Page 459 of Shadowblood Souls
The next pages are blank… of photos and stickers, anyway. Instead, shaky words scrawl across their beige surface in stark permanent marker.
IN A BETTER WORLD, THEY’D LIVE. TO MAKE A BETTER WORLD, I’LL DESTROY THEM ALL. TO DESTROY THEM ALL, I HAVE TO CONTROL ALL.
That’s it. The several pages afterward offer nothing at all.
I flip back to the urgent scrawl and suppress the shiver that crawls down my spine.
Somehow I don’t think it was the wife who wrote that. Who is it Balthazar thinks he needs to destroy?
Totally unnerved, I shove the scrapbook into the box. Nothing else inside offers up any message.
I close the box up and prowl through the rest of the room, scanning for other signs of activity. All the remaining boxes look undisturbed under their sheen of dust.
I can’t pry into them without giving away my presence here.
As I crane my neck to peer between the stacks, a glint off near the far wall catches my eye. I slip over to it, dislodging as little of the dust as possible.
A thin glass tube lies on the floor near the baseboard. One end of it looks vaguely singed.
I have no idea what to make of that. I guess it’s just a stray bit of garbage that got left behind.
The urge to get back to my room, to get away from the questions now crowding my head, rises inside me. I scramble onto the dust-free box that’s closest to my access point, swing my feet to kick off the light, and scramble back into the passage in the ceiling.
The image of the brief but emphatic manifesto lingers in the back of my mind long after I’ve crawled into my bed.
I’m heading to breakfast when the hum of the drawbridge brings me to a window instead. By the time I reach the pane, a sedan has parked beyond the rising bridge with Toni stepping out from the driver’s seat.
My feet move of my own accord. Hunger vanishing, I hurry to the nearest doorway.
Toni has already marched most of the way to the villa when I reach the door. She slows and peers at me. “Do you need something?”
I have to swallow a wrenching laugh at the thought of all the things I need that she’d never offer me. But there may be one thing she can give me.
I raise my chin, looking her straight in the eyes. “Was he always this insane, or only after his wife and son died?”
Toni stiffens—briefly, but visibly enough that I know I’ve hit my mark. She pushes forward again with a motion for me to get out of her way. “I don’t have time for conversations like this.”
“You should,” I insist. “You’re working for him. Carrying out his crazy jobs.Youdon’t seem insane, so you’ve got to be able to realize how horribly he’s treating us.”
“Balthazar has bigger dreams. A higher purpose.” Toni cuts her gaze toward me again as she brushes past me. “You should remember that. Justice doesn’t come pain-free.”
This time I do let out a snort. I stride after her, keeping pace. “Oh, yeah? If it’s his justice, shouldn’t it be his pain?”
When Toni ignores me, I let my voice rise a little. “He can’t bring back the dead. You know that. And he’s adding to the death toll instead. He’s killing people who don’t deserve it, who never did anything wrong.”
“Then I suppose you’d better follow his orders well enough that you don’t need to be reminded of your mortality, don’t you think?”
My jaw clenches. “You know where that logic leads, don’t you? If it’s okay for him to torment and kill us forhisjustice, then obviously we’d be justified torturing and murdering people to get back at him for what he’s taken from us. Why does his justice matter more than anyone else’s?”
Toni spins with a flash of her eyes. “It’s not your business to question what he does here,” she snaps.
Then she sweeps through a doorway. The click of a lock sliding into place sounds in her wake.
My shoulders slump as the rush of my show of defiance ebbs. Did she listen to me at all?
Maybe it was stupid to even try. But I know Matteo doesn’t give a shit what happens to us as long as he can run his experiments and gather his data.
Toni at least has shown glimmers of normal emotional reactions. She doesn’t like having her conscience nudged.
