Page 357 of Shadowblood Souls
A beam of sunlight streaks between the leaves overhead to glare off Griffin’s blond hair. He’s still standing calmly beside me amid the jungle vegetation, but a whiff of nervous pheromones reaches my nose.
What is he afraid of?
Should I be worried that he’s unnerved or happy that he’s capable of being scared at all?
He keeps his attention on Zian, though all five of us are watching him now. “I’ve tried to explain it. Clancy acted like he wanted to take the Guardianship in a new direction, one that sounded like it’d be good for us. You all thought that might be possible too, when you first got to the island.”
He isn’t wrong, but Jacob’s lips pull into a grimace. “I wouldn’t have dragged my friends back into captivity after they’d gotten free, no matter what I thought was ‘possible.’”
“It made sense at the time. I—I didn’t know what to think about everything he was showing me, about what you were doing, the people you’d hurt.Howyou’d hurt them. And my sense of who you all were was muddled. I hadn’t seen you in so long.”
“But youknewus,” Zian insists. “Riva hadn’t seen us in four years, and she did everything she could to help us even after we’d been assholes to her.”
Griffin swallows audibly. “It’s not the same. I don’t know how to describe how it’s been. Like everything was flat but also blurry at the same time…”
As he trails off, the shade of sadness in his expression wrenches at my heart. He obviously doesn’t want to talk about how he ended up in his current state, but I’m not sure there’s any other way of unraveling the tension between us.
I stroke my thumb over his knuckles in an attempt at reassuring him. “What did the guardians do to you that erased all your emotions, Griffin? How did it even happen?”
His mouth twists, and he grips my hand harder. There’s pain in the answer to my question, and I’ve never really wanted to hurt him.
But maybe because he can tell that, he doesn’t refuse me.
His gaze trails off toward the wilderness as if it’s easier for him to bring back those memories when he isn’t looking at any of us. “They called it ‘desensitization.’ The basic idea seemed to be to make feeling things worse than not feeling them.”
Dominic brushes aside a fern frond that grazes his arm with the heavy breeze, his hazel eyes shadowed. “How did they do that?” he asks quietly.
Griffin’s stance stiffens a little more with each word. “They started small. Showing me video clips that would provoke a little generic emotion in most people: a kid having a happy birthday party, a tense car chase, stuff like that. And they had me hooked up to a machine with different sensors. When they could tell that I was having an emotional response—from my heartrate and my breathing and I don’t know what else—they’d overwhelm it.”
Jacob’s posture has turned equally rigid, as if he’s matching his twin’s discomfort. “Overwhelm it withwhat?”
Griffin’s mouth twitches. “Physical pain. Electric shocks or chemicals that set off different types of aches or burns.”
Andreas’s eyes widen. “Fuck.”
Griffin blinks hard, a tremor running through his body. I set my free hand on his arm a little above our clasped hands, doing my best to steady him.
“It was a long process,” he says in a thin voice. “They’d show a clip, catch a reaction, lance the emotions like a boil. Then they’d play the same clip again. Over and over until my body just… didn’t register whatever had made me feel something before. Like a connection was snapped. And then they’d move on to the next clip.”
Jacob’s fingers flex at his sides. A branch cracks overhead, whipping against the trunk of a neighboring tree.
“Those fucking pricks,” he spits out. More rage burns in his blue eyes than I’ve seen in weeks.
My own anger at the guardians sears through my gut, but what chokes me up is a thicker anguish. “That must have taken a long time.”
“Yes.” Griffin swallows again, his eyes gone even hazier than usual, as if he’s retreating inside his head. “They had to—to work up through every possibility to the most intense, and destroy those automatic reactions too. I didn’t have much concept of time. During it or after. It was more than a year, at least.”
More than a year of constant agony for every emotion that stirred inside him. Tears prick at the back of my eyes.
“I still don’t understand why they wanted to do that in the first place,” I say roughly.
“So my own emotions wouldn’t confuse what I was reading in other people. So I wouldn’t be affected by the things I read.”
Jacob scowls. “And your feelings are just gone? You can’t bring them back?”
Griffin raises his shoulders in an awkward shrug. “I’m not sure I even know how to try. By the end, the whole concept of what it was like to feel things wasn’t something I could grasp.” He pauses. “And by then, I—I kind of thought maybe they were right. Maybe it was better like that.”
“What?” Zian sputters. “How could them torturing you be good?”
