Page 82 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

“Sounds like it’s settled,” Andreas says, his tone dry but mild. “Maybe we should all take a few minutes to sort out our own space, though?”

Jacob grunts but marches out. The other guys follow, but Andreas hangs back for a moment at the doorway.

When I meet his gaze, he tips his head toward me, his expression softening. “How are you doing?”

I shrug. “Other than feeling a little smothered and wondering how far in over our heads we’ve gotten, I’m okay.”

He wets his lips. “You know if you need anything—if there’s anything you’d want me to do, for whatever reason?—”

The pain I’ve worked so hard at suppressing springs up to clench around my gut.

“We’re not there yet,” I say quietly. “I don’t know if we’re ever going to be there. And I’m not going to forget that you’re around without you reminding me. Just—just leave it, okay. We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

Andreas nods, but his face has tightened as if he’s as knotted up inside as I am. “We do. But just for the record, none of this matters half as much to me as making sure you’re happy.”

He leaves before I can say anything else. I swallow thickly, so tangled up inside that for a second I can’t breathe.

I don’t bother unpacking my bag, because even at sea, it’s always possible we’ll need to make a hasty exit. I flop down on the bed and allow myself to revel in the fluffiness of the duvet for several minutes, but anxious thoughts keep gnawing at the edges of my mind.

This ship is amazing, but it’s never going to be home. We can’t stay on the run forever.

Are Rollick and his friends really going to carve out a path to a normal life for us? Or are we going to end up almost as trapped as we were in the facility, just with different types of captors, different sorts of tests?

I wish I had a better sense of the way forward.

To try to clear my head, I run through an exercise routine and take a quick shower. But when a speaker mounted in the corner of the room activates, I can’t say I’m eager for the summons.

“All passengers please report to the dining room.”

I’m both ready and not. I duck out into the hall at the same time as the guys step out from their various doorways.

Dominic looks up and down the hallway. “I don’t remember which way the dining room is.”

Zian takes a sniff of the air and strides forward without a hint of doubt. “I’m ready to dig in.”

His nose leads us well. We emerge into the dining area I saw earlier and find a few of the tables pushed together to create one long one.

Serving dishes sit down the length of it, a couple heaped with spareribs that give off spicy and tangy-sweet scents. Others hold slices of baked ham, baby potatoes glistening with butter, and two different kinds of salad, one laced with mandarin slices and another with dried cranberries.

My mouth is already watering. There’s no one else around yet—at least, no one I can see—so I grab a plate at random and add a little of everything to it.

Zian goes straight to the ribs, creating a little mountain on his plate that he tops with ham. He drops into a chair and pops the first bite into his mouth with gusto.

Obviously he isn’t worried about trusting the food. But then, it would be a pretty bizarre scheme for Rollick to arrange a massive cruise just to poison us on the first night.

As we all take seats in a semi-circle at one end of the table, Rollick saunters over seemingly out of nowhere.

“Eat as much as you like,” he says. “Technically the rest of us don’t need the food.

Although I wouldn’t associate with anyone who can’t enjoy a good spare rib.

” He plucks one of the dry-rub morsels off its platter and carries it to his spot at the head of the table.

As if on cue, several more shadowkind waver into being by the other seats. Pearl plunks herself down next to me with a bounce of her golden curls and snatches a mandarin slice right out of the salad.

“Fruit is the best,” she says in her cheery voice, and pops it into her mouth. “Don’t you think so? They taste so good, and they carry the seeds to make more fruit! And I’ve heard mortals say they give you nutrions or something too.”

My mouth twitches, but I’m afraid she’ll be offended if I laugh. Offending a monster, even a not-very-monstrous-seeming one, feels like a bad idea.

“I think it’s probably nutrients,” I say. “Like vitamins and stuff.”

“Oh! There are so many words. And that’s just your language.” She plucks up another slice. “Humans do like to make things complicated.”

Okay, that’s a fair assessment.

“That’s what I like about you,” the succubus goes on hastily as if concerned that she might have offended me . “It’s so interesting on this side. Not that you’re totally mortal. I guess we don’t really know exactly how much you are one thing and the other. It’s very exciting.”

The other beings sitting around the table don’t look all that excited. Some of them barely glance our way at all.

Others study us with apparent trepidation, as if they’re as concerned about what we might do as we are about them.

What was it I heard Rollick saying on the phone—something about his associates panicking? They aren’t that nervous about us, are they?

Why would they be?

My stomach momentarily tightens, but then I spot the dessert table over in the corner. Maybe a little sweetness will soothe my nerves.

I slip over to it, snatch up one of the smaller plates, and study the offerings. Slices of key lime pie and a cake that gives off a lemon-y scent, puffy meringues and plump cookies glinting with sugar crystals.

I scoop a piece of cake onto my plate and take one of the sugar cookies too. On my way back to my chair, I take a bite and restrain a moan at the perfect chewy, buttery dough.

Dropping back down between Pearl and Dominic, I turn to wave the cookie at Dom. “You have to try?—”

As he glances up at me, my gaze slides to his plate, and I realize he’s already grabbed two. Three, actually, counting the one there’s only a chunk of left in his hand.

He must have gone straight to the dessert table before he even started filling up his dinner plate.

A laugh bubbles out of me, startled but genuinely happy. “I guess your sweet tooth is going to have a good time around here.”

Dominic grins back. “No kidding.”

As I alternate between the remains of my main dinner and my dessert, Rollick stirs at the head of the table. He folds his hands together on the tabletop and shoots a pointed look at an empty chair next to him.

A moment later, one final shadowkind being appears out of the shadows—a lean man with scruffy auburn hair, an oddly dented cheek… and two tentacles protruding from his waist, braced as if to help his balance.

Dominic brightens. “That’s Torrent,” he murmurs to me. “He talked with me this morning—he’s going to look into reasons why my…” He waves toward his shoulders, where his tentacles are covered as usual by his trench coat. “…might act the way they do.”

Why they keep growing when he uses his healing power, he means. It looks like that guy should have some idea how these things work.

Rollick clears his throat. “All right, folks. We can eat and talk. Try not to spew crumbs at anyone else, and it’s all good.”

He shifts his attention to our end of the table.

“Our shadowblood guests of honor. You’ve been through a lot today, so I’ll give you a break until tomorrow.

But then I think our first priority should be determining exactly how you’re able to trace each other’s movements.

Assuming your younger counterparts are using the same methods, once we’ve identified them, we may be able to find ways of deflecting the connection. ”

“May.” Not “will.”

No one here is really sure what to make of us, are they? Including ourselves.

But his mention of the younger shadowbloods brings back the memory of the bloodied girl this morning. My chest constricts.

We aren’t the only ones who need help. Everything my guys and I went through at the guardians’ hands, they’re still experiencing it every moment they remain enslaved.

“And we’ll just stay on this boat until we figure that out?” Andreas asks.

“I’m hopeful it won’t be too extended a process.” Rollick smiles with a hint of grimness. “But you should be safe here for as long as it takes.”

He casts his gaze over his shadowkind companions after those last words, with a darkening of his eyes that looks like a warning. Is he worried that another of his associates might come up with their own ideas for how to deal with us?

My skin prickles. Luxury vacation or not, I don’t want to be stuck in the middle of the ocean with this bunch any longer than absolutely necessary.

And the real answer might be something we were already hoping to accomplish for totally different reasons.

“What if there isn’t any way to block the connection between shadowbloods?” I say. “Or they’re using some method that we don’t know about to even test?”

Rollick raises his eyebrows. “Then I suppose we’ll figure that out as we proceed.”

“Or we could solve the entire problem for good in one go.”

His eyebrows lift higher. “What did you have in mind?”

I tap the table. “It’s the other shadowbloods who are the biggest problem.

The guardians only started finding us so quickly once they dragged the kids into the search.

But they’re prisoners just like we were.

They don’t deserve to be used like that.

We should break them out of whatever facilities they’re being kept in, and then the guardians can’t use them anymore. ”

Zian nods eagerly. “Two birds with one stone. We have to help them.”

Rollick pauses, and one of the other shadowkind, a tall gangly guy I hadn’t noticed before, sits up straighter in his seat. The ropey muscles along his arms flex threateningly.

“We don’t need more than five of the mutants running wild.”

Rollick glares at him. “These are my guests you’re talking about, Kudzu. They haven’t caused us any trouble so far.”

On the other side of the table, Cinder lets out a derisive sound. “We’ve come all the way out here because of them.”

“Because we chose to.” The demon’s voice lowers ominously. “You’re welcome to find yourself new employment whenever you like.”

She tenses in her chair, ducking her head apologetically. But the tension still radiating through the air makes my skin creep.

“A jail-break!” Pearl pipes up, clapping her hands together. “I think that would be fun.”

Kudzu snorts. “You think everything is fun. You’re a newbie and a tourist.”

She winces, looking hurt enough that my hackles rise on her behalf.

I raise my chin. “This is the most direct way to deal with the problem. And if you all were helping us, I’m sure we could pull off a ‘jail-break’ a lot faster than experimenting with interrupting a connection we don’t even understand.”

“I agree,” Dominic says, quiet but firm.

Jacob leans his elbows onto the table. “It’s just a bunch of mortals you’d have to tackle, right? What are you all so scared of?”

From the looks most of the shadowkind shoot us then, I get the impression it’s not the guardians they’re scared of.

Like the big purple dude back in Toronto, for some reason most of these beings are frightened of us .

Maybe even Rollick is behind his suave demeanor. He waves his hand through the air as if he can dismiss all the concerns raised on both sides just like that.

“It’s an option I won’t take off the table,” he says. “But we don’t know where these facilities even are. So why don’t we start with what we have right in front of us?”

“Can you ask someone to start looking?” Andreas asks. “I wouldn’t think it’d be too hard for shadowkind to figure out what locations fit—with the resources you’ve got, anyway.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Even his noncommittal answer appears to be too much. Kudzu shoves away his plate. “You can’t be serious.”

Rollick studies him with a languid blink. “I believe in considering all the strategies available to us. It’s worked in my favor before.”

The gangly man mutters something under his breath that I can’t make out. He vanishes into the shadows a moment later.

“This isn’t like before,” Cinder says to Rollick, her expression tense, and wisps away too.

And just like that, it looks like we’ve lost two supposed allies before we even got started.