Page 166 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Thirty-Four

Riva

W e might be free, but we’re not exactly done.

Dominic hustles over to Zian, having spotted the evidence of his wound on his clothes. As he ushers him outside to find a shrub or tree to draw healing power from, I turn toward the three younger shadowbloods crouched in the back of the trailer.

Devon is there, and Booker, and a fourteen-year-old girl named Harriet who was caught up in our escape but mostly kept stoically quiet.

Clancy decided to separate the two couples who were part of our earlier escape, leaving Ajax and Nadia behind, maybe to give him more leverage over their significant others as well as us Firsts.

They peer at the carnage left in our wake in silence and then at me. Clancy’s blood still saturates my hair and smears my skin.

I swipe at my face with my sleeve, but it’s a little too late to make a cleaner entrance. Booker’s jaw works.

We didn’t have any way of looping them in on our plans. This is a much gorier revolt than the first one they joined.

“We’ll go back to get the others,” I promise.

“Right away. Without Clancy giving orders, the whole organization falls apart, at least while the guardians are scrambling to figure out what to do next. We’ll head back to the plane, and a few of us will make the pilot take us back to the island to get the rest of the shadowbloods while the rest figure out a safe place for us to regroup. Okay?”

Devon rubs his hand across his mouth with a little shudder. “Are you going to kill all the guardians on the island too?”

“Not if they don’t get in our way,” Jacob mutters. “It’ll be up to them.”

He slips from the back of the trailer at Dominic’s beckoning and limps over to our healer. Griffin comes up beside me and squats down to put himself eye to eye with the younger shadowbloods.

“It makes sense that you’re unsettled,” he says. “You’re probably not all that sure about me either. We all wish we could have let you in on what we were planning sooner, but there wasn’t any way that wouldn’t have tipped off the guardians too.”

Andreas dips his head, his voice low and rough. “There was no way they were letting us go while they were still alive. I think if you look back on everything you’ve seen of the guardians, you know that.”

Booker hesitates. “They were ready to hurt us, maybe even kill the three of us, to keep you in line.”

“Yeah.” I grimace. “You should never be in that position again—not you three or Nadia or Ajax—or any of the others. We look out for each other. We’re blood, and they can’t take that away from us, no matter what they do.”

Harriet’s head droops. “I don’t want to go back to the island. Or any other facility. I never liked any of it.”

“You won’t have to,” Griffin assures her. “Will you come with us? I think we’d better leave the trailer behind.”

Andreas glances around the interior at the slumped bodies, the splattered blood, and the tools the guardians meant to use to torment their “leverage” if we disobeyed. “Yeah. It’ll only slow us down.”

The younger shadowbloods cautiously creep forward. As Griffin ushers them out of the trailer, I turn to Andreas. “What did you do to the guardians to get them so confused?”

His mouth twists at a pained angle. “I wiped one guy’s memories completely so he had no idea who he was or what he was doing here.

Then I wiped another from all the others’ minds so they didn’t understand where he’d come from.

And after that, I threw a bunch of projected images into the mix to throw them off even more. ”

A thread of strain winds through his voice, and I don’t think it’s just because of the energy using his ability to that extent took out of him. He’s no more comfortable with the most monstrous side of his abilities than I am with mine.

I squeeze his arm. “We all did what we had to do. Now we can really take charge of our lives.”

“Yeah.” He leans in to give me a quick but heated kiss and brushes his forehead against mine. “I’m right here with you every step of the way, Tink.”

We gather the guardians’ phones and weapons for possible later use and clamber out of the trailer to find Zian already unhitching it from the truck.

“We’re going to need both of them to carry all of us,” he says, nodding to the van we arrived in.

Tegan watches the proceedings with her arms wrapped around her chest, hugging herself. “Even after we get everyone off the island, aren’t the other guardians going to keep chasing us?”

“I can handle that,” Andreas tells her. “At least partly. Once we have the other kids out of there, I’m going to erase Clancy from everyone’s minds.

If none of the guardians can remember him, they won’t remember his project or where he organized it or any of that.

There’ll be records, but it’ll take them a while to piece things together—time we can use to cover our tracks completely. ”

I peer into the front of Clancy’s truck, where Jacob has taken the driver’s seat. “Does this one have a working radio? If there are any local stations, we can figure out where exactly we are on the drive to the plane.”

He frowns at the controls. “Looks like it. Let’s get out of here, and we can check in with each other before we get to the runway to decide the final details.”

“Sounds good to me.” I like the idea of putting some distance between us and Clancy’s worksite, if only because I have no idea how aware his clients are of the details of his operations—or when they might arrive to confirm his success.

Dominic comes up beside me, resting a gentle tentacle on my waist. “You’re completely okay, Riva?”

I smile at him, letting myself lean into his offered embrace just for a moment. “Getting there. I’m looking forward to my next shower, though.”

He gives a rough chuckle and presses a kiss to my cheek, heedless of what I recently wiped off my skin. “Here’s hoping we can give you that soon.”

We climb into the vehicles—Jacob, Dom, me, and the kids from our mission in the truck while Griffin, Zian, and Andreas head to the van with the guardians’ hostages. Jacob guns the engine and spins the wheel to take us back onto the road.

“Good-bye and good riddance,” he says without a backward glance.

The van roars ahead of us, and Jake speeds after it. I take a long breath, feeling my nerves just beginning to settle down, and shift in my seat to check on the others behind me.

Just as I turn, an explosion booms and sears through the air beyond the rearview window.

It’s the trailer—it’s just blasted apart in a surge of flames. The impact jolts the ground beneath the tires, and Jacob swears.

“I didn’t think we were going to—” he starts.

Dominic is shaking his head, his body tensed. “That wasn’t us. That?—”

Another force wallops into the side of the truck, wrenching away his voice.

Our vehicle skids and tumbles into a roll.

The doors fly right off their hinges. We crash into the dry earth on the side of the road, my head smacking the steel frame.

Jacob lolls, dangling from his seatbelt, mumbling. Dominic has been flung out onto the roadside just beyond my reach.

Not that I seem to know how to reach anymore. My head is aching and spinning at the same time.

I can’t collect my voice; I can’t remember how to move. Pain washes through my limbs in waves.

Footsteps thud across the cracked dirt. I have a blurred impression of two figures standing over me—a broad-shouldered man and a wiry woman.

“You did a good job, my shadowbloods,” the man says in a roughly amused baritone. “You did half of my job for me.”

My mouth opens and closes as I grasp for words. For a shriek. For anything.

The man turns to the woman. “Toni, we need them to know right from the start that I’m no one to fool with. That one first—the one with the tentacles.”

He points, and the woman raises a gun I hadn’t noticed clutched in her hand. “Of course, Mr. Balthazar.”

“No!” I choke out, barely a whisper. I manage to jerk my arm forward?—

And something slams into my head from behind, knocking all the thoughts out of my head.

Right before the darkness closes in, the last thing I hear is the blare of a gunshot.