Page 565 of Shadowblood Souls
Riva stares at me. Her hand drops to her belly. “You mean like?—”
Heat flares in my cheeks. “I just—I know how much you care about the kids, so it’s easy to imagine—obviously it would bewayin the future if it happened at all?—”
She reaches up and touches my face, letting the softer warmth of her palm cool my blush. “I haven’t really thought that far ahead. It’s kind of scary letting myself imagine a future that normal. But I could see wanting that and being ready for it someday.” A coy smile curves her lips. “And you’d make a great dad.”
My skin flushes even hotter. “I’m not sure—I’d have to work on a lot of things.”
Riva does laugh then, but it’s one of the sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard. “I’ve seen you with the kids too. When you were carrying George around on your shoulders while we were hiking through the jungle, giving him pep talks, you practically looked like you werehisdad.”
The reminder sends a pang through my chest. George was a good kid.
And he died on the last mission the guardians sent us into.
I press a kiss to her temple. “I guess it’s silly to think about that stuff when we don’t even know what we’ll be doing tomorrow.”
Riva snuggles even closer. “No, I think it’s good to have some kind of dreams. Even if I’m too scared to really hold on to them just yet. I’m glad… I’m glad that we’ve gotten to a place where we can have dreams like that.”
My throat clogs with emotion. “Yeah. Me too.”
I might have tipped up her chin to really kiss her then, but as the words are leaving my mouth, Billy bursts into the room with his curly hair flying wild around his faun horns.
“Riva, Zian, you need to come. We’ve just seen—the other shadowbloods are attacking the mortals.”
Nineteen
Riva
Idon’t realize that I seem to have forgotten how to blink until a burn spreads across my eyes. I shake myself, but my gaze veers right back to the computer screen.
I’d thought watching the destruction Balthazar orchestrated was awful. Somehow the scenes playing before us now are even worse.
We started with the official news broadcasts on the TV. Like with Balthazar, those images showed only the aftermath of the attacks.
The footage veered across a squad of soldiers reduced to a jumble of bodies, silver-and-iron helmets streaked burgundy with dried blood. More corpses, wearing civilian clothes, sprawled in a haphazard ring with weapons intended for shadowkind—crossbows with iron bolts, blades formed out of silver—jabbed into their bodies at odd angles like some kind of horrific modern art installation.
It was after the third scene like the latter when Sorsha made a rough sound where she’d been scrolling through less-formal news sources on the laptop at a nearby table. All of us—Firsts, our few rescued younger shadowbloods, Rollick, Billy, and a dozen materialized shadowkind with who knew how many more peering from the shadows—turned toward that.
As the first shaky video recording from the cellphone of a nervous witness played across the screen, I found myself flanked by Andreas on one side and Griffin on the other. Jacob’s outrage vibrated from his rigid frame where he’d positioned himself behind me.
Drey’s arm is still tucked around mine, Griffin’s hand on the small of my back. Maybe to steady me; maybe just to remind me that they’re here with me.
But it’s not me I’m worried about.
The cellphone footage might be crude, but it shows the story of the attacks well enough. We can hear the panic in the rasped breaths as one near-victim huddles in the hasty shelter they found, their chest hitching as the shadowbloods who’ve descended on the amateur militia snap bones and stomp flesh. We watch the video tremble with another’s muffled sobs.
There’s no mistaking who the attackers are. They appear to have started their attacks yesterday in what was the early evening in the United States—past midnight for us here in Spain. But even as the dusk darkened into night for the later assaults, the glow of security lamps or fallen flashlights catch off the faces.
I catch glimpses of the thug with the skull-and-snake tattoo, the one with the scarred brow, and a couple of the others who formed Balthazar’s human shield. I spot Tegan’s pale face, and other kids whose names I never learned.
Then Nadia’s statuesque frame rushes by, flares of searing light yellowing her brown skin. Devon’s teeth flash somewhere off to the side as he lets out a vengeful cry.
We don’t even need to ask why they’re doing it. The criminal shadowbloods bellow their accusations between bursts of violence.
“You thought you could destroy the monsters, huh? You never met monsters like us.”
“You wanted this fight—now you’re getting it.”
“This fucking country belongs to us as much as it does to you!”
