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I did right by my love, by my family. This time.
If I can keep doing that, over and over again, we all might come out of this catastrophe in one piece.
Twenty-Three
Riva
“Are we sure that Nadia and the others will show up here?” Booker whispers to me through the dark as we crouch by a sawdust-streaked window.
I pause to bring up the glowing map on my phone and concentrate on my sense of her: the confident, wry teenager I knew on Clancy’s island and the being of blinding light and anger she’s become.
The fall of my finger is proof enough. “They’re coming closer. She is and whoever’s with her, at least. Last time I checked, Devon and Tegan were there.”
I slide the phone into my pocket. I shouldn’t check again—they’re less than ten minutes away at the pace they’ve been setting so far.
We don’t know exactly how far they’ll have spread out or how quickly they’ll keep moving. I don’t want anyone catching a glimpse of my face in the glow.
We didn’t bother with invisibility for this ambush, not when we need Andreas’s talents for other purposes. It wasn’t worth tiring him out for a small benefit. Both the siren sounds and Nadia’s glow have shattered the concealment he can offer us before, so the effect probably wouldn’t have lasted long enough to make a difference anyway. The darkened buildings we’re hiding in should be shelter enough until the rogue shadowbloods arrive.
And the rogues have every reason to venture into this part of the city. Ruse and Pearl visited the local vigilante group this morning and used their persuasive skills to cajole them into making a couple of public comments online about the site they planned to sweep tonight, supposedly to warn regular folks away.
And then the incubus and the succubus cajoled the same monster hunters into deciding to go to a totally different part of the city so they won’t actually get in our way.
Booker frowns as he studies the rain-slick pavement outside, gleaming under the security lamps. The drizzle stopped an hour ago, but everything’s still pretty damp.
“What if people come wanting to see the ‘monster hunters’ in action?” he asks.
I put on my best reassuring voice. “That shouldn’t be a problem. Ruse and Pearl and a few of the other shadowkind who wouldn’t be much help in a fight are patrolling the edges of the construction area. They’ll send off anyone who tries to come right in.”
The setting we’ve chosen for our ambush should be the perfect venue. The university is building a new set of dorm buildings, the outer shells complete but the innards still mostly raw wood with occasional stretches of drywall.
The construction workers all went home for the day before dinner time. Pearl coaxed the security guard into staying in his office at the edge of the site. There should be no one here but us monsters, hybrid and otherwise.
We have all the details worked out. I should feel confident. But uneasiness creeps over my skin. I find myself reaching for my cat-and-yarn necklace as if holding it will somehow make things more likely to turn out right.
My discomfort is partly from not being sure just how far the raging shadowkind will go to see through their rampage. And partly from the claustrophobic feeling the unfinished buildings give me.
That’s a benefit, really. The strip is set up like a cul-de-sac, a row of townhouses on either side of the narrow road with one more set at the dead end farther down. Once the other shadowbloods drive in, it’ll be easy to block them off.
But I can’t help thinking of the other university campus we hid out on, back when my guys and I were first on the run. The one wherewewere ambushed in the night by a squad of brutal guardians.
It didn’t look much like this. Those townhouses were dull concrete rather than the ruddy bricks that cover these outer walls. They were shorter and broader.
There were the little patios in the back, in the alley where the guardians launched their attack. Patios that held planters where Dominic tended to a tiny garden.
The angles of the shadows and the tight press of the buildings feel familiar, though. When I blink, memories flash through my mind of Brooke, the student next door who did her best to make friends with me. To protect me from the tensions she picked up on between me and the guys.
The girl who died with the stab of a guardian’s blade just seconds before my outstretched claws could save her.
No one has to die tonight. We’ll interrupt the other shadowbloods’ powers, knock them out every way we can, and cart them off in the truck that Rollick’s parked nearby. His people have spent all day outfitting a warehouse to hold the rogues, contain their powers, and keep them subdued.
Among the shadowkind lurking in the buildings around me, there’s a being called a lamia who can put any of our opponents to sleep with a touch. Steel—the scaled demon—revealed that he can shoot out a paralyzing force from a short distance that’ll last a few hours.
If that’s not enough, I can temporarily freeze the rogues with my shriek; Jacob can lock them in place with his telekinetic power. Willow the nymph volunteered to send the roots of the saplings spaced at even intervals down the street shooting from the patches of earth to bind them.
That’ll buy us the time to use the powerful sedative in the syringes we’re all carrying. Toni gave us the name of the drug the guardians found most effective for using on us.
It’s necessary, even if turning to yet another of our former captors’ tactics turns my stomach.
