Page 152 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-Five

Riva

O ur pathfinder—whose name she’s finally told us is Lindsay—lifts her head abruptly in the thickening darkness.

“I can feel it. The land slopes down again right up ahead. Like it keeps going that way, not a little dip.”

She’s gotten our hopes up over what was just a dip a couple of times already in the past hour. This time she sounds a lot more confident than before, though.

At the skeptical looks a couple of the younger shadowbloods shoot her through the dusk, she raises her chin. “It’s clearer than last time. And we should be getting almost to the highest spot by now, right?”

Nadia smothers a yawn. “I sure hope so.”

Zian and Lindsay tramp on at the head of the pack. Andreas eases back along the line to where Jacob and I are bringing up the rear like usual.

Drey glances over the motley procession before turning to us with a low voice. “I think if we haven’t reached the top yet this time, we should make camp anyway. Everyone’s getting pretty tired.”

My mouth twists. “Yeah.”

We took another short break about an hour ago after Lindsay had to divert us from one animal track that veered off along the side of the hills to a clearer passage continuing upward. At that point, I think Dominic killed half a dozen twigs healing blisters.

My shoulders are aching under the straps of my pack. The pain is faint compared to the sharper sensation digging into my chest that has nothing to do with the exertion of the hike.

We’ve finished off all the juice, and we’re getting low on water. The sky clotted with more clouds for part of the afternoon, but they burned off before any rain fell.

At this point, I’d rather we got rained on so we could collect some of it even if we all end up drenched.

And of course there’s also the memory of the kids’ shocked stares after my scream wrenched through the tiger, hovering at the back of my mind.

Jacob frowns. “The kids will have an easier time resting if they know the goal’s in sight.”

I swallow down the worry it’s probably better I don’t voice—that our goal might not be in sight at all. That we could reach the crest of this section of hills and see nothing but more jungle.

And then what?

“If we push them to total exhaustion,” Andreas murmurs, “it’s only going to?—”

Zian’s excited shout cuts him off, an eager squeal from Lindsay mingling with it.

“You’ve got to see this,” he calls back to us.

We all hustle forward, breathless remarks passing between the younger shadowbloods. My pulse kicks up a notch, partly spurred by the whiffs of anticipation lacing the air from the group.

Zian and Lindsay have stopped up ahead, eased off into the thicker vegetation to make room for the rest of us to come up alongside them. The gasps and exclamations of our younger companions as they reach that spot wash away most of the gloom that’d fallen over me.

The three of us arrive at their heels, and for a second I lose my breath.

The landscape below us is draped in the same black as the shadowed jungle around us—except for a broad patch of gleaming lights piercing the night. In the darkness, I can’t tell how far away from the hills it is, but it’s definitely there : a big, vibrant city.

We’ll be able to get food and water, one way or another. We’ll have access to vehicles and phones.

The worst part of the trek is nearly behind us.

The kids let out soft whoops, grabbing each other in a jumble of hugs in their relief. Andreas shoots me a grin.

“Guess I didn’t need to worry after all. Let’s figure out a good place to hunker down for the night and who’ll take first watch.”

“I’ll go first,” I offer automatically. “I’m too keyed up to sleep right away anyway.”

Jacob nods. “Then I’m with you. We’ll get one of the older teens too—that should be enough eyes.”

Settling into camp is a chaotic business. We hand out a little more food from our stash and try to make sure each of the kids has a decently comfortable patch of ground to curl up on.

We brought some sheets from the hotel, but anything heavier like an actual blanket would have been too much cargo. They bundle part of those up as thin pillows and drape the rest over their bodies.

The jungle terrain hardly makes for a cozy bed. I know that from our first night.

But everyone makes the most of it without complaint, maybe with dreams of finding actual beds again by the end of tomorrow.

I pick out a perch on a stump overlooking the other side of the hill and the city below. Jacob is still prowling around the perimeter of our camp, checking for immediate threats, but I suspect he’ll stick close to me once he’s done.

At the rustle of brush, I turn my head, but it’s Nadia venturing toward me, her statuesque frame giving off a faint glow to help light her way.

“Hey,” I say, abruptly hesitant. Nadia is probably the closest to a new friend I’ve made among the younger shadowbloods, but I have no idea what she thinks of me now. “Did you want to take first watch?”

She rubs her mouth. “Yeah. I’ll keep an eye on things at the other end of the camp once everyone’s settled. I just wanted to look at the city a little more first.”

I can’t hold back a smile. “Sure. I get that. If you want to take this post, I can cover the other side and?—”

Nadia cuts me off with a shake of her head. “Nah. I’ll get too distracted if I have that view in front of me the whole time. But… thank you.”

She sounds a little uncertain too. I shut my mouth and simply gaze off over the darkened landscape with her, trying to chart the path we’ll take even though that’s impossible when I can barely make out the trees.

After a minute or two, Nadia inhales audibly. “The other Firsts… Do you all have abilities like what you did to the tiger? I mean, that strong?”

Oh. Yeah, it does make sense for that question to be on her mind. She’ll never have seen any of her facility-mates pull off something like that.

“We’ve all got different powers,” I say carefully. “But they’re all pretty strong. That’s the only reason we were able to escape—before and now. Jacob had to basically set off an entire earthquake to get us out, you know.”

“Wow.” She gazes at the city lights for a few beats longer and then looks at me. “None of the rest of us can pull off anything like that. At least, I’ve never met any shadowblood my age or younger who could even get close to that kind of impact.”

She hasn’t asked a question outright, but it’s implicit in her words. I roll my answer around in my head, debating how much to tell her.

But she deserves the truth as much as we did, doesn’t she?

I swallow down my doubts. “When we escaped the first time, we tracked down one of the founders of the Guardianship—a woman who worked with Clancy’s parents.

She’s the one who figured out the process for merging humans with…

with what they think of as monsters. She told us that when we—the Firsts—were very young and she saw how we were developing, she decided she’d made a mistake. She wanted us dead.”

Nadia’s eyebrows shoot up. “But they kept making more of us.”

“It seems like the other founders and whoever else had control by then didn’t agree with her. They shut her out more and more.”

I tilt my head, thinking of the laptop we stole from her home in the Canadian wilderness, the one that’s either still in Rollick’s hands with the rest of our old supplies or tossed in the trash if he didn’t bother to hold on to our packs.

“We found some records from her work,” I go on.

“We couldn’t understand much of it, but as far as we could tell, when the other guardians pushed her for her process, she left out some parts.

She might have been hoping it wouldn’t work at all.

It looks like what actually happened was the later shadowbloods they created had a lot less of the ‘monstrous’ stuff working for them. ”

Nadia hums to herself. Then, to my surprise, she lets out a dry bark of a laugh. “Well, that sucks.”

It’s my turn to have my eyebrows shoot up. “You’d rather you had more power?”

“Sure.” She runs her hands through her thick black hair, rumpling the short strands. “Right now I can just glow a bit. If I could set off a whole solar bomb or something… We’d have a lot easier time keeping out of the guardians’ hands, wouldn’t we?”

Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that she might feel that way.

“It isn’t always a good feeling,” I have to point out. “I don’t really like seeing what I’ve done, even if it helps us.”

“But you wouldn’t get rid of the power if you had the choice, would you?”

I open my mouth and close it again.

There was a time when I’d hoped the real monsters, the shadowkind, might be able to tell us how to carve our monstrous parts out of us. That was before I knew about all the younger shadowbloods who needed our help to escape.

Before I realized just how far-reaching the Guardianship’s influence extended.

“No,” I admit. “Not right now. Not as long as we might still need it.”

Ajax’s measured voice travels from behind us, making me startle. “I wish I could read a lot more of people’s minds. Even if I’d probably see stuff that’s disturbing.”

I turn to face him where he’s standing a few steps back on the path, chiding myself for getting so caught up in the conversation that I didn’t hear him coming.

Although he’ll have trained in all the same non-supernatural skills like stealth that the rest of us have, so maybe it’s not totally my fault.

I guess I haven’t horrified the younger shadowbloods after all, at least not all of them.

“You might get stronger,” I say, shifting my gaze between him and Nadia. “The six of us all had our powers expand over time, especially once we were technically adults. I didn’t know I could scream like that until a few months ago.”

Nadia perks up visibly. She rubs her hands together with a smirk that looks a little devious. “Maybe we’ll figure out ways to develop the talents more when we get to decide how we train for ourselves.”