Page 367 of Shadowblood Souls
Celine marches part of the way toward Griffin and stalls there, wavering. “You’re such a fucking asshole!”
“I’ve done what I needed to do to get by,” Griffin replies, so calmly it’s hard to imagine he could be generating all the rage she’s showing at the same time. “Now it’s time to go home.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere withyou.”
Clancy’s voice carries through the jungle, unaltered by the loudspeaker this time. He’s close.
“Let’s keep our tempers cool and think this situation through rationally. We can all go back to the facility. No one will be punished.”
Griffin nods as if agreeing with him. “It’s for the best for everyone.”
Celine lets out a sound that’s close to a growl. She snatches a rock off the ground, large enough that she can’t totally close her fingers around it.
“All you think about is yourself. You let us go through all this shit, and now you’re laughing at us.”
My pulse kicks up another notch. Should I try to use my power?
I twist my tentacles, testing the atmosphere around me, but no one’s close enough for me to latch on to their energy now. Maybe Griffin will lure Clancy close enough that I can take him down?
But if that’s what Griffin intended, it isn’t how things go down.
“It was silly of you to think you could ever have things your way,” Griffin tells Celine.
She barks out a wordless rasp of fury and launches herself at him with the stone raised.
As she comes, Griffin jerks up his lowered hand. A blade flashes in the sunlight.
He’s got a small knife, maybe taken from the hotel kitchen. He’s prepared to stab her with it—in what will look like self-defense.
It isn’t really, though, it occurs to me with sickening clarity. He’s basically reeled her straight toward that blade like a fish hooked on a line.
Is this some kind of revenge for her betrayal? Or?—
“Griffin!”
A body hurtles up the path, singe marks darkening pale skin and hair, arms heaving forward.
Jacob managed to break free from the net to race to his twin’s protection.
The wallop of his power slams into Celine before Griffin’s knife can. Her body whips backward, her neck wrenching to the side with a crack of her spine that rings through the air.
“Jake,” Griffin says in a pained tone, his eyes wide with shock.
Jacob stumbles onto his knees. “I couldn’t let her…”
Then a stream of electricity crashes into my back, and my brain short-circuits to blackness.
Twenty-Seven
Riva
As the guardians usher us back into the island facility, I steal as many glances at Griffin as I can. My gut has been tangled in queasy knots since I woke up with my wrists cuffed and the clamp around my neck that squashes my throat, braced with my fellow shadowbloods in the back of a helicopter.
Griffin wasn’t locked up like that then, and he strides along beside Clancy and the guardians now as if he’s one of them. He holds his head high, his gaze steady.
My memories of the guardians’ assault on us are blurry, bits and pieces scrambled by the electric jolts of the net that caught me. I saw Griffin claiming that he called Clancy to our spot—I saw Celine fly into a rage and lunge at him.
I believed her when she confessed before. I don’t know how he could have provoked those specific details out of her about the girl she saw die and her fear of the “monsters” I might turn to for help.
