Page 46 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Thirty-Two

Riva

T he house reminds me so much of the magazine clipping from decades ago that I have to stop and stare for a moment to make sure I’m not hallucinating.

The trees surrounding it aren’t draped with snow, but their needle-laden boughs swoop around the log walls in a woodsy embrace. Those walls rise two stories above the low slope where the house is perched, to a sharply peaked roof that makes me picture a vaulted ceiling beneath.

Large windows gleam darkly glossy, reflecting the forest around them. The afternoon light is too bright to allow any glimpse of what’s inside.

To my eyes, anyway. Zian peers at the place and then glances at us.

“I’m going to sneak a little closer to get a better look inside. Make sure she doesn’t have other guardians in there with her.”

Jacob nods. “Just be careful.”

As Zian treads lightly between the trees to approach the house, Andreas rubs his mouth, his expression unusually pensive.

“All of the guardians we tackled on the way here—in their memories of talking to her, it seemed more like they were her jailers than her protectors. She always sounded like she was irritated that they were insisting on staking out the house.”

There were three more guards stationed along the path through the woods, just as I’d thought I’d determined from the one we questioned. None of them revealed anything more useful than the first, though—other than what Andreas just said.

I think back to the other things we’ve learned about Ursula Engel. “They pushed her out of something she set up… They’re probably worried she’s going to reveal secrets they don’t want getting out.”

To us? Or to the general public?

What would ordinary people think if they found out that people like me and the men around me exist?

An image of Brooke’s crumpled body flashes through my mind. That wasn’t our fault—but we’ve dealt out plenty of violence ourselves.

Somehow I don’t think we’d get a cheerful reception from the average human being. Every monster movie I’ve ever seen, the strange creatures, the mutants, and the freaks are greeted with screams and gunfire, not open arms.

But the woman inside that house knows what we are and cared for us almost like a parent. She had some part in making us, I have to assume, whether directly or just instructing others.

And maybe we’re about to find out how and why.

Andreas motions toward me, his fingers skimming the air a few inches from my arm without quite touching me. “Riva, can I talk to you for a second?”

He’s beckoning me away from Jacob and Dominic. As the other guys give him a curious look, my legs balk instinctively.

Andreas swallows audibly, a trace of queasiness crossing his face. “Please,” he adds. “I’ll give you plenty of space. I really just want to talk.”

It was talking that ruined everything to begin with, but the rawness of his voice tugs at my heart against my will.

If I don’t like what he has to say, it’s not as if I can’t march right back to the others without finishing hearing him out.

“Fine.”

He leads me back through the brush in the opposite direction from the house until the others are just fragments of color between the trees. Then he stops, keeping a good five feet of distance between us as promised, and turns to face me.

Andreas has always been the most fun-loving one of us, the quickest to toss out a joke or latch on to an opportunity for amusement. But there isn’t the slightest trace of humor in his expression now.

His gray eyes are shadowed, his lips pressed in a tight line. His normally rich brown skin looks tarnished even in the bright daylight, as if the base color has been leeched out of it.

In spite of everything, seeing him like this makes me want to grab him in a hug. My arms itch with the urge, but I hold them rigidly at my sides.

“I’m sorry,” he says abruptly in a low voice. “I know I said that before, and I know it’s not enough—I just don’t know what else to do, and we’re about to walk into that house, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

He stops to drag in a shaky breath, and I just stand there silent, my stomach twisting itself into knots. How can I ache so much with both the agony this man inflicted on me and the pain I can hear twined all through his voice?

Andreas holds my gaze with a glint of determination lighting in his eyes. His hand twitches as if he wants to reach for me but held himself back.

I can taste his nervousness. He thinks that what I do here, what I say, could hurt him.

“I shouldn’t have believed the guardians’ story or that stupid video,” he goes on. “I should have realized you were telling the truth from the first moment you came back to us.”

My jaw clenches. “Yes, you should have.”

His head droops slightly, but he doesn’t break eye contact.

“I was wrong and an idiot, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to make up for that, however long it takes.

But I need you to know—that night in the farmhouse, I’d been trying to convince Jake that we could trust you beforehand.

I knew you were on our side. I wanted to understand everything you’d been through, and I was hoping if I had more of the story I could make him see what I already had. ”

“You still…” I grope for the words through the constricting of my chest. “You nudged me in the direction you wanted. You manipulated the conversation. You told me those stories, talked like you thought you were failing the other guys?—”

“That was all true,” Andreas breaks in with a rough laugh. “Hell, I have been failing. They all fell to pieces, and I’m the only one who wasn’t really shattered, and I still couldn’t figure out a way to put them back together, not properly. And now I’ve failed you too.”

“ I can’t fix that.”

“I know.” He drops his gaze for just a second before catching mine again. “But I meant everything I said that night. Every single thing. I love you, and I’ve loved you for as long as I had any idea what the word even meant. It’s a fucking honor to be connected to you however I am.”

His hand rises to his chest, to the spot where I know his skin is marked beneath his shirt.

“I fucked it up, I broke the most precious thing I’ve ever been given, and no matter what happens, no matter what those assholes come at us with next, I’m going to be fighting to my last breath to make it right again.

I just hope my last breath doesn’t come in the next hour or two. ”

His words have sent wave after wave of churning emotion through me. The last sentence jars me out of the haze. “You think it’s that dangerous, going in there?”

Andreas grimaces. “I don’t know. But this is big, and we don’t have anything close to the full picture…

I can’t shake the feeling that we might be walking into something we can’t come out of, one way or another.

And I didn’t want to take the chance of that being true without telling you how much you mean to me. ”

He touches his chest again, over his heart this time. “We are blood.”

My fingers curl toward my palm of their own accord, wanting to rise to the same spot on my own chest.

“We are blood,” I murmur. “I don’t—I don’t know how the rest will go. But I want to find out exactly what that means. And then… whatever else we do, whatever else happens, it’ll begin there.”

“Yeah.”

Andreas searches my face for a moment, but if he was hoping for more absolution from me, I can’t give it to him.

Dominic did an amazing job mending the torn-up pieces of my body, but my feelings are still jagged shards scraping against each other from the base of my throat all the way down to my gut.

Drey doesn’t push for the answers he wants this time. He simply dips his head and turns slowly to give me time to recognize that he’s returning to the others, so we can walk together.

I keep the same definite distance the whole way back, but maybe some of those broken pieces inside me don’t scrape quite as sharply as they did before.

We reach Jacob and Dom just as Zian does from the other direction.

“I couldn’t see anyone else inside,” he says quietly. “Engel is there—or at least a woman who looks like how Drey described her. Sitting in the living room with a mug and a book. The rest of the place is empty.”

We all exchange a glance. I raise my chin and speak before Jacob can give the final command.

“What are we waiting for, then? Let’s see what she has to say.”