Page 144 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-One

Jacob

I thought the island we were stuck on was fucking hot, but somehow the jungle we’ve crashed into is even worse.

The interlacing branches overhead, heavy with leaves, block out most of the direct sunlight, but humidity saturates the air underneath. Trudging along feels more like wading than walking.

Bugs buzz past, some of them stopping to nip at us. I guess the island breezes kept the worst of them away back by the facility.

Our group skirts a patch of huge ferns, the edges of the fronds tickling over my arm. I swipe at the sweat collecting on the back of my neck and scan our surroundings.

I used to like the occasional opportunities the guardians gave us to explore the forest beyond the facility where we grew up. Gazing up at the leaves and breathing in the wild scents loosened something inside me, like a trace of freedom.

I’m not sure I’m ever going to feel the same way about the jungle. Between our training on the island and this trek, I can’t help associating the dense vegetation and heavy warmth with restrictions and perils rather than peace.

We’ve been walking since sun-up, other than a short snack break partway through the morning and a slightly longer break for lunch a couple of hours ago. The younger kids appear to be drooping with the sticky heat, but the older teens are carrying themselves pretty well, I have to admit.

Well, they’ve been through the same brutal training as the rest of us. At seventeen, they’re practically adults, not kids at all.

We were around that age the first time we made a run for it.

The thought brings my gaze veering back to my friends.

Andreas is loping along as quickly as the dense underbrush allows, no sign of sickness from the jungle water he drank last night. We filled up two emptied juice jugs at the waterfall before we moved on from our campsite.

He’s got a cord he picked up somewhere wrapped around one hand. On the easier stretches of terrain, he’s fallen into a rhythm of twisting it into knots and loosening them again, like he used to do sometimes back at the old facility. Maybe it helps him focus.

Zian pushes ahead at the front of the group, snapping branches and crumpling shrubs to allow easier passage for all of us behind. And probably terrifying any wildlife that might notice us into giving us a wide berth.

Well, other than the damned bugs.

Dominic has stuck to the middle of the group, his head swiveling periodically as he conducts a similar scan to mine. Any time one of the younger shadowbloods so much as stubs their toe, he’s there, siphoning life out of a twig or a wildflower to set them right again.

His short ponytail clings damply to his neck. I hope he’s keeping his health in mind just as much as everyone else’s.

Riva prefers to stick to the rear of the group where she can monitor the whole bunch more easily, so I’ve hung back too. It means I’m close by if the brush happens to trip her up, although she’s scrambling through it perfectly fine so far even with her tiny frame.

And it means I can keep an eye on my brother wherever he happens to drift through the group.

Griffin does drift quite a bit. One hour he’ll be at the left of the pack, the next at the right. Sometimes he presses forward until he’s just behind Zian and other times he slows until he falls into stride with Riva.

When that’s happened, she’s reached out and taken his hand. Nothing spoken, not much more than a brief glance exchanged, but something in his expression softens just a tad when her fingers curl around his.

It makes him look almost like he really is my brother again.

Can I trust that impression? Is he actually coming around, snapping out of the demented stupor the guardians inflicted on him?

Or is he simply making the best moves he can to win us over so that he can then betray us when he has an ideal opportunity?

I can’t read the answers in his face or his behavior. And the knowledge that he can sense my uneasiness without even trying gnaws at me.

We always thought that Griffin was the weakest out of us, at least when it came to combat skills. But knowing how your enemies are feeling, being able to twist those emotions to your will if you want to…

I’d rather deal with another guy like me, with telekinetic talents and poison spikes, than face off with my brother.

At least I haven’t seen any sign that he’s manipulating us. Riva might have kissed him last night, whatever he said to her that encouraged the gesture of affection, and she’s offering moments of companionship now, but her gaze stays wary when she looks at him.

She isn’t convinced he’s really come back to us either. And if he was going to mess with anyone’s emotions to his benefit, presumably it’d be mine or hers.

The kids in front of us clamber over a fallen tree that rises to my thighs, and I extend my hand automatically to heft Riva with me over it. She accepts the help with a soft smile that rearranges my insides and gives my hand a squeeze before she lets go on the other side.

Even when we’re not touching, it feels like we are through the mark now burned into my flesh at the top of my collarbone. I can sense exactly where she is in an instant.

I’ll never really lose her again.

But somehow I can’t convince myself that even that closeness is enough. Can’t shake the vague impression that there must be something more I should offer that I haven’t worked out yet.

It turns out that not every wild creature around has been warded off by Zian’s might. We’re just ducking around the low branches of a vine-draped tree when one of those “vines” lifts its head with a threatening hiss.

The huge snake’s head swings toward Riva. With a jolt of panic, I hurl out a surge of power that smacks it backward but doesn’t dislodge it from its perch.

Before I can launch a more aggressive defense, Riva sets her hand on my shoulder and parts her lips. The sound that seeps from them echoes the snake’s hiss with a hint of one of her deadly shrieks.

A flinch ripples through the snake’s body. It recoils and slithers away higher into the tree.

Riva shoots me another smile. “I appreciate the protection, but I wanted to see if that would work. I’d rather not kill the animals if we don’t have to.”

She looks so pleased with herself—with the control she’s gaining over her powers, with the kindness she was able to offer that beast I’d have smashed to pieces—that my heart just about bursts.

I rein in the urge to grab her and pour all my adoration into a kiss of my own. We’ve both got to stay alert.

But the longing lingers as we tramp onward.

The jumpy kid with the spiky white hair does one of his teleporting hops and nearly trips onto his face. Riva dashes forward in an instant and catches him before he hits the ground.

She walks on next to him, getting into a murmured conversation. I’m torn between wanting to catch up so I’m close at hand if she needs help again—not that she ever needs that much—and knowing she’d rather at least one of us was at the back of the pack to keep track of all the kids.

Then Griffin drifts backward again, falling into step beside me. The weird pang that hits me every time my twin is nearby radiates through my chest.

It feels wrong to still be grieving him when he’s right here . But he’s not exactly. Not one piece of my body has come to grips with that fact.

“You don’t miss the comforts of the facility?” I hear myself saying before I’ve considered the question. It’s not a bad one, though. If I could assume he’d answer honestly.

Griffin shakes his head without hesitation. “It wasn’t really that comfortable when you got down to it, was it? I just… I was looking at things too narrowly.”

I guess that’s one way of saying he royally screwed us over.

As if he’s read that thought as well as my emotions, he glances over at me. “I am sorry, you know. I made mistakes—I misjudged the situation. I hope… I hope that none of us will have to hurt people the way you had to before, but I can see why you didn’t feel you had much choice.”

I gaze back at him, letting my gaze harden. “Anyone we hurt, it was to make sure they couldn’t kill us. Or turn us back into slaves.”

“I know. I know you did the best you could.”

He pauses, a crease forming in his forehead as if he isn’t sure of what he’s going to say next. He exhales softly.

His voice comes out quieter. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, too.

It always seemed… wrong, being apart from the rest of you.

Especially you . I tried to tell the guardians, to convince them.

We supported each other in a way they didn’t seem to understand.

And I didn’t know what you were thinking with me being gone, how that would affect you, but it bothered me, so it couldn’t be good. ”

Another pause. His head bows. “I’m not sure it would really have made things much better if they had let me come back the way I am now, though.”

“It would have been better,” I burst out. “I wouldn’t have been thinking you were murdered because of a plan I helped come up with. They couldn’t have messed with us making us believe that was mostly Riva’s fault.”

I aim a scowl at my twin. “You realize that’s the main reason they kept us apart, right? It was an easy way to lie to us, to fuck us up even more than they already had.”

“I didn’t know what they’d told you,” Griffin says. “If I had, I’d like to think I’d have fought harder to get back to you. Maybe I wouldn’t have trusted Clancy at all, even though he acted like he wanted nothing to do with the group who’d been handling me since the escape.”

I can’t conceive of what our lives would have been like if Griffin had turned up, in his currently vacant state or not, before Riva crashed back into our lives. If we’d known from the start that the guardians had lied to us about his fate—and therefore probably hers too.

It kills me even trying to picture it in comparison to what actually went down.