Page 214 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

One

Riva

A borrowed power ripples through my veins. It’s as familiar as the men standing around me but exhilaratingly new at the same time.

I test my sense of the energy inside me like a flexing of muscles, looking around the clearing where we’re holding this demonstration.

The warm breeze ruffles the fronds on a nearby palm tree and licks under my braid. December in southern Spain feels like spring has in most places I’ve been to before.

I shift my feet against the thick grass and study the other, bushier trees that surround the clearing. All I need is a single, small branch jutting away from the others.

I’d rather not chop down an entire tree—or even half of one—by accident.

There. One of the shorter trees, barely more than a sapling, has a long twig with just a sprinkling of leaves poking from its trunk below the thicker boughs.

I gather the roiling power behind my eyes and focus it into heat. Then I slice that heat down through the base of the twig.

It only takes a moment. A whiff of smoke laces the air with a crisp woody scent, and the twig drops to the ground, its severed end charred black.

As I glance at Zian and nudge the tingle of energy from me back into his brawny form, Rollick brings his hands together in a brief round of applause. “Fascinating. Both in how far your skills have developed and how seamlessly you can exchange them.”

Our host smiles at us, his dark blue eyes twinkling. In his human guise, the millennia-old demon has the stunning good looks of a movie star—and I find him as difficult to read as if he really was only a mask made of special effects and studio lighting.

The beings like Rollick—who call themselves shadowkind but most humans who know of them call monsters—haven’t often been friendly to my guys and me.

Many of them don’t trust beings like us : hybrids with both human and shadowkind characteristics, capable of major supernatural power but lacking the few weaknesses that can hinder other “monsters.” Shadowbloods, as our makers named us.

Which is probably fair, because the humans who created us did it specifically so that we could go out and kill shadowkind on their behalf. They weren’t counting on us developing strong enough minds of our own to decide they were a hell of a lot more monstrous than our supposed enemies.

And Rollick has proven more than once that he doesn’t consider us the enemy either. It’s thanks to him that we made it away from the worst of our captors just yesterday.

I’m not sure how many other shadowkind might be watching the demonstration he asked for after we told him about our new abilities. One thing they can do and we can’t is merge into patches of darkness in their truest shadowy forms.

There could be dozens of beings watching us from beneath the trees without us having a clue.

We’ve already traded powers a few times while Rollick watches. Without speaking, Andreas looks toward me. He meets my gaze with a softly reassuring smile as I feel the quiver of one of my shadowblood powers coursing out of me.

He turns his head with a jostle of his dark brown curls and fixes his gray eyes on a butterfly fluttering through the clearing. Before my heart can even finish skipping a beat, the insect plummets to the ground.

Rollick is watching more intently now. My most brutal talent, the vicious banshee shriek that can rend bodies apart with its hunger for pain, has always worried the shadowkind the most. And it’s developed new dimensions too.

“You didn’t make a sound,” the demon says to Andreas as Drey passes my power back to me with a little jolt.

Across from me, Jacob’s mouth forms a tight smirk. He’s always appreciated my powers, as terrifying as they might be. “She can scream just in her head now. Which I guess means any of the rest of us can too.”

Beside him, Griffin nods. “We haven’t found any power we can’t borrow from each other.”

It’s still a little strange seeing the twins side by side after four years of believing Griffin was dead. They’re mirror images of each other in so many ways, but time has shaped them a little differently.

The sharp angles of Griffin’s face look a little softer than Jacob’s harder edges. His golden-blond hair drifts shaggier around his face, while Jacob keeps his shorter strands swept back from his forehead.

I notice those minor details because I know them both so well. A stranger would still mix them up.

Rollick taps a finger against his mouth. If he’s disturbed by the progression of my talent, it doesn’t show in his languid voice. “This is all very interesting. I can’t say in all my centuries that I’ve ever heard of shadowkind trading powers.”

Dominic lifts his head where he’s standing next to me, his short auburn ponytail swishing across the collar of his long-sleeved tee. His two slim tentacles, a more orange hue than his olive-brown skin, protrude from two notches cut in that collar just below his shoulders.

“We aren’t shadowkind,” he points out in his usual quietly thoughtful tone. “The guardians made something totally new with us. It’s not the only way the six of us are connected.”

My hand rises automatically to the top of my chest, where a line of five thumbprint-sized splotches decorate my collarbone like a tattooed necklace. The marks connect me to all of my men, each blooming the first time our shadows merged alongside our bodies.

It was when the last of the guys and I had sex, with the forming of the final mark, that the connections between us opened wide enough that we could exchange powers as well as our simple awareness of each other’s presence.

“We’re blood,” I say. That motto got us through our childhood of imprisonment and torturous experiments. It’s kept us going through our escapes that’ve so far either failed or been far too temporary.

And it’s true. We are blood—the only people on the planet quite like us, bound not only by our shared heritage but by all the years we’ve had only each other to count on.

But we aren’t the only shadowbloods in the world. The guardians made more after us, if with weaker talents.

I don’t think I could share my powers with anyone other than these five men. There’s something a little more that binds the six of us together.

Of course, there’s no telling what else might be possible now that our most powerful enemy has started making shadowbloods of his own.

The memory of receiving the news of Balthazar’s latest scheme yesterday tugs at my nerves. I’ve been craving answers since that moment, but Rollick insisted that we put more distance between us and our former captor’s last known location before further discussions.

None of our previous jailers—Balthazar or the guardians—should be able to track us here. When the guardians hunted us down before, it was with the help of Griffin’s locating skill. The times when he refused, we could evade their notice even without the support of a very powerful demon.

By the time we arrived at Rollick’s Spanish estate last night, the six of us were exhausted. And he wanted to have his people question Toni, the woman who turned against her employer in the end to help us, before he listened to any more stories about Balthazar’s plans.

I shift my weight from one foot to another, unable to completely tamp down my growing impatience. “You have a pretty good idea of what we can do now. It doesn’t really matter how , does it? We have to figure out what Balthazar is going to do next—and stop him.”

“Patience, little banshee,” Rollick says in the droll tone that’s sometimes reassuring but I’m currently finding infuriating.

As he opens his mouth to say something else, a shorter figure comes charging through the trees of the country estate’s vast grounds.

Zian springs to my side faster than anyone would expect from a man of his bulk, his fingers curling as if to form his wolf-man claws and his muscles tensing defensively beneath his peachy-brown skin. But before he can even growl, he must recognize the bouncing blond curls, like I just have.

“Hey, shadowbloods!” Pearl comes to a stop at the edge of the clearing and beams at all of us. She has a large canvas sack clutched against her curvy body. “Are you done showing off for the boss? I’ve got new clothes for you.”

We’ve been stuck in the same smoky-smelling clothes since yesterday. Despite my restlessness, my spirits lift. “Thank you.”

The curvy succubus waves her hand toward the house. “Come on. It’ll be easier to sort through them on the table on the back lawn. I don’t know how well those doofuses followed my instructions… I should have gone to collect these.”

“ You have already shown yourself around Balthazar’s people,” Rollick reminds her, but he strides after her as we do. “When we don’t want to give them any hint of where their escapees have gone, caution matters more than fashion.”

He’s kept his tone light, but I think I catch a hint of tension in his words. Balthazar managed to breach even the demon’s defenses—stealing a laptop from his hotel back in Miami while Rollick was distracted with his rescue efforts.

The laptop may have been the key to Balthazar perfecting his process for creating new shadowbloods. But I can’t blame Rollick for losing it. I’m the one who told Balthazar where it was, not realizing how big a mistake that would be at the time.

We emerge from the trees and cross the lawn to the broad wrought-iron patio table that’s painted white to match the walls of the sprawling mansion beyond it.

The building’s arched colonnades and clay-tiled roof give it a traditional flair, but its overall vibe is modern enough that it doesn’t stir up bad associations with the old Italian villa where Balthazar had us trapped.

Pearl upends the sack over the table, sending a deluge of fabric across the white surface. The guys and I gather around to paw through the offerings.