shift into a totally stony gargoyle, bat-like wings and all.
Then there’s a woman who looks totally human except for the deep blue hue of her cascading hair—and the ominous atmosphere that seems to hover around her, giving me the sense of an impending thunderstorm. And a squat but muscular man with shiny metallic scales dappling his forehead.
And finally, definitely not getting invited to parties, is the burly dude with a scruffy brown pelt on his head and a pair of incisors so thick they jut against his lips. Appropriately, I heard Rollick call him “Fang.”
I’m not sure what abilities the bunch of them bring to the table, both metaphorically and literally, but I doubt their powers have anything to do with sunshine and roses.
From the whiffs of uneasy pheromones my guys are giving off, I don’t think I’m alone in my wariness. My fingers curl around my newly restored cat-and-yarn charm, but I resist the urge to give in to my nervous habit of clicking it open and shut.
We’re here together. Completely united in ways we hadn’t even imagined.
We’ll get through this like we have so much else.
