Page 570 of Shadowblood Souls
A firm command rings out from the SUV. “Get back in the van, kids.”
Nadia glances over her shoulder, uncertainty darting across her face. “Are you sure, Cutler?”
I get a brief glimpse of the man she’s talking to behind the wheel when he leans toward the open window—the shaved head with the skull-and-snake tattoo. The guy the others described to me who seemed to be leading the criminal shadowbloods.
He pulls back into the shadows behind the glow of the headlights before Riva would have had a chance to latch on a killing shriek. And any larger attack on the SUV would risk everyone inside.
Given their strategy so far, I’d be incredibly surprised if they didn’t have at least a couple of the kids in each of the vehicles as leverage.
“There’s no point in talking with these assholes,” Cutler says. “We’ll just get on with business.”
Nadia only hesitates for a second before hustling back to the van with the other kids. We all exchange a glance. Are they figuring they’re going to smash right through our blockade?
Riva lifts her voice in what serves as a warning. “We’re not going to let you keep rampaging around. The slaughter stops now.”
The teens keep clambering into the van. I don’t see any sign that the wayward shadowbloods care about her implicit threat.
I breathe slow and deep to steady myself. Wecanstop them. We’ve got the shadowkind on our side here when they couldn’t help Riva and the others in the forest. There’s no way this group can match the power our allies can bring to bear.
I just hope we don’t have to hurt many of the kids in the process.
“Take out the tires,” Jacob mutters under his breath. “Fuck up the engines. That way they can’t get anywhere but we’re not murdering anyone.”
Riva nods. Without another word, most of my companions leap forward.
Metal screeches within the hoods of the closest vehicles. Flames shoot up beneath their tires, hot enough to meld the rubber to the asphalt.
As Zian slams his fist into the hood of the van that’s at the front of the line, hard enough to crack the steel and dent it down toward the components inside, our opponents burst out the backs of their cars. Some are simply fleeing toward the farther vehicles we haven’t touched yet, but others are launching their retaliation.
Streaks of painfully bright light rake through the air. The pavement lurches beneath our feet. With a bellow, all the lamps and headlights nearby shatter, casting the road in total darkness.
Grunts and thumps reach my ears from all sides. And then, with a shine in a few windows along the sides of the street, jabs of fear lance through the chaos of emotion I’m drowning in.
Fear—from the residents waking up at the clamor of the battle, having no idea what madness is going on just beyond their doors. If the rogue shadowbloods decide to take out their anger on those innocent people as well…
The thought hasn’t even fully formed in my mind before I spot a tall, muscle-bound man heaving away from the road onto one of the dimly lit lawns. The scar scraping across his brow makes his harsh features look even more threatening in the hazy light.
I’ve got no weapons, no talent that’s much good against brawn. I don’t want to steal any of my friends’ talents in case they need them right now. But panic shoves me toward the running man with the vague idea that I’ve got to protect the people who have no part in this fight from whatever he intends.
Maybe he wouldn’t have done anything to the residents at all. Even as I sprint toward the scarred man, he veers along the edge of the lawn, racing as if to charge past our blockade rather than to head to the houses.
“Griffin!”
My brother’s voice tears through the night. And the man’s knee buckles.
He falls to the ground with a groan and a hissed curse when his broken leg smacks the lawn. I stall in my tracks just a few feet from where he fell.
His head jerks up so he can glare at me, and a blast of cold air freezes the grass around my feet hard enough to grip my shoes.
“You have to let me at those fucking hunters,” he growls, his gaze darting past me to the darkness beyond our car. “Those assholes, you don’t even know—I saw what that one prick did to the kids at our halfway house. Death is too fucking kind for?—”
Another form dashes toward us so fast I can’t make out whether it’s male or female. Male, by the hoarse voice that rasps out, “Omar, I’ve got you!”
The man with the scarred forehead rolls, and the supernaturally swift figure hefts him right off the ground. They disappear into the fray farther down the road, leaving me with an ache in my gut.
It wasn’t just anger I sensed from that man—Omar?—when he talked about the hunters they’d wanted to attack, about the one man he knew… He was full of enough anguish to knock the breath out of me.
Did he grow up around here? He recognized one of the hunters from the news footage?
