Page 38 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

There’s nothing to sit on down here other than the bed. I debate for a second and then scoot all the way over to the head where the limp pillow is lying. Then I pat the blanket a few feet away in offering.

As Andreas lowers himself onto the edge of the bed at the opposite end from me, giving me plenty of space, my mouth dries up. I haven’t really talked to him—to any of the guys—since I let myself break down in front of them in the old facility.

Stalling, I reach back to try to work at the knots in my hair again. Drey watches me for a moment, taking in my wince as I yank on a few strands harder than I meant to.

“It’s tangled up pretty bad, huh?”

“That’s what happens when it’s left braided for days on end.” I let out a sigh and dig my fingers between two twisted locks. “It’ll be even worse if I sleep on it like this.” Maybe I’ll have to cut the whole rat’s nest off.

A twinge runs over my neck at the thought of leaving it bare, as if my hair is really any protection.

Andreas sets his hands on the mattress and then ventures, “Do you want help? At least I’ll be able to see what I’m doing.”

My body seems to sway toward him and recoil simultaneously, wanting him close but afraid of wanting too much. I wet my lips, and the trace of disappointment that crosses his gorgeous face at my hesitation defeats my doubts.

“Sure. I’m obviously not getting very far on my own.”

I twist on the mattress so that my back is partly to him, and he eases close enough to reach my hair. His knee comes to rest against the small of my back through the thin fabric of the borrowed dress.

Suddenly I’m twice as aware of the fact that I have nothing at all on under that thin layer.

But Andreas simply lifts the tangled locks and starts loosening one knot carefully. Of course, his hands brush my bare neck with his movements.

Each brief contact sends a flash of heat over my skin. It’s pooling in my face—and lower down, where at least he won’t be able to see it.

Then his next words douse me in cold. “Do you think about Griffin a lot?”

“I—” My voice catches in my throat. I have to swallow before I can continue, wishing I could see his expression now. “Of course. Every day.”

“I don’t think he would like the way Jake is trying to ‘avenge’ him.”

The comment relaxes some of the tension inside me. Drey isn’t leading up to an accusation.

A pang of guilt radiates through my chest anyway. “I guess that’s hard to know.”

While the agony of the bullet tore through him, in the moment when he must have realized he was dying, did some part of Griffin curse me for making such a stupid move? Would he agree with his twin that it was all my fault?

Andreas wiggles a few strands free and lets them drift down across my shoulder. I have to hold myself back from leaning into his gentle touch.

“Do you remember that time with the cookies when we were really little?” he asks.

“The cookies…” I repeat, combing back through my recollections.

Andreas hums to himself, his knuckles gliding across my neck.

“We were sitting around the table in the training room having lunch, and right after Griffin asked to use the bathroom, the guardians on duty brought out a plate of chocolate cookies. It was the first time they’d given us any dessert in weeks.

We each downed ours like we were sugar-deficient, and Griffin still hadn’t gotten back?—”

The moment flickers up from the depths of my mind, provoking a twitch of my lips. “And Dominic took his.”

Andreas chuckles. “Right. Dom snuck that last one and inhaled it, and then Jake noticed Griffin’s was gone and demanded to know who’d stolen his brother’s cookie. He was kind of a self-righteous dick even back then, wasn’t he?”

I’m outright smiling now. “I think I’d better plead the fifth, or next time he’ll have me sleeping in the garage.”

Andreas’s hands falter for just a moment before they resume their work on my hair.

“Zian got all flustered and guilty-looking even though he hadn’t done anything, because he was usually the one who’d eat the most, so he figured he’d get blamed.

But Jake pointed out the extra crumbs by Dom’s spot and started glaring at him. ”

“I thought Dom was going to faint, he looked so agonized.” The image swims up through my mind of the much younger version of the man I know now.

“No kidding. So Griffin finally gets back and Jake wastes no time calling Dom out, Dom sits there all horrified with his eyes starting to well up with tears, but just before he can babble a gazillion apologies, Griffin just smiles at him. And says if Dom took it, he must have wanted it a lot, so it’s okay. ”

My throat constricts. “Yeah. That was just… how he was.” Griffin would have been able to sense how awful Dominic felt about his petty crime without the other guy needing to say anything.

Andreas shakes his head in bemusement. “Funny how that guy was more mature at five or six than the rest of us are even now.”

I arched an eyebrow on the side he’d be able to see. “Speak for yourself.” But an unexpected sense of peace has settled over me, as momentary as it might be.

I haven’t let myself think about Griffin that far back in a long time. Mostly I’ve just beaten myself up with images from our last night together.

Twisting my head as far as I dare without disrupting the detangling session, I peek at Andreas’s face. “You’ve always been our memory-keeper as well as the memory-reader, haven’t you? Keeping track of all our history.”

He smiles at me. “I like my collection of stories.”

Yes, all the stories he’s compiled from the people he saw on missions whose minds he dipped into. The remark sparks another jolt of curiosity. “Did the guardians still have you all go on missions after—after we tried to escape?”

“Yeah,” Andreas says, casually enough that my anxiety around asking fades away.

“Not as often as before, and they’d still have us on a low dose of whatever drug they kept us doped on so we couldn’t do anything too crazy.

And the same old threat hanging over us that if we acted out, the others would pay for it. ”

His smile twists. “After they saw how we reacted to losing Griffin, they must have been even more sure of how effective that warning would be.”

Losing Griffin, he says. Not losing both of us.

Because they didn’t think of me as being lost—because they assumed I’d left them behind on purpose, for reasons I still don’t totally understand.

But I don’t want to bring that up again now, not when it’s gotten me nowhere before and we’re having this moment where things feel almost okay.

I gaze across the room toward the washing machine. “Any good stories I missed?”

Andreas clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Let’s see. What would the best ones have been…?”

He lowers what must have been an entire section of the braid, now knot-free, and moves to a matted area closer to the middle. His fingers graze my spine.

“There was this woman I noticed in a park in Seattle one time,” he says.

“She looked like a very bookish, cautious type—hair in a tight bun, cardigan buttoned all the way up, plaid skirt down to her ankles. Sitting there with a book on her lap and a notebook she was writing in propped against it. I figured she had to be a super-committed student studying for exams.”

I inhale slowly, resisting the urge to sink back and take in even more of his warmly musky scent. “But I’m guessing that’s not what you found in her head.”

“Nope. I got all kinds of memories of going out scuba-diving. Cruising around in this boat with fancy radar-checking maps. Swimming way down to find ruins of sunken ships, showing off artifacts she’d found online.

” He laughs. “An underwater Indiana Jones. I bet she was actually taking notes on what her next dive site could be.”

“I bet she’d have lots of interesting stories too.”

“Looking for my replacement already?” Drey gives my hair a playful tug. “I’ve got a whole library in this head. You don’t need anyone else.”

“Fine,” I say, wishing it could be like this with him—with all of the guys—always. “Tell me another one then.”

He’s silent for a moment, thinking and unwinding my hair. Then he starts to speak in a softer voice than before.

“The last mission I did, I saw an elderly couple in a coffee shop. I noticed them because the woman was gazing around all dreamily while the man looked just… beaten. Sad and weary. I couldn’t help wondering how they’d ended up like that—why he’d stayed.”

My stomach clenches in anticipation of an awful explanation. “What was it?”

“Well, I searched his head for memories about her. And there were tons of them, going back decades to when they must have been only in their twenties. And in most of the memories, they were so happy, having a blast, building their life together… But then the ones from recently, when they looked a lot older, she was forgetting things, getting cranky, often not even recognizing him…”

An ache squeezes my heart. “She had Alzheimer’s.”

“Or something like that,” Andreas agrees.

“But it was hard to say it was a sad story, you know? Because they’d had so many years together before things got bad.

And even the way they were right then—while I was watching, there was a moment when she turned to him and said his name and just beamed at him, and all his sadness disappeared.

He looked like he figured he was the luckiest guy alive. ”

The ache expands into something brighter and bittersweet. The words just tumble out. “Griffin would have loved that story.”

“Yeah, I bet he would have.”

Andreas rests his hand against the back of my shoulder, not quite an embrace but like an offering of one. When I hold still, he moves it to finish teasing apart the last tangled bits of my hair, and I wince inwardly against the pang of my regret.

“He was the heart of our group,” Drey goes on. “I mean, it was obvious even when he was there, but it got really fucking obvious when he was gone. I’ve tried to fill that gap, because the other guys sure as hell don’t know how to, but I’m not sure I’ve done all that great a job.”

His voice has gone raw. The sound cracks something inside me.

I reach back and grasp his forearm. His hands go still.

“You’ve been here for me,” I say. “You have no idea how much that matters to me.”

Andreas swallows audibly. He tips his head forward so I can feel his breath tickle over my hair. My whole body wakes up to tingling alertness and a starker craving I can’t pretend away.

But how can I even be thinking about him like that when?—

As if he’s followed my train of thought, Andreas’s voice comes out halting but gentle.

“Tink, there’s something you haven’t told us about what happened when you and Griffin were getting out of the facility, isn’t there?”