Page 68 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Eleven

Riva

“ A re you sure?” Jacob asks as he edges toward the window. As if Zian would make up an invasion of guardians.

Zian is staring at the street outside again. He nods.

“There’s this clinking sound their stupid armor makes… It’s not very loud so I almost didn’t hear it, but I’d know that noise anywhere.”

His muscles twitch with restrained power.

My own body has gone rigid with alarm. “How many are there?”

“I’ve only seen two.” He tips his head toward the window. “There’s one around the corner of a building across the street, and another ducked next to a car.”

Dominic frowns. “I doubt they’d only send a squad of two to try to take us down. There are probably others too far out of view for even your X-ray vision to catch them.”

Zian lets out a faint growl. “Yeah.”

“At least you caught on so you could warn us,” Andreas says in a typical attempt at optimism, though he looks as unnerved as the rest of us. He grips the strap of his backpack against his shoulder and jerks his chin toward the door. “We’ve got to get to the car.”

Jacob lets out his breath in a huff. “Yeah. No good waiting here for them to finish ambushing us. If that fucker yesterday hadn’t taken our guns…”

Zian draws back from the window. “We managed without shooting anyone before. Out in public, and in daylight too, they’ll have to be careful how they attack us, right?”

A shiver runs down my back. “We have no idea how far they might be willing to go. But I hope so.”

“Be ready,” Jacob says. “They might simply try to tranq us like before, or they might have decided it’s better to just take us out, no matter what Engel said. I’ll use my powers to keep them as far away as possible.”

Zian glances at me. “Riva and I can smash anyone who gets close.”

“I’ll muddle anyone I can see with projected memories,” Andreas says. “It’s worked before. We’re not trapped this time. We can make it.”

“As long as it’s just them.” My throat constricts. “Do you think the shadowkind monster last night tipped them off somehow? What if more of them are out there too?”

We all pause for a moment in uneasy consideration. Then Jacob shakes his head.

“The guardians won’t negotiate with us, and they know us. I can’t see them collaborating with the things they wanted us to kill.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t the shadowkind who gave us away somehow,” Dominic says quietly. “Maybe we didn’t get out of the city fast enough to make him happy.”

Zian grimaces. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just get going now, and then we’ll all be happy.”

He has a point. I roll my shoulders to loosen them and move with the others toward the door.

The house we’re staying in has an outer staircase built against the side of the building to allow outside access to the second floor. Our car is parked by the garage around back.

So close and yet so far.

Jacob goes first, easing the door open and peeking outside. I’m immediately grateful for the solid concrete wall that runs along the landing and the stairs to waist height, even though it looked dreary to me when we first showed up.

“No sign of them yet,” Jacob mutters. “Stay low, but move fast. Maybe we can get out of here before they’re even fully in position.”

He launches himself toward the stairs, his knees bent and shoulders hunched to keep him mostly below the level of the wall. It’s more a scuttle than a run.

Zian motions for the rest of us to go ahead of him. He’s planning on bringing up the rear, which isn’t a bad strategy.

Once we get to the bottom of the stairs, we may need someone big and strong to cover the rest of us in our sprint to the car.

I slink forward behind Jacob, extending my claws from my fingertips. The tension of our escape brings the caustic vibration into my chest, but I suppress it with gritted teeth.

I can’t let out a shriek like that without knowing where my targets are. I’m not sure I could even hone the power enough to make sure it only captured our enemies and not random bystanders as well.

The busy activity of the city makes it an ideal spot for us to hide away … but also difficult to avoid collateral damage.

Jacob has almost reached the middle landing when his feet appear to slip from under him. He stumbles and sprawls forward on his hands and knees.

“What the—?” He scrambles up, his head jerking around as if he’s looking to see what he tripped over.

Before I can say anything, it hits me too: an invisible surface smacking against my ankles. I teeter and snatch at the railing for balance.

Not a surface, I register through the sudden thudding of my heart. An invisible force , like Jacob’s telekinetic talent?—

Footsteps thunder across the pavement below us. Jacob snarls and slashes out his hand.

The rest of us barrel down to catch up with him, to help him.

Something clatters on the ground; projectiles rattle against the side of the stairwell. A dart whizzes past my ear.

They’re still not trying to kill us. But what the hell was that energy that tripped us?

I catch the flashes of sunlight glancing off helmets below—a fuckload more than just two of them. The guardians sway this way and that as Jacob shoves them back.

He dashes farther down the stairs with the rest of us at his heels. Andreas’s eyes flash red, and a couple of shouts ring out with a familiar tremor of confusion.

Then a spurt of flame roars into being partway down the stairs.

We jerk to a halt, gaping. A glint of movement catches in the corner of my eye just in time for me to yank Dominic down.

Another dart streaks by, inches from his head.

Then dark vines ripple out of nowhere over the top of the wall. Swallowing a yelp, I aim a punch at one that looks ready to snatch at us.

My hand flies straight through it, my knuckles banging against the concrete.

I stare, and something clicks in my head. “It’s an illusion. How?—”

As my head spins, there’s only one explanation I can think of. I bob up just for a second, my gaze searching.

Most of our talents require seeing our target, if not being directly within reach. Whoever’s responsible is probably nearby.

There. By a bus shelter beyond the end of the driveway, a girl who doesn’t look like she could be more than sixteen is poised with a guardian on either side of her.

When our eyes lock, her mouth drops open. Then I’m ducking low again to avoid a barrage of darts.

“There’s a guy on the other side of the street,” Zian mutters to me as he crouches at the back of our pack. “A kid , but he’s doing something.”

I swallow thickly, a difficult task now that my mouth has gone totally dry. “They really did make other shadowbloods.”

There are kids out there, teens just like we once were, and somehow or other the guardians are forcing them to attack us.

What kinds of torture have they been through across their lifetimes?

Jacob swings his arm, and a few more bodies thump on the ground beyond the stairs. But he can’t focus enough to do a ton of damage when he’s dealing with a whole army of them at once.

The flames lick up toward the sky, but they haven’t expanded beyond their patch. Andreas jabs his forefinger toward them.

“Just charge right through them and keep going until we get to the car,” he says. “Same plan as before.”

Jacob pushes the attackers back, Andreas confuses them, and Zian and I rip apart anyone who gets through them. And Dominic is here to patch up whatever wounds our attackers deal out along the way.

We all nod and dash forward.

The guardians have been keeping their voices down, but more mutters and footsteps carry from beyond the staircase. We hurtle onward.

I veer to the side so the fire only flicks across my limbs with a brief searing before I’m past it. Then we’re out in the open.

Jacob swings around, darts flicking this way and that with the movements of his arms and head. They clatter against the side of the building or plummet to the ground rather than hitting us.

A few of the incoming guardians stumble, their hands flying out as if to grapple with something only they can see, but more are rushing toward us.

Zian barrels straight into one who’s wielding a taser. He roars, his distorted wolfish muzzle protruding from his face, and wrenches his thick claws straight down the man’s torso.

I duck under the swipe of a baton and plunge my own narrower claws into my attacker’s gut. As I yank sideways to ensure this one won’t come at us again, blood and bits of flesh splatter me.

I leap and tumble, slashing a throat here and kicking out hard enough to break a thigh bone there. I’m only vaguely aware of Zian fighting alongside me and the other three guys racing to the car.

The engine roars. The sedan zooms toward us and screeches to the side, the trunk ramming into another guardian who’d just lunged forward.

The back door whips open. Dominic beckons us from inside.

I punch the nearest attacker with a crunch of shattering jaw and fling myself into the seat.

Zian springs after me and fumbles to haul the door shut in his wake. Andreas is already slamming on the gas pedal.

As the car lurches around and races onto the road ahead, I crash into Zian’s lap with the turn. He grasps my arm to help right me, and his posture goes abruptly taut.

“Riva!” he cries out, half protest, half groan.

When my head snaps up, his expression is frozen in an expression of horror, his face caught halfway between its fully human and wolfman forms. His wrinkled jowls draw back from uneven fangs; the whites of his eyes gleam with apparent panic.

A howl bursts from his lips, one so agonized that my heart nearly stops. At the same time, it raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

Any guardians out there trying to follow us won’t miss that sound.

“Zee!” I hiss, trying to push myself away in case our closeness is the problem. But he keeps clutching my arm, his gaze raking down over me.

His whole massive frame shudders. “No, Riva, no, no.”