Page 50 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Ursula Engel’s voice carries from somewhere behind me, crisp as before and somehow steady in spite of the battle that’s being raged around her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t plan for it to end up this way when I started. But I did make you, so it’s my responsibility to unmake you when no one else is willing to take that step.”

“But—”

Her tone is so cool and dispassionate it lances straight through me.

“I’ve been arguing for this since you were toddlers, when the Company of Light was destroyed by a hybrid not that different from you.

I demanded it again and again when I saw how quickly your abilities were evolving and expanding, when my colleagues started pushing for you to be sent beyond the protection of the facility.

But no one would listen to my warnings, and they shut me out. ”

“You’re insane,” Dom shouts at her in a ragged voice. “We’re not?—”

Engel cuts him off. “You’re monsters of the worst kind.

Abominations growing out of control, without even the few weaknesses that make the other creatures vulnerable and not enough humanity to rein your impulses in.

That’s not what I meant to create. So I’ve gathered my own guardians to my purpose, and now I can end the catastrophe I set in motion. ”

She must give some signal, because the booted feet thump toward our shelter again. My stomach lurches, but I know then that this is the end.

I have no other choice. I can kill the girl I wanted to be, for myself and for the guys around me, or I can watch us all die.

It isn’t even really a choice.

As my lips part, it occurs to me that Engel doesn’t even know. She’s so confident her soldiers will be enough.

She screwed herself over by going rogue. The regular guardians haven’t been filling her in on all the details. She didn’t know Griffin had died; she probably wasn’t aware of some of the guys’ newer powers.

And she clearly has no idea about the destruction I wreaked in a cage-fighting arena two weeks ago, whether I meant to or not.

Not a single person in this building is prepared… including me.

Andreas gasps a ragged breath, and our attackers throw something that hits the dining table with a smack. The wooden surface blasts apart in a shower of splinters.

And the last of the control I was holding onto snaps.

The shriek that’s been swelling in my chest claws up my throat and sears from my mouth. It screeches out of me so loud my ears ring with it.

My vision hazes. My body sways where I’m braced against the floor, the power of the scream threatening to consume my entire consciousness as it careens through the room.

I dig my claws deeper into the boards beneath me, holding on, refusing to be as overwhelmed as I was last time when it took me by surprise, when I had some toxic drug dragging me down.

If this is me, then I have to own it. I have to be awake enough to make sure I only hurt the people who’re trying to hurt us, not the men who are my blood.

Whether those men still want any kind of bond with me after this moment or not.

The piercing wail keeps pealing from my lungs and ricocheting through the room, and a sense of the figures around me ripples back into my body like some kind of echolocation.

I’ve pinned them in place, six men still standing in the front area beyond the dining table, eight in the living room who’d been approaching the sofa, three in the kitchen behind me.

And Engel. I can feel her too: a slightly different, more familiar quiver that runs through the lancing energy I’m throwing at them.

She’s tucked away at the top of the basement stairs where she must have been watching from, as paralyzed as the others.

“Riva?” I hear one of my men murmur, so distant through the scream that I can’t even tell who it is.

I ignore him, plummeting deeper into the current of the scream as it radiates through every cell inside me. Hunger courses with the vicious energy, prickling all the way down to my gut.

My awareness of my captives sharpens with the heightening of the shriek. I can follow the thumping of their pulses, the trembling of their straining muscles.

All the nooks and crannies where the pieces of their bodies fit together. All the soft and tender spots filled with fragile nerve endings.

My attention homes in on the closest man. His feet.

I snap the balls up toward his shin so fast I turn the arches inside out.

The crack of the bones sets off his guttural cry, and the blaze of pain flows back into my lungs. But it doesn’t hurt me.

No, it’s like drinking the freshest lemonade on the hottest day, a balm to every place inside me that’s been craving relief.

I need more. More.

They have to pay.

I close my eyes, lost in the ringing in my ears, the screech of my own voice, and the bodily reactions reverberating into me. Every sensitive spot on our attackers lights up in the picture painted by my new senses.

Crush his knee caps. Burst his balls. Crack every bone in his spine from the tailbone up—but careful not to sever the cord.

Let him feel every tremor and stab of agony I’m inflicting on him. I can only gulp it down if he tastes it too.

Pop his elbows inside out. Mash every finger from tip to knuckle. Break his ribs and shove the shards down into his kidneys.

The stream of anguish widens into a torrent. It floods me, shockingly exhilarating.

Somewhere way deep down in the back of my mind, there’s a flash of horror, but not enough to distract me.

The current halts as the man blacks out, his mind short-circuiting. Nothing more to gain from him. I wrench his head around to end him completely, my awareness already leaping to the next.

One and then another and another. Faster with each iteration as I gain momentum.

Tendons rent, sinews torn, bones fractured. Organs punctured, joints unhinged.

The glorious flood of agony tingles over every inch of my skin. I’m vaguely conscious of the wound on my shoulder sealing up, the flesh smoothing out like it was never split.

The last lingering tears that even Dominic couldn’t totally heal inside me meld together good as new.

I’m stronger—so strong. Stronger than I ever imagined I could be. Stronger than anyone else could have guessed.

More foes fall like dominos, and the surge of giddy elation propels me to my feet. My scream still resounds through the building.

With every thump of my pulse and heave of my lungs, I obliterate another life.

Until there’s only one left, other than the four clustered around me.

One woman huddles at the far end of the kitchen, trembling with both rage and terror. Spittle flecks her lips as she tries to force out words.

I don’t want to know what the experimenter who made us has to say about me now. If I’m a monster, then I learned it from her.

She made us, she raised us, and then she set us up to be slaughtered. How dare she expect any better in return.

My shriek hitches even higher. Bones burst into cutting shards from Engel’s toes across her feet, through her ankles and knees up her legs.

They carve waves of pain out of her to feed the fire burning inside me. It’s so fucking bright now.

I could take on the whole facility. I could raze an entire fucking town.

But her torment is most satisfying of all. The closest thing we ever had to a mother—the attempted murderer of her own children.

Her spine bows back. Her ribs split from her chest.

Every horrible thing she thought about us, every vicious plan she had for our demise will disintegrate with the agony ravaging her mind.

Then I wrench her heart in two, and she collapses into a puddle of blood and urine.

The scream whips around for a new target, and I suck it in with a gasp.

No. No fucking way. We’re done now.

We did what we needed to do.

The hunger clamors for more, but I tense my entire body, hauling it back. I will not let this horror take me over, not completely.

The sound peters out. My jaw swings shut.

And I find myself standing, my muscles quivering with restrained power and the flavor of blood coating my mouth, in the middle of a tableau of carnage.

Contorted bodies lie sprawled all around our shelter. The sight of them sends a jab of shame and a splash of revulsion over me, but the high of the moment is still humming through my veins.

The guys are standing too, staring at the massacre: Jacob gripping the edge of the island, Zian’s shoulders held at a lopsided angle but looking full human again, Andreas with his arm looped around Dominic’s shoulder while one tentacle mends his wounded body.

The guardian slumped at their feet lies still and lifeless, but nowhere near as grotesque as the deaths I wrought.

Their gazes slide from the deformed corpses to me, and the bottom of my stomach drops out.

I rescued us all. I seized our freedom.

And deep down inside, I loved every second of the butchery I carried out.

Now I get to find out whether I’ve lost everything after all.