Page 288 of Shadowblood Souls
“Are you going to tell us who we’re going up against and why?” I have to ask.
“We’ll get to that.”
He turns on his heel and leaves me to it.
I tackle the wall twenty more times just to make sure I’m fully prepared. I might have kept going if the last joints of my fingers didn’t feel ready to fall off by that point.
I stop to catch my breath, flexing my hands to stretch out some of the soreness. Clancy returns with a smaller sack I didn’t notice the guardians carrying.
He pulls it open to reveal a wire cage containing eight white mice.
I recoil instinctively. “I don’t want to kill them.”
Clancy gives me an evaluating look. “I don’t want you to either. I think your power could be much more useful than that, in ways you might be more comfortable putting it to use. From the video footage I’ve seen—you can only break one body at a time, but you can hold dozens of them frozen while you work your way through them. Is that right?”
“Yes.” I swallow against the sudden dryness in my mouth.
“Then if we can modulate that scream of yours, you should be able to maintain it at lower levels of influence. Simply paralyze your targets without inflicting any damage. Possibly even seek them out without touching them at all, like a sort of sonar.”
His even words steady my nerves, but doubts coil in my gut. “I don’t know. It… It reallywantsthe pain.”
Clancy doesn’t object to my characterizing my talent as something separate from myself. “It’s in you. You can control it. You simply need to learn how.”
I drag in a breath. “What did you have in mind?”
Clancy motions for me to sit and sets the cage in front of me. “We’ll pull back from your innate impulses by degrees. Can you damage one of the mice without outright killing it?”
I give him a sharp look, and he smiles apologetically. “We have to start somewhere. If you can manage it in one go, we can scale back even more.”
Every molecule of my body balks at torturing an innocent animal, but I remember Rollick’s admonishments far too well. If I don’t learn how to control my power, then it’s going to control me when I least want it to.
Like when I nearly tore apart one of the shadowkind who’d been most welcoming to us.
The memory of Billy’s twisted, smoking body congeals inside me, stiffening my resolve. “All right. I’ll do my best.”
Seven
Riva
Ikill the first mouse.
I don’t mean to. I summon the furious vibration in my lungs, remembering the other guardians chasing us down, the cage-fights in the arena, the attacks of the monster hunters, and part my lips, letting only the thinnest shriek slip out.
But maybe the vicious thing inside me is too hungry after all the days it’s lain dormant. Or maybe other parts of me crave the rush of power a little more than I want to admit.
The scream jolts out of me faster than I intended. The mouse twitches and spasms, the flavor of its agony hitting me in a swift smack like a gulp of cold water on a hot day.
The next thing I know, it’s lying in a disjointed lump on the cedar chips covering the base of the cage.
I flinch at the sight, but Clancy sets a careful hand on my shoulder.
“It’s going to take time. After everything I’ve heard and observed, I think your problem might be how much you’re resisting the urge.”
I stare at him, barely holding back a glower. “Isn’t the point to resist?”
“Then you’re fighting against yourself. You’ll only make yourself weaker.” Clancy tips his head thoughtfully. “What if you focused on how youwillget what the power wants? Stretching out the pain so you can absorb more of it—and then you’ll have more time to pull back as well. Even holding a creature in place with the sense of something horrible to come is a pretty painful act, if you think about it.”
I wet my lips and look at the dead mouse again. I don’t know if what he’s saying makes sense, but it’s true that my past attempts at control haven’t gotten me very far.
