Page 5 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Two

Riva

I blink, my eyelashes sticking together briefly before pulling apart, and find myself staring down at the floor of the fighting ring. I’m hunched over, my hands braced beneath me, fresh score marks streaking from my claws through the scuffed beige surface.

The most horrible smell I’ve ever encountered clogs my nose. Like raw meat tossed into a putrid public restroom.

My stomach lurches, sending a spurt of acid up my throat. I sputter and raise my head, and then I just stare, frozen in place.

The scene around me is just as deathly still.

The scene around me is death .

None of the horrors the guardians subjected me to prepared me for this.

Bodies lie sprawled all across the stands around the arena, but they look nothing like bodies should. My gaze jars at the twisted shapes formed by the limbs and torsos, splattered with blood where the skin has cracked.

It’s like a giant stomped all over the crowd—and then stirred them a little more for good measure.

My eyes jerk to the nearest body—the corpse of my former opponent, stretched out on the floor just a few feet from where I’m crouched.

His mouth gapes in a vast, broken maw as if someone grasped his chin with one hand and his cheek with the other and slammed them in opposite directions, taking his jaw right off its hinges.

Uprooted teeth dapple the puddle of blood beneath his head.

His lifeless eyes bulge so violently they’ve almost popped from their sockets.

His limbs lie akimbo, snapped and bent in a half a dozen places to form far more joints than any arm or leg is meant to have. Jagged ends of bone gleam where the flesh has totally split.

His torso is a crater, the ribs collapsed inward. A dark stain marks his neon-green training shorts, seeping into a yellow-brown puddle beneath his ass that suggests he both pissed and shit himself.

As I take the wreckage in, more bile shoots up my throat. I lurch forward in a full-out vomit.

My half-digested dinner of spaghetti and meatballs—because the boss always wants me primed on carbs before a fight—splatters the floor. I jerk my hands back, my stomach still roiling, and push myself to my feet to study the wider arena again.

As my attention trails over the carnage beyond the cage, where dozens of bodies lie wrenched and deformed like the one next to me, I become distantly aware that my legs are holding me perfectly steady.

My gut is churning, and my chest has constricted with horror, but the dizzy unsteadiness brought on by whatever the boss drugged me with has vanished.

The boss. My gaze shoots to his high seat, and I suck in a ragged breath that floods my lungs with more of the awful stink.

He’s strewn buckled backwards over one of the chair arms, his spine bent so sharply his head could touch the backs of his knees.

His eyeballs dangle from their sockets, his jaw torn right off and resting on the seat next to them.

The one arm I can see is rippled as if it was wrung out like a wet towel.

What the hell—what the hell happened here?

The last few moments before I blacked out rush through my mind. My desperation and fury, the boss’s smirk. My attacker’s hand clamped around my arm, and the scream reverberating up my throat like a bolt of lightning.

Like some kind of power.

My arms stiffen at my sides. I pull them up to wrap them tightly around my chest.

I couldn’t have done this… could I? I’ve never had any kind of vocal power before—I’ve never damaged a body through anything other than physical combat.

But I’m the only one left standing, with all but one of the corpses lying far beyond my physical reach while I’m trapped within the cage. And that scream…

The memory of it sends a shiver up my spine, one that feels like anticipation almost as much as revulsion. I shudder and hug myself tighter.

Only a monster could have done something like this. A much more terrifying and inhuman monster than I’ve ever been.

Than I’d ever want to be.

The bouncy melody of a pop song erupts from the stands and shatters my shellshocked daze. Flinching, I jerk into a defensive stance—and realize it’s a ringtone.

Someone’s phone survived the carnage.

There are so many people here. So many mangled corpses. It won’t be long before someone on the outside realizes there’s a problem and comes looking.

But for now, I’m all alone.

My heart leaps high enough to overtake my horror. This is my chance. No one is standing in my way.

I can get out of here—I can go back for my guys like I’ve wanted to for so long.

I have to move quickly. As soon as any of the boss’s people find this bloodbath and realize I’m missing, they might warn the guardians that I’m on the loose. I’ll lose any element of surprise.

And I’m going to need every possible advantage if I’m going to break the boys out of the facility on my own.

My jaw clenches, my focus narrowing with the same cool detachment I bring to a fight, shutting out every consideration other than the job I have to get done.

First, I have to find a way out of this cage.

The guard who escorted me to the door lies at the edge of the ring where he’d stood waiting. Glancing away from the horror etched on his distorted face, I stretch my arm through the bars toward his hip.

I barely manage to hook my fingers inside his jeans pocket and snag the key ring. Breathing shallowly through my mouth, I push the key for the cage into the lock and twist it.

The door pops open. I’m free.

My limbs tense with the impulse to hurtle through the massacre to the exit, but I spot another object near the guard’s fractured thigh: a pistol.

I prefer to work with my claws, but I can’t deny that weapons would be an asset. Especially when I have no idea just how tightly secure the facility will be after our previous near escape.

The guys might not even be in that building anymore but moved to some place with additional protections.

I grab the gun and push myself onward through the deathly wreckage, scanning waists and hips and the items scattered in between, avoiding faces as well as I can.

There’s another pistol, and a switchblade, and a thin knife that looks perfect for throwing, wedged beneath someone’s contorted pelvis. My lips press flat as I yank it out.

It’s all just meat now. Nothing worse than a butcher shop.

If I tell myself that enough times, maybe all of me will believe it.

I consider a fallen phone, but electronic devices are easily tracked.

I do snatch up the least bloody wallets I spot—because I’m going to need money sooner rather than later—as well as a couple of lighters, a few pieces of jewelry that look pawnable when the cash runs out, and a voluminous purse with only a few scarlet flecks on the leather to shove my haul in.

Don’t think about who this necklace or that bracelet once belonged to. Don’t think about whether they were as immoral as the people who ran the cage matches or just someone who happened to get caught up with the wrong crowd at the worst possible time.

Don’t think about how much they must have suffered, and who inflicted that suffering on them.

Jacob. Zian. Andreas. Dominic. All that matters is them. I’m finally coming for them.

By the time I’ve reached the exit, the one the audience arrives through that stands just beyond the boss’s chair, I’ve added three more guns and another blade to my collection. One firearm for each of us, if the ammo lasts that long.

I don’t know how many bullets they have in them, but I’m not lingering here to check.

My gaze flicks over to the boss’s chair. To the thick gold chains looped around his purpling neck.

I bet they’re worth plenty, but all of me recoils from the idea of taking anything of that man’s with me.

I shove past the door into a wide but short hall that leads to a flight of stairs. Three more disfigured corpses sprawl on the floor here.

I don’t want to think about the implications of that fact either. Or of the fact that the injuries I took in the fight aren’t so much as stinging anymore.

With that sudden memory, I glance down at myself. The cut on my shoulder has sealed up, leaving only a ruddy line. The same with the one on my hip, visible through the slit carved in my sweatpants.

I’ve always healed quickly—we all did. The guardians remarked on it more than once. But not that fast. How?—?

That doesn’t matter either. I don’t have to think about it. All that matters is there’s no one standing in my way when I race out into the night.

I find myself under a single dim security lamp at the edge of a parking lot packed with cars I don’t know how to hotwire or drive. All the things the guardians taught us, and they never bothered with that particular skill, the pricks.

I sling the strap of the purse over my shoulder cross-body and tighten it until the bag rests firmly against my back. After scanning the area for movement and seeing none, I extend my claws and sever my skin just below the scratch I made earlier tonight.

Blood trickles down, and smoke wafts up. Up and, as I hold my memories of the guys firmly in my head, to my right.

Now I know where I’m going.

I set off at a swift lope, my braid swaying against my back.

The concrete building that holds the arena stands between several decrepit industrial buildings on what appears to be the outskirts of a town—or maybe even a city.

I mark the position of the nearest highway when headlights cruise by and keep a healthy distance from the few cars passing by this late.

The shabby warehouses give way to scruffy fields and then stretches of farmland with weathered wooden fences and the occasional darkened house standing at the end of a long drive. I keep the same pace whether I’m jogging through rows of corn or along the edges of pastures.

After several houses, I come across a bike leaning against a post just down the drive. I yank it up and hop on.

Pumping the pedals, I can move so much faster, but I need some kind of firm path beneath the wheels. Thankfully the cars come even fewer between as the night creeps on.

I stick to desolate lanes when I can and sprint along the highway when I can’t. Every now and then, I slow enough to squeeze more blood and smoke from my cut to confirm I’m still heading in the right direction.

It still feels too slow. I don’t know how many hours of darkness I have left.

When I duck down in the ditch as a transport truck rumbles toward me, I decide to make a gamble. I drop the bike and dash over the shoulder at the last second to leap at the back of the truck.

Hooking my legs around the metal bar beneath the doors, I grasp one of the metal supports it’s attached to. The truck keeps roaring forward with no sign that my intrusion has been noticed.

I prod a steady stream of smoke from my arm. It wavers through the ruddy glow from the lights on the back of the truck, pushing forward despite the rush of the wind.

We’ve sped past the fringes of another city, a couple of small towns, and a long stretch of forest before the dark wisp abruptly veers to my left instead of ahead.

With a hitch of my pulse, I spring from the truck. I roll over the grassy shoulder and stop with a smack of my side against a tree trunk.

It’s only seconds before I’m on my feet and hurrying onward again.

Hustling through the underbrush, I stumble on an overgrown dirt lane… where the tufts of weeds have been recently pressed flat by tire treads. My senses go on high alert.

I run onward, gulping down air both for oxygen to fuel my muscles and for any trace of pheromone-emitting humans nearby. The lane weaves through the woods, across a stretch of tall grass, and into a denser sprawl of forest.

I don’t encounter anyone. But then, the guardians would mostly be concerned about their wards getting out , not about anyone coming in .

When I spot a fence up ahead around a bend in the lane, I slow, still sticking to the shadows at the edge of the road. Slinking closer, I ease farther into the shelter of the trees.

Then I come to a stop several feet from where the forest thins. The certainty rings through every inch of my body that this is the place.

I don’t think it’s the same facility where the guardians held us before, but that’s not really surprising. Their security had been partly breached.

It’s a similar setup, though: a clearing the size of a few football fields surrounded by forest, with a lone concrete structure not far from the gate, looking no larger than a bungalow. There’s no way to tell just looking at it how deep and wide the building extends underground.

No cars are in sight. The guardians must have added some kind of underground parking garage to keep them out of unwanted hands.

The fence is taller, about twice my height, with barbed wire coiled all the way around its top. Cables that run between the metal posts just above the barbed wire give me pause.

Then it clicks.

The fence is electrified as well as barbed. The guardians want to tear into anyone who tries to breach it in every possible way.

I wet my lips. I don’t have much time. Dawn is creeping closer with every thump of my heart.

It doesn’t appear that anyone has sounded the alarm about my escape so far, or else if they have, the guardians aren’t worried I’ll already have made it here. I only spot a few armed sentries ambling across the field around the building.

Even if my nerves are screaming for me to race straight to my guys, I have to be smart about this. I’m not screwing up what’s probably my last chance.

I prowl around the edges of the field until I’ve fully charted it. One pine stands close enough to the fence and tall enough that I plan to return to it later.

Before I can do that, I need as many of the guardians as possible diverted by other concerns.

I slink back around until I’m on the side of the facility opposite my pine. Digging through my stolen purse, I produce one of the lighters.

With a flick of the dial, I confirm the flame still works. Then I grasp a fallen branch covered in curling, dead leaves, set it against a crumbling log, and send it up in flames.