Page 209 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Her words could be taken as a mild, vague threat to someone who doesn’t know what Toni recently offered us.

The older woman stares at Riva for a second before dropping her gaze. “We all have our limitations.” Then she tilts her head toward the villa. “Come on. Balthazar wants to talk to all of you about something.”

As we trudge after her toward the doorway, my stomach sinks. Has our captor figured out even more about our covert activities?

Or maybe he’s simply going to throw as many wrenches at us as he can and hope at least one of them jams up anything we have in the works. He wants to rattle us—that’s obvious from the way he needled Jacob the other day and his decision to reveal Riva’s genetic heritage to her.

But what?—

Zian pauses a few steps from the door with a flick of his gaze toward the far end of the garden. The rest of us hesitate too.

He motions to his ear, indicating that he heard something.

Before the rest of us can respond, Rollick’s dry voice blares through the quiet of the grounds. “Ready or not, shadowbloods—here we come!”

My pulse stutters. I drag my gaze across the landscape, searching for any sign of an immediate attack, and yank it back to Toni… who’s blinking at the rest of us with an air of mild confusion.

She couldn’t hear the message. Of course not—Rollick’s been using some magic that means only we shadowbloods can make out his words.

Then the horror of the situation hits me like a punch to the gut.

The shadowkind assault is happening right this minute. And we’re not prepared after all.

Riva swivels, probably scrambling for a solution. “It really doesn’t matter now,” she murmurs.

She looks toward the pool, but there can’t be more than a few inches of water left in it. We’d be better off with bathtubs.

Instinctively, I take a step toward the pool. Maybe if we can pry open the panel and start the water running again—if Balthazar somehow doesn’t find out what we’re up to until it’s full enough to protect us—if we can even accomplish that much before the attack starts?—

A crackling bolt of flame sears from the sky and smacks into the roof of the villa. In an instant, the fire surges across the undulating terracotta as if the clay is as flammable as paper.

“Shit!” Toni stumbles to the side, her eyes widening. She stares at the fire and then at us with dawning understanding.

She fumbles with her phone and jabs her thumbs at the screen to compose a hasty message. As she holds it up to us, she flings her hand to point to the northeast corner of the grounds.

“Get away from the house!” she shouts. “Mr. Balthazar won’t want you hurt.”

Her phone’s screen tells us the rest: Move the solo granite vase. 5-3-9-7. Go down. I’ll try.

I’ve barely had time to read all of it before she’s dashing away into the house. Another fiery bolt warbles from some source I haven’t spotted and crashes against the front of the building.

I push the others toward the spot Toni indicated. “Come on! The whole thing’s going up.”

My heart thuds as we sprint across the courtyard and between the hedges. We have to keep up the charade that we’re only trying to stay clear of harm, not complicit in this attack, for as long as possible.

Long enough for Toni to sever Balthazar’s connection to our manacles… or for the man and anyone else who’d carry out his intentions to die.

Heat wafts against our backs. The fire hisses and roars, billowing across the villa in sizzling waves of flame.

I spot the “vase” Toni must have meant—a three-foot flowerpot of solid stone holding a shrub that’s browned with the colder weather. But as I push myself forward with a fresh burst of speed, voices ring out behind us.

“Hey, where do you think you bunch are going?”

“Stay where you are!”

Jacob whips around. The two guards charging after us trip at the same moment.

Their skulls collide hard enough to smash the bone.

Okay, there’s no coming back from that. We just have to hope that if Balthazar still has control over the metal around our wrists, any surveillance cameras pointed this way have already melted.

The whole side of the villa has been swallowed by flames. They’re streaming down to the garden now, gorging on the grass, sizzling madly. Smoke hazes the air.

Zian slams into the flowerpot. It topples over to reveal a manhole cover that’s about two feet in diameter, with a keypad lock in the middle of it.

Through the pounding of my heartbeat, it clicks in my head that Riva said she and Zian saw the shadowkind man hanging around in this part of the grounds the first time. Does this hole lead to the secret route through the hill?

The numbers from Toni’s screen flit through my memory. I dive between Griffin and Andreas to tap the four digits in.

The lock rasps over. As Zian drops down to wrench open the cover, my gaze darts around us.

I don’t know what we’ll find down there, but there might not be anything alive other than us. If I’m going to be much help in whatever we face next, I’ll need fuel for my—and the others’—powers.

My hand swipes past Riva, focusing on that new, sharper quiver of energy that runs between us. With a mental tug, I borrow her supernatural strength.

Then I wrap my tentacles around two nearby saplings and wrench them out of the soil roots and all.

Andreas gapes at me and lets out a rasp of a laugh. I push Riva’s power back into her, and she leaps through the hole into the darkness below.

I jump down last, tossing my saplings ahead of me. By the time I’m sliding over the lip into the unknown space below, the flames are already crackling through the hedge that stands just a few feet from where I was poised. My nose prickles with the smoke billowing on the breeze.

A cough sputters out of me. As I plummet, I wrap the end of one of my tentacles around a handle on the inside of the cover and slam it shut above me.

My feet thump to the ground a little sooner than I dared to hope. Zian catches my elbow to steady me.

“I’m going to borrow this,” he tells me. There’s a crack as he snaps a branch off one of the saplings.

With a flick of his gaze, he lights up the jutting twigs with a fire much less intimidating than the one raging overhead. The wavering glow washes over the room we’ve found ourselves in.

The floor, walls, and ceiling all appear to be stone—other than the manhole we just dropped through and three doors around us. There’s one to my right, where the floor slopes slightly upward, and two to our left, side by side.

They gleam with the sheen of steel. The one at the right and the second door at the left have keypad locks like the manhole cover.

The first door on the left is just a solid slab of metal, not even a handle protruding from its smooth surface.

“Where do we go?” Riva asks into the sudden silence.

“Not up,” Jacob says grimly, turning toward the pair of doors. He motions to me. “Try the code.”

I hustle over and tap the same sequence of numbers into the keypad on the second door. It gives a hostile beep and a flash of orange light.

Andreas swears under his breath. “I doubt it’s safe to stay right here.”

Zian peers around us. “But as long as we’re in the hill, not going past the line of the walls, our manacles shouldn’t knock us out, right?”

Riva glances back toward the upper door and exhales roughly. “As long as no one activates them manually.”

We can’t afford to wait around and find out if that’ll happen.

I motion toward the lower doors. “We’ll have to break one open.” My mind whips through the possibilities. “The one without the extra lock. We just want to put some distance between us and the house—no point in messing with anything especially defended that might set off the security system.”

Really, anything down here could be dangerous, but we might as well do our best not to trigger our doom.

Zian shoves at the smooth door, but it doesn’t budge. Then he narrows his eyes at the shiny surface.

A searing red line traces across the top of the metal. But after a moment, he shakes his head. “It’s really thick. I don’t know if I can cut all the way through. I can’t even see the other side—it’s all dark.”

My pulse kicks up a notch. “You’ll be able to if you power up. I could?—”

I stop myself, realizing there’s a simpler solution. One that means handing over my talent rather than playing the hero myself.

But then, that’s always been my main role in our group anyway—a supporting one. I’ve gotten us through an awful lot that way.

I reach toward Zian. “Take my energy-absorbing power!”

It’s as if he pulls it and I push it toward him at the same moment. With an unnerving tingle, my frame feels somehow lighter.

Zian hesitates, then grasps one of the saplings I brought along. His hand clenches around the narrow trunk, and his eyes flare.

The young tree withers in his grasp, and the metal whines with the slice of his brutal vision.

As I watch him, a different sort of lightness rises up inside me. He’s taking the supernatural skill I’ve loathed, the one that made me feel like a monster, and using it to save our skins.

The tree dies, but the rest of us live. Can I really say that’s a bad trade-off?

The steel warps and bends. The chunk Zian is cutting out of it sags open.

He flings my power back into me, and we scramble through the opening.

I remain at the back of the pack, dragging the second sapling. I’m just heaving it through the rough hole when the door at the upper end of the room flies open.

“There they are!” a figure in a military-style helmet shouts, his gun pointing straight at me.

There’s no room for the others to maneuver. Instinctively, I snatch through the energies around me to grab at Jacob’s and then wrench my arm upward.

Half a dozen purple spines fly from my forearm like porcupine quills… only deadly. They sink into our attacker’s throat and chest before he can pull the trigger.

Then Riva is beside me, her hand on my waist, her gaze searching the room. Three more armed men thump through the doorway toward us—and topple one after the next with a spasm of their limbs before they hit the ground.

She cut them down in the space of a few thuds of my pulse, her eyes narrowed but no sound leaving her lips.

Am I supposed to be horrified by how quiet her vicious skill has become? All I’m filled with in that moment is awe.

“Let’s go!” she says, urging me ahead of her with a tight grin, and hefts the other end of the sapling to help me carry it.

Andreas’s voice carries from up ahead. “We’re all still conscious and wrists intact. Something must have stopped the manacles from working.”

Or someone. I glance toward the room we just left, which is falling into darkness as we hustle down the steeply sloping tunnel on the other side with Zian’s torch.

Is Toni going to be able to get out of the villa alive? I can’t say I feel exactly friendly toward her, but she did help us at least a little in the end.

We might be dead already if she hadn’t directed us to this passage.

As the floor veers even more steeply downward, I run my free hand along the lumpy wall to help keep my balance. “I guess this is taking us right down the hill?”

“I hope so,” Riva says. “This has got to be the secret route for the shadowkind, and they could climb partway up the cliff through the shadows. But somehow I don’t think Balthazar would leave the very bottom unprotected.”

No, that doesn’t fit his typical M.O.

The tunnel swerves sharply to the right. We hurry along the turn, our footsteps rasping over the stone.

And then the ceiling crumbles with an unearthly groan.

Rocks pelt down on us. Riva tackles me to the ground, sheltering me as well as she can with her smaller but tougher body.

There’s an oof and a dwindling of the light as Zian must drop his torch while he shields the others.

Griffin’s voice breaks through the clatter of falling stone. “Jake!”

I wrench around on the rough floor. A few feet from the guttering flames licking along the broken branch, Jacob lies slumped, his forehead streaming blood and smoky essence where a particularly large rock bashed him.

There’s another rumble, and the ground shudders beneath me. Panic shoots through my chest alongside an unnervingly cool sense of certainty.

I have to be a hero here after all.

Jacob’s knocked out, but he isn’t dead. The energy of his powers still hums when I reach toward him.

My fingers curl around the sapling alongside one of my tentacles. I thrust my other hand upward just as another shower of rocks rains down on us.

They bounce off the invisible wall I just cast around us, pushing the air into a barrier with the telekinetic power I borrowed from Jacob.

I need to heal him too, but not until I’m sure the rest of us aren’t going to get our heads smashed open.

My nerves wobble with the striking of the jagged rocks—all of them bigger now. The effort of holding the shield in place is already wearing at my own energy.

So I’ll just have to draw what I can out of the sapling. Killing so that we can live.

A faint twinge flutters through my strange appendages, and I know that means they’re creeping a little longer from my flesh. But the flash of revulsion that comes with the thought isn’t the only thing I feel.

It’s kind of incredible, isn’t it—the way I can boost myself or any of the others when I choose how I use my powers? I have to remember that.

As a thrilling stream of renewed energy courses up through my tentacle into the rest of my body, the last voice I’d want to hear reverberates from an unseen speaker.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t have other fail safes in place?” Balthazar says, his voice taut with derision and maybe anger as well. “I’ll bury you all, you traitors.”

A chill lances up my spine. I don’t know how long I can maintain this shield before I’ve sucked all the energy out of my one source.

And if he collapses the entire tunnel, it won’t matter. We won’t have any way to get out.

I suck in a shaky breath, my mind scrambling for a solution—and Riva pushes herself away from us, scrambling over some of the stones that’ve fallen farther up the path. Her voice peals out into the dimness.

“Dad—wait!”