Page 23 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

She sounds young. I jerk up her goggles to properly see her face beneath her short brown hair and find myself staring at a woman who couldn’t be more than a few years older than most of the college students we’ve been hiding among.

Andreas grimaces. “She isn’t going to know much about anyone who worked here two decades ago.” He stalks closer to the man Zian has pinned and shakes his head. “Neither of them would have been around at the right time.”

“Check them anyway,” Jacob says.

“Check us for what?” the guy demands. “We’re just following orders here—we don’t?—”

Zian clamps his hand over his captive’s mouth. When the woman starts to sputter, I do the same to her. Zian and I exchange a look, a hint of exasperation crossing his face, and a weird but welcome sense of comradery stirs in my chest.

This is how it’s meant to be—all of us working together toward the same goals.

Andreas kneels down next to the woman. His eyes flare with a ruddy sheen, and I know he’s searching her memories for any interactions with Ursula Engel.

His grimace makes it clear that he got nothing, as expected. He moves on to the man, studies him for a few beats, and then straightens up.

“They never met her.”

Jacob’s eyes narrow. “Is it just the two of you working here?”

The woman nods beneath my grasp, and the man does the same a moment later.

Dominic frowns. “There was a family photo in one of the apartments—everyone in it Asian. Neither of these two would fit, and the guards wouldn’t either.”

Trust him to have paid that much attention to the details. We all pause, listening for any sign of another presence in the building.

Our captives stay silent, but mine’s stress spiked at Dominic’s comment. It’s possible that whoever that photo belonged to isn’t here at the moment, but I’m willing to bet they are.

“We should search the other rooms,” I say.

Jacob scowls at me, but it’s the obvious next step. He motions to Zian.

“Let’s get them tied up and gagged, and then we can move on. Make sure they don’t have any other weapons—or phones—on them. We can always question them more later if nothing else pans out.”

I suppose we could at least find out what they’re working on here—although whether it’ll have much to do with what Ursula Engel would have been working on nearly two and a half decades ago, there’s no way to know.

Once the scientists are bound, we venture on down the hallway. There are just a few more doors.

The first leads to a records room with shelves stuffed with textbooks, binders, and storage boxes. The next is merely a washroom.

Zian gazes through the doorway and shakes his head with a frown. The door swings open to reveal another lab room with a single counter and then two desks with computer equipment, and no one in view.

I step inside, my nerves prickling uneasily. The woman I caught was worried about us finding something . What are we missing?

A faint tang in the air interrupts my thoughts. It’s a trace of nervous adrenaline—fresh, tainting the air.

Someone was in here, recently, and now they’re not.

Or at least they’re not anywhere we can see.

The guys have started to pull back, but I wave at them to catch their attention. They watch me as I slink farther into the room, Jacob with unrestrained skepticism, the others curiously.

I make a circuit of the room, taking several breaths, and stop where the scent is strongest. Where a tiny, renewed whiff reaches my nose.

I point at the wall behind the desk and turn to mouth the words to the guys: “There’s someone in there.”

Zian hustles over. His eyes widen as his penetrating vision must confirm my suspicions. He beckons Jacob over and points to where I suppose the opening mechanism for the safe room must be.

The people who run this place weren’t prepared for anyone like us. Jacob focuses on the wall, flicks his fingers, and a hidden panel detaches itself from the edge it sat flush against, whirring open.

Zian didn’t just see the woman who’s hunched in a corner of the narrow room on the other side. The second the panel glides open, he lunges at her and snatches the rifle she was lifting out of her hands.

As he snaps it over his knee, she flinches and cowers back against the wall.

She must be the one who stays in the room with the photo Dominic saw. She looks Chinese or maybe Vietnamese, her smooth skin beige in contrast with Zian’s peachy brown but her rounded features reminding me of his.

Her black hair is streaked with gray, and tiny lines have formed at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She’s definitely old enough to have known Engel, if she’s been working here that long.

Zian grasps her wrists to hold her in place. There’s no need to gag her when there’s no one left for her to call out to.

“We’re not here to hurt you,” he tells her gruffly. “We’ve just got some questions.”

“I don’t bargain with terrorists,” she snaps.

Andreas laughs. “It’s a good thing that’s not what we are, then. We’re looking to tone down the terror, not increase it.”

He ambles over and crouches down next to Zian. “I don’t suppose you ever worked alongside a woman named Ursula Engel?”

The flicker of surprise the woman can’t suppress sends a surge of triumph through me. We’re going to get some real answers after all.

Andreas doesn’t ask anything else out loud. He stares into the woman’s eyes, already rummaging through all her memories of the woman in question.

Our captive flinches and twists away as well as she can, but Andreas doesn’t need the eye contact. Zian keeps his hand clamped around her wrists. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Andreas starts to speak, his voice distant as if he’s in a trance. Which I guess he sort of is, still riffling through her mind.

“It seems like they worked together a little more than two years. Dr. Gao here mentioned it when Engel was getting ready to leave. From the discussions they had, they were working on ‘compounds’ and ‘chemical enhancements’ for improving the focus of soldiers in the field—strength and sensory acuity and things like that.”

Dr. Gao squirms in Zian’s hold but doesn’t get anywhere. She hisses through her teeth in panicked frustration. “What are you doing ? How can you?—”

Zian shuts her up with his other hand. Andreas keeps watching her, delving through her skull with his gaze.

“She saw a paper Ursula tried to hide—a deed to some land. Someplace out in Kansas. She bought property out there, not long before she quit, and she was being cagey about it, which caught Dr. Gao’s attention. I think I can make out the coordinates if I focus—someone get me a piece of paper!”

Dominic dashes off and returns with a notepad and a pen. Andreas moves the nib over the paper without breaking his gaze, pausing a few times with a furrowing of his forehead.

He’s silent for another few minutes. A sheen of sweat has broken out on his brow. I bite my lip, hoping he isn’t pushing himself too hard.

“Engel left behind some bits and pieces in her office,” he says finally.

“Nothing anyone figured was important, but they stuffed it all in a box that they put in the records room just in case they wanted to go through it later if something came up. It might still be there. That’s the only other useful thing I’m seeing. ”

“That’s great,” Jacob says, his voice unusually soft. “You got plenty, Drey.”

He must be able to tell the strain Andreas has put himself through. A tremor runs through the leaner guy’s legs as he stands up.

But he isn’t done yet. He focuses on the scientist again and gives her a thin smile. “Don’t worry. You won’t remember any of this—or any of us—after we’re gone.”

Zian starts tying her up. Andreas waits there to complete his work and sear away the newest of her memories—all of those we feature in.

When Jacob prods me toward the door, I tear my gaze away. He, Dominic, and I hurry back to the records room.

Dominic spots the right box first. A peeling, yellowed label on the side has ENGEL written in small caps. He pulls it off the shelf and sets it in the middle of the floor so the three of us can sit around it.

A sour smell rises up out of the box the moment Dominic lifts the lid. I wrinkle my nose and start digging out the various bits of paper and other odds and ends alongside the others.

It quickly becomes clear why Engel wasn’t worried about leaving any of this stuff behind. The highlights include a post-it note that simply says, More coffee!! and an empty chip bag. I don’t understand why they didn’t just throw this stuff in the garbage.

But down near the bottom of the mess, I unearth a magazine clipping. Unlike the rest of the contents, it hasn’t been affected by age quite as much, because it’s encased in a sealed plastic sleeve. The photo that fills the clipping is still glossy, the colors sharp.

I stare at it, tightening my grasp as a wave of emotion sweeps through me.

It’s a snowy forest scene, but not like this place or the facility. There’s a log cabin nestled between the trees, amber light glowing through its windows in welcome.

I can almost taste what it would be like to step through the doorway into the warmth and peace, so far away from the rest of the world.

Jacob knits his brow. “Is that another property she bought?”

Dominic leans closer to examine it. “I don’t think so. Look at bits of text where it was cut out—I’m pretty sure that was from a magazine, not a real estate listing.”

I finger the plastic covering. “It was something that mattered to her, though. She wouldn’t have sealed it so carefully otherwise.”

“Yeah.” Dominic nods slowly. “And look, there are tack marks on the corners of the plastic. She had it hanging up somewhere—so she could see it regularly, I’d guess. Maybe it’s someplace she wanted to have or go to?”

I swallow thickly. Is it possible that Ursula Engel dreamed about the same kind of escape and peaceful isolation that I do?

How absurd is that?

I want to tuck the picture into my pocket, but I’d have to fold it to fit, and that seems wrong. Zian and Andreas join us a minute later, and I slide the clipping into Zian’s now mostly empty bag.

We’ve pawed through the rest of the box’s contents, and nothing else has jumped out. We all stand up, clustered in the records room.

“All right,” Jacob says. “We got everything these people can offer that might be useful. Andreas will wipe all memory of us from their minds, and I’ll untie one of them before we go so they can all get free.

No point in killing them. They don’t seem to have had anything to do with the facility anyway. ”

Zian cracks his knuckles. “And then what?”

Andreas is looking at the phone. “I guess we head out to Kansas? It’ll take a couple days, but if we leave right now?—”

I blink at him. “You want us to head straight to this other spot from here?”

Jacob scowls at me. “Why not? Do you have a better idea?”

“I just…” Every inch of my body balks at the idea of charging off on a quest into some new unknown when we’ve only just survived this venture.

Do we really have to race straight into sticking our necks out all over again?

With each step we take, we’re getting closer to Ursula Engel’s connections to the facility. Closer to the enemy. Why can’t they see how dangerous that is?

I drag in a breath and speak before Jacob can sneer at me again.

“We pushed ourselves pretty hard here. Wouldn’t it be smarter to go back to the townhouse and take a day or two to go over everything we’ve learned and rest up?

We’re tracing what this woman did more than twenty years ago—it’s not like a couple of days is going to make a lot of difference to that. ”

Andreas rubs his head. I suspect from the flattening of his lips that he’s fighting off a headache.

“She does have a point,” he says. “I’m not sure I can even drive right now.”

Jacob raises his eyebrows. “So you’re going to trust her judgment?”

Andreas shrugs. “She did help us here a lot. She stepped up every time we could have expected her to, even when she didn’t need to.”

He smiles at me, and I smile back through a rush of warmth. Maybe a couple more days will be enough to convince them to see this situation completely my way.

Jacob scoffs. “We don’t know if the guardians might catch on and start covering their tracks—or Engel’s. Every minute could count.”

A spark of inspiration hits me. “But shouldn’t we scour the townhouse to make sure we’re not leaving anything that could be used against us? It’d be careless to leave it without making sure we’ve totally covered our tracks. We didn’t expect to be abandoning it when we left this morning.”

Dominic’s mouth twists. “That’s a good point.”

Zian rubs his hand over his thick black hair, his forehead furrowing. “Should we come up with some kind of story too, to explain why we’re leaving all of a sudden? So that our neighbors don’t ask too many questions?”

Jacob glares at him as if annoyed that even the guy whose main focus is brawn is coming up with solid reasons to go along with my suggestion. But now it’s four against one, and while he’s pissed off at me, he isn’t so spiteful he’s going to screw his own mission over just to stick it to me.

“Fine,” he bites out. “We’ll go back for one night and tie up loose ends. But we don’t want to waste any more time than that. We could be risking the entire mission.”

Andreas hesitates, and for a second I think he might change his mind. The others would probably follow.

He glances at me, and I let my smile slant wryly as if to say, There he goes, being a grumpy jerk again .

Drey’s expression relaxes. “Until tomorrow,” he says.

I can’t deny that there’s a flutter of hope in my chest that maybe Ursula Engel’s tracks will be covered before we can follow them any further.

If there’s no trail to follow, then the guys will have to stop chasing her down this reckless path.