Page 100 of Shadowblood Souls
There’s only that small, shadowed form lying motionless by the trees.
Zian gets to her first. He falls to his knees and reaches his hands out to her, clenching his fingers before he actually touches her like he’s afraid he’ll somehow make it worse.
He leans backward, his face contorting with his wolfish features, and tips his head toward the sky. An anguished groan reverberates through the air.
My open coat flaps against my sides. I yank at it as well as I can without slowing down, heaving it from my shoulders and letting it whip off me.
I’m going to need to bring every bit of my ability to this moment, every piece of me that can contribute. No hiding, no holding back.
Andreas stumbles to a stop by Zian. With one glance at Riva’s body, his eyes widen and a mumbled curse falls from his lips.
Jacob is already there, dropping down and bringing his hands to her face with a sudden gentleness I had no idea he still had in him.
His fingers slide down to her neck. “She’s still got a pulse. Not much of one but—Dom. She needs you.”
“Coming,” I gasp out, hurtling the last several paces to where she’s lying.
Even in the dim moonlight, partly draped in the spindly shadows of the saplings, it’s a horrifying scene. She looks like a jointed doll who’s been smashed on the floor by a malicious kid.
Her one arm is drenched with blood, arching away from her body at an angle that makes me wonder how much it’s even still attached to her shoulder. On the same side, her torso is crumpled in, more blood drenching the pale dress and the grass beneath her. Her motionless face looks pure white except for the speckling of blood across her lips.
Streams of dark smoky stuff gush up into the air, twining with the shadows.
I collapse to the ground next to Riva, already flinging one of my extra appendages around the nearest sapling. As the suckers dig in tight to the smooth bark of the trunk, I wrap the other around her waist and set my hand on her throat.
Jake pulls back to give me room, his whole body trembling.
“Dosomething,” he says, but his voice is so hoarse I know he doesn’t mean it as a criticism.
Just this once, I’m the strong one, and the rest of them can only watch helplessly.
He was right about her pulse. It stutters, faint and fading against my palm.
I focus on that, close my eyes, and haul all the energy I can from the tree I’m gripping.
The sapling is full of life—vibrant, green, growing. So much fucking potential that I can see the massive tree it’d have eventually grown into in the back of my mind.
I drag all of that out of it, quivering across my back, and pour it into Riva.
I don’t know all the parts of her that might be shattered or crushed, but it doesn’t matter. My power senses what to align and seal.
My own heart thuds on at a sickly frantic rhythm as I pull more life, and more, and more out of the sapling.
The tree bows, its branches sagging, its bark blackening. Beneath my touch, Riva’s flesh fuses back together.
Bones snap into place and meld their broken edges. Blood vessels reattach themselves.
I will more of the vital fluid to form in her arteries and veins. The flavor of raw meat forms in the back of my mouth and my stomach roils, but I ignore both sensations.
I’m inflicting death as much as I’m giving life, but only the second part matters.
Only Riva matters.
Flashes of memory dart by behind my closed eyelids. The moments when we’d figure out the answer to a problem in the same moment, and she’d shoot a softly sly smile my way to match my own.
All the times when I’d be lost in a tangle of emotions after a session where the guardians pushed me to use my talents in ways I’d never have wanted to, and she’d come over to work patiently alongside me until I’d decided what I wanted to share.
The day when she begged one of them to put a wildflower from the outdoor training field into a pot for me so I could keep it in my room, because I’d commented on how it was going to get trampled before too long.
