Page 120 of Shadowblood Souls
Until there’s only one left, other than the four clustered around me.
One woman huddles at the far end of the kitchen, trembling with both rage and terror. Spittle flecks her lips as she tries to force out words.
I don’t want to know what the experimenter who made us has to say about me now. If I’m a monster, then I learned it from her.
She made us, she raised us, and then she set us up to be slaughtered. Howdareshe expect any better in return.
My shriek hitches even higher. Bones burst into cutting shards from Engel’s toes across her feet, through her ankles and knees up her legs.
They carve waves of pain out of her to feed the fire burning inside me. It’s so fucking bright now.
I could take on the whole facility. I could raze an entire fucking town.
But her torment is most satisfying of all. The closest thing we ever had to a mother—the attempted murderer of her own children.
Her spine bows back. Her ribs split from her chest.
Every horrible thing she thought about us, every vicious plan she had for our demise will disintegrate with the agony ravaging her mind.
Then I wrench her heart in two, and she collapses into a puddle of blood and urine.
The scream whips around for a new target, and I suck it in with a gasp.
No. No fucking way. We’re done now.
We did what we needed to do.
The hunger clamors for more, but I tense my entire body, hauling it back. I will not let this horror take me over, not completely.
The sound peters out. My jaw swings shut.
And I find myself standing, my muscles quivering with restrained power and the flavor of blood coating my mouth, in the middle of a tableau of carnage.
Contorted bodies lie sprawled all around our shelter. The sight of them sends a jab of shame and a splash of revulsion over me, but the high of the moment is still humming through my veins.
The guys are standing too, staring at the massacre: Jacob gripping the edge of the island, Zian’s shoulders held at a lopsided angle but looking full human again, Andreas with his arm looped around Dominic’s shoulder while one tentacle mends his wounded body. The guardian slumped at their feet lies still and lifeless, but nowhere near as grotesque as the deaths I wrought.
Their gazes slide from the deformed corpses to me, and the bottom of my stomach drops out.
I rescued us all. I seized our freedom.
And deep down inside, I loved every second of the butchery I carried out.
Now I get to find out whether I’ve lost everything after all.
The Girl We Knew
(A Jacob POV Bonus Scene)
What made Jacob realize he was wrong about Riva and decide to race to her rescue when she ran toward the train tracks? Find out in this alternative POV scene from his prespective…
It takes way too long for Andreas to come upstairs.
The other guys have already crashed on the bed in the second bedroom. I’ve staked myself out next to one of the two windows in the main bedroom, the open door giving me a view of the stairs.
Mostly I’m looking out over the lawn toward the road. With the moonlight gleaming down from the clear sky, the fields outside are cast in shades of gray.
If the guardians track us all the way out here somehow, they’ll most likely come from that direction—from the road. And if they try to swoop in by helicopter or hitch a ride on a train like we did, I’ll hear the engine well before they get here.
