Page 116 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Three

Jacob

I hate this fucking room.

There’s nothing in it. Just me and a floor, ceiling, and walls that all look and feel like rock.

A steel door I can’t budge with my powers, no matter how hard I pull.

A light fixture sealed behind layers of some translucent material that’s so well-secured I can’t wrench it out either.

Of course, if I could break it, then it’d be just me and the dark. But at this point I’m too pissed off to care how practical the strategy would be.

I prowl through the small space, my sneakers smacking the flat but rough ground, my hands clenched into fists. My power zings this way and that, snatching at every surface around me for something to catch on to and snap.

The guardians screwed us over somehow. Some stupid trick that I didn’t recognize until it was too late.

When we’d gotten the kids out of the facility we invaded, I had the strongest sense that I needed to keep digging, keep searching—that there was something else important there. I remember opening a door with a rush of exhilaration that I’d finally found whatever that was.

Then the door slammed shut behind me, tossing me forward as a hissing sound filled the air. A chemical smell filled my nose.

And before I could do shit about any of it, my mind went black.

Am I still in the same building? The stone surfaces make me think of the cave the other one was built into, but all the rooms and halls there looked like a regular building, not something carved right out of the rock.

When I get my hands—or my powers—on the fuckers who’re caging us now…

I march up to the door and pound my fists against it, even though I know it won’t budge. Let them know how fucking furious I am.

They’re going to have to face me eventually. I can’t see them going to the trouble of knocking me out and shutting me in here just to leave me to starve to death.

What have they done to Riva? To the other guys?

I should have been with her—protecting her. If they’ve gotten her too…

God fucking damn it .

I slam my clenched hand into the door once more, hard enough that a lance of pain shoots up my arm. The renewed surge of anger and frustration sends me storming in another circuit of the room.

The guardians have always come down hardest on her. She was the one they took away when we first tried to escape.

They left her on her own to fight for her life at some crime boss’s whims. How much worse will they do this time?

“Fuck!” I shout, flinging an invisible force at the wall, which of course doesn’t budge.

I’m just coming up on the door again when a panel I didn’t notice slides open on the ceiling and a screen whirs down from it.

All I register is a middle-aged man’s face on the screen, hard angles topped by short orange hair, and his mouth moving to form words. “Hi there, Jacob. This seems like the safest way to?—”

My power whips out of me at the first viable target it’s gotten since I woke up on the uncomfortable floor.

The screen shatters. Bits of glass rain down on the floor. Sparks sputter from the electronic frame that held it.

It occurs to me a moment too late that I should have been a little more careful. I should have cracked the glass so I’d have a larger piece to work with as a weapon.

Fuck it. I’ve got a dozen spines that’ll spring from my arms, as sharp as any glass and poisoned on top of that.

I stomp through the glass-littered part of the room for good measure, taking a tiny pleasure in the crunch of the shards under my feet. The panel starts to hum shut again, but I snatch at it too.

With a heave, I bring the camouflaged covering and the metal frame crashing down too.

That’s what I think of their attempt at conversation. They want to say something to me, they can come look me in the eyes.

“Where’s Riva?” I yell in the vague direction of where the screen once hung. “Where are my friends? Let me out of here, you assho?—!”

A current of electricity jolts through my body from the floor and cuts off my last word with a rattling of my jaw. My body spasms.

My legs give, and I fall to my hands and knees. The brief zap has dissipated, but every nerve in my body continues to vibrate with the discharged energy.

I’ve bitten my tongue. The tang of blood trickles over it.

I grimace and shove myself, wobbling, back onto my feet. I’m going to tear those pricks apart and dance on their fucking?—

The roar of anger reverberating through me simmers down like a pot taken off the stove. A strange rush of cool, soothing calm muddies it.

I should be raging. Why the hell am I?—

This tantrum is silly. Everything is okay. The others must be okay too.

No, that’s ridiculous. The guardian bastards grabbed us and?—

Another cool wave rolls over me, numbing the searing flames. I suck in a shaky breath.

What is going on in my head?

I’m bewildered and chilled out enough that when the lock in the door clicks, my power doesn’t immediately jerk to the ready. I just stand there, staring, somehow sure that I need to wait and get the answer I need when it swings open.

There’s a soft hiss of escaping compressed air. The door slides partway into the side of the stone frame rather than swinging inward.

For an instant, I think it’s opened to reveal a mirror. That’s a reflection of me, gazing back at me with the same pale blue eyes.

But reflections don’t walk on their own like this one steps into the room, the door thudding shut behind him. A reflection wouldn’t be wearing a green shirt when mine is black.

A reflection wouldn’t aim an awkward-looking smile at me while my jaw hangs slack.

“Jake,” the other man says in a mild voice that seems to sweep over me on a third swell of calm. “You need to stop fighting. Let’s try talking. You can talk to me if you don’t want to listen to anyone else yet.”

I think I’ve swallowed my tongue. I can’t seem to find it, and a choking sensation constricts my throat.

I cough and sputter and find my voice again as my heart thumps on with an erratic beat.

“Griffin?”

It’s hardly more than a hoarse whisper. I’m almost afraid to have made his name audible, as if I’ll shatter the illusion by addressing it.

But the man in front of me doesn’t fracture. He looks steadily at me, not denying my naming of him.

“I’m sorry it’s been so long. Things have been… complicated.”

“They— what ? You—we thought—I saw you?—”

A different surge of emotion sweeps away all my words. My gut knots up, and the rest of me lurches forward.

I wrap my arms around my brother and tug him close. Absorbing the warmth of life from his skin, the even rhythm of his pulse thumping in his chest.

He’s really here. Right here with me, speaking, breathing.

But not quite the way I remember. The way I know down to my bones that my twin is supposed to be.

Griffin would have laughed, because I’m usually not a hugger, and hugged me back tightly. Griffin would have overflowed with his excitement at the reunion.

The guy I’ve embraced has lifted his arms to return the hug, but more in a comforting way than with any clear enthusiasm. He stays quiet as I pull away.

I stare at him, trying to connect the figure before me with my expectations and memories. Nothing quite makes sense. My mind feels as if it’s been buried under a landslide.

“Where have you been ?” I blurt out, which maybe isn’t the best question to lead with when I should be singing Hallelujah that he’s alive at all, but it’s the one that careens out first.

Griffin smiles in his new, tight way. “Another facility. It took them a long time to heal me and to make sure that I was prepared for everything I might have to face. And then the guardians said it would be better if I didn’t come back and disrupt the habits you all had gotten into. I asked… You know what they were like.”

He didn’t die. We thought we saw his life leave him in the video they showed us, but his injury wasn’t quite so bad that they couldn’t patch him up.

He was alive all this time, and they kept rubbing it in our faces that supposedly Riva arranged his murder. That it was her fault he was dead when even the dead part wasn’t true.

The realization and my brother’s last words spark a renewed flare of frustration. “What they are like. Those assholes?—”

But Griffin… shakes his head. “New management. Things are changing. We’re here , and together. It’s a fresh start. I’d really like to embark on it with you—with all of you, but especially you, Jake.”

I’m gaping at him again, wishing I had Zian’s X-ray vision so I could peer inside his skull in case I might find a little gremlin sitting at a set of controls where his brain should be. “A fresh start? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Someone new has taken over the guardians,” Griffin says. “He’s got different plans—he’s going to let us run missions that actually matter. Take control over our lives. Have a say in our training. You have to give him a chance to explain.”

“Whoever he is, he shut me in this prison! He took away the others—Riva?—”

Griffin’s voice gentles. “They’re all here.

I just talked to Riva a half hour ago. She’s fine.

Everyone’s fine. You’ll be able to see them, talk with them and the younger shadowbloods who are here, go outside—everything.

When you’ve calmed down and we don’t have to worry about you hurting anyone by accident. Or on purpose.”

Something about that last sentence makes my pulse hitch.

He knows. He knows the people I’ve already hurt—in both ways.

Griffin never wanted to hurt anyone. He’d feel their pain as well as his own.

He can’t understand.

I raise my chin. “I was protecting us. I’d do it again.”

“You won’t have to,” Griffin says. “We’re safe here. We don’t have to go out and tackle the real villains until we’re ready.”

I scowl at him. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Griffin sighs. It’s a mild sound, but it conveys enough disappointment that I want to cringe away inside my own body, away from the sense that I’ve let him down.

I let him take lead in the escape—I let him be the one to race out first, where the bullets started flying?—

How much of the strangeness I see in him now is my fault too?

I suck in a breath through my teeth. “We can’t trust them. We can’t trust any of them. Even Engel, the one who made us, turned out to hate us.”

“Clancy isn’t like that.” Griffin steps back toward the door. “Show that you’re ready to talk and listen, and then we’ll get somewhere.”

He slips out before I can get another word in, leaving me behind in the cold, empty room.