Page 35 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-Five

Andreas

“ W e shouldn’t stay in this junk heap of a car any longer than we have to,” Jacob announces as he marches us out of the underground building. “We don’t know if these guardians radioed details about it back to wherever they came from.”

He glances over at me. “Where exactly are we going?”

“I’m figuring that out,” I say without looking up from the phone I’ve taken control over. It’d be a hell of a lot easier to do this search on a computer with a big screen and proper keyboard, but I’m making do with my thumbs because I don’t have a choice.

The conversation I plucked out of the one guardian’s memories replays through my head. I’ve been concentrating on nothing but that since I recognized it was our best shot at finding Engel.

She’s going all the way up to Glen Lily?

And a stretch farther north, it sounds like.

Must be fucking cold up there.

It was obviously a place, not a person named Glen. I squint through the reflected sunlight at the search results that pop up on the screen.

“Sometime when she was packing up to leave the facility—at least, I think that was what was happening—that one guy we caught was monitoring things from outside her office with another guardian. They made a few comments to each other about where she was going.” I frown.

“The main thing popping up is someplace in Kentucky—I can’t tell whether it’s an actual town or just, like, a landfill site or a road name. ”

Zian perks up. “Kentucky isn’t too far from Kansas.”

“Yeah, but… it doesn’t really make sense with the other things they said. They were talking about her going ‘all the way up’ there. Kentucky isn’t ‘up’ from any of the facilities we know about.”

“Keep digging and see if you can find anything else,” Jake orders.

As we reach the car, the other guys yank open the doors. I lower the phone for a moment to glance at Riva.

She hasn’t said anything since her breakdown in front of the guardians—however much it was actually breaking down and not a sort of performance.

But her silence now makes me even more certain that even if she released all that emotion on purpose, there was nothing fake about the anguish in her voice.

The tears that streaked down her cheeks have already dried, but there’s still a hint of redness along the rims of her eyes. Her gaze has gone distant as if she’s pulled back inside to collect herself.

To rebuild the dam that kept the torrent of grief and despair shut away before.

If the outburst hadn’t really taken anything out of her, if it’d only been an act, it wouldn’t still be affecting her now. And I didn’t really think it was an act even in the moment.

I had to focus on our targets, on watching for their mental defenses against my talent to weaken, but the pain in her voice matched the brief comments she made to me in the car yesterday.

I move to get into the back with her, wanting her to know I’m still with her even if she pushed away from me before. I don’t know what’s going through her head, but it’s a hell of a lot more than we’ve acknowledged.

Before I reach the door, Jacob gives me a sharp look and motions me to the front passenger seat as he gets in behind the wheel. My jaw clenches, but we don’t have time to argue about this.

If I’m going to end up navigating, it does make more sense for me to be up front. He might not even be trying to separate me from Riva.

Given how he’s treated her since the first moment we crossed paths with her, though, I’m pretty sure that’s at least an equal part of his motivation.

The second all the doors are closed, Jacob hits the gas. I dive back into my search results.

I dig deeper and try a few different added words, and then sigh. “Nothing looks quite right.”

“Are we sure that going after Engel is still our best option?” Zian asks from the back seat in an impatient tone. “I mean, we could just stick around here and more guardians will show up… If we’re prepared for them, we could pick off a few to question.”

Jacob shakes his head. “Those are grunt workers—expendable people. No one who’s in charge with a real understanding of the big picture would be running into a fight. Anyone else who has an in-depth understanding of what they did to us will be behind all the facility’s security.”

“And it seems like Engel’s the one who painted the big picture to begin with,” I say as I continue skimming the internet. “She’d know more than anyone.”

“Do you think they’ll take her into protection after they realize we broke into that place?” Dominic asks.

We all sit in momentary silence as his question sinks in.

Jacob grimaces. “It’s possible. But they shouldn’t have any idea how we ended up at the old facility or why. Engel wasn’t around us enough when we were older for us to have any memories of her—there’s no reason for them to assume we were focused on her.”

I nod. “As far as they know, we shouldn’t even be aware she exists. And they don’t seem to want her around the facility anymore. The guardians I just checked had no memories of her that seemed at all recent. Nothing where they talked to her about us escaping, for sure.”

It’s Riva’s voice that pipes up next, low but clear.

“That’s why she’s the best option. We were her project first, and the others shut her out somehow.

The guardians are willing to die to keep their secrets.

We could interrogate dozens of them and not get anywhere.

But Engel… she might even think we deserve to know. Maybe that’s why they kicked her out.”

“Right,” Jacob says, sounding a little annoyed to be supporting her point even as he agrees with her.

“So, we track her down and see where that gets us. And if it turns out the guardians have brought her back under their wing to shield her, then we’re in the exact same scenario we’d face if we never go looking for her. ”

Zian sinks deeper into his seat. “So… where exactly are we going, then?”

“I’m still working on that.” I jab at the screen, flick through another list of results and another. “I guess it’s possible I misunder—oh, wait!”

Jake glances over. “What have you got?”

“There’s a town called Glenlily in British Columbia—Canada. That’s definitely up north.” With excitement bubbling up inside me, I flick through to the photos that come with the search and smile. “Jackpot. That looks like snowy cottage country to me, don’t you agree, Tink?”

I hold the phone so Riva can see it from the back seat.

She sucks in a breath. “That’s exactly the right kind of place.”

Dominic lets out a hitch of a chuckle. “British Columbia’s quite a hike from here.”

“Maybe we should check Kentucky first, just in case?” Zian suggests.

I balk at the suggestion. “That’s in the opposite direction. We’d lose days. The longer we wait, the more chance there is that the guardians will catch on.”

Twisting in my seat, I catch Riva’s gaze. She nods, understanding the question I’m asking without needing words.

I turn to Jacob. “I say we go straight to BC. It’s our best shot by far.”

Jake hesitates for a second and then waves his hand toward me. “Let’s do it. Give me our route and see where we can look for a new ride along the way.”

With a few beats of my thumb, I bring up the map for our location. I meant to focus on the roads streaking across the state around us, but as I study the landscape, another detail catches my eye.

I zoom in and trace the markings crisscrossing the map. “What if we didn’t get a new car right away?”

Jake’s gaze flicks toward me as he propels our current vehicle down the bumpy country road that brought us here. “The guardians could already be on the lookout for this one. We don’t want?—”

I hold up my hand. “That’s not what I meant.

They’ll be looking for us in cars in general.

We’ve got a long way to go—it wouldn’t be a bad thing if we could get some rest while traveling too.

There are a bunch of freight train lines through Kansas.

We could hitch a ride like we did with the truck before. ”

Dom speaks up from the back. “Would we be able to catch one that goes all the way up to Canada?”

I tilt my head, studying the screen. “I don’t know what the typical routes are, but there’s a network with tracks that go northwest all the way up to the border.

It looks like… we could pass through Nebraska, then Wyoming, and then Montana, and cross into BC there.

We’d have to check the GPS periodically, and I suspect we’d need to switch trains at least a couple of places, but they could get us most of the way there. ”

Jacob’s expression turns pensive. “That method could be faster or slower depending on how consistently the trains are running. But we can always hop off once we’ve gotten some distance from this place and grab a car somewhere there’s less heat on us.”

I nod. “Yeah, exactly. The more we mix things up, the harder it’ll be for the guardians to predict what we’re doing or where we’re going.”

“All right. Figure out the best place for us to catch a ride nearby—and where we could ditch the car easily too.”

I shoot Jake a tight smile in return. “Already on it.”

The light in the train car gradually fades with the sinking of the sun. We eat the rest of our stash of food, making plans to pick up more wherever we get off this first train, and sway with the jostling of the car on the tracks.

Every half hour, I check the phone to confirm our progress on the line this freight train is traveling along. When I curl up on a musty canvas sheet next to the stacks of wooden crates to try to get a little rest, Jacob takes over.

I’m not sure he’s been sleeping at all. He always pushes himself to his limit, even when he doesn’t have to, but how the hell any of us could convince him to take a break, I don’t know.