Page 42 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-Nine

Dominic

R iva looks so fragile with her small frame silhouetted by the train’s headlights. I was worried before, but the image sends a bolt of pure terror through me.

She wouldn’t really— She doesn’t mean to?—

Even as my mind makes its silent protests, I push my legs forward even faster, or at least I try to. My balance wavers on the uneven ground.

The others have all pulled ahead of me, but they’re still not close enough. My arm shoots out as if I can grab her across that distance and wrench her to safety.

Jacob’s voice rings through the night, raw and frantic. “Wildcat, no! ”

At his shout, Riva appears to swing in the opposite direction. But before even a wisp of hope can rise up inside me, the side of the onrushing locomotive slams into her.

She spins into the air with a spurt of liquid blood and smoke that shocks a cry from my throat. The mutilated form that falls to the ground near a cluster of saplings barely looks human, let alone like our Riva.

“Dom!” Jacob yells in the same panicked tone as before.

It comes down to me. I don’t know how we’re going to fix any of the mess we found ourselves in that sent her running to begin with, but I’m the only one who can ensure she’s even alive for us to try.

If there’s enough left of her to save. If I can make it to her in time.

A surge of my own panic pushes my limbs beyond what I thought I was capable of. The train roars on past us, but I’m barely aware of the cars rattling along the tracks.

There’s only that small, shadowed form lying motionless by the trees.

Zian gets to her first. He falls to his knees and reaches his hands out to her, clenching his fingers before he actually touches her like he’s afraid he’ll somehow make it worse.

He leans backward, his face contorting with his wolfish features, and tips his head toward the sky. An anguished groan reverberates through the air.

My open coat flaps against my sides. I yank at it as well as I can without slowing down, heaving it from my shoulders and letting it whip off me.

I’m going to need to bring every bit of my ability to this moment, every piece of me that can contribute. No hiding, no holding back.

Andreas stumbles to a stop by Zian. With one glance at Riva’s body, his eyes widen and a mumbled curse falls from his lips.

Jacob is already there, dropping down and bringing his hands to her face with a sudden gentleness I had no idea he still had in him.

His fingers slide down to her neck. “She’s still got a pulse. Not much of one but— Dom . She needs you.”

“Coming,” I gasp out, hurtling the last several paces to where she’s lying.

Even in the dim moonlight, partly draped in the spindly shadows of the saplings, it’s a horrifying scene. She looks like a jointed doll who’s been smashed on the floor by a malicious kid.

Her one arm is drenched with blood, arching away from her body at an angle that makes me wonder how much it’s even still attached to her shoulder.

On the same side, her torso is crumpled in, more blood drenching the pale dress and the grass beneath her.

Her motionless face looks pure white except for the speckling of blood across her lips.

Streams of dark smoky stuff gush up into the air, twining with the shadows.

I collapse to the ground next to Riva, already flinging one of my extra appendages around the nearest sapling. As the suckers dig in tight to the smooth bark of the trunk, I wrap the other around her waist and set my hand on her throat.

Jake pulls back to give me room, his whole body trembling.

“Do something ,” he says, but his voice is so hoarse I know he doesn’t mean it as a criticism.

Just this once, I’m the strong one, and the rest of them can only watch helplessly.

He was right about her pulse. It stutters, faint and fading against my palm.

I focus on that, close my eyes, and haul all the energy I can from the tree I’m gripping.

The sapling is full of life—vibrant, green, growing. So much fucking potential that I can see the massive tree it’d have eventually grown into in the back of my mind.

I drag all of that out of it, quivering across my back, and pour it into Riva.

I don’t know all the parts of her that might be shattered or crushed, but it doesn’t matter. My power senses what to align and seal.

My own heart thuds on at a sickly frantic rhythm as I pull more life, and more, and more out of the sapling.

The tree bows, its branches sagging, its bark blackening. Beneath my touch, Riva’s flesh fuses back together.

Bones snap into place and meld their broken edges. Blood vessels reattach themselves.

I will more of the vital fluid to form in her arteries and veins. The flavor of raw meat forms in the back of my mouth and my stomach roils, but I ignore both sensations.

I’m inflicting death as much as I’m giving life, but only the second part matters.

Only Riva matters.

Flashes of memory dart by behind my closed eyelids. The moments when we’d figure out the answer to a problem in the same moment, and she’d shoot a softly sly smile my way to match my own.

All the times when I’d be lost in a tangle of emotions after a session where the guardians pushed me to use my talents in ways I’d never have wanted to, and she’d come over to work patiently alongside me until I’d decided what I wanted to share.

The day when she begged one of them to put a wildflower from the outdoor training field into a pot for me so I could keep it in my room, because I’d commented on how it was going to get trampled before too long.

The time Andreas challenged me to run her all the way around the track piggyback style, and we collapsed at the end in a fit of laughter, the most ridiculous but also the most free I’d felt in ages.

And then there’s the moment when I healed her after the club night, when she talked about how much she wanted to fix things. The way she’s hesitated to ask for my help even when she was on the verge of collapsing, because she could tell I don’t like what my power costs me.

How could we not have realized sooner that the guardians were the ones who’d deceived us? How could I not have realized sooner?

I was so concerned about my monstrousness, about the deformities sprouting from my back, but it wasn’t my physical strangeness she ran away from. No, it was my attitude, cold and silent while Jacob laid into her, shying away from her gestures of friendship.

I can’t even hate what I am right now, even if it was the guardians’ awful tests that grew most of this part of me, because my strangeness is what’s saving her.

The sapling dwindles completely, crumbling into deadened dust. The blood seeping from Riva’s body has slowed, but I can still feel it trickling out of her as both smoke and viscous liquid.

Shifting my position, I extend my appendage to the next nearest tree. Another surge of life energy, another being I’m consigning to death.

The woman beneath my hand is breathing now, in little spurts of air. Her pulse remains sluggish, but it beats stronger against my fingers even if it’s slow.

She’s coming back to us, bit by bit. Please let her make it all the way.

As the worst of her injuries bind back together, I become aware of the toll the healing has taken on me, even when I’m only acting as a conduit. Pain throbs at the base of my skull; my mouth tastes like ash as well as blood.

A tremor runs through my bones, and a hand rests on my back to steady me. “You’re doing good,” Andreas says raggedly. “You’re really doing it, Dom.”

The scuff of footsteps tells me Jacob is pacing. I don’t need Griffin’s talent for reading emotions to sense the tension rolling off of the guy.

Zian lets out another pained grunt. “Is there anything else you need? Anything we can do?”

I open my eyes and peer down at Riva, inhaling deeply as I do. The headache splinters right through my brain, and I’m not sure I can propel any more energy into her until I’ve rested at least a little.

“Does anyone… have any water?” I croak. Both she and I could probably use it.

Jake stops and makes a brusque gesture toward Zian. “You can get back to the house fastest. There are a few bottles in the bag that had the food.”

Zee dashes off without hesitation, and Jake stoops over Riva, staring down at her face. From his hard expression, I’d think he’s as coolly emotionless as usual if it weren’t for the anxious flexing of his hands.

His gaze jerks up to meet mine. “Why hasn’t she woken up? Did you fix everything inside?”

Drey frowns, his hand adding more reassuring pressure to my shoulder. “He’s obviously been doing everything he can, as well as he can.”

I cough and manage to speak a little clearer. I don’t want to tell him that I can’t say for sure whether she will wake up.

“I think I healed all the most important parts. She seems to be stable.” Another thought jabs at me, too insistent for me to ignore. “I’m going to heal the poison out of her too.”

Jacob’s features twitch with what might be a suppressed flinch. “Of course,” he snaps. “Heal everything. Just get on with it.”

I try to swallow past the dryness of my throat. “I’ll—I’ll keep going, I just need a moment?—”

“It’s fine, Dom. That was amazing.” Andreas gives my shoulder another squeeze, but when he looks down at Riva, there’s no mistaking the anguish that contorts his face.

“She ran right at that train,” he says in a low voice.

Jacob swipes his hand over his jaw. “She was running away from us. She wanted to get away from us that badly…”

His voice trails off with a rasp.

“I don’t think it was only that.” Andreas hesitates. “Just for a second, while you were riling her up, I felt— We all had new talents emerge in the past few years. We haven’t seen anything like that from her. Yet.”

My attention drops to the unconscious woman we’ve surrounded. I study the body I’ve been melding back together.

Does she have her own unnerving abilities that she’s keeping to herself, as much as I’ve done the same?

I didn’t sense anything physically unusual about her while I healed her, but I’m not sure if I would have.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jacob snarls, shoving himself to his feet. “We fucked up. I fucked up, so much?—”

His voice cuts off with a strangled sound—and the tearing of roots from soil. One of the other saplings rips right out of the ground, yanked by his power, and whirls across the field.

Drey tenses. “Dom might need?—”

I don’t hear the rest of his sentence, because right then Riva’s eyelids flutter. Flutter and open, the bright brown irises shining up at me.