Hail’s discomfort mingles with my own. I swallow hard. “Hail, you don’t have to?—”
“Someonehas to,” he interrupts. “I can do it best. So it should be me.”
With a soft crackle in the air, a sheen of frost whips over the merged creature. The pain emanating from it vanishes.
It rocks over on its side, frozen solid.
I offer Hail a strained smile. “It isn’t feeling anything anymore.”
He ducks his head. “Good. As long as they don’t all start mashing together like that.”
We look up at the sound of pounding feet. During our distraction, the flood contracted all the way back into the building. The rift must be collecting it again.
Zian rejoins us, his face flushed. “That rogue higher shadowkind—she’s just popped up on the other side of town.”
23
Hail
Raze glances down the city block and pulls back his lips from his teeth in a silent snarl. “Too late again.”
The street looks like a war zone. The rogue shadowkind has been stepping up her game.
One row of neighboring buildings has been reduced to rubble amid the broken skeletons of their frames. A stack of crushed cars at least ten high stands next to them, like some bizarre modern art piece.
Humans would happily do shit like that to each other. Theydowhen they can find the means.
Why is it suddenly such a problem when the perpetrator is a shadowkind?
Oh, right, because if they realize shadowkind exist, they’ll rain down all kinds of hell on us too.
A pang of distress resonates into me from where Peri is studying the ruins nearby. Her mix of grief and guilt makes mewant to go over to her—to hug her? To shake some sense into her?
She shouldn’t get this upset over these people who’d murder her if they knew what she is. Why can’t she see that?
I keep my mouth shut, because I know enough by now to realize snarking at her would only make her more upset, and I’d have to feel that too, along with my own guilt.
Mirage cocks his head with a more deflated air than I’m used to from the fox shifter. “Knock ‘em down and build ‘em back up? Can we help fix this?”
One of the shadowbloods who’s joined us, a guy nearly as pale as I am whose demeanor is awfully icy too, shakes his head. “I could use my telekinetic power to lift up the blocks, but I don’t have a clue about the engineering that goes into making a whole building stable.”
Riva pats his shoulder. Her touch seems to melt a little of the tension from his stance as if by magic. “No one expects you to handle it all yourself, Jake.”
She glances at the rest of us. “Rollick is arranging for some workers to volunteer in the rebuilding under the guise of one of his corporations… But that doesn’t help unless the buildingsstopbeing knocked down.”
My self-control wavers, and my mouth pops open despite my intentions. “Maybe the humans should move someplace else. They have lots of other cities. Let the shadowkind have this one.”
Raze glowers at me. “You know that’s not a good idea, even if there was any chance of them agreeing to it. They shouldn’t have to leave just because one higher being has gone insane.”
Insane or committed to dealing out reasonable justice?
I manage to hold in that question, through considerable effort. “Fine, fine. When you have a better idea, let me know about it.”
Raze, Mirage, and Peri start murmuring to each other, maybe about the actually insane plan to trot her out as bait. Do they really want to offer up our cream puff to a shadowkind they see as a maniac?
I might not blame this weird being for the havoc she’s wreaked on the mortal city, but she knows we’ve been trying to stop her. Attacking Peri would also be justified from her perspective.
And based on past experience, none of us would be able to dash in there fast enough to stop her. Even Peri’s startling power might not do much good against this being, if she could manage to blast her energy out despite the fact that she wants to help the vigilante, not harm her.
