Page 569 of Shadowblood Souls
That’s the plan. But picturing it sends a lurch of nausea through my gut.
I have trouble seeing how it’ll all come together without some kind of disaster. The best we can hope for is a better disaster than the one that’s already in motion.
“Here we go,” Andreas murmurs, and swings us around a corner.
As we hurtle toward the mass of rage, my queasiness grows. I motion to the intersection up ahead. “That street. No more than a hundred feet away.”
Riva stiffens. “Park right in the middle of the road so they can’t keep going.”
The SUV jerks to a halt at the intersection, blocking any traffic from the street beyond my window. Headlights gleam across the dark asphalt.
Without speaking, we ease out of the vehicle. No one wants to be confined to that small space when we’re not entirely sure of all of our opponents’ supernatural abilities.
Several shadowkind materialize around us. Rollick glances at the darkened windows of the shadows around us and appears to judge it safe to shift into his massive, ruddy-skinned demonicform. Steel’s metallic scales ripple across his entire bulging body, and Thorn whips out his wings, his eyes glowing red.
Staying sheltered behind the van, Billy—who insisted on coming along even though he isn’t a fighter—brings his panpipes to his lips and starts to play a soothing tune. It’s a nice thought, but I doubt it’ll settle down the rampaging shadowbloods any more than my efforts could.
The silvery notes spill out into the night and are swallowed up by the growl of the approaching cars. An assortment of vehicles—an SUV, a couple of vans, a station wagon, and a pick-up truck—roll to a stop a few houses down from where we’ve set up our blockade.
For the first tense minute, we get nothing more than the low thrum of the still-running engines. The shadowbloods must be communicating with each other—flashes of confusion, frustration, and even starker anger flare through the roiling impression of continuing fury.
There’s a creak as the back doors on one of the vans swing open. We all brace ourselves. Sorsha hasn’t lit any balls of fire yet, but a sharp heat wafts off her skin as if she’s restraining herself.
A bunch of the shadowbloods must have been crammed in the back of that van. Several figures move toward us between the vehicles. I recognize a few of their faces from the island facility, including Riva’s friend Nadia and the scrawny girl who isn’t even quite a teenager yet.
The whole group is kids, I realize. The new adult shadowbloods have sent out the ones they know we’re least likely to kill.
No silver bands show on their wrists. They must have figured out how to get Balthazar’s manacles off.
Nadia steps to the front of the group, her chin high, her hands balled at her sides. “What are you doing? Get out of our way.”
Riva shakes her head. “You can’t go around killing people all across the country. That’s just as wrong as what they were doing—and you’re going to make everyone else even more scared of ‘monsters.’ How does that fix anything?”
A tremor runs through Nadia’s body with a strange mix of revulsion and irritation. “Maybe we don’t want to fix anything. Maybe we’re tired of being expected to be a solution, and we just want to break everything that’s wrong in this world.”
“Which is a fuckload of things!” one of the other kids snaps from behind her.
Next to me, Zian scowls. “So, what, you’re just going to break everything as things get even worse?”
“If we want to,” Nadia retorts. “We have the power now. We can do whatever we want.”
Riva splays her hands pleadingly. “Nadia, you know that’s not the life you wanted before. You could still have something normal. We want to make that happen for all of the shadowbloods.”
I catch just a flicker of hesitation. Then the girl’s eyes narrow. “Really? Even the new shadowbloods Balthazar made? Cutler and them have been looking out for us, you know. They could have ditched us, but they didn’t.”
“Because you make a convenient shield,” Rollick remarks in the deeper, eerily resonant baritone of his demonic form.
Nadia shivers when she looks at him, but she draws herself up straighter. “Why would any of us need a shield? What are you really here to do?”
“They want to slaughter us all like we’re the real monsters,” someone hollers from the pickup truck.
Sorsha crosses her arms over her chest. “We don’t want to hurt you. We only want to stop you from hurting anyone else.”
Nadia’s eyes flash. “And what happens if we say no?Thenyou kill us?”
I raise my voice. “Not if we have any other choice. That’s the last thing we want. We’re angry too, shadowbloods. But weareblood, all of us—the six of us Firsts have always said that. We only need you to meet us partway.”
Jacob lets out a hoarse laugh. “Yeah. And then we can destroy whatever needs destroying together.”
