Page 102 of Shadowblood Souls
I didn’t sense anything physically unusual about her while I healed her, but I’m not sure if I would have.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jacob snarls, shoving himself to his feet. “We fucked up. I fucked up, so much?—”
His voice cuts off with a strangled sound—and the tearing of roots from soil. One of the other saplings rips right out of the ground, yanked by his power, and whirls across the field.
Drey tenses. “Dom might need?—”
I don’t hear the rest of his sentence, because right then Riva’s eyelids flutter. Flutter and open, the bright brown irises shining up at me.
Thirty
Riva
Everything hurts.
I’m not even exaggerating. I mean, there’s my chest and my ribs and my stomach and my head. My shoulder and my hip and my knee, all consumed by a deep ache that rises and ebbs with my breath.
But even my ears prickle. My big toes throb. My fucking pinky finger twinges with pins and needles.
What the hell— Where am I?
I blink and find myself staring up at Dominic, his shadowed, handsome face etched with worry and strain. Stars speckle the night sky beyond him.
I’m lying on my back. Grass tickles the backs of my bare arms. The air is cooling damp patches all across my torso and legs.
Dominic lifts his hand from where it was resting at the base of my throat. Something else shifts across my belly; somethingthin and sinewy… like the things I can see sprouting over Dom’s shoulders.
The shapes of them are vague in the moonlight, but I make out the curves of rows of suckers along the undersides of the things. I blink again, but the view doesn’t change.
He has twotentaclesgrowing out of his upper back.
The words slip from my lips before I have a chance to think about them, more a creak than a voice. “When did you become an octopus?”
Dominic’s expression shutters. I can feel him closing himself off from me, and the memories from what happened right before this moment rush back to me with a jolt.
The farmhouse. Andreas, in the basement. And afterward—everything they said—all the things I hadn’t realized?—
I close my eyes, sinking back into the physical pain that’s somehow more comforting than the swell of anguish that wants to swallow my whole mind. And Dom answers my question.
“About three and a half years now. We’ve all been evolving.”
His voice is tight but even, no hostility in it. More pieces click together in my head.
This is what he’s been hiding under his ever-present coats—what I saw him flinging at the guardians when they attacked us at the campus townhouse. What he never wanted me to see.
“Why…?” I rasp, and can’t quite form the question.
Dominic’s hand comes to rest on my sternum. “I’m healing you. You—you got bashed up pretty bad. I’m patching you up as quickly as I can, but it’s a work in progress.”
When I open my eyes again, his are shut. A rush of warmth flows through me, some at my chest where his fingers are pressed, but mostly from the tentacle lying across my abdomen.
The sensation radiates through my flesh. If the healing energy he conjured before was a stream, this is a river, coursing through every crack and gash that needs to be knit together.
The other tentacle, the one not wrapped around my belly, veers off toward… a nearby sapling. The tip curls around the thin trunk.
Its branches are sagging, the whole tree bowing toward the ground as its bark darkens as if overtaken by rot.
Dominic must notice my gaze. “The energy has to come from somewhere. It all balances out one way or another.”
