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Oh, God. I didn’t even realize she was here. The kid istwelve, for fuck’s sake. What was Balthazar thinking?
I already know the answer to that question, so sure it turns my stomach. He was only thinking about his ends, his goals, and to hell with how it hurts anyone else.
“We killed him for you,” Zian protests, looking more bewildered than threatening now.
I motion to my bare wrist. “The manacles don’t matter anymore. Sorsha can burn out the mechanisms. You don’t have to do any more fighting for—”
“Why the hell wouldn’t we want to fight for him?” the tattooed man interrupts. He holds up his meaty hands, the thin leather gloves he was wearing splashed with blood. “Hefreed us from life behind bars. He gave us the power to do whatever the fuck we want.”
A figure drops from one of the trees at the edge of the pavement—Jacob, his form hazy as his own invisibility has started to fade with the passing of time. “He used you like tools, just like the guardians always did with us. Hewasone of them and only left them so he could be even worse.”
“Now they’re all dead,” I add, motioning to the bodies strewn around us. “Like Sorsha said, it’s over.”
The scarred guy close to us aims a sneer my way. “I don’t think so. I liked the work he gave us. And it sounds like you expect us to stop.”
My heart lurches. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the hardened criminals Balthazar picked out to do his dirtiest work are the kind of people who’d enjoy bashing up buildings and leaving carnage in their wake.
I always knew we might have to fight his new shadowbloods as well as the man himself. I hadn’t expected it to go down quite like this, though.
My gaze darts to Nadia. She’s still poised with her hands raised as if ready to blast us with another bolt of light. As if she thinks she might need to.
The taste of ash coats my mouth. “Nadia, you know what Balthazar was like. You saw what he did to Lindsay—to Sully—what he always threatened to do to you.”
She shakes her head with an odd twitch of her eyes, as if they refuse to totally focus. “He cut out the weak ones. He found a way to make us stronger.”
“Yeah!” Tegan says, stirring restlessly from foot to foot. “He made us as powerful as you Firsts are. Maybe more! Like we always should have been.”
Nadia rolls her shoulders with another twitch, and her tone turns harsh. “You’re jealous. He said you probably would be. You liked being the strongest shadowbloods, seeing the rest of us so weak and pathetic. You wanted to always be in charge of us. Now we can fight back for ourselves.”
Her voice takes on a fiercer rasp with those last few words, and ice forms around my gut. I can imagine Balthazar indoctrinating the kids, telling them lies over and over that fed into their insecurities and regrets.
During the time when we all lived together, some of them admitted to me that they longed for more power. That they felt useless, expendable. And it wasn’t as if they could see any chance of living like a regular human instead.
They had the worst of both words, too monstrous to be normal but not monstrous enough to fight their way free, and Balthazar gave them a little flame of hope.
I’d like to think that his manipulations wouldn’t have worked on the kids I knew back on the island. But Ajax told me that the process for bringing out their stronger talents has riled up something else in the younger shadowbloods.
Has Balthazar not just expanded their powers but made them as insane as he was too?
Not all of them. Ajax sounded normal.
And another familiar voice, if a little hoarse, carries from the other side of the clearing. “You’ve got to know that’s not true, Nadia.”
I yank my gaze in the opposite direction. Booker stands tensed near the tree line, his shaggy blond hair damp with sweat and maybe a little blood, no sign of carefree surfer dude attitude in him now.
His supernatural ability was reading auras. I have no idea how Balthazar’s treatment might have warped that talent.
“The Firsts always looked out for us,” he adds. “They did everything they could to get us away from the guardians. Of course they’d do the same with Balthazar.”
Nadia’s eyes flick to her boyfriend—if they still have that kind of relationship—but only for a second. Her expression tightens.
“He could have given us more,” she says, her voice rising. “He found ways of making us better that no one else managed to. They took that chance away from us.”
Sorsha folds her arms in front of her with a skeptical glance. “From what I’ve seen, this Balthazar guy didn’t give you anything except a whole lot of crap to weigh on your conscience. If he wasn’t sending you kids out to destroy and murder already, he would have soon.”
The tattooed man with the bladed shoulders snorts. “There’s nothing wrong with teaching a lesson to the people who never thought we’d amount to anything anyway.”
Tegan glares at Sorsha. “We don’t even know who you are. What does it matter what you think?”
