Page 393 of Shadowblood Souls
For the little bit of good he tried to do amid the bad, he deserves at least to have his death witnessed.
Opening my eyes, I whip my arm upward to rake my hand across Clancy’s throat.
His blood splatters down over my face and hair. There’s just an instant before his body crumples when he stares down at me, shock and denial and the briefest flash of emerging rage contorting his features.
You asked for this, I think.You wanted us too badly to let us go.
As Clancy’s dying body hits the ground, the other guardian starts to yelp—but the sound is lost in the crack of Jacob’s talent wrenching her neck around. Before she’s even fallen, I’m sprinting for the trailer.
I throw open the doors to total chaos. Andreas and Dominic must have taken their cue and run with it.
Three of the guardians are circling each other and yelling in what sounds like bewilderment. Dominic has a stranglehold on another with one tentacle.
Another sprawls at Andreas’s feet, still twitching from the jolt Drey must have given the man with the baton he’s snatched.
I lunge forward, determined to end this now. To end everyone who’d have continued our torture.
I’m not sure the guardians even know what hit them. I sever one’s throat and plunge my claws into another’s chest, and then Zian is there behind me, bashing a skull into the trailer’s floor.
Dominic’s jaw clenches, and the man he’s clutching purples as the tentacle around his neck squeezes and sucks the life out of him simultaneously. Andreas yanks a knife from one of the other guardian’s belts and jabs it into the back of the man he toppled.
We stop, all of us panting. My nerves jangle through my body as if waiting for another shoe to drop. “That’s—that’s all of them?”
“That’s all,” Dom says, quiet and grim as he releases his victim.
I exhale with a sound like a sob. My knees wobble for real this time as all the pent-up stress and effort catches up with me.
We don’t know what country we’re in or where we’re going next. But right now, we’re more free than we’ve ever been before.
Thirty-Four
Riva
We might be free, but we’re not exactly done.
Dominic hustles over to Zian, having spotted the evidence of his wound on his clothes. As he ushers him outside to find a shrub or tree to draw healing power from, I turn toward the three younger shadowbloods crouched in the back of the trailer.
Devon is there, and Booker, and a fourteen-year-old girl named Harriet who was caught up in our escape but mostly kept stoically quiet. Clancy decided to separate the two couples who were part of our earlier escape, leaving Ajax and Nadia behind, maybe to give him more leverage over their significant others as well as us Firsts.
They peer at the carnage left in our wake in silence and then at me. Clancy’s blood still saturates my hair and smears my skin.
I swipe at my face with my sleeve, but it’s a little too late to make a cleaner entrance. Booker’s jaw works.
We didn’t have any way of looping them in on our plans. This is a much gorier revolt than the first one they joined.
“We’ll go back to get the others,” I promise. “Right away. Without Clancy giving orders, the whole organization falls apart, at least while the guardians are scrambling to figure out what to do next. We’ll head back to the plane, and a few of us will make the pilot take us back to the island to get the rest of the shadowbloods while the rest figure out a safe place for us to regroup. Okay?”
Devon rubs his hand across his mouth with a little shudder. “Are you going to kill all the guardians on the island too?”
“Not if they don’t get in our way,” Jacob mutters. “It’ll be up to them.”
He slips from the back of the trailer at Dominic’s beckoning and limps over to our healer. Griffin comes up beside me and squats down to put himself eye to eye with the younger shadowbloods.
“It makes sense that you’re unsettled,” he says. “You’re probably not all that sure about me either. We all wish we could have let you in on what we were planning sooner, but there wasn’t any way that wouldn’t have tipped off the guardians too.”
Andreas dips his head, his voice low and rough. “There was no way they were letting us go while they were still alive. I think if you look back on everything you’ve seen of the guardians, you know that.”
Booker hesitates. “They were ready to hurt us, maybe even kill the three of us, to keep you in line.”
