Page 236 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Seventeen

Riva

A s the scarred shadowblood thug strides toward us, Zian jerks closer to my side, more visible by the second just like I am. His lips pull back to show his wolf-man fangs.

My pulse is racing so fast my chest rattles with it, but I hold up my hands. “Wait! We’re on the same side as you. We got rid of Balthazar to set you free.”

I can’t tell if the hulking shadowblood even registers my words. Fury flashes in his eyes—and a figure outlined in fire descends from the sky to plant herself by my side.

Sorsha’s phoenix flames sear away the invisibility Andreas had cast over her. She takes in the swarm of shadowbloods around us, a ball of fire hovering over one hand and her scorching wings unfurled from her back. “Back off. The fight is over.”

The several shadowbloods who’d been watching the confrontation freeze. Even the man who was stalking toward us hesitates, sizing Sorsha up. Through the tears in his coat from the fighting, I see his muscles flex.

One of the other former inmates, one with a tattoo of a skull in a snake’s embrace emblazoned on his shaved scalp, pushes toward us. Thick, bone-like blades protrude from his shoulders—they ripped through his clothing as they emerged from his body.

He jabs his hand at us. “You were working with the Guardianship—the fuckers who made all you young ones. You turned on our own people to help them .”

A few gasps from around us tell me that the kids in the crowd hadn’t thought the situation quite that far through yet—and find the revelation even more shocking than our accuser does.

I raise my chin, keeping my voice loud and steady. “We used the guardians. When we tried to get at Balthazar by ourselves before on his own territory, he was too prepared.”

A thin, scratchy voice wavers out from my left. “You tricked him. You tricked us !”

My head jerks around. Tegan has come up beside Nadia, her hands clenched at her sides, her pale face gone even more sallow with horror within its frame of fawn-brown hair.

Oh, God. I didn’t even realize she was here. The kid is twelve , for fuck’s sake. What was Balthazar thinking?

I already know the answer to that question, so sure it turns my stomach. He was only thinking about his ends, his goals, and to hell with how it hurts anyone else.

“We killed him for you,” Zian protests, looking more bewildered than threatening now.

I motion to my bare wrist. “The manacles don’t matter anymore. Sorsha can burn out the mechanisms. You don’t have to do any more fighting for?—”

“Why the hell wouldn’t we want to fight for him?” the tattooed man interrupts. He holds up his meaty hands, the thin leather gloves he was wearing splashed with blood. “ He freed us from life behind bars. He gave us the power to do whatever the fuck we want.”

A figure drops from one of the trees at the edge of the pavement—Jacob, his form hazy as his own invisibility has started to fade with the passing of time. “He used you like tools, just like the guardians always did with us. He was one of them and only left them so he could be even worse.”

“Now they’re all dead,” I add, motioning to the bodies strewn around us. “Like Sorsha said, it’s over.”

The scarred guy close to us aims a sneer my way. “I don’t think so. I liked the work he gave us. And it sounds like you expect us to stop.”

My heart lurches. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the hardened criminals Balthazar picked out to do his dirtiest work are the kind of people who’d enjoy bashing up buildings and leaving carnage in their wake.

I always knew we might have to fight his new shadowbloods as well as the man himself. I hadn’t expected it to go down quite like this, though.

My gaze darts to Nadia. She’s still poised with her hands raised as if ready to blast us with another bolt of light. As if she thinks she might need to.

The taste of ash coats my mouth. “Nadia, you know what Balthazar was like. You saw what he did to Lindsay—to Sully—what he always threatened to do to you.”

She shakes her head with an odd twitch of her eyes, as if they refuse to totally focus. “He cut out the weak ones. He found a way to make us stronger.”

“Yeah!” Tegan says, stirring restlessly from foot to foot. “He made us as powerful as you Firsts are. Maybe more! Like we always should have been.”

Nadia rolls her shoulders with another twitch, and her tone turns harsh. “You’re jealous. He said you probably would be. You liked being the strongest shadowbloods, seeing the rest of us so weak and pathetic. You wanted to always be in charge of us. Now we can fight back for ourselves.”

Her voice takes on a fiercer rasp with those last few words, and ice forms around my gut. I can imagine Balthazar indoctrinating the kids, telling them lies over and over that fed into their insecurities and regrets.

During the time when we all lived together, some of them admitted to me that they longed for more power. That they felt useless, expendable. And it wasn’t as if they could see any chance of living like a regular human instead.

They had the worst of both words, too monstrous to be normal but not monstrous enough to fight their way free, and Balthazar gave them a little flame of hope.

I’d like to think that his manipulations wouldn’t have worked on the kids I knew back on the island. But Ajax told me that the process for bringing out their stronger talents has riled up something else in the younger shadowbloods.

Has Balthazar not just expanded their powers but made them as insane as he was too?

Not all of them. Ajax sounded normal.

And another familiar voice, if a little hoarse, carries from the other side of the clearing. “You’ve got to know that’s not true, Nadia.”

I yank my gaze in the opposite direction. Booker stands tensed near the tree line, his shaggy blond hair damp with sweat and maybe a little blood, no sign of carefree surfer dude attitude in him now.

His supernatural ability was reading auras. I have no idea how Balthazar’s treatment might have warped that talent.

“The Firsts always looked out for us,” he adds. “They did everything they could to get us away from the guardians. Of course they’d do the same with Balthazar.”

Nadia’s eyes flick to her boyfriend—if they still have that kind of relationship—but only for a second. Her expression tightens.

“He could have given us more,” she says, her voice rising. “He found ways of making us better that no one else managed to. They took that chance away from us.”

Sorsha folds her arms in front of her with a skeptical glance. “From what I’ve seen, this Balthazar guy didn’t give you anything except a whole lot of crap to weigh on your conscience. If he wasn’t sending you kids out to destroy and murder already, he would have soon.”

The tattooed man with the bladed shoulders snorts. “There’s nothing wrong with teaching a lesson to the people who never thought we’d amount to anything anyway.”

Tegan glares at Sorsha. “We don’t even know who you are. What does it matter what you think?”

I summon all the patience I can. “Sorsha’s with us. She’s as close to blood as anyone who wasn’t created by the guardians can get, and she wants what’s best for you too. If we could just talk this through, I’m sure we could figure out a way to go forward that?—”

“They’re going to try to take our powers away!” a youthful voice cries out from closer to the helicopter. “They want to crush us like they did to the boss.”

“No!” My jaw clenches for a moment before I can speak through my frustration. “We’re looking out for you just like Booker said. We can set up new lives free from anyone ordering us around or forcing us into awful situations.”

The tattooed man who appears to be the most outspoken of the criminal shadowbloods sputters with derisive laughter and starts striding toward us again.

“I don’t think so. Sounds like you pipsqueaks figure you can give the orders now.

No fucking thank you. Get out of my way. We’ve got so much more to do.”

I don’t like the awful implications of his statement—and obviously neither does Sorsha. She steps forward to meet him, her wings flaring brighter. “Stop right there.”

His face flushes with anger. “I’m getting back on that chopper to go where I feel like, and I’m taking whoever wants to come with me. Unless you really are trying to call the shots for us now.”

“You can’t just take off,” I protest. Not to do whatever it is he and the other shadowbloods are planning—we can’t leave these super-powered criminals running rampant.

“Oh, I think we can,” the tattooed man growls, and springs forward to lunge past Sorsha toward the helicopter.

A yelp of dismay breaks from my throat. Sorsha spins, her hand whipping back to fling fire toward him—and a streak of blinding light sears from Nadia’s hands straight into the phoenix’s eyes.

Sorsha gasps, and her spurt of fire flies wide, singeing the back of the tattooed guy’s coat before smacking into a nearby tree. The flames roar up the trunk with a wash of heat.

Suddenly, everyone seems to be yelling. I whirl around, reaching out toward Nadia and Tegan, but the two girls dash toward the helicopter. Other shadowbloods race off into the forest or follow them to the chopper.

Zian looms over me, his head swiveling as if he’s hoping to protect me from all sides. My throat aches with a futile scream I don’t know how to let out.

Who should I be attacking here, if anyone? Technically Sorsha attacked them first; Nadia was only defending someone she apparently sees as a friend.

Jacob charges toward the helicopter too, lifting his hands. One of the propeller blades is already bending with a metallic groan when a shadowblood thug hurtles into Jake.

They thump to the ground and roll on the concrete. Barbs jut from the older man’s hand and wrist, and he rakes them across Jacob’s face.

As I scramble to help, my lips parting with a shriek I might emit after all, the thug shoves himself away from Jacob with a stomp of a foot that’s grown abnormally large and a crack of Jacob’s forearm.

The first squeak of sound breaks from my lips, and another body slams into me from behind. I topple face-first toward the pavement, only just throwing out my hands in time to catch myself with a scrape down to my elbows.

I buck at my attacker with all my supernatural strength, but they’re already heaving away off me. Zian barges toward him with a wolfish snarl.

Devon has clambered partway into the helicopter. He raises his hand toward the warped blade as another of the former inmates hauls himself right onto the top of the aircraft to reach it.

As heat flares from Devon’s hands with a ruddy glow, softening the metal, the guy up top wrenches the propeller back into its proper shape.

I push myself toward them. If they get that thing in the air—if we can’t even try to talk sense into them?—

Then Tegan leaps between us Firsts and the chopper, her mouth opening wide.

I’ve seen the twelve-year-old use her power once before—to help us escape the guardians on the island facility. Then, she only emitted a puff of noxious smoke just large enough to cover a narrow path.

Now, a rippling haze billows out of her with a heave of breath. It rushes toward us, stinging my eyes and burning my lungs in an instant.

“You don’t get to stop us!” she shouts. “No one gets to hold us down ever again.”

I crumple, coughing and wheezing. Zian slumps beside me.

And the rumble of the helicopter’s propeller reverberates through the clearing.

I hear Sorsha muttering curses, but no more fire streaks through the air. Between Nadia’s light and the toxic haze, she’s probably afraid she’ll end up incinerating us rather than the escapees.

I’m not sure I’d even want her to try. The adult shadowbloods might be hardened criminals, but the kids… There’s got to be a way to shake them out of their madness.

A soft pressure wraps around my wrist—the curl of a tentacle. As the whir of the helicopter fades into the air, a breeze gusts through the smoke, washing the worst of it away.

Dominic kneels beside me, his other tentacle extended toward Jacob’s sprawled form, a bush he must have uprooted clutched in his hands. With a surge of tingling energy, the pain in my lungs recedes.

The second Jacob’s bones have melded back into a regular arm shape, Dominic reaches toward Zian and Sorsha. His mouth tightens, and the shrub in his hands withers even more.

Jacob rolls into a sitting position, swiping at the blood left on his face from the healed cuts. “Fucking hell.” Then his gaze fixes on something across the clearing from us, and his stance goes rigid.

Booker hurries over, his eyes wide. He motions to a girl who looks to be about fifteen, who’s hugging her skinny frame tightly.

The teens hesitate several steps from our cluster. Booker’s gaze darts between us. “We—we can come with you, right? I didn’t want— I don’t know what they think they’re going to do— Those guys scare me.”

From the way he talked to Nadia, I suspect even she scares him right now.

I swallow against the dryness of my throat. “Of course. That’s what we wanted from all of you.”

My gaze travels around the concrete yard, taking in the corpses of the guardians and Balthazar, the streaks of blood and ash, and the aching absence of all the shadowbloods we meant to save. A wave of despair crashes down on my spirits.

The battle was supposed to be over. We destroyed all our enemies. So why does it feel like we only created more?

I wet my lips, the flavor of cinders filling my mouth. “And now we have to figure out where we go from here.”