Page 136 of Shadowblood Souls
“What do you mean?” I blurt out. “We never saw—the guardians never said?—”
Dominic waves at the screen with a rustle of his parka. He must be sweltering in the thick coat even with it unzipped, but I’ve never seen him display his tentacles unless he absolutely has to.
“It’s not obvious whether they actuallydidcreate more hybrids. But I found a file that refers to different processes that Engel used. There’s an original one, labeled first gen and dated almost twenty-two years ago.”
“Around the time we would have been conceived, however that happened,” Andreas fills in, looking ill.
Dominic nods. “And then there are two others, one from about five years after that and then another after two more.Some of it is in shorthand notation I don’t understand. But it seems like she’s reminding herself of where she left certain things out.”
My stomach has balled into a massive knot. “She didn’t want to make more people like us. She didn’t even wantusto keep living. She said by the time we were toddlers, she’d already changed her mind.”
Jacob frowns, leaning his weight onto his hand where it’s resting on the comforter next to me. He isn’t paying any attention to me, but I’m abruptly aware of how close he is.
How close they all are.
I scrambled onto the bed at Dominic’s beckoning without thinking, just wanting to know what he’s found. Now I’m perched on my knees with Jacob just a few inches at my right and Andreas equally close at my left.
And Dom is right in front of me. I could tip my head onto his shoulder if I wanted to.
An unwelcome tingle of warmth races over my skin. Suddenly I wish I never took Andreas’s suggestion of a soak in the tub, as brief as I made it.
I figured the regular salts he got might be good for the wound on my side that’s still raw. If it gets infected, I’llhaveto ask Dominic for help.
But now my skin is scrubbed clean under my crisply new clothes. The sensation is energizing in ways I’d rather not tap into.
No matter how badly these men hurt me, some part of my body—maybe even my soul—believes that I belong with them. As close to them as I can get.
Thankfully, it’s my mind that gets to make those decisions.
I stay stiffly still where I can still see the screen but avoiding easing any closer to the guys.
Jacob makes a vague gesture at the computer. “She was the one who figured out how to make us, but she said there were other people who had control over the facility—who could boss her around. They wanted to keep us. Maybe they wanted to make more too.”
Zian lets out a rough chuckle. “She could have given them instructions that were missing pieces so it wouldn’t actually work. Pretended it was a fluke they produced us.”
“Or the new process worked, but without the parts she thought made us too dangerous,” Dominic says quietly.
I shudder. “There could be a bunch of shadowblood teenagers being put through all the same tests we were.”
Or even younger kids. There’s no saying the guardians wouldn’t have used Engel’s processes more than once after she handed them over.
“Is there anything else in there that would tell us for sure?” Jacob demands.
As Dominic starts clicking through more files, I scoot farther back on the bed. Could there have been other people like us, with wisps of smoke in their blood and monstrous powers, at the facility where we grew up?
There were an awful lot of doors on the same levels as our cells. For all we know, the guardians had separate training rooms elsewhere in the building.
And we know we lived in at least three different facilities over the course of our captivity. It’s also possible they kept younger test subjects in a totally different place.
Or maybe Engel screwed her colleagues over and they never managed to create anyone else even sort of like us. She didn’t seem bothered that it was just the five of us who showed up, other than wondering about Griffin’s absence.
Dominic makes a discontented sound. “There are more documents with that weird system of notation I don’t knowhow to read. I don’t see anything definite about other ‘shadowbloods,’ but she doesn’t seem to have any files even on us here. I’ll keep digging.”
“You got into her phone too?” Andreas asks.
“Yeah, but she must have deleted everything whenever she used it. No call history, no saved contacts, nothing.”
I restrain a sigh and push myself right to the edge of the bed. My limbs itch to return to my own room where the guys’ presence won’t niggle at me, but I want to hear the second Dominic finds something.
