Page 10 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Six

Zian

L ess than a minute after we’ve leapt off the truck, Jacob looks over at Riva where we’re tramping through a sparse stretch of forest and holds out his hand. “Your bag. Let’s see what you’re carrying.”

Riva’s hand tightens around the strap for a second before she tugs it up over her head and hands it over. “It’s just things I thought might help with the escape. Some of which I actually used. You can see one of the guns is empty.”

It’s an odd bag for her to be carrying to a fight, some kind of leather purse with a decorative fringe along the side. But she speaks with the same firm tone she’s answered all our questions with so far.

“Weapons,” Jacob mutters, and shoots me a look. He already told me to stick close to her, without needing to point out that I’m the only one in our group who can match Riva in strength and speed.

If she takes off on us, it’s going to be up to me to catch her. The idea makes my stomach flip over, but it’s already balled tight.

Where has she really been all this time? What was she doing when I stumbled on her in the control room?

She isn’t acting like a person horrified that her closest friends think she betrayed them. Barely any emotion has flickered across her face, and most of what I have seen I recognize as anger.

If even part of her story is true—if she’s been through hell for the past four years and came for us expecting a joyful reunion—wouldn’t more of that show?

My mind darts back to the first moment when I saw her in the control room. I was so shocked the memory is blurry. Did her face light up right then, seeing me—more like she was happy than concerned that I’d broken in?

But even if it did, she could already have been putting on an act, realizing she was caught.

“Fuckload of guns and knives, wallets, jewelry…” Jacob fixes his gaze on Riva. “Did you just come back from a day trip robbing a bank?”

She glowers at him. “I had a chance to grab some stuff that seemed like it might be useful when I got away from the cage match place.”

“Right, right.” He paws deeper and lifts out a crystalline bottle of perfume. “And you figured smelling nice would help with our escape?” He tosses that back in and pulls out a ticket stub. “And going to concerts too. Busy woman.”

Riva’s jaw twitches, but her voice stays only terse. “I didn’t bother to empty the purse when I grabbed it. I was in kind of a hurry, which shouldn’t be a surprise. That stuff isn’t mine.”

“Uh huh. Looks more to me like you’d just come back from one of their stupid missions, with the benefit of a little R&R time.” Jacob slings the purse strap over his own shoulder. “Zee, check her over and make sure she’s not carrying more than what’s in the bag.”

Riva’s shoulders tense, but she doesn’t shy away from me when I step closer. Her fitted tank top and sweatpants don’t leave much room for hiding weaponry. I can see with my regular vision that she doesn’t have a pistol shoved in her waistband or a sheathed knife at her hip.

But because he asked, and because any tiny miscalculation could screw us all over, I stare a little harder, letting the tingling of my talent form in the back of my eyes.

I skim my gaze over her hips and back, jerking it away quickly from the curve of her small but sculpted ass with a flush of heat through my skin that I hope the other guys can’t see. Then I move up beside her so I can give her front a quick scan, darting over her breasts with similar speed.

More heat trickles up the back of my neck and singes my cheeks. As I yank my focus back into regular sight, for a moment I simply watch her marching along next to me.

She looks so much like the Riva I knew. The same delicate features. The same odd hair, dark gray beneath and silver on top, pulled back in a typical if loosening braid.

The same deceptively slim frame that you’d think would snap in a swift breeze, when actually you’re lucky if she doesn’t snap you in half.

Still just as pretty—maybe even more so with the sharpening of her face with adulthood and the slight filling out of her modest curves. Still leaving me with the same urge to scoop her up and shield her by tucking her close against my much broader body.

I used to imagine holding her in other ways too, but my mind freezes up against those memories.

I thought I knew her. I believed the affection for me that I saw shining in her eyes, her determined commitment to all of us.

How could the girl I knew back then have turned on all of us—on Griffin , of all people—like that?

What kind of a woman is she now?

My temper stirs and simmers, but I hold back a full-out flare of rage. Wolfing out isn’t going to help any of us.

And how can I feel angry and still have to hold my fingers back from brushing over her hair, her bare shoulder, as if I can reconnect with her that literally?

As if someone like me has any business touching anyone that way.

I wrench my mind away from those images—and a different thought hits me like a smack of frigid water.

“The trackers!”

The others all jerk to a halt, Riva last.

Jacob spits out a curse and jabs his finger at her. “Aren’t you so glad your distraction made us forget?”

Riva blinks at him. “Forget what ? What are you talking about?”

“We don’t have time to argue about it,” Andreas breaks in. “We have to get them out now .”

Dominic clears his throat with an uncomfortable expression. “Riva might have one too.”

She almost definitely does.

I step in front of her. “Open your mouth.”

It’ll be easier that way.

She knits her brow. “What?—"

“The guardians put tracking devices in our teeth,” I blurt out. I should have remembered it sooner—I’m the one who found them in the first place. “We figured it out after—after some things happened. Unless we pull the right tooth out, it’ll be a homing beacon straight to us.”

Something wavers in Riva’s expression. Horror at the thought of yanking a tooth right out of her jaw or at losing some level of protection she thought she had thanks to the guardians she sold us out to?

It doesn’t matter as long as we get this done.

Her lips part, and she opens wide. One of her front teeth is chipped, and another farther back looks like it’s missing a chunk.

I don’t think about that, only delve my gaze inside each of them searching for that bundle of metal.

There. “First molar on the top left, same as the rest of us,” I announce, and hesitate. “I’m the one who needs to?—”

“She’s got the strength to do it too,” Jacob snaps. “Let her deal with her own mouth. You can do mine first.”

He steps forward, his stance rigid, and drops his jaw as far as it’ll go. I tear my gaze away from Riva, revulsion coiling in my gut as I prepare to get down to work.

We talked about this part of the plan, and I pictured the process to try to prepare myself, but none of that could have matched the awfulness of actually having to reach into my friend’s mouth, grip a tooth, and rip it out of his gums root and all.

As I pinch my thumb and forefinger around the right one, even more nausea fills in my stomach. “Sorry,” I can’t help rasping.

Then I wrench the molar out with a heave of my arm, as fast as I can manage.

Jacob is the most impervious of us all, but even he gives a ragged groan as blood spurts over his lips along with a puff of dark mist. Dominic is at his side in an instant, placing his palm against Jake’s jaw by the wound. Dom’s mouth presses flat, and Jacob’s shoulders sag with released tension.

The sprig of wildflowers Dominic plucked up withers and disintegrates in his hand.

I want to apologize to him too, but none of this can be helped. All we can do is get it over with as quickly as possible.

“Break the tooth,” Andreas reminds me in an urgent tone.

I set Jacob’s molar on a flat stone and stomp my foot on it with my full inhuman strength. It shatters with a crackling of circuitry.

If the guardians were tracing us using that, the signal just went dead. But there are four more devices beaming out their radio waves.

Andreas is waiting when I raise my head. My stomach keeps churning as I perform the second extraction. He buckles over with a gagging sound, and then Dominic is there by his side.

A leafy twig crinkles away into dust from Dominic’s hand. Then he faces me. “My turn.”

I hate doing this one the most. Dom has been through all the same training as us, and I know his slender frame has plenty of muscle packed on it, but he’s the smallest of us four. The least overt in how he’s feeling.

I never know how he’s really doing behind his quiet demeanor, but we all know he’s got at least a few things haunting him.

Clenching my jaw, I tear out his tooth even faster than the others. As his hand shoots right into his mouth to heal the wound, I crush yet another tracker under my heel.

When I step back, Riva lets out a faint strangled sound. Shuddering, she grips the side of her face and drops the tooth she must have just dragged from her own jaw onto the stone. It smashes under the slam of her foot.

Blood dribbles over her chin, and her shoulders quiver. My gaze leaps to Dominic, but Jacob pushes between him and Riva.

“She waits,” he says in a steely tone. “If she can deal out pain, she can endure a little. Take care of yourself, Zee, and Dom’ll make sure you’re okay first.”

Riva’s head droops. She doesn’t protest, but something twists in my chest.

I hate what she did and everything that came after, but the viciousness of Jacob’s rage is unsettling even me. And I’m normally the brute around here.

To get it over with as quickly as possible, I brace myself and catch hold of my molar. My muscles balk in the first instant against damaging my own body, but I push through the resistance and haul the tooth out.

Pain screams through my face. I sputter with it, and Dominic is by my side, palm against my cheek.

Soothing warmth blooms through my gums. When he pulls back, a dull ache remains, but the gaping hole is sealed.

We agreed beforehand that he’d only put in as much energy as it took to remove the possibility of infection.

He moves to Riva next, and Jacob doesn’t argue. She holds perfectly still as Dominic works his healing power on her. Then she wipes the bloody spittle from her mouth with the back of her hand and stares at all of us with her bright brown eyes smoldering like coals.

I have to look away.

Andreas kicks dirt and fallen leaves over the crumbled remains of our teeth and the devices they contained. “We’re going to want to hitch another ride as soon as we can, to get more distance between here and the last place they could have located us, yeah?”

Jacob nods. “We were heading toward another highway, weren’t we?”

“It’s at least a few more miles, but that’s the idea.”

“Then let’s get going.”

By the time the sun is well up in the sky, we’re holed up in the back of a freight truck we spotted at a truck-stop diner.

Andreas grabs some apples out of one of the produce crates and tosses us each one—even Riva, after a momentary pause.

“Thank you,” she says quietly.

I dig into mine, both savoring the tart flesh and wishing it was even half enough to settle the grumbling of my empty belly. I could really go for about five steaks and a side of bacon right now.

Jacob shifts where he’s been sitting with his back against the wall near the door. “When we hop off of this ride, we’re going to need to get more strategic. Focus on our goal.”

My heart thumps a little faster. “Ursula.”

We haven’t been able to talk in much detail about any part of our plans while we were in the facility. We only sketched out the basics.

Now, the possibilities for our next steps seem to spill out endlessly in front of us.

“That one guardian suggested she might go ‘back to Pennsylvania,’” Andreas points out, hunkering down against the crate. “It would make sense to start the search there.”

I frown. “ How are we going to search? All we’ve got is a first name and a few vague details. There won’t be an official employee registry for the facility or anything like that.”

Drey chuckles. “No, definitely not.”

“What about a university?” Dominic says, pitching his soft voice just a little louder than usual to be heard over the rumble of the engine.

“We’re the right age—we’d fit in pretty well.

We’d have lots of other people around to blend in with.

And there’d be libraries and computer rooms and all that, right? ”

Other than one mission I’ve run, my experience with the American college system is restricted to TV show and movie portrayals. But his suggestion at least sounds reasonable.

“Who’s Ursula?” Riva pipes up abruptly. “Shouldn’t we just find someplace to settle in where no one at all can notice us?”

Jacob snorts. “Not if we want answers, but then, you’d probably rather we didn’t get more of those.”

I hesitate, not sure how much we even want to tell her, but Andreas shrugs.

“We picked up enough info from the guardians to find out about someone important who worked at the facility in the past but then left—or got shut out. If we’re going to figure out what exactly they did to us and what we can do about that, she seems like our best bet unless we figure we can take on the entire facility at once. ”

I can’t help letting out a snort of my own at that suggestion, but a bittersweet pang shoots through my chest at the same time.

Is this actually going to work? Is it really possible we could learn something that could fix all the things that are wrong inside us?

Riva’s forehead furrows. “Isn’t chasing after anyone associated with the facility only going to make us more likely to get caught? What does it even matter ?”

Jacob shoots her a cold look. “It matters to us. And if you were one of us, it’d matter to you too. But you’re not going anywhere.”

“I don’t want to leave. I was just saying… Fine. Whatever the rest of you think you need to do, we’ll do. I am one of you, and I’ll be right there with you.”

Jacob eyes her for a long moment. Then he glances at the rest of us. A hint of a smile touches his lips, one that chills more than warms me.

“We can’t have Zian playing guard dog with her twenty-four seven,” he says. “So we’re going to need some other way of ensuring she stays true to her word. And I just thought of the perfect solution.”