Page 119 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Five

Riva

H owever skeptical I might be about the intentions of the new man in charge, I have to admit that mealtimes in the mountain facility are a big step up from our past imprisonment.

No more trays of bland food chosen only for nutritional completion shoved through a slot in a door to be eaten in solitude. We get our choice from a spread of dishes set out in shifts, with a random assortment of about ten fellow shadowbloods in the cafeteria for company.

The buffet isn’t anywhere near as extensive or gourmet as the meals Rollick provided us with on his yacht, but everything I’ve sampled so far at least tastes good. And there’s something to be said simply for getting to pick.

For this morning’s breakfast, I’m debating between omelets stuffed with cheese and fried veggies or bowls of steaming oatmeal laced with berries and brown sugar. I kind of want one of each, but I don’t think my stomach will thank me after I’ve stretched it to twice its regular size.

I end up grabbing a plate with an omelet, add a small scoop of hashbrowns and a bottle of orange juice for good measure, and turn toward the tables.

The rock-carved room holds five rectangular tables that comfortably seat six each, but I’ve never seen them full. Because we eat in shifts, I have no idea exactly how many shadowbloods are staying here.

Right now, the two of the tables on the left hold three and four of the younger shadowbloods respectively. I spot Nadia and Booker at one, her laughing hard at something he’s said and then covering her mouth as if embarrassed.

Today her shirt is neon green. She obviously has a thing for bright clothing.

Everything in my wardrobe is darker shades… Did she ask Clancy for those tees specially?

Did he give her new clothes simply because she asked?

As I’m working through my new debate of whether to be friendly and go sit with them or huddle on my own at one of the empty tables, a familiar blond head passes through the doorway at the right side of the room.

My pulse skips a beat, and my plate wobbles in my hand. For an instant, I’m not sure which of the twins I’m looking at.

Then his gaze collides with mine, and any doubt flies out of my mind. Only Jacob could look at me like a dam’s just burst open behind his eyes.

Before I can even part my lips to speak, he’s hurtling forward, straight toward me.

He doesn’t even veer around the vacant tables between me and him. With a flick of his arm, he sends them flipping over to clear his path.

Both tables clang against the stone wall. Jacob strides by without a split-second of hesitation, his gaze still fixed on me.

Then he stops right in front of me and raises his hand with a gentleness totally at odds with the aggression of his approach.

As he touches my cheek, my fingers tighten around my plate and the neck of the juice bottle as if I’m clutching them for dear life.

My heart pounds against my ribs. I’m too choked up to speak.

To say that Jake and I had a stormy time with our original reunion is like referring to a hurricane as a light breeze. But in the last few days before we ended up here, I came to understand how he acted a lot better than I had before.

To recognize that no one could hate how he first treated me more than he did himself. To see just how far he’d go to ensure nobody ever hurt me again.

And how far he’d go to make me feel good , when I’d let him.

The maelstrom of emotion in his sky-blue gaze matches the turmoil his presence has stirred up inside me. He strokes his fingers over my cheek with nothing but tenderness, staring at me as if he can read my experiences of the past few days through my skull.

“Are you okay?” he asks in a low, taut voice, either because he can’t tell or he wants me to confirm it.

I manage to get enough of a grip on my internal state to locate a trace of my sense of humor. “I’m fine. I don’t know if the tables are.”

Jacob doesn’t spare the pieces of furniture he upended even the briefest of glances. “Fuck the tables.”

I’m not sure Clancy’s staff are totally on board with that attitude.

A man and a woman have stepped into the room to eye the results of Jacob’s arrival.

Like Clancy himself, the guardians working under him don’t wear the protections we’re used to—but then, we know those are useless against our powers anyway.

But they’re the only people around who are older than me and my guys, so they’re easy to identify.

I tense, expecting them to march over and yank Jacob away from me—Lord only knows how big a catastrophe that would turn into—but the woman simply shakes her head in apparent consternation.

She and the man heave the tables onto their feet, study the new but small dents along the edges, and nudge the chairs back into place.

Huh. I guess they’re choosing their battles.

I have no idea what the younger shadowbloods are making of Jacob’s dramatic entrance. I only manage to watch the guardians for a matter of seconds before my attention swings back to him as if drawn by a magnet.

I move as little as I can manage to set my plate and my juice down and then rest my hands against the front of Jake’s shirt. “Are you okay? You must have— Did Griffin?—?”

He nods with a tightening of his mouth, cutting off the question I’d only started. “If you can even call him Griffin anymore,” he mutters.

A tremor passes through his body, and he brushes his fingers farther across my face to stroke them over my hair. He hasn’t moved one inch closer since I set aside the meal I was holding.

He’s waiting for my welcome—or lack thereof. I can feel his tense anticipation like a vibration in the air.

I ease forward and tip my head against his chest.

A breath rushes out of Jacob with a shudder, and his arms encircle me. He hugs me to him tightly but still with a sense of restraint, as if he’s afraid he’ll hurt me even now.

But if our new prison has proven anything to me so far, it’s that Jake has never really been my enemy.

He fucked up, and he shouldn’t have treated me the way he did. But the guardians fucked him up first.

They did it on purpose.

And having seen the new Griffin, drained of any noticeable emotion, devoid of warmth, I know just how thoroughly they can break a person.

I may never fully understand exactly how much they wrecked the man I’m holding.

Jacob’s voice comes out in a rasp muffled by my hair. “I’m sorry.”

I frown and raise my head. “What for?”

I hate how familiar I am with the anguish etched on his chiseled features. “I was supposed to be looking out for you in the other facility—I swore I’d keep you safe—and they still managed to— I got distracted. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Hey.” I touch his cheek the way he cupped mine. “You know that Griffin was there , right? He messed with our emotions to get us where the guardians—at least the ones on Clancy’s side, I guess—wanted us to be.”

Jacob blinks at me, and a muscle ticks in his jaw. Maybe he hadn’t realized that part.

“Shit. I should have recognized—I should have known?—”

“No.” I tap the side of his face firmly to emphasize my protest. “We all got caught. It’s all of our faults or none of ours. I haven’t for one second blamed you. So you’re not allowed to blame yourself for this.”

Jacob’s mouth twists, but he can’t seem to find a way to argue with me.

I pull away from him a little reluctantly and pick up my breakfast to bring it to the nearest undented table. Jake snatches the first plate in reach and follows me.

As he sits down across from me, I hover my fork over my omelet. “So, you decided to give Clancy’s missions a try? We’ve been a little worried about you since we hadn’t seen you yet.”

Dominic joined in my outdoor training session yesterday morning, and I saw Zian and Andreas again at separate meals. Jacob’s absence has been weighing on all of us.

Jake shrugs a little stiffly and jabs his fork into the fried egg. “It wasn’t really much of a choice, was it? It was the only way they’d let me see you, or the guys. They still made me wait a whole day for that after I said I was in.”

Clancy must have been watching him, evaluating whether he could trust Jacob’s intentions enough. “They just left you in your room all that time?”

He shakes his head. “I think they take us outside in shifts just like the meals. Clancy and a couple of his underlings brought me out to a training area that’s a ways into the forest, along with some of the kids. We didn’t see anyone else going to or from.”

I haven’t been taken to any separate areas of the valley yet, but his explanation doesn’t surprise me. Zian said that he and Dominic were escorted to a rock-climbing area yesterday afternoon while I was in the field again.

Jacob takes a bite and considers me over the table as we chew. “We have to get off this island for one of these missions. See how it all works. Then we can make more of a decision.”

Exactly what I’ve been thinking. I offer him a crooked smile in return. “Yeah.”

We eat for a few minutes in silence, wary of who might be listening unseen. Then Jacob motions his fork at me.

“You said ‘we.’ How many of the others have you seen?”

“All of them, now. But only here and there. And never more than three of us together at once.” I swallow a lump of cheese-saturated egg, the flavor turning sour as I think about my answer.

“Clancy made it clear that he doesn’t think it’s in his best interests to let all five of us have a chance to collaborate. ”

Jacob lets out a disdainful huff. “Because we’d run fucking circles around his operation here.”

He could be right. But we’re not getting to find out, are we?

Even though the omelet is perfectly enjoyable, my stomach has twisted into a knot by the time I’ve finished eating. I get up to put my dishes away, knowing that in a matter of minutes some of the staff will come by to usher us to our various next destinations.

But I’ve barely set my plate down in the bin when Clancy himself pokes his red-topped head into the cafeteria.

He walks over to my and Jacob’s table at a briskly professional pace. “The two of you appear to be settling in.”

Jacob eyes him, looking like he’s grappling with his self-control. “I’d like to see the rest of my friends.”

“We’ll get to that. I’m sure Riva’s already told you that they’re perfectly fine, as she is.” Clancy motions to us. “I was hoping to talk to just the two of you in my office for a moment.”

Jake and I exchange a look. Our new captor makes the request sound voluntary, but somehow I don’t think he’ll be pleased if we refuse.

We’ll get more chances to figure out this place and how to leave it the more we dance to his tune.

But I’m not going to let him call all the shots either—at least, as much as he’ll let me have a voice.

As we follow him into the hall, I clear my throat. “There were a few things I wanted to ask you about too. Just to understand how we ended up here better.”

I don’t know whether to be relieved or suspicious that Clancy answers without hesitation. “That’s completely fair.”

Of course, after we’ve stepped into an office room that’s got the same stone walls as the rest of the mountain facility, it’s Jacob who speaks up first. He doesn’t even wait until Clancy has moved behind the desk at one end of the room.

“In the other facility, the one we broke into—you set us up to get caught, with my brother’s help. How did you know we’d be coming there? Why did you let us get the kids out first?”

I’ve been wondering a lot along the same lines. I study Clancy’s face as he sinks into the simple office chair behind the desk, leaving us standing.

“About your brother’s part in things, I think that’s something you should discuss with Griffin, as much as he’s willing to.

As for the rest, I didn’t intervene right away because I wasn’t sure how the situation would play out.

Not everyone working at that facility was completely on board with my approach.

I hoped their strategy would work and that I could arrange your transfer to the island regardless. ”

The knots in my gut pull tighter. “But it didn’t work, so we slaughtered a bunch of people who were causing problems for you.” How convenient.

And technically, I slaughtered most of them.

Clancy doesn’t show any reaction to that statement. “I’m not happy about the loss of life. It is what it is. We did have to resort to a certain amount of trickery in the end, but I’d known that if brute force wasn’t going to do it, we’d have to be as smart as possible instead.”

They’d waited until we’d started to split up and then divided us even further.

“What about the younger shadowbloods—all of them?” I ask. “The ones I’ve talked to here all already know about the sha—the monsters we’re supposed to be fighting. Some of them have already been sent on missions directly against them. That never happened with us.”

Clancy folds his hands in his lap as he leans back in his chair.

“We’ve made some modifications to our process from generation to generation.

We were able to train in the younger shadowbloods faster because we’d learned from our experiences with you.

And after your escape attempt, a significant portion of the Guardianship felt it would be too dangerous for the six of you to leave the facilities under any circumstances. ”

Modifications in their process. He probably doesn’t realize what we learned from Ursula Engel’s computer files—that she never gave the rest of the guardians her full formula for creating us.

The kids have weaker powers than we do. That’s at least as much a part of why the guardians worried less about sending them into the field.

But it also means they’d have been less equipped to actually fight the shadowkind they were up against.

“What are we doing here if you’re not actually going to give us anything to do other than train more?” Jacob demands, scowling.

A hint of a smile touches Clancy’s lips. “I said a significant portion. I didn’t say I felt that way. I actually brought you in here so we could discuss your first potential assignment.”