Page 74 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Fourteen

Riva

T he man stabs his knife at my shoulder, and I just barely manage to duck—blocking his friend’s punch at the same time. Some distant part of my mind is protesting, What the hell is going on? but my fighting instinct overrides any other consideration.

These three pricks don’t look like guardians—no armor, no helmets. They don’t seem to have any idea what they’re dealing with.

But whatever their reasons, they’re trying to hurt me. And they’re going to regret that decision.

I have my own blades in my cargo pants pockets just in case, but it’s easier working with just my body. I knock the knife from the one guy’s hand with a punch so hard the bones in his wrist crack.

He stumbles to the side with a grunt of both shock and pain. The other guy lunges at me—and does a double-take when I flash my claws at him.

I take advantage of his surprise to kick him in the gut, sending him careening through the air to sprawl several feet away.

Only then do my ears pick up the scrape of other footsteps behind me. I whirl, clocking my third attacker in the face as I pivot on my feet.

He reels backward, and I find myself staring into the barrel of a gun—just as a long, sinewy tentacle smacks into the man pointing it at me.

The gunman’s arms slam sideways. The shot goes wild, clanging into the metal fence.

Dominic rushes in, his trench coat shed, both tentacles whipping around us. Another attacker, this one clutching a knife, lies slumped on the ground in his wake.

I leap in and wrench the gun from the shooter’s hand. He barely seems to notice me.

His broad face has gone sallow as he stares at Dominic. At the inhuman appendages protruding from Dominic’s back.

“What the fuck!” he spits out. “What kind of freak?—”

A sharper fury than when it was only me they were attacking roars up inside my chest. I ram my fist into his mouth before he can finish his question.

His jaw jerks right off its hinges. With a moan, he sinks to the ground, clutching it.

Dominic stares down at him, panting. He looks almost as sickly as the man staring at him does.

He’s put so much effort into hiding his strangeness. This is exactly why.

He knew what reactions he’d get.

But he let these assholes see him, let them gape at him in horror like all of them are now, to save me.

Other, more welcome footsteps thud toward us. Jacob, Andreas, and Zian race across the lot, their faces taut with confusion and anger.

“Who the hell are these fuckheads?” Jacob growls, leaning mainly toward anger as usual.

I step farther away from the five men, all fallen to the ground with their various injuries and staring at all of us. Their aggression has given way to fear.

My mouth twists into a frown. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen any guardians around.”

Zian marches up to the guy with the broken wrist, bristling with fury. “Who sent you at us? What do you want?”

The man flinches at the bellowed questions. “None of your fucking business,” he grits out, but he still looks bewildered.

“I don’t think they had any idea who we are,” I murmur. Or what.

“You’re—you’re monsters ,” mumbles the guy I kicked in the gut, scrambling to his feet. His gaze is fixed on Dominic, his face gone waxy.

Andreas snorts in derision. “I’d say the monsters are the ones going around randomly attacking people.”

He grips Dominic’s shoulder, and the other guy stirs out of the agonized daze he seemed to have slipped into.

“Grab your coat,” Andreas says, quiet and gentle. “I’ll wipe you from their memories. They’ll have no idea what they saw. It’ll be like it never happened.”

Dominic nods shakily and hurries to where he dropped his coat. My gaze follows him, my heart wrenching on his behalf.

It did happen. I’m not going to forget it.

I already knew he was willing to let the monstrous parts of himself grow to heal me. But revealing himself like this… doing that might have been even harder.

As Andreas turns toward my injured attackers, Jacob looms over the nearest one and slams the guy’s back into the asphalt with a stomp of his shoe against his ribs.

“You’d better tell us what the hell you were trying to do here, or a whole lot more of you is going to end up broken. In ways you can’t even imagine.”

Whether because of Jacob’s fierce expression, the venom in his tone, or the inhuman features he’s already seen, the man lets out a whimper of surrender. “It was just a job. We got some cash and some pictures—we were supposed to get more if we offed the girl.”

“Who gave you the job?”

“I don’t know! It was just an envelope—left in our car a half hour ago telling us to come right away.”

Andreas is studying him. “I think he’s telling the truth.”

“If he is, then it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Jacob grumbles.

“It doesn’t.”

Andreas’s eyes flare ruddy. After a minute, he shakes his head. “I’m not seeing anything that would connect these jerks to the guardians.”

Jacob grimaces. “I guess you’d better wipe all of us from their memories then.”

He turns to glower at the injured men. “You’re going to walk us over to your car, give us the pictures and the cash, and then we’ll let you drive off to the hospital like none of this ever happened. Or we can kill you right now and take all your stuff anyway. It’s up to you.”

“We’ll give you what you want,” rasps one of the other guys.

I rub my arms, my nerves still clanging with uneasiness. I don’t like this at all.

“After that,” I say, “I think we’d better have our next chat with Rollick sooner than we’d planned.”

If I had any doubts that the self-proclaimed demon took the threat of the guardians seriously, the fact that he’s left behind the comforts of his hotel to meet with us elsewhere erased them.

I don’t know how much we can actually trust him to have our best interests at heart, but he seems awfully practical when it comes to his own security.

We drive into the immense underground parking garage he directed us to with our eyes peeled, but there’s no sign of any danger within.

After we’ve parked not far from the exit ramp and eased out into the cool, dim space, Rollick wavers into being near a concrete column several feet away without warning.

All of us flinch, our hands jerking up defensively.

Rollick chuckles, the corners of his eyes crinkling with well-worn smile lines. “I didn’t mean to startle you. If you’re going to be keeping much shadowkind company, you’d better get used to abrupt comings and goings.”

Jacob studies him intently. “How do you do that? The shadowkind we tried to talk to before—some of them just vanished, as fast as you appeared right now.”

Rollick raises his eyebrows. “There’s a reason we got our name. The realm we came from is made mostly of shadow, and that’s our natural home. We can meld into and out of the darkness of your world whenever we want.”

Zian looks down at himself as if expecting to see his own body blending into shadow. “ We can’t do that.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. The only other hybrid I’ve ever met needed a lot of practice to tap into that particular skill, from what I hear.”

Curiosity jolts through me. “You know another hybrid like us?”

“Not exactly like you,” Rollick says with a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “She came by her combined nature through more natural processes, no experimentations by nosy humans.”

Andreas has perked up too. “Where is she? Maybe we could talk with?—”

Rollick gives a dismissive wave of his hand.

“I’ve already attempted to reach out to her and gotten no reply.

She’s kind of a flighty being, in more ways than one.

But also prone to taking on projects of various sorts.

No telling how long she might have dropped off the grid this particular time.

But I did bring a few other associates for you to meet. ”

He makes another motion, and three more figures solidify into sight in a semi-circle facing us.

Like Rollick, they look human as far as I can tell, but they give off an obvious vibe of supernatural energy. My muscles tense.

Is this some kind of ambush?

But Rollick goes on talking without any hint of aggression. “I thought these three might be of some use if your ‘guardians’ come calling again. Cinder can manipulate electricity.”

The wiry-thin woman at his left snaps her tan fingers, and sparks shoot up. More dance in her pale eyes.

Rollick indicates the stockier man with a head of thick, chocolate-brown curls next to her. “Slick has a knack for tracking down objects and coaxing them into his possession.”

The man tips his head toward us with a blink of his heavy-lidded eyes.

“And I insisted on coming along because you all seem so interesting!” the woman at Rollick’s right pipes up.

She grins at us with no sign of self-consciousness. Her hourglass figure in its silk dress gives her a sultry look that’s offset by her dimpled cheeks and the youthful glow in her smooth face.

Rollick clears his throat. “Pearl was watching from the shadows during our first meeting. But she’s selling herself short. As a succubus, she can persuade most mortals to do just about anything.”

“Doesn’t even have to be dirty,” Pearl says with a bell-like laugh, and considers the men standing around me. “Although for the bunch of you, I certainly wouldn’t mind taking a?—”

A snarl of warning vibrates up my throat before I’m aware of my reaction. My claws have sprung from my fingertips, and the mark that formed after Andreas and I had sex burns.

Pearl holds up her hands. “Hey, now! I don’t touch where there’s already a claim.”

She lowers her eyelashes and peeks at me through them. “I’d mention my offer extended to you too, but I have a feeling it’d be the rest of them growling then.”

As it is, the guys around me have stiffened at her final remark. I will my claws back into my fingertips, my face flushing with embarrassment.

“It isn’t— We’re not?—”

But some part of me is clamoring to tear her limb from limb if she suggests so much as touching any of them again.