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That power might not sway any fistfights… but it could get us one step closer to winning this war.
Twenty-One
Riva
Ican’t stop prowling through the hotel room. Every luxurious feature my gaze passes over somehow sets off my annoyance all over again.
When we first got to enjoy Rollick’s opulent tastes, I appreciated the indulgence. It was thrilling to experience that kind of extravagance after a lifetime of tiny prison cells and tasteless food.
Now, the fluffy duvet and elegant furniture of the place where he got us rooms just remind me of how little I fit in here.
Iwasraised in prison cells. I should know how to get through to the other shadowbloods, both the kids and the former inmates.
So why are they still out there, driving around in stolen cars, launching crazed attacks, while I’m roaming around this pretty bedroom?
Andreas looks up from where he’s been scrolling through his phone while propped against the mahogany footboard. “It looks like there are only a few dead. It could have been a lot worse.”
The guys all tramped in here to join me about ten minutes ago after seeing the morning news. It’s playing on the huge TV mounted on the wall now: scenes of smashed signs and shattered glass, crumpled cars and blood-splattered sidewalks.
Our fellow shadowbloods were only more furious after we deflected their attack on the hunter group they meant to slaughter, however badly the confrontation fell apart in the end. They took out their anger on downtown Memphis.
There might be only a few deaths so far, but the text scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen mentions more than twenty hospitalized for their injuries. If it’d been any earlier in the night—more restaurants open, more people on the streets…
As I imagine the carnage, I shudder.
Jacob is pacing too, near the door, with a scowl darkening his face. “It will be worse if those fuckers keep this up. Who are they kidding, saying they’re just destroying the things that are wrong? They’re bashing up whatever the hell they feel like.”
Dominic swipes his hand across his weary face where he’s sitting on the chair by the executive-style desk. “Maybe they think everyone and everything except them is broken. This is the world the guardians came from, after all. Every ‘normal’ person is afraid of monsters.”
Zian looks like he’s considering kicking the foot of the bed in frustration but then thinks better of it, maybe because of how expensive the bedframe looks. He growls under his breath. “They can’t just kill everyone in the whole world.”
Jacob lets out a raw laugh. “They can try.”
Griffin has perched on the edge of the desk itself. He casts his gentle gaze across all of us. “We’ll get through to them. They’ve got more going on inside them than just anger.”
I drop down on the side of the bed, my head drooping. “But how are we going to do that? We weren’t even strong enough to get them under control with a bunch of the shadowkind there to back us up.”
We couldn’t have known that the hunters would notice the fight and charge in before we’d finished what we started—but where can we catch the rampaging shadowbloods that we won’t risk being interrupted?
It’s not as if I can blame the hunters for trying to protect their communities from the violence we brought down on them.
My gaze veers to the TV screen again, to worried bystanders with panicked eyes being interviewed by a reporter. Terrified of beings like me.
The words that’ve been solidifying in my head over the past several hours—possibly the past several days, if I’m being honest—tumble out. “Maybe Engel was right.”
Jacob’s head jerks toward me as his feet jar to a stop. “What?”
I can’t quite stomach the disbelief I know will be etched on all the guys’ faces, so I stare down at my lap instead. “She thought we were too dangerous. That the guardians should get rid of us rather than trying to keep using us, because we’d end up doing worse things than the monsters they wanted us to fight. Aren’t the other shadowbloods proving her point right now?”
“That’s the rest of them, not us,” Zian says with a wave of his hand toward the screen. “And Balthazar made them like that after Engel was already gone.”
My throat constricts. “Kind of. He used her formulas to make whatever injections and pills let him give the criminals their new powers and enhance the ones the kids already had.”
I pause and force myself to lift my head. If I’m going to say this, I have to be brave enough to face the reactions I’ll get. “Haven’t you ever wondered if we could end up becoming just as unhinged as the others are? What if Balthazar just sped them along on a path we’re heading down too?”
Griffin blinks at me as if he really hadn’t ever considered that possibility. I guess that’s reassuring, considering he has the deepest access to our inner states.
Dominic’s pensive expression suggests that hehasthought along those lines before, though, and he doesn’t like where those thoughts have taken him.
