Page 11 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Seven

Riva

T he second the words perfect solution leave Jacob’s mouth, I can tell that I’m not going to like his proposal. Even so, I’m not prepared for his next move.

He extends his muscular arm, almost impressive enough to rival Zian’s brawn, and squeezes his fingers into a fist. And a row of purple spikes shoot from his skin from the side of his wrist to just before his elbow.

My pulse stutters, my body tensing with the instinctive sense that whatever those are, they’re a threat. They look like the spines on some exotic reptile.

Jacob never showed anything like that in the time I knew him before.

He stares at me with his ice-hard eyes as if daring me to comment.

Andreas clears his throat. “Jake, man, I’m not sure?—”

“It’s simple,” Jacob interrupts. “I give her a mild dose of the poison. Then she’ll have to stick with us so Dom can heal the damage regularly enough to keep her alive.”

His lips curve into a tight smile, his gaze boring into mine.

“I developed some new abilities while you were enjoying the high life. If I don’t jab you much, it’ll take a while before the toxin builds up enough to be fatal.

But there isn’t any regular cure—the guardians tested that very thoroughly. You take off on us, you’re dead.”

Zian’s dark eyebrows have drawn together. I think he might protest this torturous suggestion, but instead he glances at Dominic. “But if Dom has to keep healing her…”

Jacob looks over his shoulder at Dominic, his face softening just slightly for the first time since we’ve reunited. Because he still cares about the other guys, just not about me.

“Only if you’re okay with it,” he says. “It shouldn’t take too much, just once or twice a day, to keep her functioning. And hopefully we won’t need her for too many days.”

Like the boy I remember, Dominic takes a moment to think. I don’t totally get why they’re especially worried about him—will it really take that much energy to offset the effects of the poison?

He didn’t seem all that fazed by healing our gums after we extracted our treacherous teeth. My tongue flicks over the new gap at the back of my mouth automatically, the tissue there still tender.

Dominic’s stance looks a bit stiff, but before too long, he answers in his low, measured voice. “It’s all right. I can do it.”

Nausea unfurls up through my chest as I remember Jacob’s phrasing. Keep her functioning .

“I might not die , but your poison is going to mess with my body, isn’t it?” I say to him. “If the guardians catch up with us, I won’t be able to help you fight them off very well if I’m physically sick.”

Jacob turns to face me again, nothing but disdain in his expression now. How can he look so gorgeous and so cold at the same time?

“That’s asking us to believe you’d be fighting against the guardians instead of with them.”

I can’t suppress the edge that creeps into my voice. “Yes, that is what you should believe, because that’s what’s fucking true.”

At least the layer of frustration helps tamp down the anguish that’s roiling through me underneath. Every quiver of that fraught emotion rippling through my chest makes me feel as weak as if I’ve already been poisoned.

It doesn’t matter what the guys think right now. I have to prove to them that I’m the same Riva I always was, that I’ll put all my strength toward defending them and keeping us together.

I can’t do that if I’m falling apart.

“And yet somehow I’m still not seeing it,” Jacob snarks back, and rolls his shoulders. “Of course, I still see just offing you as a viable solution too, if you’re so upset about this option.”

My mouth tightens into a flat line. None of the other guys speak up against his very explicit threat.

Memories flood the back of my mind: my dizziness last night, the shakiness of my muscles. He’s asking to do the same thing to me that the boss did—the way the boss tried to murder me.

He wants to put me in a different kind of cage, with my own body trapping me.

A prickle creeps into my lungs—a tiny oscillation like something sharp-edged starting to vibrate within my ribcage.

Like a vicious, angry sound that wants to break free?

I stiffen up, clamping down on the impression and taking a deep breath to clear my lungs. That—that wasn’t me. I won’t let it be me.

There’s no need to get angry about it anyway. Jacob is asking rather than ordering, at least.

He’s telling me how this will go and waiting for my response. If I accept, if I show I’m willing to trust that they won’t take it too far, that’ll be one step toward convincing them that they can trust me too, won’t it?

I’m not really sure what else I can do at this point.

I scoot across the floor of the cargo hold toward him. “Fine. Just remember that if I stumble when we need to move quickly or defend ourselves, it’s not because I want to.”

Jacob lets out a derisive sound. He grasps my hand, and in spite of everything, a tingle shoots straight through my nerves at the contact. My breath catches.

How can he not feel that we’re all meant to be together, me included? That we really are blood in all the ways that matter?

We’re connected in ways no other people on this planet are.

He’ll have to realize it. I just need to keep trying.

Andreas steps closer, wobbling with the movement of the truck. “Are you sure you can control the dosing well enough right now? With our talents dulled…”

Jacob cuts a sharp glance toward the other guy. “You don’t need to bring that up in front of her.”

Andreas simply shrugs. “It’s not going to matter by the end of the day anyway.

” He catches my eyes. “After you left, the guardians started drugging us somehow or other so we couldn’t use our powers at full strength.

Protective measures.” His mouth twists into something halfway between a grimace and a smirk.

“It’s already wearing off,” Jacob says. “I know what I’m doing.”

He tugs my arm straight in front of him and twists his arm so he can bring the purple spines protruding from it to my flesh. He lets just two of them rest against the skin and then presses them harder.

A stinging sensation like the needles the guardians sometimes injected us with shoots through my forearm and radiates into my hand and shoulder. Unlike with the needles, the sensation lingers, prickling in my veins even after Jacob has pulled his spines away.

That’s the only effect of the toxin that I can feel so far. If that’s all it is, I won’t do too badly.

But that’s probably too much to hope for.

Jacob is still holding out my arm as if he’s forgotten that he no longer needs it. Because his attention has homed in on the front of my shirt.

I glance down at myself, wondering if I’ve gotten something on the tank top, just as his hand shoots out. He yanks on the chain around my neck to pull the cat-and-yarn charm out from its safe spot beneath the fabric.

A jolt of panic shoots through me with the thought that he’s going to rip it right off my neck. My body reacts on instinct, my hand smacking away his before he can get a real hold on the necklace, my feet shoving me out of reach.

My back jars against the side of the cargo hold. Jacob takes a step toward me, chilling fury blazing in his eyes.

“They let you keep it. That was my brother’s, and they let you— And you want us to believe you didn’t win yourself special treatment?”

“I—” My fingers close around the charm protectively. My gaze darts from him to each of the other guys, and for the first time it sinks in that none of them are wearing their old necklaces. “What happened to yours?”

Zian’s lips have pulled back with a growl. “The guardians took them from us as part of our punishment for trying to run.”

They took even that from the guys—from Jacob? The one thing of his twin’s he should have been able to hold on to?

My heart aches, but I don’t know what to say. “I have no idea why they let me keep it. It wasn’t part of any deal.”

Jacob looms over me, his eyes narrowing. I brace myself for some kind of attack, but he just shakes his head with a derisive curl of his lips.

“Whatever. If you get totally out of it with the poison, say something, and Dom will balance you out. Until then, keep your mouth shut unless you’re finally going to cough up some inside info about the guardians.”

I frown at him. “I’ve told you already, I don’t know any more about them than you do.”

“Then you’re basically useless, aren’t you?” he retorts, and shifts his attention to the other guys as if I don’t even exist.

My introduction to the state of Pennsylvania is a dingy clothing outlet store standing between two other big, boxy outlet stores just off the highway we’ve been driving down.

Between the guys’ talents, they were able to commandeer a seven-seater SUV in a mundane shade of tan from, as Andreas described it, “the kind of people who aren’t going to be reporting their car stolen. ”

He’s behind the wheel now as he pulls into the parking lot outside the store, a little more confident after his stint in the driver’s seat earlier today. Have they managed to practice their driving skills since I’ve been gone, maybe as a little detour on missions?

I want to ask but I have the uncomfortable suspicion that any questions about their activities will come across as digging for info for my supposed guardian allies.

“Okay,” Jacob says as Andreas parks at the far end of the mostly empty lot. “The three of us will go in and grab a few sets of low-profile clothes for all of us. Dom, you stay here with Riva.”

I raise my chin from where I’m tucked away in the back seat. “Why can’t I pick out my own clothes? I’m the one who brought the money you’re using.”

Jacob twists to shoot a glare at me. “You shouldn’t look strange with that hair on a university campus, but out here in the boonies? We’re trying to avoid getting noticed—at least, the four of us are.”

I make a face at him, but he does have a point. My gaze slides to Dominic in the middle row, to the left of my seat.