Page 58 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Four

Riva

I n the first few moments after Dominic’s declaration, all of us simply stare—at him, at the laptop screen. My head is spinning too fast for me to concentrate on the words.

“What do you mean?” I blurt out. “We never saw—the guardians never said?—”

Dominic waves at the screen with a rustle of his parka. He must be sweltering in the thick coat even with it unzipped, but I’ve never seen him display his tentacles unless he absolutely has to.

“It’s not obvious whether they actually did create more hybrids. But I found a file that refers to different processes that Engel used. There’s an original one, labeled first gen and dated almost twenty-two years ago.”

“Around the time we would have been conceived, however that happened,” Andreas fills in, looking ill.

Dominic nods. “And then there are two others, one from about five years after that and then another after two more. Some of it is in shorthand notation I don’t understand. But it seems like she’s reminding herself of where she left certain things out.”

My stomach has balled into a massive knot. “She didn’t want to make more people like us. She didn’t even want us to keep living. She said by the time we were toddlers, she’d already changed her mind.”

Jacob frowns, leaning his weight onto his hand where it’s resting on the comforter next to me. He isn’t paying any attention to me, but I’m abruptly aware of how close he is.

How close they all are.

I scrambled onto the bed at Dominic’s beckoning without thinking, just wanting to know what he’s found. Now I’m perched on my knees with Jacob just a few inches at my right and Andreas equally close at my left.

And Dom is right in front of me. I could tip my head onto his shoulder if I wanted to.

An unwelcome tingle of warmth races over my skin. Suddenly I wish I never took Andreas’s suggestion of a soak in the tub, as brief as I made it.

I figured the regular salts he got might be good for the wound on my side that’s still raw. If it gets infected, I’ll have to ask Dominic for help.

But now my skin is scrubbed clean under my crisply new clothes. The sensation is energizing in ways I’d rather not tap into.

No matter how badly these men hurt me, some part of my body—maybe even my soul—believes that I belong with them. As close to them as I can get.

Thankfully, it’s my mind that gets to make those decisions.

I stay stiffly still where I can still see the screen but avoiding easing any closer to the guys.

Jacob makes a vague gesture at the computer. “She was the one who figured out how to make us, but she said there were other people who had control over the facility—who could boss her around. They wanted to keep us. Maybe they wanted to make more too.”

Zian lets out a rough chuckle. “She could have given them instructions that were missing pieces so it wouldn’t actually work. Pretended it was a fluke they produced us.”

“Or the new process worked, but without the parts she thought made us too dangerous,” Dominic says quietly.

I shudder. “There could be a bunch of shadowblood teenagers being put through all the same tests we were.”

Or even younger kids. There’s no saying the guardians wouldn’t have used Engel’s processes more than once after she handed them over.

“Is there anything else in there that would tell us for sure?” Jacob demands.

As Dominic starts clicking through more files, I scoot farther back on the bed. Could there have been other people like us, with wisps of smoke in their blood and monstrous powers, at the facility where we grew up?

There were an awful lot of doors on the same levels as our cells. For all we know, the guardians had separate training rooms elsewhere in the building.

And we know we lived in at least three different facilities over the course of our captivity. It’s also possible they kept younger test subjects in a totally different place.

Or maybe Engel screwed her colleagues over and they never managed to create anyone else even sort of like us. She didn’t seem bothered that it was just the five of us who showed up, other than wondering about Griffin’s absence.

Dominic makes a discontented sound. “There are more documents with that weird system of notation I don’t know how to read. I don’t see anything definite about other ‘shadowbloods,’ but she doesn’t seem to have any files even on us here. I’ll keep digging.”

“You got into her phone too?” Andreas asks.

“Yeah, but she must have deleted everything whenever she used it. No call history, no saved contacts, nothing.”

I restrain a sigh and push myself right to the edge of the bed. My limbs itch to return to my own room where the guys’ presence won’t niggle at me, but I want to hear the second Dominic finds something.

It could be there’s nothing useful on the laptop at all. That we’re even more adrift than when I first broke them out of the facility, when they had the goal of finding Engel to see what she knew.

The TV remote is sitting on the bedside table. Aimlessly, I pick it up and start flicking through the channels.

Zian gets up and comes around to get a better view of the TV, but he sits carefully on the other bed, a few feet away. I know I don’t have to worry about him getting up in my personal space.

He shoots me a cautious glance, but his voice comes out with a friendly warmth despite its gruffness. “Do you figure a massacre in that little cabin will make the news? Stuff like that can’t happen very often near some tiny town.”

I consider the question seriously, lingering on a news report about traffic conditions. “Engel’s place was so isolated, it’d have been the guardians who found it. And they’d have covered it up.”

“Like it never happened.”

“Yeah.” I cross my arms, tapping my elbow against the rebandaged wound that’s hidden under my hoodie.

I wish I could erase what I did completely out of existence, as thoroughly as Andreas can wipe out memories.

I wish I could erase the ability right out of me .

I flip the channels a few more times and pause with a jolt of recognition. The faces on the screen, the slightly hazy lighting, and the dramatic swell of music are all so familiar they send me back more than four years to the TV breaks we got in the middle of training.

A woman with billowy hair and an elegant dress wags a manicured finger at a stern-looking man with slicked-back hair. “Don’t you dare,” she says, drawing the words out.

He squares his shoulders, glowering down at her dramatically. “You’re the last person who should be threatening me, Carolina.”

Andreas has lifted his head to see what I’m watching. A soft chuckle escapes him. “That’s the crazy soap opera Griffin always wanted to watch.”

Jacob’s gaze jerks up too. At the flexing of his jaw, I feel like I have to explain—to make it clear I didn’t mean to rub salt in a wound.

Even though my own heart aches with the memory of watching these storylines play out tucked next to his twin on the sofa.

Heat tickles across my cheeks as I make myself speak. “It was actually—I liked it. Griffin just knew, and he knew you guys would tease me about it if I said I wanted to watch the show.”

From the tick of Jacob’s eyelid, I can’t tell whether my admission made things better or worse.

Andreas arches his eyebrows, but his tone stays mild. The same careful way he’s been speaking to me ever since his last apology.

“I think you’re allowed one or two interests that are a little girly, Tink. We would never have forgotten that you could take us down in two seconds flat in a sparring match.”

Zian gives a huff. “The rest of you, maybe.”

I squirm a little, still embarrassed. “Everything in this show was just so different from the facility. They were always going to fancy places and meeting fancy people. And when they got angry, they’d just stare and snap at each other instead of stabbing or shooting.”

Not to mention that watching the characters’ melodramatic relationship issues made me feel a little less ridiculous having a crush on all five of my best friends.

Before anyone can talk about the soap I secretly adored any more—before it can provoke any further painful memories—I shut the TV off and turn back toward Dominic. “Anything else on the laptop?”

He’s brought one hand to his mouth, resting his knuckle against his lips as he scans the current batch of files. “I mean, there’s a lot on here. Some of this is kind of interesting—she’s got notes on different types of ‘monsters.’”

We all perk up.

“Like, what kinds we were made out of?” Zian asks.

Dominic shakes his head. “Nothing connecting them specifically to us. Just observations and data, abilities and possible weaknesses.”

Jacob grimaces. “Either to figure out what she wanted to fuse into us or how we were supposed to go take the things down.”

Engel had said that she originally created us in the hopes that we’d be powerful enough to fight the creatures she called monsters. Then she decided we were even more dangerous than the original monsters were.

I draw my legs up to my chest. “We’ve got to figure out more about what we are and what we can do, somehow. If the full monsters can go around mingling with humans without most people noticing, they can obviously control their abilities just fine.”

So there ought to be ways that we can too. Ways to make it easier to contain my urge to shriek when I get angry.

Ways to ensure Andreas doesn’t fade away after he uses his ability to turn invisible. Ways to tame Zian’s wolfish rage.

Maybe even a way to get Dominic’s tentacles to shrink back into him instead of growing.

Dominic rubs his chin. “It doesn’t seem like anyone at the facilities would know. Engel made us, and I don’t think she ever shared the full process with anyone else.”

“We’d have a hell of a time trying to go straight at the guardians on their home territory anyway,” Andreas says.

Zian hesitates and then catches my gaze. “What about—the place they sent you to, after we tried to escape?”

I suppress a shudder at the thought of the cage-fighting arena where I was held—the weekly matches against armed men twice my size, the shackles that weighed down my arms in between, and the mix of fear and hatred that emanated off my keepers.

“They didn’t know anything,” I said. “I’m not sure they had any idea what I was other than, to them, a freak.”

Jacob’s eyes narrow. “We need to pay them back too. They’re going to regret everything they put you?—”

“They already regretted it,” I break in, and jerk my gaze away. I don’t want to watch their expressions while I admit this. “That’s the first time my new power came out. I took out the boss and all his people who were around… and the whole audience.”

My shoulders come up defensively, but I refuse to outright cringe. The memory of that much larger massacre still makes me queasy, but it got me free. It brought me back to my guys, even if our reunion hasn’t exactly gone the way I hoped.

If it wasn’t for the carnage I dealt with my scream, I’d still be in those shackles in the room where the boss kept me, all alone.

There’s a moment of silence, like the other guys aren’t sure what to say. Then Zian grunts. “Good.”

Jacob’s mouth curves into one of the hard little smiles that until recently were normally aimed at me. This one is on my behalf. “Yes. They got what they deserved.”

I’m not sure the other two guys feel quite the same way, but Andreas at least changes the subject so we don’t need to dwell on my past brutality.

“If we can’t get more answers about our ‘monstrous’ talents from the people who put them into us,” he says, “what if we asked the things that have their own talents?”

Zian knits his brow. “You want to talk to the monsters ?”

Andreas holds up his hands. “I’m just saying, they’re the only other direct source of information. We don’t have to make friends or anything, just find one or two and question them.”

As his suggestion sinks in, I find myself nodding. “And we don’t know how monstrous those monsters actually are. Engel said they’re horrible… but she thought we were horrible too.”

The guardians are against the things they call monsters, and they want to enslave us. So we share at least one other thing with the creatures: a common enemy.

“We’d still need to be cautious,” Dominic points out.

“Of course. Trust no one.” Jacob rolls his shoulders as if he’s warming up to launch into an interrogation right now. “Any idea from her notes where we’d be best off looking for these creatures?”

Dominic tilts his head to the side, studying the screen. “It sounds like most of the ones that mix with humans regularly like to do it where there are lots of people to blend in with. So a big city seems like it’d be our best bet.”

Zian relaxes a little. “That’ll mean more people for us to blend in with too. Should we stick to Canada still? What’s the biggest city up here?”

“That would be Toronto. Bigger than most of the cities in the States too.” Andreas glances around at us with a slow-stretching grin. “What do you say we head a little farther east to do some monster-hunting?”