Page 27 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Eighteen

Jacob

T he new car is the best we could nab in the short timeframe we were working with, but I don’t like it. The engine makes a periodic coughing sound, we need a whole minute to bring it up to full freeway speed, and one of the back doors nearly falls off its hinges every time we open it.

We also realize as soon as we set off in it that it’s only got about an eighth of a tank of gas, but at least that’s something we can fix.

I stand in the early morning darkness next to the pickup truck I found parked by a farmhouse, about a mile down the road from where we parked. At the tug of my mental energy, a steady current of gasoline flows past the open fuel cap into the large jug I’m filling for the third time.

My nose wrinkles at the cloying chemical smell. I breathe shallowly through my mouth until the jug is full, replace both its cap and the one on the truck, and set off toward our sort-of camp, lugging the sloshing weight.

Part of the reason we stopped was to crash for the night and catch up on our rest. I’ve only slept a couple of hours, but that’s okay. Keeping busy stops me from thinking about anything but the task at hand.

We’re not doing so badly. We destroyed the guardians who came after us. We ditched our former SUV in a lake where it vanished well beneath the surface, leaving no sign of us behind.

Now we’re another fifty miles farther away, down a winding path of several obscure country roads the guardians have no way of tracing us down.

At least, they shouldn’t.

The thought of how they found us at all is an uncomfortable niggling in the back of my skull. I scowl as I march through the grove of trees that shelters our camp from the road.

There’s nothing down the overgrown lane but a small, rusty storage shed that’s missing its door, but we didn’t need much.

Zian is keeping watch at the moment, leaning against the shed next to the doorway. He gives me a nod when I emerge from the trees.

Andreas is dozing in the back seat of the car. Dominic sprawls in the tipped-back passenger seat, the collar of his trench coat pulled up so it’ll shade his eyes when the sun peeks over the horizon.

I told Riva to take the shed. It’s the only spot with just one exit for Zian to monitor.

I ease open the fuel cap on our new junker and propel the current batch of gas into the tank by sheer force of will.

We should almost be full up after this. I’m hoping we can cross a couple more state lines before we have to do anything as blatant as stopping at an actual gas station.

The process only takes a couple of minutes. I tuck the jug into the trunk in case we need it again and step away from the car.

A light breeze washes over me and rustles through the leaves of the poplar trees looming over us. I amble a short distance away, drinking in the fresh air and the silence of the night.

It got this dark in my cell in the facility, but that darkness was tight, controlled, suffocating. Standing here, I can feel the entire world stretching out around me with no walls holding me back.

There’s only one path I want to take, but there’s still a relief in the freedom. I close my eyes, absorbing the quiet and the openness and letting it carry all my thoughts away so I’m nothing but an empty vessel.

The scuff of footsteps breaks my reverie. I turn to see Riva emerging from the shed in the hint of a dawn glow that’s just starting to touch the landscape.

As I watch, she nods to Zian with a quick smile. “Thanks for keeping watch,” she murmurs, as if she doesn’t know he was guarding against her as much as for her. “Are you going to be able to get some more sleep too?”

I don’t like how his posture turns a bit awkward as if he’s concerned about how she’ll feel about his answer. She shouldn’t matter to any of the others any more than she does to me.

She cut herself off from us the second she decided getting a few privileges was worth more than Griffin’s life. But apparently the others are soft enough to be willing to forgive the past.

They never did see things as clearly as I did—and it wasn’t their brother she sentenced to death.

I step closer before Zian has to answer and motion him toward the shed. “You should rest a little more. I can keep an eye on things.”

On her.

A frown crosses Zian’s face, maybe as he tries to calculate how much rest I’ve gotten, but he’s never been the type to enter a debate voluntarily. He pushes himself off the shed wall and ducks inside.

Riva stalks toward me.

She stops a few feet away from me with a hesitant expression that irritates me even more. If she doesn’t like how she knows I’m going to respond to her, maybe she should leave me the hell alone.

I fold my arms over my chest and keep my voice low so I don’t disturb my sleeping friends. “Do you need something?”

Her shoulders come up for a second at my purposefully cold tone, but she appears to force them to relax a moment later. The movement of her body makes me annoyingly aware of the wiry grace with which she holds herself—and the rise and fall of her breasts behind the fabric of her hoodie.

Her presence stirs up all kinds of sensations in me, but most of them I choose to ignore. They don’t matter either.

Her voice comes out soft but steady. “I just wanted to say that I understand why you’re upset with me. I was right there, and I didn’t— You have no idea how much I’ve beat myself up for not realizing something was wrong sooner—” She shakes her head. “I still think about Griffin every day.”

My spine stiffens at her last comment, a sharper anger flaring inside me. “Keep his name out of your mouth. You don’t deserve to even talk about him.”

Riva’s head droops for a second before she catches my gaze again. “I’m sorry. I hate what happened, and I know it must have been harder for you than anyone. I thought I should say that. Before, I was so focused on getting us away and keeping us all alive—I didn’t show how much I cared.”

And I’m supposed to believe she does now? This is obviously all part of the sob story she keeps trotting out to try to wear down our defenses and steal our trust.

But I never would have believed the girl I knew four years ago, the girl I?—

I never would have believed that girl could have turned on us as viciously as we all know she did. I’d hurl a derisive laugh in her face if I wasn’t still trying to stay quiet.

“Sure,” I say instead. “You care so very much—about making sure you stay alive to get whatever the hell it is you’re after now.”

Riva’s face twitches with a flash of emotion. It isn’t right that she still looks as pretty as she always did—more so, even, with the last hints of childhood faded from her features, all striking, powerful woman now.

But not as powerful as she used to be. I’ve clipped her wings so she can’t pull another sudden flight.

She wets her lips, and I don’t let myself track the movement of her tongue, focusing on the burn of anger in my chest. Her voice comes out even quieter than before.

“Is there anything I can say or do that would make it easier for you to believe me?”

She’s even worked a hint of desperation into her voice. I start to glower at her, and a flicker of inspiration shoots up inside me.

The other guys wouldn’t let me destroy her, and maybe they were right, but I still intend to pay back all the pain she dealt out. And if she’s going to offer herself up so willingly in her charade of innocence, why shouldn’t I take her up on it?

There is a chance that I’m protecting all of us at the same time.

“Come here,” I say with a jerk of my hand toward the trees.

Without questioning, Riva follows me into the grove. Leaves rustle under our feet. The faint beams of dawn light seeping through the branches catch on her silvery hair.

I don’t want to do this where the other guys could see if they got up. They’d probably interrupt.

When the tree trunks block clear view of the shed and car, I stop and turn to fully face her. She stands stiff and ready, her chin raised.

Even that annoys me.

I let my gaze trail over her body with a detached expression. “It’s possible you led the guardians to us without even knowing.”

Riva knits her brow. “What do you mean?”

“There could be another tracker on you that we didn’t find.”

“But Zian scanned me—he would have?—”

I shake my head. “Zian can only see . They could have implanted a device that would blend in with whatever it’s up against. But I can test you with my power, make sure nothing moves that shouldn’t or in ways it shouldn’t.”

It’s unlikely she has any kind of tracker on her, really. It wouldn’t have taken the guardians a week to find us on that campus if they’d had a signal pointing straight to us.

But it isn’t impossible. It could have been something that needed specific circumstances to activate.

It could be something she needed to activate and couldn’t right away. So even making the request is a test in itself.

Riva simply shrugs with no sign of concern. “Then you should definitely check. If there’s anything like that in me, I want it out right away.”

I fix her with a hard gaze so she knows I mean what I’m saying. “It’s going to hurt. Your joints and veins aren’t going to like me prodding them.”

Her jaw clenches slightly as if she’s bracing herself. “That’s fine.”

So fucking stoic. Part of me wants to admire her response the way I used to get a rush of elation watching her race through a brutal training course, throwing herself over every obstacle, and then circling back to help Dominic or Griffin if they needed it.

The rest of me wants to strangle that first part.

“Good,” I say. “We’ll start at the bottom.”

I aim my attention at her feet, encased in the black sneakers we picked out for her. Reaching out with the force of my talent, I can trace the lines of bone and sinew, tendons and cartilage, all through those delicate appendages.

Then I start to twist them.

A little here and a little there. Nudging and tweaking every surface and strand of flesh. Watching for something that feels a little too hard or that shifts amid the rest in a way no part of the human body is supposed to.

Riva’s breath gives a slight hitch. That’s the only sign she reveals of her discomfort.

So far.

I work my way up, from her ankles to her calves to her knees. Her legs tremble, and I glance up at her face just for a second, taking in the flat line of her mouth with a jolt of satisfaction.

Griffin must have suffered so much—the agony when he realized she’d betrayed him, the blast of the gunshots ripping through him. She’s still only gotten a small taste of payback, but it’s a start.

“You could sit down if you want,” I say.

She squares her shoulders. “No. I can handle it.”

“If you insist.”

I continue my upward journey, clamping down on the flush of heat that ripples through me around her groin. I can’t ignore it, because if the guardians were going to trick us, that’s exactly the sort of tactic they’d use, but I move over it quickly and efficiently, no lingering.

This won’t be a very good test if it compromises me too.

Onward and upward; organs, ribs, arms. When I tug at her spine near the base of her skull, she sucks in a little gasp she couldn’t quite suppress.

I restrain a smile.

But I reach the top of her head without any sign of a hidden piece masquerading as bone or tissue. Releasing my focus, I shake the tension out of my own body from the intense concentration of the last several minutes.

Riva’s shoulders slump a little, but she isn’t shy with her smile. “There’s nothing? They couldn’t have traced me?”

The brief satisfaction I got out of this ordeal vanishes in a snap. “Not like that ,” I retort, and my gaze homes in on the chain around her neck. “There is one more thing.”

My hand shoots out faster than she could have been prepared for, but Riva’s reflexes are sharper than mine even in a weakened state. She jerks backward, her own hand whipping up to cover the lump of the pendant under her shirt.

“What are you doing?” she asks with a flash of teeth.

This is what gets her upset? Not all the jabs of physical pain I just sent through her body—the thought of me so much as touching the necklace that my brother bought?

My teeth grit with the impulse to bare them in return—like Zian would, as if I’ve got an animal lurking inside me, mutating my body, too.

“They could have hidden a tracker in there,” I snap. “Give it to me.”

It’s not as if she deserves that piece of him anyway, not when the rest of us had our last connection to Griffin stolen from us.

Riva pulls the cat pendant out but keeps her fingers closed around it. “You don’t need to take it. You tested everything else without even touching me.”

She’s right, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. “It should be mine. He was my brother.”

Something both fierce and haunted flares in her bright eyes. “It’s the only thing I have left. We—we can look for the other ones—we’ll get them back someday. But he gave this one to me .”

Her voice turns ragged with the last few words, anguished enough that I find myself hesitating despite my best intentions. And that pisses me off more than anything.

“Fine.” I glare at her hand, which she unfolds tentatively so I can at least see the little silver sculpture, and press my talent against every nook and joint to confirm it doesn’t contain hidden circuitry.

I could break it so easily. One swift twist, and the cat and yarn would crack apart for good. But I’m not quite angry enough to do that.

It isn’t just hers. It was Griffin’s too.

When I sigh with the release of my attention, Riva tucks the pendant away. “Nothing there either?” she checks eagerly.

My teeth set on edge. I aim the full force of my glare straight into her eyes.

The other guys might be starting to forget who she’s proven herself to be, but I never will, and I won’t let her forget either.

“No,” I say, flattening my voice so it’s hard as steel.

“But it doesn’t make a difference. It doesn’t matter even if you really are trying to help us now.

There’s nothing in this hellhole of a world that you can do to make up for what you’ve already done.

You killed all of us that day, one way or another. ”

Riva flinches. “Jake?—”

“Don’t you dare talk to me like I’m still your friend.” I take a step forward, looming on her tiny frame. “The only reason I’ve hung in here is so I can annihilate everyone who had a part in destroying my brother, and that is always going to include you.”

My anger doesn’t feel hot anymore. My veins might as well be full of ice.

I whip around before Riva can try to respond and stride back to the car, lifting my voice to wake the others.

“Let’s go! The sun’s coming up, and we have gas—we’ve got to get moving before those pricks find us again.”