Page 278 of Shadowblood Souls
“Griffin?”
It’s hardly more than a hoarse whisper. I’m almost afraid to have made his name audible, as if I’ll shatter the illusion by addressing it.
But the man in front of me doesn’t fracture. He looks steadily at me, not denying my naming of him.
“I’m sorry it’s been so long. Things have been… complicated.”
“They—what? You—we thought—I saw you?—”
A different surge of emotion sweeps away all my words. My gut knots up, and the rest of me lurches forward.
I wrap my arms around my brother and tug him close. Absorbing the warmth of life from his skin, the even rhythm of his pulse thumping in his chest.
He’s really here. Right here with me, speaking, breathing.
But not quite the way I remember. The way I know down to my bones that my twin is supposed to be.
Griffin would have laughed, because I’m usually not a hugger, and hugged me back tightly. Griffin would have overflowed with his excitement at the reunion.
The guy I’ve embraced has lifted his arms to return the hug, but more in a comforting way than with any clear enthusiasm. He stays quiet as I pull away.
I stare at him, trying to connect the figure before me with my expectations and memories. Nothing quite makes sense. My mind feels as if it’s been buried under a landslide.
“Where have youbeen?” I blurt out, which maybe isn’t the best question to lead with when I should be singing Hallelujah that he’s alive at all, but it’s the one that careens out first.
Griffin smiles in his new, tight way. “Another facility. It took them a long time to heal me and to make sure that I was prepared for everything I might have to face. And then the guardians said it would be better if I didn’t come back and disrupt the habits you all had gotten into. I asked… You know what they were like.”
He didn’t die. We thought we saw his life leave him in the video they showed us, but his injury wasn’t quite so bad that they couldn’t patch him up.
He was alive all this time, and they kept rubbing it in our faces that supposedly Riva arranged his murder. That it was her fault he was dead when even the dead part wasn’t true.
The realization and my brother’s last words spark a renewed flare of frustration. “What theyarelike. Those assholes?—”
But Griffin… shakes his head. “New management. Things are changing. We’rehere, and together. It’s a fresh start. I’d really like to embark on it with you—with all of you, but especially you, Jake.”
I’m gaping at him again, wishing I had Zian’s X-ray vision so I could peer inside his skull in case I might find a little gremlin sitting at a set of controls where his brain should be. “A fresh start? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Someone new has taken over the guardians,” Griffin says. “He’s got different plans—he’s going to let us run missions that actually matter. Take control over our lives. Have a say in our training. You have to give him a chance to explain.”
“Whoever he is, he shut me in this prison! He took away the others—Riva?—”
Griffin’s voice gentles. “They’re all here. I just talked to Riva a half hour ago. She’s fine. Everyone’s fine. You’ll be able to seethem, talk with them and the younger shadowbloods who are here, go outside—everything. When you’ve calmed down and we don’t have to worry about you hurting anyone by accident. Or on purpose.”
Something about that last sentence makes my pulse hitch.
He knows. He knows the people I’ve already hurt—in both ways.
Griffin never wanted to hurt anyone. He’d feel their pain as well as his own.
He can’t understand.
I raise my chin. “I was protecting us. I’d do it again.”
“You won’t have to,” Griffin says. “We’re safe here. We don’t have to go out and tackle the real villains until we’re ready.”
I scowl at him. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Griffin sighs. It’s a mild sound, but it conveys enough disappointment that I want to cringe away inside my own body, away from the sense that I’ve let him down.
