Page 125 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Ten

Dominic

I stretch out my legs in the back of the van, then tuck them into a cross-legged pose, and pretend I don’t notice our local contact shooting uneasy glances my way. He’s sitting sideways in the driver’s seat so he can alternate between looking out through the windows and over toward me.

I know I’m not much to look at right now. Clancy outfitted me with a track jacket even lighter weight than the trench coats I used to use to hide my tentacles.

It only falls to my hips, so I have to keep my unusual appendages coiled a couple of times over. But he must have had the jacket custom made, because the inner lining holds loops of soft fabric to help support them.

I hadn’t realized that spreading out the weight across my body would make them feel like less of a burden.

In any case, all the stranger can see is that my back is oddly shaped. I’ve been holding the tentacles still—holding my whole self pretty much still as we wait to see if I’ll be called in to save any of my fellow shadowbloods.

He rubs his hand across his chapped lips and shoots me another glance. “Do you want something to drink? I have water bottles up here.”

His accented voice should give me a clue about where Clancy has sent us, but all I can tell for sure is his native tongue isn’t Spanish or anything in that family of languages. Maybe German? Or some variation of Eastern European?

Hell, it could be Swedish or Turkish and I’m not sure I’d know the difference. I don’t even know if he’s a long-time local to this place or a more recent transplant from abroad.

“That’s okay.” I pat the knapsack resting on the thinly carpeted floor next to me. “I’ve got a canteen.”

He grunts in acceptance and goes back to gazing through the windows, though there isn’t much to see out there in the night. With the van’s overhead light on at its dimmest setting, the world beyond the windshield looks totally black to me.

I understand why Clancy arranged for his man as my sort-of guide. The de facto leader of the guardians needed to be in touch with people on the ground to find out exactly what we’d be dealing with.

If there’s a problem, this guy will know the roads and the rules of them better than any of the guardians would. He’ll get me straight to my friends if they need help.

He’ll recognize the signs of trouble faster.

But I can’t help wishing, for the first time in my life, that I had a guardian for company instead. Someone who already knew about my strangeness and wasn’t fazed by it.

What have they told this guy? What is he going to think if I do have to rush in and whip out my tentacles to pour healing power into one of the other shadowbloods?

God forbid.

I shift my weight, my pulse picking up a faster beat. Will Riva and Jacob already be inside the house?

How long will it take them to carry out their first part of the mission—the most dangerous part?

Has the man sitting with me and whatever colleagues he’s had helping Clancy given us all the information we needed to keep them safe?

I brush my fingertips over the thin leaves of the shrub that’s poised on the floor next to me, its harness ready to fling onto my back in a matter of seconds. The tingle of energy I can sense within them settles my nerves just a little.

I gave the plant a bit of water from my canteen right after we hunkered down here, about a mile from the house—not close enough to draw attention but not too far to cross the distance quickly if I have to rush in. Its crisp herbal scent tickles my nose.

Please, don’t let me have to kill it. For all our sakes.

I’d rather not have to destroy any more life. Even a plant’s.

The screen on the van’s dashboard stays empty. No news so far.

I close my eyes, inhaling the smell of the shrub. My mind strays back to my new room at the island facility.

After our first training session for his assignment, I asked Clancy if I could have some potted plants in my bedroom. I told him it’d help me feel more at home, since that seems to be what he wants.

I didn’t really think he’d go along with it anyway, but by the evening, he’d come to escort me to a different room that must be near the face of the mountainside. My old one had no windows, but this one came with a skylight where one wall slanted into the ceiling.

Three potted shrubs of different types and an assortment of flowers waited for me, right where the sunlight would hit them best. A whole garden.

Just remembering it sends a little thrill through me. This isn’t the life I expected to be living, and I’m not done sorting out how I feel about Clancy and his plans… but is it possible this new facility could be a real kind of home, eventually?

It already feels more mine than any other place I’ve stayed, both at past facilities and when we were on the run.

My guide is peering at me again. He lifts his chin toward the shrub.

“Your special power—you can make injuries better? But you need the plant?”

I brush my fingers over the leaves again. “If it’s a big injury, I need to draw the energy to heal it from something else. Plants are… easiest.”

They make me feel the least guilty about the life I’ve stolen. But I don’t want this guy thinking about what else I might suck the energy out of.

He hums to himself and adjusts his weight in the seat. I guess he’s probably getting a little restless too, stuck in this van with a particularly strange stranger.

He’s curious, though. Maybe I should be trying to make more of the opportunity.

Do more than sit here like a lump hoping I won’t need to do anything else.

When we were first driving out to this spot from the airfield, I tried nudging him for clues about where we are, but he shut those down quickly. Clancy must have instructed him not to tell us anything identifying.

“It’s safer for all of us,” was how he put it to us shadowbloods.

But even having more of an idea about how Clancy is reaching out to people beyond his Guardianship could be useful to know.

“The man who set up this mission with you,” I venture. “He told you about our powers?”

My guide shrugs. “Some. Not a lot. Enough to be sure that you should accomplish what you’re here to do.”

“It doesn’t bother you? Or did you already know that people like me and my friends exist?”

“Many unexpected things exist in the world. Better to work with those you can when it benefits you, not dismiss them or run away.”

He chuckles lightly, but his gaze flicks toward my back for just a second with the same wariness I’ve noticed before.

He’s happy to use our services, but that doesn’t mean he trusts us.

His mouth tightens with a momentary frown, and he twists a little farther in the seat to face me. “Your friends—they won’t touch anything they find in the house, will they? They only destroy the people.”

“That’s what we were told to do.” I can’t say whether Clancy might have given Riva and Jacob other instructions at the last minute. “Is there something important inside?”

He waves his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. That’s for us. That was the deal.”

An uneasy prickle runs down my spine at his words. Who is “us”? What “deal”?

I thought he was helping our mission because he wanted to see the child-slavery ring taken down too—for the good of his community. What would that have to do with anything the perpetrators are keeping in the house?

I try to tell myself that he could simply be thinking of records about the kids and where they’ve been sold or something understandable like that, but I can’t quite shake the sense that he didn’t mean it that way. Why would he avoid talking about it if that’s all he meant?

“Our boss does take his deals seriously,” I say carefully, watching the man’s expression.

He lets out a guffaw. “He should, with what he’s getting out of it.”

The prickle jabs deeper under my skin.

I try to keep my voice even, but I’m not sure I totally succeed. “What exactly is he getting out of the deal this time?”

This time, the man’s gaze darts toward my face rather than my back, with a flicker of panic as if he’s realized he’s said something he shouldn’t have. Then he turns to face the windshield.

“That’s between us and him. Not your concern, right?”

I’m sure as hell concerned now. “Are you saying that you paid him to take on these guys?”

That isn’t necessarily so bad, right? They could be a group of outraged citizens who raised the funds to hire someone to deal with a problem they couldn’t tackle themselves.

But the way he’s acting is setting off my internal alarms. And Clancy never mentioned anything about getting compensation—or about being called by the locals.

He made it sound like he’d found the slavers and decided they needed to be taken out all on his own.

“Did he come to you first or did you come to him?” I ask.

The man shakes his head. “We’re done talking about this.”

“I just want to understand what’s going on. I’m part of this too.”

“You work for your boss. I work for mine. We all get what we want. That’s all you need to know.”

No, it’s not, not when everything he adds to the puzzle makes the pieces look more ominous. He has a boss—helping with this mission is work for him?

I wish Andreas was here to peer right inside this guy’s head and find out what’s going on. But he’s not.

It’s just me.

“Please,” I say. “I came all the way out here. It’s my mission too—why shouldn’t I know all of it?”

My guide keeps his mouth clamped shut. He appears to have decided he’s not going to talk at all.

The old me might have given up. This me has faced off with literal monsters and murderous gunmen.

This me has watched the woman he loves torn apart and then melded her back to life.

If there’s something going on here beyond what we know, I have to find out what that is. All of our lives could depend on it.

I’m not going to be the weak one. I can’t let this slide.

I push to my feet, ducking my head under the low ceiling of the van. “How were you and your ‘boss’ involved in setting up this mission? I need you to tell me.”

“You can ask your own boss if you want to know more.”

I step toward the guy and take in his flinch with a wince of my own. But underneath my revulsion at his reaction, I know I can use it.

He’s scared of me. And fear can be an incredible motivator.

“I don’t need you,” I say. “I can drive this van myself. I could tell my boss that you freaked out about my abilities and tried to hurt me. It was self-defense.”

The man’s head jerks toward me. “What are you talking about?”

I hate using my physical differences this way, like a threat, but it’s the only thing I’m sure will work. I shrug off my jacket and let my tentacles rise on either side of my shoulders.

I aim a firm gaze straight into the man’s twitching eyes. “I can use anything living to draw energy from. I can drain a whole human being in a couple of minutes. I know, because I’ve needed to before.”

The man cringes in his seat against the door of the van. He snatches at the handle, but I whip out one tentacle and snag it around his nearer wrist.

“You’re not going anywhere. Just tell me the terms of the deal, and we can go back to just sitting here like we never talked at all.”

“Get that thing off me!” The man jerks at his arm, but my suckers and the sinewy muscles within the tentacle clamp tight.

“I can start siphoning off your life right now,” I warn him, but he keeps struggling.

I need to prove it. I need to make him feel what he could be losing.

My mouth goes dry. I managed to take just part of a fish’s life once, back when Rollick and his people were helping us get control of our abilities on his yacht. That last set of exercises I attempted with him, I was just starting to get the hang of refusing the deeper hunger.

But that was only once, in a perfectly controlled situation.

On the other hand, a fish has a lot less life than a human being.

I can do this. I have to do this, or what did I even start threatening this man for?

I clench my teeth and give a tug through my tentacle. My will catches hold of the streams of life energy that thrum through the man’s body alongside his pulse.

The first spurt of it rushes through me with a giddying warmth, like drinking the richest hot chocolate in the world. I want more—I want to drown myself in it?—

My mind flails, and for a second I almost do lose myself.

Then I yank up a memory of Riva. Riva smiling at me. Riva stroking the tentacles and telling me I’m not a monster.

With her, I’m not. Right now, I don’t need to be either.

I cut off the flow of energy that was flooding me. The man’s shoulders slump, a shudder passing through his body.

But he’s alive. He’s breathing properly, if rapidly. His skin hasn’t lost his color.

I didn’t take too much.

Only enough for him to know what it feels like. For him to get a sense of how far I could go.

My stomach lists queasily, but at the same time his now-watery eyes dart to mine.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t supposed to say. It’s very simple. We give him the money, he clears out the house and leaves it for us.”

I knit my brow, not letting up my hold on the man’s wrist. “What do you want the house for? What’s in there that’s so special?”

My guide gestures vaguely with his free hand. “Not so much the house. Records, equipment, connections. They had a good business going. We move in and take over. Everyone wins.”

I stare at him. “You’re going to take over their business?”

The man starts squirming against my hold again. “Not me . My boss wants to expand. That’s all it is. Just business.”

Acid burns the base of my throat. For a second, I think I might actually vomit.

It’s not business to the kids who’ve been getting snatched and sold.

We aren’t really protecting them. If I’m understanding this guy right, there’ll be a brief respite, and then a new syndicate is going to take over where the group we’re slaughtering left off.

And they paid Clancy for the opportunity. They paid him to send us in and do their dirty work.

How much does he even know about what they’re planning?

What else that he’s told us has been a total fucking lie?