Page 336 of Shadowblood Souls
“Open the fucking doors!” Jacob snarls.
Griffin steps up beside him, his presence weirdly calm amid all the turmoil. “Force isn’t working. Let me try.”
Jake narrows his eyes at his twin. “You?—”
Andreas cuts him off with a grasp of his shoulder.
Griffin doesn’t appear to be paying much attention to the other guys anyway. He peers through the window at the pilot, and my skin prickles with the sense of exuded power.
The pilot’s expression shifts, loosening other than the worried slant of his mouth. “What do you need? How can I help?”
Griffin only offers the slightest of triumphant smiles. “Open the doors and let us on.”
The hatch halfway down the body of the chopper opens up. I wave the remaining shadowbloods on board, my mouth gone dry.
Will Griffin really be able to manipulate this guy into doing everything we need? Should we even believe Griffin is looking out for us?
But then, how else are we going to get a flight out of here? Jacob and Zian can’t beat the guy into submission and then expect him to coherently direct an aircraft.
If it seems like something’s wrong during the flight… we’ll just have to deal with it then.
We squeeze into the dim, metallic-smelling space alongside several plastic crates and cardboard boxes that must be the supplies the guardians were expecting. Griffin comes around to the cockpit, leaning against the back of the pilot’s seat.
Jacob stations himself right beside his brother, poised for potential trouble.
“Take us into the air,” Griffin says in a voice that’s almost hypnotic in its smoothness. “We need to leave this spot.”
He may as well have hypnotized the pilot from how quickly the man moves to follow his suggestion.
As the helicopter lurches into the air with a whir of the blades, Griffin glances back at me. His backpack wobbles as his cat squirms inside it, her head ducked down in the chaos.
“Where do we want him to go?”
God, that is the question, isn’t it? I can’t see anything but darkness beyond the windshield right now.
I freeze up, both because I’m not sure what the right answer is and because I don’t know if I could say it loud enough for Griffin to hear me anyway.
Dominic catches my hand and answers for me. “The nearest major city on the mainland. As quickly as we can get there.”
Griffin nods at the pilot. “You heard him.”
The helicopter swings around with a bob of the floor beneath our feet. I snatch at the corner of a box for balance and glance around at our fellow escapees.
A few of the kids I know have made it—Nadia and Booker, Celine, Ajax. The spiky-haired kid is here. And then a few others I haven’t specifically noticed before.
They’re all huddled together in the cramped space. Booker is gripping Nadia’s hand like Dominic has mine, but she looks too frightened to appreciate the gesture of affection. Ajax has wrapped his arm right around another boy who looks about the same age, with dark hair, brown skin, and features that make me suspect the human part of his genetic heritage is Middle Eastern.
“What do we do now?” Celine asks from where she’s sitting against a stack of crates, her normally perky voice gone a bit shaky.
I swallow and find I can speak a little more loudly, though it’s not much better than a croak. “I guess we get to the city and get our bearings, and then make more decisions.”
I can reach out to Rollick without telling him where we are. Find out exactly what went down after our break-in at the other facility.
Zian stiffens abruptly. “Tracking devices.”
I stare at him for a split-second before my gut lurches.
Right. When we made our first escape, he’d figured out that we all had trackers embedded in our teeth.
