Page 158 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-Nine

Riva

I hear Nadia before I see her—her dry laugh carrying from between the trees by the row of obstacle courses. I recognize it, but there’s a dull edge to it that wasn’t there before.

It’s harder to spot her than I expect. I find her standing with one of the other older teen shadowbloods and Ajax near the climbing course, dressed in black sweats and a dark gray tee that blend with the shadows between the trees.

Before I’ve even spoken to her, my heart sinks.

The three of them glance over at me as I emerge into the clearing by the first of the rope ladders. I nod to them all, my gaze holding Nadia’s.

“Hey. No neon today?”

She rubs her toned arms self-consciously. “I guess I just haven’t been feeling all that bright lately.”

Her mouth tilts into a half-smile, but I can’t find even a hint of good humor in it. If my heart was heavy before, now it feels like it’s morphed into a lump of lead.

Ajax runs his hand over the sheen of stubble on his dark scalp, but he can’t seem to think of anything to say at all. Only the third kid, the one who wasn’t part of our escape, shows any energy.

He claps his hands together. “Come on! Are we going to climb or what?”

The form of a guardian stirs farther away along the edge of the clearing, with a clearing of her throat. “This is time for training, not talking.”

I hold back a bitter snort. When have they ever given us much time to talk—to do anything other than train and bodily necessities like eat?

The guy who clapped his hands grasps the ladder, and Nadia and Ajax shuffle into line behind him automatically. The droop of Nadia’s shoulders and sluggishness of Ajax’s movements send a jabbing sensation through my gut.

I touch Nadia’s arm. “Your brightness got us through a lot. Remember that.” And Ajax’s shoulder. “You heard things the rest of us couldn’t.”

I don’t know how well my attempt at raising their spirits lands. Nadia only dips her head, and the smile Ajax shoots at me is fleeting. The energy in the clearing remains downcast.

What else can I say?

A weird sense of homesickness winds through me, missing the brief days we had our freedom. Not because I loved tramping through the jungle with not much more than crackers to eat, but because we did all help each other.

It’s not just the six Firsts who can accomplish a lot together. All of us shadowbloods make an amazing team.

When we have the chance.

As I watch Nadia and then Ajax scale the ladder with obvious reluctance, my heart seems to plummet all the way to the ground.

As difficult as our trek on the mainland was, it was better than this. We deserve to be free.

We aren’t the tools Clancy sees us as or the experimental property we are to most of the other guardians. We’re people —we shouldn’t be owned by anyone.

We sure as hell don’t owe the Guardianship anything after the hell we’ve already been through at their hands.

Who would Nadia and Ajax and all the others be if they could simply… be ? Have the space and peace to explore what a regular human life could look like, on their terms?

I want to give them that, so fucking badly. But I don’t have a clue how.

I’m just reaching for the ladder myself—not that I really want to go through the course, but I’ve got to do something to look like a participant and not a rebel—when the underbrush rustles behind me. “Riva?”

My pulse hiccups before I even glance back. It’s Griffin’s voice, soft and even.

As I turn around, he comes to a stop at the end of the path.

It’s hard to imagine that I confused him with his twin just weeks ago. All I can see now are the ways they differ—the shagginess of Griffin’s slightly longer blond hair in contrast with Jacob’s smoothness, the gentler lines of his face.

The distance in his eyes, as if the whole sky really is contained in their blue irises.

I clamp down on the urge to hug myself. “What’s up?”

His mouth forms a small smile. “I was hoping we could spend a little time together. We haven’t seen each other since… everything. There are some things I’d like to explain.”

Searching his gaze, I grapple with my response. I’m pretty sure he did what he did to protect the rest of us, not because he was the real traitor among us. But not one hundred percent sure.

And either way, I’m supposed to believe he betrayed us. What reaction would the guardians expect to see to keep up that ruse?

I raise one shoulder in a partial shrug. “I’m not interested in hearing your explanations.”

He holds out his hand. “Please. For old time’s sake?”

Have I resisted enough to sell my wariness? I’m also supposed to be trying to cooperate with the new status quo, to avoid me or the other guys getting punished.

I settle for ignoring his hand, as much as I’d like to take it, but stepping toward him. “Fine. What did you have in mind?”

Griffin’s expression twitches as he lowers his hand, a trace of discomfort crossing it that I wouldn’t have expected to see even a week ago. The feelings that’ve woken up inside him haven’t vanished, then.

He motions for me to follow him and doesn’t speak again until we’re partway along the narrow path. “You seemed to enjoy tossing the knives during our last meeting. Clancy agreed to give us private use of the shooting range.”

I press my hand to my mouth to contain a sputter of laughter. “And you’re not worried you’ll end up with a bullet in you?”

Griffin’s tone lightens—just slightly, but any break from his new typical monotone is a relief to hear. “You managed not to stab me last time, so I think my chances are good.”

We cross the stone bridge over the thin but deep river that courses away from the waterfall and climb the damp stone steps to the hidden entrance. The cool spray flecks my skin, sharp against the tropical heat.

Just inside the entrance to the shooting range, with the water rushing down inches away, Griffin stops me with a careful grasp of my wrist. He leans in so I can hear him over the warble of the falls.

“We aren’t being directly monitored here. Clancy went along with a lot of concessions… because he thinks I'm trying to get him the data he wants."

He pushes up one sleeve to reveal a band like the ones the guardians made Zian and me wear—in the hopes of monitoring the forming of our marked connection.

My stomach clenches. “I?—”

“It’s okay,” Griffin murmurs. He takes my hand, interlacing our fingers, and lets out a sigh that speaks of days of bottled tension releasing.

“I wouldn’t want to ‘help’ him like that anyway.

It just buys us a little privacy. He said it only records physiological data, not voices, but I thought we should be extra careful. ”

Hence talking by the waterfall. I nod.

Griffin’s head dips closer, the side of his face grazing mine. “I’m sorry. This isn’t—I didn’t want us to end up back here. I don’t know…”

He trails off, but the anguish in his words is unmistakable. Any lingering doubts I felt disintegrate.

I ease closer to him, slipping my arm around his back in a loose embrace. The crisply airy scent that clings to him fills my lungs and tingles through the shadows in my blood.

“Why didn’t you tell us you were worried about Celine?”

Griffin exhales raggedly. “I couldn’t tell if there was really something to be worried about or if I was misreading her.

It wasn’t anything obvious. Just here and there, especially when we were in the helicopter, I got flickers of emotion from her that felt upset, or defiant, in ways that didn’t match everyone else.

I didn’t want to accuse her of anything when I had no idea what was actually going on with her. ”

“You were sure in the end, though.”

“Yeah.” He swallows audibly. “She was so relieved— happy —when she heard the choppers coming for us. And a little triumphant. It was obvious then that she’d done something…

I think she’d brought a device that would send out a location, but one that couldn’t be set up properly if she was trying to carry it on her.

I was watching her pretty carefully before Zian pulled us away. ”

I have a vague memory of Celine darting out of sight in the middle of our rush out of the facility. She could have grabbed something then.

But I also remember what she said to me when she acknowledged her betrayal. “It might not have been you stopping her before. It’s possible she wasn’t totally sure if she should use it or not… until after I admitted that we might turn to the shadowkind for help.”

“Either way…” I feel Griffin’s wince in the movement of his features next to mine.

“I didn’t want her dead. It was just—in the moment, when they’d arrived and they’d already incapacitated most of you, and Dominic’s strategy didn’t work—all I could think was that the guardians were going to take us back either way.

And the only way I’d be able to fix things was if Clancy believed I was still on his side. ”

“And he wouldn’t have believed that if Celine was alive to tell him she’d signaled them,” I fill in.

“But maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was some way we could have still escaped. It was hard to see clearly with my feelings and my ideas all jumbled together—I’m not used to sorting through them anymore.

I thought I saw our best chance, so I took it, because I thought I had to, but I can’t say that was right. ”

A tremor runs through his lanky frame. “I’m going to get better. I’ll get used to balancing both again. Andreas managed to arrange to see me yesterday—he’s found out a few things—I have some ideas for using this mission to turn things back in our favor.”

Hope flutters up through my chest. “What?”

“I’ll have to see what I can pull off. Clancy might believe I’m standing with him, but that doesn’t mean he listens to me all that much.” Griffin pauses. “I don’t think we can end this while he’s still alive, though.”

I absorb that statement with only the faintest twinge of uneasiness.