Page 240 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series
A tremor runs through Nadia’s body with a strange mix of revulsion and irritation. “Maybe we don’t want to fix anything. Maybe we’re tired of being expected to be a solution, and we just want to break everything that’s wrong in this world.”
“Which is a fuckload of things!” one of the other kids snaps from behind her.
Next to me, Zian scowls. “So, what, you’re just going to break everything as things get even worse?”
“If we want to,” Nadia retorts. “We have the power now. We can do whatever we want.”
Riva splays her hands pleadingly. “Nadia, you know that’s not the life you wanted before. You could still have something normal. We want to make that happen for all of the shadowbloods.”
I catch just a flicker of hesitation. Then the girl’s eyes narrow. “Really? Even the new shadowbloods Balthazar made? Cutler and them have been looking out for us, you know. They could have ditched us, but they didn’t.”
“Because you make a convenient shield,” Rollick remarks in the deeper, eerily resonant baritone of his demonic form.
Nadia shivers when she looks at him, but she draws herself up straighter. “Why would any of us need a shield? What are you really here to do?”
“They want to slaughter us all like we’re the real monsters,” someone hollers from the pickup truck.
Sorsha crosses her arms over her chest. “We don’t want to hurt you. We only want to stop you from hurting anyone else.”
Nadia’s eyes flash. “And what happens if we say no? Then you kill us?”
I raise my voice. “Not if we have any other choice. That’s the last thing we want. We’re angry too, shadowbloods. But we are blood, all of us—the six of us Firsts have always said that. We only need you to meet us partway.”
Jacob lets out a hoarse laugh. “Yeah. And then we can destroy whatever needs destroying together.”
A firm command rings out from the SUV. “Get back in the van, kids.”
Nadia glances over her shoulder, uncertainty darting across her face. “Are you sure, Cutler?”
I get a brief glimpse of the man she’s talking to behind the wheel when he leans toward the open window—the shaved head with the skull-and-snake tattoo. The guy the others described to me who seemed to be leading the criminal shadowbloods.
He pulls back into the shadows behind the glow of the headlights before Riva would have had a chance to latch on a killing shriek. And any larger attack on the SUV would risk everyone inside.
Given their strategy so far, I’d be incredibly surprised if they didn’t have at least a couple of the kids in each of the vehicles as leverage.
“There’s no point in talking with these assholes,” Cutler says. “We’ll just get on with business.”
Nadia only hesitates for a second before hustling back to the van with the other kids. We all exchange a glance. Are they figuring they’re going to smash right through our blockade?
Riva lifts her voice in what serves as a warning. “We’re not going to let you keep rampaging around. The slaughter stops now.”
The teens keep clambering into the van. I don’t see any sign that the wayward shadowbloods care about her implicit threat.
I breathe slow and deep to steady myself. We can stop them. We’ve got the shadowkind on our side here when they couldn’t help Riva and the others in the forest. There’s no way this group can match the power our allies can bring to bear.
I just hope we don’t have to hurt many of the kids in the process.
“Take out the tires,” Jacob mutters under his breath. “Fuck up the engines. That way they can’t get anywhere but we’re not murdering anyone.”
Riva nods. Without another word, most of my companions leap forward.
Metal screeches within the hoods of the closest vehicles. Flames shoot up beneath their tires, hot enough to meld the rubber to the asphalt.
As Zian slams his fist into the hood of the van that’s at the front of the line, hard enough to crack the steel and dent it down toward the components inside, our opponents burst out the backs of their cars.
Some are simply fleeing toward the farther vehicles we haven’t touched yet, but others are launching their retaliation.
Streaks of painfully bright light rake through the air. The pavement lurches beneath our feet. With a bellow, all the lamps and headlights nearby shatter, casting the road in total darkness.
Grunts and thumps reach my ears from all sides. And then, with a shine in a few windows along the sides of the street, jabs of fear lance through the chaos of emotion I’m drowning in.
Fear—from the residents waking up at the clamor of the battle, having no idea what madness is going on just beyond their doors. If the rogue shadowbloods decide to take out their anger on those innocent people as well…
The thought hasn’t even fully formed in my mind before I spot a tall, muscle-bound man heaving away from the road onto one of the dimly lit lawns. The scar scraping across his brow makes his harsh features look even more threatening in the hazy light.
I’ve got no weapons, no talent that’s much good against brawn.
I don’t want to steal any of my friends’ talents in case they need them right now.
But panic shoves me toward the running man with the vague idea that I’ve got to protect the people who have no part in this fight from whatever he intends.
Maybe he wouldn’t have done anything to the residents at all. Even as I sprint toward the scarred man, he veers along the edge of the lawn, racing as if to charge past our blockade rather than to head to the houses.
“Griffin!”
My brother’s voice tears through the night. And the man’s knee buckles.
He falls to the ground with a groan and a hissed curse when his broken leg smacks the lawn. I stall in my tracks just a few feet from where he fell.
His head jerks up so he can glare at me, and a blast of cold air freezes the grass around my feet hard enough to grip my shoes.
“You have to let me at those fucking hunters,” he growls, his gaze darting past me to the darkness beyond our car. “Those assholes, you don’t even know—I saw what that one prick did to the kids at our halfway house. Death is too fucking kind for?—”
Another form dashes toward us so fast I can’t make out whether it’s male or female. Male, by the hoarse voice that rasps out, “Omar, I’ve got you!”
The man with the scarred forehead rolls, and the supernaturally swift figure hefts him right off the ground. They disappear into the fray farther down the road, leaving me with an ache in my gut.
It wasn’t just anger I sensed from that man—Omar?—when he talked about the hunters they’d wanted to attack, about the one man he knew… He was full of enough anguish to knock the breath out of me.
Did he grow up around here? He recognized one of the hunters from the news footage?
It isn’t difficult to believe.
Fire streaks through the air. The ground shakes with a monstrous roar—and a different kind of roar reaches my ears from behind.
Engines. Several vehicles are racing toward us from the opposite direction. Are there more shadowbloods who split off from the first bunch?
No. As the vehicles screech to a halt and their doors fly open, the figures that charge out are holding weapons I recognize from the newscasts—crossbows and odd guns and eerily glinting knives.
We caught the rogue shadowbloods by tracking them to where they were looking for the hunters. And now the monster hunters have found us. Shit.
With shouts that sound a little panicky, the hunters hurtle into the fray. Bullets and crossbow bolts zing through the air.
A few shadowkind who were focusing their attention on rounding up the rogue shadowbloods cry out when the weapons puncture their conjured flesh. As they spin around to face the new threat, streams of smoky essence trickle up toward the sky.
My gut lurches. Somewhere to my left, Jacob lets out an epic string of curses.
Supernatural light blazes across the street, hazing my vision. I stagger, and my brother catches my arm.
“Those idiots are ruining everything.” He swipes at his eyes, which must be just as spotty as mine are right now. “Damn it.”
More yells and yelps cut through the night. I stumble toward the SUV, knowing I’m a liability out in the open rather than a help.
Then Zian’s holler cuts through the rest of the chaos. “I hear sirens coming! Someone called the cops.”
At the urgency in his voice, I hustle faster toward the car.
Riva catches up with me after a few steps, grabbing my arm. Her voice is raw with frustration. “There’s nothing else we can do. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What happened to the other shadowbloods?” I ask as we scramble into the back of the SUV, the others clambering in around us.
Dominic crashes into the seat just in front of us and peers past it as whoever grabbed the driver’s seat guns the engine. “The other shadowbloods stole some cars farther down the street. A couple of them must have talents that let them hotwire the things easily.”
“And one of the vans took off before we could get to it.” Riva sighs and slumps in her seat, deflated.
“Jacob managed to shatter one of the new shadowblood’s skulls, and Sorsha torched at least one.
I think the other shadowkind killed a couple of the criminals.
But I don’t know if it’ll make any difference.
The rest of them are going to be even more pissed off at us. ”
As the van lurches around, I debate with myself. But I don’t want to keep any more secrets from the woman I love or the brother I nearly lost.
“I don’t know if we should want all of the criminal shadowbloods dead either,” I say quietly. “The one guy who ran my way—he said something, he was feeling something…”
Jacob raises his eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”
I grimace. “I think he had a personal reason to want to attack the hunters here. I think he’d actually seen that at least one of them had hurt a lot of people in the past—not monsters, only troubled kids.
He wanted to protect everyone from that guy, not just kill for the sake of killing.
I don’t know about all of the inmates Balthazar picked out, but they’re still human. They’re not only out to do evil.”
Jake scoffs. “That one wasn’t, maybe.”
But Riva’s brow has knit. “We really don’t know about any of them—what they’ve been through, what they’d really want if they thought they had a real choice.” She tips her head back against the seat. “Fuck!”
I scoot closer to her and slip my arm around her waist. She leans her head against my shoulder. “I wish it wasn’t so complicated,” she murmurs.
I kiss her forehead, reveling in the ease with which she relaxes into my embrace. “People are complicated. We’re trying. At least we gave them something to think about tonight. Maybe some of them will decide to back off once the things we said sink in.”
“Maybe.” Riva sounds as doubtful as I have to admit I feel too. She tucks her head right against the crook of my neck. “Stay right there. Don’t let me go.”
A lump rises in my throat, all affection and agony for the woman I love. “Never.”
After a while, with the rumble of the engine and the gentle rocking once we get onto the highway, Riva’s breaths slow into a doze. I think Jacob drifts off too where he’s leaned his head against the window. Next to him, Andreas leans forward to carry out a hushed conversation with Zian up front.
My own eyelids are sinking when Billy emerges from the shadows, perched on the seat next to me.
He peers at me and Riva with his wide eyes and scratches at his head just below one of his horns. His voice comes out in a whisper. “You two are very close.”
I can tell he’s not just talking about our current physical position. The corner of my lips curls upward. “Yeah. All six of us are.”
“I mean… You told her something that upset her. But she still wanted to be near you.”
I blink, considering the implicit question. “She knew it wasn’t my fault—I was just passing on information. And being with each other makes us feel better.”
The faun cocks his head, studying Riva’s face again. His mouth forms a smile that looks pained. “I don’t know what that’s like. I have friends, but it isn’t normal with shadowkind—most don’t really get attached like that.”
Curiosity shines in his eyes. The offer comes out of me automatically. “Do you want to see what it feels like?”
Billy stares at me for a second before his lips part in understanding. “You can do that. Your talent. I— If you wouldn’t mind…”
“Of course not.”
I focus on the warm emotion that glows inside me when I’ve got Riva in my arms, the tenderness and the adoration and the sense of shock that I’ve managed to earn a love like this at all.
A few of the more passionate impulses, I edit out of the feelings I convey, but the rest I let flow through me into the slim shadowkind man.
He sits very still as if soaking in the impressions I’ve passed on. Then his gaze darts to meet mine again with an almost giddy cast to his features.
“That is… That is something that shouldn’t ever be lost. I’m glad I’ve been helping you, even if there isn’t much I can do. I won’t let anyone ruin what you’ve found with each other.”
The conviction in his words brings an ache into my chest, even after he’s slipped back into the shadows. I tip my head against Riva’s and shut my eyes against the tears that prick at the backs of them.
There’s sadness in those tears—for the problems we’re still facing, for the complications we don’t know how to handle yet. But there’s sweetness too.
I might not have a talent that can win a skirmish for us, but my powers can do more than manipulate. I can learn and reveal and teach, make things clearer not just for my friends but everyone else we want on our side too.
That power might not sway any fistfights… but it could get us one step closer to winning this war.