Page 262 of Shadowblood Souls
Dominic’s tentacles whip from his back to slap around a neck and crush a windpipe.
A guardian next to me stumbles, and Andreas is on him with his knife before I need to whirl around.
“The door!” Zian calls out, his voice low but urgent.
The lit helmet has spun toward the far end of the cave—where we can see a solid wall with a steel door on the verge of slamming shut.
Jacob jerks his hand forward, and the door jolts to a halt just a crack from locking. The muscles in Jake’s arm bulge with the strain.
Zian heaves himself forward, and I dart after him just as fast. He catches the edge first, but his thicker fingers can’t push inside the crack to yank it farther open.
There’s no handle on this side.
I dive in and squeeze my own fingers into the tiny gap. With an ache I feel all the way through my shoulders, I haul at it.
The door shifts toward me, just enough for Zee to get a proper grip too. He yanks it wide?—
And another squad of guardians barrels into us.
Electricity crackles with a prod that smacks my arm. My limb spasms, but I hold on to enough control to kick my attacker aside with a force that must crack several ribs.
Jacob hurls himself at the man who jolted me with a growl that could match Zian’s wolf. He crushes the guardian’s skull against the rocky floor with his bare hands.
Darts whiz toward us, and I fling myself around so my face and head are protected. With another jab of my heel, I snap someone’s jaw.
Zian roars. There’s a gristly tearing sound and a thump that’s probably an arm or maybe a head torn right off.
These people want to destroy us. They’ve always wanted to destroy us, even if only our free will and our spirits.
They managed to slaughter Griffin, but we won’t let them take another one of us.
An arm swings upward with a flash of an unexpected blade. I throw myself between the fallen guardian and Jacob just in time to deflect the slash so it only glances off his cheek.
My claws rake across the woman’s throat, and she slumps with a gush of blood. When I glance up, Jacob swipes the thin scarlet streak from his cheek and offers me a smile that reaches all the way up to warm his cool eyes.
Yes, we’re a team now—all of us.
The five of us push into the space beyond the steel entrance. Dim light illuminates a short hallway with a door on either side and an elevator at the end.
A helmet glints in the crack where the door on the left is pushed ajar.
Before the guardian there can pull the trigger on his weapon, Jacob’s power batters him into the tiled floor. Zian crushes the man’s head under his heel as we storm past.
We burst into what’s obviously the control room, screens mounted all across three of the walls over a long console of controls.
The guy seated in front of the console whips up a gun, but it flies from his hand to smack against the wall. Jacob and Zian loom over the guardian while the rest of us hang a few steps back, Andreas keeping watch by the door.
“Where are you holding your experimental subjects?” Jake demands. “The ones with powers, like us?”
The man’s panicked eyes leap to the screens and back to us. I scan the footage projected from various security cameras around the building.
There’s a vast training area that looks more like a cavern than a room. Hallways full of more doors.
No one stirs in any of the images. Have we really eliminated the entire staff of this facility already?
If that’s true, then all that stands between us and getting the kids out is this prick.
But we might need him. We don’t know what codes or keys it might take to open the cells our fellow shadowbloods are locked inside.
