Page 17 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Eleven

Riva

T he current catches me and hurries me toward the waterfall—a little too fast. A twinge of Jacob’s poison rattles my muscles at just the wrong moment, and my foot stumbles.

I careen forward, arms wheeling, and nearly tumble right down to the pond in a fatal swan dive.

My heart lurches. I try to throw myself backwards, teeter in the rushing water, and feel my shoes lose their grip.

As they slip right over the edge, I whip around and snatch out with my hands.

My arms smack into the water elbows first. One scrapes across a jagged piece of stone with a flare of pain through my forearm.

I gasp, and my other hand manages to snag on a knob of rock. My shoulder jars, the flow of the waterfall still battering me, but my body jolts to a stop.

Pain is splintering through both of my arms now, but I can’t afford to hang out here in the middle of the deluge. The helicopter might already have landed.

I gulp air and ease down the cliff as fast as I can manage. Brace my feet, slide my hands down to the next holds, then clutch them for dear life as my feet skid farther below. Press my face close to the rough, slimy rock so I can suck in little puffs of breath.

I will the throbbing in my arms and shoulders as far back as I can. Clench my jaw until it’s aching too.

Gravity is working with me rather than against me now, but a little too enthusiastically. It takes all my strength not to tumble with the falls into the shallow pool below.

By the time I’m close enough that I dare to jump the last several feet, tears burn in the backs of my eyes. Thankfully, the spray of the waterfall disguises any that have crept out.

I slog back to the bank on wobbly legs. The guys are gone—retreated to the car when they saw the helicopter coming, I assume. I’m too exhausted to even worry that they’ve abandoned me.

Regardless of how they feel about me , they really wanted the plastic superhero I’m carrying on my back.

The stretch of wilderness before I reach the overgrown track where we parked the car is totally black. I make my way more by sound and feel than sight. Finally, I catch the glint of moonlight off the windshield beyond the trees up ahead.

The moment I emerge, the engine rumbles to life. It must be Andreas behind the wheel, because Jacob leans out the passenger-side window to snap at me. “Let’s go!”

As if I’ve been dawdling.

I stomp over to the passenger door, passing through the glow of the running lights. When I open the door to hop into the SUV’s middle seat, Andreas has twisted in his spot up front.

“Are you bleeding?” he asks, his forehead furrowed with concern.

I glance down at my injured arm. The rock split the fabric, and blood streaks across the sliver of bare skin around the scrape, trickling down to the back of my hand. Somehow it hurts worse now that I can see how bad it looks.

“Just a little,” I say nonchalantly.

Andreas lets out a rough noise and reaches for the key, but Jacob snatches his wrist before he can.

“I know how to bandage a cut too. We need to get out of here now .”

Oh, joy. As Andreas reverses down the bumpy track, Jacob squeezes between the front seats to join me behind, bringing a first aid kit one of the guys had the foresight to stash in the glove compartment.

“I can do it,” I inform him, not super keen on the idea of the guy who sent me cliff-climbing in the first place handling my damaged flesh.

“It’s easier if it’s someone else,” he says curtly. Like he’s annoyed that I’m inconveniencing him even while he’s insisting on being inconvenienced.

I sigh and roll up my sleeve, biting my lip against a wince as the wet fabric rubs over the scrape. Jacob grasps my hand with the bare minimum of care and dabs the moisture from my arm with a folded piece of gauze.

Then he pauses. “You did get it, didn’t you?”

I wrinkle my nose at him. “I know better than to come back without your prize. It’s in the backpack, exactly as planned.”

He lets out a huff as if even that fact doesn’t please him and dabs antiseptic gel on my arm. As the stinging radiates through the muscle, he wraps some fresh gauze around my forearm.

Annoyingly, even while he’s been such a jerk, other parts of my body have woken up with little tingles at his closeness. Someone should really give me a good shake.

And I shouldn’t want it to be him.

“There, all patched up,” Jacob says briskly, and pushes to the other side of the seat to get as much possible distance from me. You’d think I’m the one who goes around poisoning people with a touch.

“You okay, Riva?” Andreas asks.

Is he worried about the cut still or what fresh hell his friend might have wreaked on me?

I decide to assume the former. “It was pretty shallow. More an irritation than a real danger. Better I lost some skin than my whole skull going over the falls.”

Jacob frowns, but just this once, his bad mood isn’t directed at me. “That computer punk shouldn’t have said the guy would be gone all night if he wasn’t sure.”

“Maybe plans changed at the last minute,” Andreas says.

“But you can lay into him when we get to the meetup if you want. Just don’t wreck his doll.

” He pauses and then speaks again in an eager tone so familiar in my memory that it brings a fresh burn of tears to my eyes.

“Did I ever tell you guys about the man I saw on the subway who used to work at a toy shop?”

“Probably,” Jacob mutters, but he can’t totally disguise the note of curiosity in his voice.

The guardians never let us hold on to much in the way of physical possessions, but Andreas built up a collection of a different type.

Every time he’d go off on a mission, he’d delve into the memories of any person he saw who caught his interest and come back with the most interesting stories he was able to dig up.

He falls into that yarn-spinning cadence now as he turns the SUV off the track onto a proper road. “It seemed like he hadn’t ever really wanted to run a store—especially one full of toys. He’d inherited it from an uncle, and when he first found out, he was outright pissed off. But then…”

As Andreas unravels his tale, I curl up against my window and let my eyes drift closed. It feels almost like old times, if I let myself focus on nothing but his voice.

By the time he’s switched on the radio instead, I’m drifting off to sleep, exhausted enough that even my damp clothes can’t keep me awake. It’s a long drive back to the city. When I wake up with the cutting of the engine, the fabric is pretty much dry.

The hacker is waiting in the back room of a foreclosed arcade. When the three of us come in, his head jerks up with an eager flash of his pale eyes.

Zian and Dominic, who’ve been waiting with him and sort of standing guard, straighten up with pinched expressions like they’ve had a little too much caffeine to stay awake this long.

“You—” Jacob starts to vent, but I don’t have the patience to listen to him harangue the guy. The expedition is finished now. We all survived.

I wave him quiet. “Let’s just get this over with.”

I unzip the backpack, meeting the hacker’s gaze. “We got what you wanted.”

When I pull out the action figure, still encased in its translucent watertight bags, the guy’s face lights up as if I’ve brought him the elixir of life. He reaches for it automatically, but Andreas steps in.

“You know we got it. Now you need to dig up the information we need. Then we pay.”

“Yes, of course.” The hacker grins at me. “You have no idea how much this means to me. They only ever made a hundred with that specific detailing, and most of those have ended up in the trash over the years. That one—my dad helped me buy it, just a couple of months before cancer finally got him.”

Oh. Maybe it’s a little more than just a silly toy after all.

I offer an awkward smile and tuck the box under my arm. “We’ll take good care of it until it’s time to hand it over.”

He chuckles, and his smile turns slyer. “I bet you will, if you had the skills to get it in the first place. I’d have liked to see you in action.”

I don’t know how to respond to that. His tone sounds oddly flirty, not that I’d be a good judge of that.

He can’t really think I’ve come back from his death-defying mission looking for a hookup, right?

“There wasn’t much to see,” I reply. “It was very dark.”

“Hmm.” The hacker sidles close enough that he can trace his fingers over my forearm—the unwounded one. “But so many fun things can happen in the dark, especially with a girl as?—”

“Get away from her,” Zian snarls, shoving between us so abruptly that I stumble backward. Before I can even catch my balance, another hand grabs me by the elbow and yanks me farther away from the overly optimistic hacker.

I glance around and find Jacob gripping me, his eyes searing cold as he glares at the other guy with just as much hostility as Zian is giving off. “She isn’t on the menu.”

“Whoa, whoa,” the hacker says, holding up his hands and backing up a few paces. “No offense meant. Just like to take my shots when they present themselves. I didn’t realize you were together like that.”

“She’s with us,” Zian says with a growl, and even though I know he doesn’t mean like that, that he might mean simply as a prisoner, something low in my belly wobbles giddily at the sight of his protective stance.

“Sure, no problem. Here, initial gesture of good-will—I have the fake IDs you wanted too.”

He hands Andreas the counterfeit driver’s licenses with our photos and birthdates that make us all drinking age—which we might actually be, not that we plan on drowning ourselves in alcohol.

We never celebrated birthdays in the facility, and the best we can figure is we’re around twenty or twenty-one.

The hacker takes another step back and gives us a flippant salute. “I’ll get on with your search… and maybe with fielding a phone call from one very pissed off trust-fund kid too.”

A smile touches his face as he says those words, but it tightens almost as soon as it’s formed. A shadow passes over his expression. He tramps out the door without another word.

I watch him go, a strange pang echoing through me. His happiness about getting his toy back didn’t last very long, even if the figure had a special meaning to him.

How much did his former friendship mean to him? Getting this one thing back might not be enough to heal all the wounds dealt when it was stolen.

I look around at the guys I’ve reunited with and somehow found myself so much farther apart from at the same time, and suddenly all I want to do is burrow under the covers on my bed and imagine we could start this whole situation over from the beginning. And that it’d turn out better this time.