Page 71 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

My gaze skims over the drifting groups, and my feet stall beneath me. Zian jerks to a halt too.

Inside… this place doesn’t look normal at all. The quivers hitting me are melding together into an electric shock.

At least a third of the people I glance at set off that reaction in me. It might be closer to half.

The whole club is packed with monsters.

Welp, we’re definitely in the right place.

The other guys pause and look at Zian and me, taking in our reaction. I motion them all over to a quieter corner beyond the end of the marble-topped bar.

“There are tons of them,” Zian says in a low mutter before I can speak. His muscles flex beneath the thin fabric of his tee. “I don’t like this.”

My fingers curl instinctively around my pendant, itching to pop and click the cat around the yarn like I used to. “Yeah. If we piss anyone off… we could be in big trouble.”

Jacob inhales sharply and studies the room again, his mouth tightening. “We have to try.”

“Why don’t we ask someone on staff?” Dominic suggests. “The security guys or the bartenders? Even if they’re not shadowkind, they’ve got to have some idea how to reach out to their boss.”

Andreas snaps his fingers. “That’s the ticket. Come on.”

He strolls over to the not-yet-crowded bar and leans his elbows on the counter. The nearest of the two bartenders—a tall, slim guy with a cleft chin—comes right over, sending another quiver through me.

I don’t know if all the staff are shadowkind, but that dude definitely is.

“Hey,” Andreas says in his usual easygoing way. “We’ll get a round of Sangrias—and we were hoping to have a word with the guy who owns this place. I think his name is Rollick?”

The bartender’s eyes narrow. He looks us up and down, and I catch a tick in his expression that looks like surprise.

“He doesn’t normally chat with random visitors,” he says, calmly enough.

“Well, if there’s a way to make an appointment or something, we’d appreciate any tips you can give us.” Andreas offers a warm smile. “We were pointed this way by someone who thought he could give us a hand.”

“And who was this someone, so I can pass on a name?”

“He didn’t give us one,” I pipe up, speaking just loud enough for the bartender to hear us but not any nearby fully human patrons. “It was a big purple dude with lots of horns who enjoyed floating, hanging out in the Toronto area, if that rings any bells.”

The bartender’s jaw works. I can’t tell whether he looks more unnerved or irritated.

“Give me a minute, and then I’ll get to those drinks.”

As he walks off, Jacob grimaces. “Are you sure that was a good idea, Riva?”

I shrug. “I could tell he’s one of them. And he could obviously tell there was something different about us.”

“If giving him that info makes it more likely this Rollick guy would talk to us soon, it sounds good to me,” Zian says.

Jacob still doesn’t look happy. “Stay on guard. We don’t know how friendly our welcome is going to be.”

It can’t be more than a minute before the bartender reappears from wherever he went off to and starts pouring our drinks. He slides them across the counter to us and accepts Andreas’s cash without a word.

I curl my fingers around the sweating glass, wrinkling my nose at the sour-sweet smell. I wish I had more of my custom lemonade instead.

“Now what?” Zian asks.

Andreas considers the rest of the club. “I say we stick together and wait. I don’t think it’d do us any good to badger anyone else at this point.”

He sips his drink with an approving expression. I simply hold on to mine for appearances, having no interest in fizzing my thoughts with alcohol.

More people drift into the club. Quite a few of them aren’t actually people, from what my heightened senses tell me.

One song bleeds into the next, and the colored lights sweep over the figures, more of whom are dancing now. The beat thrums through my muscles, but I’m too on edge to immerse myself in it even if I wanted to.

We move away from the bar as more customers come over. My skin starts creeping with uneasiness.

“What if—” I start to say, and just then a woman saunters up to us out of the growing crowd.

I immediately know she’s shadowkind. Even if I didn’t have any special sensitivity, she’d look unearthly with her statuesque height, her sharp cheekbones and jawline, and the feral grace to her movements.

“Rollick will see you now,” she says, briskly and simply, and turns as if expecting us to follow.

There isn’t a whole lot else we can do. With a wary glance at each other, we trail behind the woman past the bar and through the rest of the club to a door that blends into the dark gray walls.

She unlocks the door with a press of her hand and leads us up a flight of stairs and down a short hallway to another room. When she’s opened that door, she ushers us in ahead of her.

We step into a large but sparsely furnished office. A thick crimson rug covers most of the floor, leading to an old-fashioned wooden desk with a leather chair behind it. A matching liquor cabinet stands nearby, and that’s it.

Well, other than the man who’s getting up from the leather chair as we file in.

Like the other creatures that call themselves shadowkind that I’ve met so far, this man’s outward appearance is totally human. Extraordinarily handsome human, like one of my soap-opera hunks stepped right out of the screen with lighting effects and makeup intact, but not monstrous in any way.

Our escort shuts the door behind us, standing with her back to it as if to block us for making an escape.

The man ambles closer. The bright glow from the light fixture gleams off his tawny hair.

He smiles, but it’s a measured smile, like he isn’t sure how much warmth he wants to offer us yet. He’s as tall and muscular as Jacob, which doesn’t mean much against my or Zian’s supernatural strength—but who knows how much power he’s hiding.

When he stops, still about five feet away from us, a waft of that power tingles over my skin. He’s giving off enough don’t-fuck-with-me vibes to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“So,” he says in a silky drawl, “a purple dude in Toronto told you to come looking for me.”

He’s quoting my words back at me. I feel it’s my job to respond. “He said that you… you might be able to do something for us. That you help out shadowkind who are ‘odd.’”

The man who must be Rollick arches his eyebrows. “But you’re not shadowkind, are you?”

“We’re hybrids,” Jacob says tersely. “We have powers.”

Dominic clears his throat. “We were brought up by human experimenters who I’m sure knew a lot less about living with those powers than actual shadowkind would. We just want to get a better idea how to handle that side of our nature.”

Andreas nods. “That’s all we were looking for. A little guidance. Not trying to make trouble or get in anyone’s way.”

Rollick crosses his arms over his chest. “And these experimenters are the ones responsible for your hybrid state?”

“Yeah,” Zian says, and hesitates. “I don’t think— Have there been other hybrids before that you know of?”

Good question. The shadowkind guy didn’t sound particularly surprised by the idea that we could exist at all.

“Not like that,” Rollick replies in a bland tone that doesn’t really answer anything. He studies us in silence for a long moment. “I don’t run tutoring sessions.”

He seems to be entertaining the idea of helping us, though. If the purple floater sent us here to be decimated, wouldn’t the guy in front of us be getting on with that already?

“We just want to make sure that we’re not disturbing regular people by accident,” I say. “And to figure out if we can stop the people who made us from tracking us down. Things like that. Maybe you were born knowing it, but we have no idea what we’re doing.”

Rollick chuckles. “You obviously have a lot to learn, starting with the fact that shadowkind aren’t born.”

He rubs his jaw and then adds, “Well. It could certainly be interesting seeing what you’ve made of yourselves so far and where you could go with it. And I’d rather not have beings of any type running amok drawing attention to our existence.”

“Does that mean you can give us a hand?” Zian ventures.

The unsettling man eyes us for yet another stretch of apparent contemplation. My skin starts to itch.

Then he swipes his hands together as if washing them of the dilemma. “Let’s see what you can do, and I’ll set you up in the hotel for a few days while I decide what I make of it.”

My flare of hope is shaken by a jolt of nerves. A few days in one spot?

Andreas has clearly been struck by the same concern. “We appreciate the generosity, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to stay in any one place for very long. The people hunting us down managed to track us to Toronto in about a day.”

“They might have just gotten lucky,” Dominic adds. “We managed to stay in one location for about a week earlier on. But we can’t know for sure.”

Rollick hums to himself. “Someplace to stay while staying on the move. I might have an idea how you can accomplish that too. But it’d be dependent on you staying close enough to stop by and meet with me every day. Could you accept those terms?”

Jacob lifts his chin, his jaw set at a firm angle. “I think that depends on what your idea is.”

The shadowkind man grins as if delighted by the answer. “They didn’t experiment all the brains out of your heads, I see. It just so happens that I met an odd bunch several years ago who had a very useful method of transportation…”