Page 49 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Thirty-Four

Riva

A s I fling myself away from the windows, glass shards slice at my hoodie, one scraping across my jaw. Heavy feet thud onto the ground inside Engel's house with enough force that the floorboards tremble.

With the ear-splitting booming of the first shots, a broad hand snags around my arm and yanks me farther away from the intruders with supernatural strength. Zian and I tumble toward the kitchen island, propelled by his backward lunge.

He was standing ten feet away when the attackers burst in. He leapt toward them rather than away just to pull me to safety.

A bullet whizzes across my upper arm, clipping me and searing through my skin. As I bite back a yelp of pain, Zian grunts, flinching where he’s still gripping me. My heart stutters with panic.

“Here!” Jacob’s voice rings out, taut and furious. Scraping, creaking sounds surround me, mingling with the thunderous rattle of the gunfire.

I roll onto my feet and spin around, flicking my gaze over the chaos that now surrounds us.

The other guys dove down by the island too. Jacob’s turned this spot in the middle of the house into a sort of triangular fort, with the sofa and the overturned dining room table yanked close by his powers to form the other two sides.

The reason we haven’t leapt behind the island is obvious from the cacophony of sound battering my ears. Some of the shots are blaring from the kitchen. Others from the front of the house, opposite the living room.

Our attackers entered from all sides—front, back, and up from the basement. We’re surrounded.

And those are actual bullets, not any kind of tranquilizer. Blood is soaking through my hoodie from the shallow gouge in my arm, and Zian?—

Zian’s right shoulder has completely sagged, a splotch of red blooming fast around a bullet wound right where his shoulder meets his chest. I can’t tell whether the bullet is still lodged inside or tore straight through, but if it’d been even a few inches farther to the right…

He almost died, pulling me to safety.

The figures shooting at us almost killed him.

Something Engel said echoes up from the back of my mind with chilling clarity. The disdain in her voice when she talked about the guardians. I knew they’d only want to recapture you.

In the moment, I’d thought she’d meant as opposed to letting us keep our freedom. The sickly certainty coiling in my stomach tells me it was just the opposite.

She didn’t want us to even survive.

The prickling vibration resonates through my chest. I clench my jaw against it and force myself to focus on the battle.

The initial barrage of gunfire has dwindled for just an instant. One benefit to being surrounded is that our attackers can’t pelt us with bullets wildly without significant risk of hitting their colleagues.

Of course, the benefit only lasts as long as they can’t get close enough to shoot us like fish in a barrel.

My claws jolt from my fingers, my nerves buzzing with combat alertness.

But there isn’t much I can do to fend off the pricks without charging out there on a suicide mission…

or letting lose the stirring power inside me that has a mind of its own.

A vile, vicious mind I don’t want anything to do with.

Near me, Jacob’s face has gone tight with concentration, his hands jerking as he throws his telekinetic force through the room around us. Bones crack and pained groans reverberate through the air.

Andreas grimaces. “I can’t project memories to distract them from down here where I can’t see them. But if I?—”

He cuts himself off and vanishes into thin air in the next moment.

All at once, several of the sets of footsteps around us start stumbling. Shouts of confusion echo them.

Andreas has slipped out there among the enemy combatants unseen, muddling their minds.

There are too many of them, though. Bodies thump closer to our makeshift shelter, and Dominic bobs higher, his tan face turned greenish. Having shed his parka, he lets his tentacles whip free to smack away the gunmen attempting to get at us.

Another figure charges up to the overturned table. I spring at him before he can get in his shot and slice my claws right through his forearm.

Blood spurts and tendons sever, but the man still slams his other fist toward me.

Zian roars. The massive guy pummels my attacker in the face hard enough to bash in his skull and wrenches the rifle from his grasp in the same moment.

I spin toward my protector, my pulse stuttering at the thought of the wound he’s already taken. More blood is leaking out through his shirt, but he shoves me out of the way while scanning the room beyond the table warily.

In his protective rage, his wolfish fur has sprouted from his skin all across his neck and arms. His jaw has extended with the beastly folds of flesh, widened nose, and protruding fangs.

But his dark brown eyes are still Zian’s even as they flash with fury. Only a brief shudder through his massive frame reveals the pain he’s in.

Even shot, he’s right here with me, looking out for me like we always promised to do.

All of the guys are. We fend off the attackers in a weird sort of dance, Zian and I hurtling up to tackle anyone who gets too close, the other guys keeping most at a distance.

As I slash through the calf of a gunman who’s jumped onto the island, Dominic heaves out his tentacles to bat away a second foe I hadn’t seen launching herself at us. There’s a clatter and a splash as the woman must stagger into the pot of hot chocolate.

When another enemy shoves the muzzle of his rifle through a gap between the table and the sofa, I shatter his jaw with a kick moments before Jacob hurls him away.

And all the while the yells and mutters of confusion tell me that Andreas is working his powers, keeping our attackers unsteady. One of the fighters manages to snatch my arm in mid-swipe, and Drey appears for just an instant behind him, jabbing a knife between his ribs.

Even if the bonds of friendship—and whatever more we could have had—have fractured between us, we’re still a team. Right now, in the midst of the fray, not one particle in my body doubts that I could trust each of these men with my life.

And I’ll be here for them too, whatever it takes. We are not letting these assholes take any of us down.

If the battle weren’t so fraught, maybe I’d take comfort in the thought. But just as I start to think we might be able to withstand the onslaught, they throw a new tactic in to the mix.

One of our attackers hurls an object over our barricade. I yelp out a warning.

Jacob whirls in time to heave it away before it hits the floor—but as it soars away, it explodes in mid-air.

We all fling ourselves to the floor instinctively under the hail of shrapnel. Jacob’s body spasms where he’s fallen next to me.

I jerk myself onto my hands and knees to see him clapping his hand to his temple. Blood streams out from under his fingers. His eyes twitch as if he can’t quite focus them.

“Dominic!” I cry out. I don’t give a shit about what a jerk this guy has been to me when he’s fading before my eyes.

Dominic stretches a tentacle to encircle Jacob’s head, but his gaze darts around us with a panicked expression. There’s nothing here for him to grab onto to suck in the life energy he must need to heal a serious wound.

If he took it out of himself, would he be the one crumpling?

Andreas must have seen and recognized the problem, because the next second he’s flitting into view near the table and flipping one of our attackers right over it, headfirst. Dominic’s other tentacle lashes around the intruder’s neck, tight enough to strangle, but another of our enemies shoots at Andreas in his momentary visibility.

Andreas flickers translucent and throws himself to the side, not quite quickly enough. His torso lurches with the impact as the bullet catches him in the back.

He staggers toward us with a choked gasp, snapping back into completely solid form. Zian and I lunge together to haul him into our shelter.

He collapses there, wincing as he struggles to push himself more upright. “I can’t—I need to?—”

Blood is pooling beneath him. Jacob is still bleeding too, as quickly as Dom is trying to stabilize him. Footsteps close in around us again.

Panic chokes me. And the vibration within me that I’ve been suppressing thrums up through my lungs too forcefully for me to ignore.

I can stop them. I can shred them apart and make them wish they’d never tangled with us.

My claws dig into the floorboards with the wrenching longing to do just that.

I open my mouth, and my gaze snags on the faces around me. Dominic’s, tight with urgency and strain. Jacob’s, fighting the slackness that’s creeping over his muscles. Andreas’s, his eyes glazing with pain. Zian’s, his anguish showing even across his wolfish jowls.

In that instant, I can feel that I’ll be able to shield them from the vicious rage. I’m not angry with them, not right now. I can aim this brutal energy beyond the boundaries of our little barricade, away from those within.

But that’s not the only problem.

The growing shriek at the base of my throat makes me feel sick even as the urge clamors through my nerves to set it free.

What will the guys think of me after they see it? Once they know what I’m capable of doing—what I’m willing to do?

What some part of me will revel in?

They only just started believing that I’m the girl they always knew, and I can shatter that illusion with a single scream. Make them think they were right to distrust and shun me before.

I am that girl. I never asked for this power. It isn’t me .

The wrongness of this whole situation sweeps over my body, and it’s a question rather than a scream that bursts from my throat, aimed at the woman I have to assume is still somewhere in this house with us and the soldiers she summoned.

“Why? Why are you doing this? You made us.”

Is there anything that could change her mind, make her call off the slaughter?