Page 98 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-Seven

Riva

T he boat rocks, and I jerk awake with a jolt of alarm. My body springs into a defensive crouch, tossing off the covers before I’m even fully aware of where I am.

No shouts or crashes carry from beyond the small bedroom’s door. The thin gray light of pre-dawn drifts through the small window, making the plain furniture look outright dingy.

The boat settles, whether from a wave or one of my guys moving around. I sink back down onto my ass and retract my claws.

I’ve taken one calmer breath when the door swings open and Jacob marches into the room.

He smiles at me immediately, but the friendly expression doesn’t quite reach his eyes. His pale irises have darkened like churning storm clouds.

Dark splotches dapple the fabric of his light blue shirt as well—streaking across the sleeves where they’re rolled to his elbows, splattering his chest. When he steps to the foot of the bed where the light is a little sharper, the spots glint with a ruddy crimson sheen.

My stomach lurches all over again. “What happened?”

Jacob’s smile stretches wide enough to bare all his teeth. He reaches around to yank a bulging plastic bag from his backpack.

“I happened.”

He upends the bag, and a deluge of bloody objects tumbles onto the far corner. A meaty smell floods the air.

I stare and abruptly recognize the details—the jutting fingers, the stumps of wrists, a glint of a thick silver ring.

They’re all hands.

Hands severed from their bodies and dumped on the end of my bed.

My claws spring back out automatically, my ears tufting with their catlike peaks. My gaze jerks to the door that’s clicked closed behind him in anticipation of some even larger threat.

Jacob tosses the bag aside with a plastic warble that brings my attention back to him. “There’s nothing to worry about. They’re never going to squeeze a trigger at you again. I made sure of it.”

His voice is even but fervid. The gleam in his eyes looks almost feverish now.

I stare at him. “You— Those are from?—”

“Every last one of them,” he says with a slight rasp. “Drey and I tracked them down, and I slaughtered them like they tried to do to us. To you.”

He glances down at his trophies. “I’d have brought their heads, but they wouldn’t all have fit in the bag. Their hands are what they tried to hurt you with most anyway.”

“I…” I don’t know what to say.

I should be horrified, right? There’s a heap of chopped-off hands lying on my bed.

Some part of me is horrified, with a thread of nausea creeping through my gut. But at the same time, a strange lightness is rushing up inside me.

We’re safe. Safe from the hunters who tried to murder us.

Because Jacob went out and took care of them before I even had the chance to worry about them again.

He’s watching me so intently my skin flares under his gaze. But whatever reaction he was searching for, he must not get it, because something in his expression falters.

The sight sends a twang of regret through me, knowing the lengths he’s just gone to on my behalf, but I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know if I can give it.

“They aren’t the only ones who hurt you,” he says, his voice gone raw, and jerks a knife out of his pocket. The blood smeared across its heavy blade suggests it’s the one that sawed through all those wrists.

Then he brings the knife to his own arm, right below the roll of his sleeve.

Something in my brain stalls. I can’t fully process what I’m seeing until he angles the blade to dig it in.

A cry breaks from my throat. I throw myself forward and grab his wrists just as blood starts to spring from his skin.

My hands look tiny against his bulging muscles, but the supernatural might in me gives me the strength to wrench his knife hand away from his forearm.

More blood is flowing from the cut he managed to make before I sprang in. Another pained sound hitches out of me, and I press my palm against it.

“We need Dom.”

I suck in a breath to call for our healer, but Jacob shakes his head.

“No. I hurt you. I poisoned you with this fucking arm. I don’t deserve to keep it.”

He means it. Every word propels from his lips with the same fierce resolve I used to hear when he accused me of murdering Griffin.

He barrels onward. “I can’t change what happened, but I can show you it’s over. I can pay the price. I?—”

“Not like this,” I break in. “Never like this, Jacob.”

I squeeze his arm harder. Only a little blood is streaking out from beneath my hand now—I don’t think he’d managed to cut very deep yet—but my heart still aches to see it.

Jacob stares down at me like he can’t quite believe I’m refusing him. When the tears burning behind my eyes brim over, he flinches.

With a shudder of his fingers, the knife thumps to the floor. His legs give.

He slumps to the floor, his head tipping forward to lean against the edge of the bed by my knees. But he doesn’t pull his arm away from me.

“I hurt you so badly,” he mumbles. “I can’t take it back. I can’t make it better. I don’t know how to do this right.”

My throat closes up. I keep clutching on to his forearm, but I have no idea what to say.

The boy in front of me seems so lost and alone, but he’s already pushed me so far away that I don’t know if I could ever reach him.

But I don’t want to lose him. Whatever we still have, however much all our history before the past few weeks matters, that one fact resonates through me beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“I don’t know either,” I say, my voice coming out rough. “But you have to be here, in one piece, to do it.”

He inhales with a hiss through his teeth. “What if I’m never going to be in one piece the way I was again?”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

Jacob is silent for a stretch before he speaks again. “I wasn’t lying when I said I died that day, even if it wasn’t you who killed me. When I saw Griffin fall on that screen, when I knew he was gone… It was my fucking fault. I should have taken lead. I shouldn’t have let him?—”

He cuts himself off with a strangled sound.

My other hand drifts over as if of its own accord to rest on the rumpled strands of his hair. My tentative touch seems to give him the resolve to go on.

“Everything was wrong, and there wasn’t anything I could do.

I just wanted to be gone too. There wasn’t any point.

The only thing… The only thing I felt other than empty was rage at the pricks who shot him down.

If I hadn’t known I might still get to pay them back, I would have slit my own fucking throat four years ago. ”

Fresh tears prickle in my eyes. “What about the other guys? You still had them.”

Jacob manages a shrug in his slouched position. “I look out for them. I’m not letting them fall if I can help it. Because that’s what we do for each other. I don’t—there’s nothing in me—I couldn’t manage to be a brother properly so I sure as hell can’t handle being a friend.”

He lifts his head to gaze up at me. “Until I watched you racing toward that train, and I—I cared, so fucking much, and I was terrified and ashamed and I wanted so many things that I haven’t even thought about in years.

But I’m not fixed. It’s like I just broke more.

The emptiness is all filled in with total fucking chaos.

I can’t even keep my goddamned powers from going haywire. ”

I feel as if I can see the broken pieces of him behind his distraught eyes. I didn’t know that moment made such a difference to him.

But I still have to ask, with a quiver of nerves that rises up despite everything he’s said, “So you’re not at all angry with me anymore? I didn’t—I didn’t know what would happen that night, but I got distracted; I distracted Griffin. If I hadn’t kissed him…”

Jacob is already shaking his head. He meets my gaze again.

“The guardians figured out what we were up to somehow. I don’t see how it’d have happened any differently no matter what you did out there. At least he got that little bit of happiness before they murdered him.”

I can’t sense any trace of rancor in his words. I think he means that too.

But I can’t help prodding a little farther. “You believed it was my fault for a long time.”

“I—” He exhales harshly. “Maybe it was like Andreas said. Maybe it was easier hating a you that was alive somewhere than believing you were dead and having to mourn you too. I hated and hated until it was all I could do. I didn’t know how to turn it off until I hurt you that badly that it jolted me out?—”

Jacob cuts himself off with a growl that seems directed entirely at himself. He pushes himself onto his feet but stays crouched enough that we’re on the same level, and lifts his hand to touch my cheek.

“I’m glad you got to have that moment with Griffin before everything went to hell. I know—I know you would rather they’d taken me out than him—I know he was always?—”

“Jake,” I interrupt with a burst of emotion that cuts off the rest of my words for a moment. My heart feels like it’s breaking now.

I rest my free hand over his against my face and repeat the words I know Andreas already told him. But Jacob wasn’t in a place where he could hear them then, was he?

Maybe he can now.

“I loved all of you,” I say quietly. “Nobody more than anybody else. You were all different but not more or less. I loved you . The way you’d spot answers to problems so quickly. The way you could cut through any worries or confusion we got caught up in.”

Jacob lets out a sputter of a laugh, but I keep going.

“You could always get us focused and on track, right there with you. It was the best feeling when we’d make it through a training exercise together, and you’d smile at all of us like we’d already defeated the guardians…

If I started feeling out of sorts, I could always hang out with you, and you’d have some new challenge we could tackle together… ”

His head droops, his hand falling though he’s caught my fingers in his. “I don’t even know where the track is anymore. I’m the one all out of sorts.”

The corner of my mouth ticks upward with a bittersweet smile. “I can’t think of anyone else who’d set out on a crusade to kill all the monster-hunters in town before they could find us again.”

His gaze jerks back up with a flare of the passionate determination I loved so much too. “Anyone who comes at you has just signed their death sentence. Maybe I can’t promise much, Wildcat, but I can guarantee you that.”

After this morning’s bloody present, there’s no way I can doubt his declaration.

“Just don’t think you’re ever handling them on your own,” I retort.

Jacob’s mouth twists, but he doesn’t argue.

A breeze drifts past the thin curtain. Its cool taint reminds me of the sticky dampness beneath my other hand where it’s still pressed to Jacob’s forearm.

“Let me bandage your cut? If you’re going to insist that Dominic doesn’t take care of it right away.”

Jacob’s expression pulls into an outright grimace. “It’ll heal fast enough on its own. He shouldn’t have to extend himself any more than he already has.” He lays his arm down on the blanket. “Go ahead. Thank you.”

He replaces my hand with his as I reach for my backpack to find the first aid gear I stashed there for my own past injury. I can’t help thinking that his concern for Dominic sounds a lot like being a damn good friend.

He’s cared all along, even if his grief overwhelmed his awareness of it.

I brush an antiseptic wipe over the cut before wrapping a wad of gauze in place with a longer strip of the stuff. As Jacob flexes his arm to check the tightness, I lean back on the bed and wipe my blood-streaked fingers on the sheet.

We really owe a major apology to whoever we stole this boat from. Maybe leaving a nice wad of cash as a thank you will balance the scales?

I’m struggling to decide what to say next when a series of thumps emanate from above, forceful enough to set the boat bobbing in the water.

My pulse stuttering all over again, I jump to my feet.

Zian’s voice bellows down from the deck. “Guys! It’s those asshole shadowkind.”