11. Chapter 11

11

T ime froze as Rebecca and Rowan stared at each other across the training gym. Her heart thudded in her chest, pulse pounding through her while her guts soured and twisted with guilt and the kind of fear for someone else’s well-being and survival she hadn’t felt in ages.

She’d killed him.

It only got worse when the look in Rowan’s glassy hazel eyes intensified her helplessness, like he was silently calling out to her to fix this. To make it right. To change it before it was too late.

Like he was blaming her and condemning her for this.

Even if she’d been able to do something, there wasn’t any more time.

Then Rowan’s eyes rolled back in his head. His entire body grew rigid and dangerously stiff.

The silence permeating the gym felt as though, any moment now, something would puncture through the tension and the deafening lack of sound and the collectively held breath to remind them all that this was supposed to happen.

Only it wasn’t.

Rowan didn’t scream. He didn’t move an inch once his eyes had rolled to show only their whites. Then his body tilted backward, picking up speed, and he careened to the floor, stiff and unmoving as a plank of wood.

His back thumped against the floor before his skull followed suit with a gut-churning crack.

No one said a thing. No one moved.

Rebecca didn’t even breathe as she willed Rowan to fight through this, to succeed, to overcome this final challenge the way he overcame everything else.

No more than two hours ago, she’d been secretly plotting the best way to keep him from victory.

It was all a mistake. He had to move again, didn’t he? He had to…

She silently begged him to move, her vision blurring with the hot sting of oncoming tears that never arrived, because she couldn’t let them. She had to hold everything back.

She had to watch and wait and pray to gods she did and didn’t believe in and everything in between that she hadn’t just killed him.

A quick twitch of Rowan’s leg punctured the stillness. His hand jerked next, then an entire leg, then all his limbs at once.

Still stiff and glowing with that inner blue light, his flesh remained streaked with dark mercurial silver creeping across his physical form like vines around in an abandoned temple. Rowan’s body bucked on the floor, convulsing and jerking in every direction.

Then the glowing blue light of the potion gave way beneath a thicker, brighter, more dangerous gray-silver strobing around him. First in one limb, then the other. Jumping from side to side. Winking once at the hollow of his throat and again at the center of his chest before sparks erupted above his kneecap and from his ear.

In seconds, the same silvery-gray light of Rebecca’s Bloodshadow magic, the final touch to this potion of The Striving, fluttered up and down Rowan’s form while his legs flopped and kicked at the floor. His hands slapped against the wood without control, and his head whipped from side to side, completely at the mercy of his own experiences.

Rebecca was about to be sick.

This final trial’s potion was only supposed to confront initiates with the deepest, darkest parts of themselves. For someone like Rebecca, who already had an intimate relationship with all those parts of herself, it had been a piece of cake.

It would have been just as easy for Rowan, too, if she hadn’t added a little extra punch to go with it. If she hadn’t added pieces of herself to his trial using her own intimate knowledge of his weaknesses to confront him alongside everything he knew and hated about himself.

Rowan wasn’t just squaring off against Rowan Blackmoon in his own mind right now.

No, whatever plane to which the potion had transported him, he now stood against himself as his own worst enemy and Rebecca Bloodshadow.

His friend. His greatest ally. His most dangerous opponent.

Rebecca could hardly breathe at the sight of him seizing on the floor beneath the potion’s grip. This was only supposed to have been a message sent to him alone, something extra only Rowan would understand. He would have understood it, too—the meaning behind everything she’d crafted of her magic and slipped into that flask.

That he was butting into her business and she wouldn’t stand for it.

Clearly, she’d miscalculated, and now it was all wrong.

She wanted to believe in him, to have faith in his strength, to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it looked too much like she’d made some horrible, irreversible mistake. She’d misjudged the amount of her own magic she’d turned into a poison for him.

Had she added too much to this final stage, or not enough? Had he changed so much in the last several centuries, weakened this badly, that what he otherwise might have withstood in the past was now too much and she was killing him?

The echo of Rowan’s limbs bucking and twitching and slapping against the gym’s hardwood floor were the only sounds now. They continued in one long, endless, unbearable symphony of struggle and disaster, and there was nothing anyone could do.

No one could help him. No one could intervene, even a sworn healer like Zida.

This was The Striving. Rowan was on his own.

Rebecca nearly jumped out of her seat when a deafening crack ripped through the gym, as if an ancient tree had split apart down the middle, though it all came from Rowan’s bucking body within the casting circle.

The nauseating sound echoed again and again through the gym, lasting far longer than it had a right to last. Then the darkening silver streaks flashed together one final time and disappeared.

Rowan stopped moving and lay there in the casting circle, limbs spread haphazardly where they’d landed, his head rolled to one side. Completely motionless.

Lifeless, even.

From where Rebecca sat, that was exactly what it looked like.

No one said a thing. No one moved. Everyone waited, watching, hovering on the edge of anticipation, because surely there was more.

Surely, this couldn’t be it.

Only when she finally released the breath she’d been holding did Rebecca realize she was already trembling. She forced herself to inhale slowly and deeply, so she wouldn’t keel over too, right here on the dais. Then she glanced up at the clock above the doors.

Only three minutes till midnight. Three goddamn minutes, and nothing else had happened.

Rowan lay there on the floor, maybe dying, maybe already dead. She had no idea. But she had to do something.

There weren’t any options.

Part of her wanted to leap out of her chair and off the dais and go to him. To heal him right there in front of everyone. To break all the rules of The Striving and all the rules she’d set for herself and followed to the letter since the day she’d decided to be someone else. Something else.

That felt like the only way to ensure she didn’t lose him. Once again, it took standing at the precipice of losing him to remember just how much she didn’t want to.

Rowan was like family. More than family. More a part of her than her own flesh and blood within the Bloodshadow Court. She couldn’t just stand by and do nothing. She couldn’t just sit here and watch him die.

She’d only wanted to hurt him a little, mostly to scare him away, but now it was clear she had more than crossed that line. If he died here tonight, there would be no coming back from this.

He would be gone to her forever, and Rebecca would be…what?

She didn’t know, but the thought of it mortified her into continued inaction.

Two minutes till midnight now, and still nothing.

From the corner of her eye, she saw other Shade members whispering to each other, each of them afraid to move or to say much at all while they waited for something else to happen. She couldn’t hear them.

The only thing in her awareness now was the image of Rowan lying slack and motionless on the floor, the heat of guilt mixing with the frigid, stone-cold dread sinking in her gut, and the deafening rush of her racing pulse pounding in her chest and through her ears, drowning out everything else.

She wanted to be positive. She wanted to root for him, to see him pull through, but she couldn’t fight off the agonizing certainty that she’d just ruined everything.

Wiping tingling, clammy palms on the legs of her black jeans, Rebecca looked at the clock one more time. One minute left, that was it.

Rowan lay there, his skin still blue and streaked with cracks of dark gray. Nothing changed.

That was it, then. Rebecca was done sitting here and watching. She was done doing nothing. The seconds ticked toward midnight, and she made her decision.

Sucking in a sharp breath, she shoved herself out of her chair on the dais and leapt to her feet, ready to launch herself across the room and try to save him before it was too late.

The second the soles of her shoes thumped down onto the makeshift stage, someone else across the room gasped and shouted, “Look!”

Rebecca froze, and of course she looked.

The blue-gray flush tinting Rowan’s entire body faded and morphed, softening, lightening, returning a ruddy hue of light and life and existence to his flesh that only moments before had looked as dead and nonliving as stone.

His cheeks were flushed. The pointed tips of his ears were deep pink as they emerged from within his russet hair that had come undone while he’d battled for his life on the floor.

When his hazel eyes snapped open, illuminating a deep glowing-orange light from within as he drew one horrifyingly long, endless, desperate gasp, Rebecca’s knees weakened.

The entire world and all of existence and the passage of time crashed back into reality around her all at once. Somehow, she still managed to keep her feet firmly planted on the dais, still felt like all the breath had left her lungs.

That orange glow in Rowan’s eyes brought back so many memories in an instant—made her want to reach out to him.

But then the light faded, his eyes returning to their normal luminous hazel as he blinked straight up at the ceiling and took another deep breath.

The wavering, reverberating bellow of an enormous gong filled the training gym, followed by Bor’s booming voice.

“Rowan Blackmoon… Your striving is complete!”

Holy shit, he actually did it!

Blinking in surprise and still numbed by shock, Rowan pushed himself off his back to sit there in the middle of the casting circle. His gaze flickered around the entire room like he still didn’t remember where he was.

Then the silent tension filling the gym crackled and shattered beneath the explosive cheers rising from Shade, all of whom had come here specifically to see this.

When the first wave of spectators surged forward out of their seats, or launched themselves away from where they’d stood against walls or support pillars, Rowan stiffened.

He looked like he was about to scramble backward toward some perceived safety, but then the first magical crossed the threshold of the casting circle painted on the floor without any reaction or backlash.

Then it looked like Rowan remembered where he was.

The Striving was over.

With a wry chuckle and a crooked smile, he accepted the hand offered to help him up to his feet. Then the entire task force surged around him, tightening and knotting, everyone shoving their neighbors forward and closer to the elf at the center of it all.

Their newest initiate to have withstood Shade’s Striving and survived.

The echoing cheers and whistles and bellowing cries of victory echoed in all directions, pinging off the walls with laughter and quick, congratulatory back-slaps.

Rebecca puffed out a sigh and plopped back down into the chair behind her, her head spinning. Her gut churned so fiercely, she expected to grow dizzy beneath the weight of it.

Rowan had succeeded. He’d completed The Striving. He’d survived.

The relief engulfing her was more powerful than anything she’d felt in a long time.

She hadn’t killed him after all.

Only now, she had to deal with the consequences of Rowan successfully making it through The Striving—the final piece of Shade’s initiation.

Now she had to deal with the consequences of having given him the chance to prove himself and join their task force, which she’d wanted to avoid badly enough that she’d meddled with his trials.

But at least he wasn’t dead.

Rebecca didn’t have any other excuse for sending him away from Shade headquarters in Chicago or however far the reach of her position extended.

She couldn’t force him to leave her alone anymore.

Rowan would come after her relentlessly when this was all over. He would want to talk, and that was what she’d been trying to avoid this whole time.

Talking to Rowan Blackmoon, of all people, only meant getting pulled back into everything she’d left behind in her old life. She couldn’t risk that here, especially not with her and Maxwell still in the beginning stages of figuring out how the hell they were going to trust each other.

The thought of Maxwell made her turn toward him. The shifter was easy to find in the training gym.

Though she’d never tried, Rebecca was fairly certain she could have picked him out of any-sized crowd, anywhere, under any circumstances.

Maxwell clearly did not share the communal excitement and celebration fueling the rest of Shade’s shared mood. He scowled openly at Rowan, not bothering to hide his outward contempt for the elf man.

That would be another issue in the foreseeable future.

Rebecca was certain her Head of Security would accept Rowan’s victory, that The Striving had marked him worthy and, therefore, Maxwell would behave accordingly.

That didn’t mean he had to like it.

Right now, it seemed he enjoyed Rowan’s acceptance just about as much as he’d enjoyed Rebecca’s on the night she’d survived The Striving herself.

There was no point in trying to hold off the inevitable any longer. Not after this.

She pushed herself to her feet again and made her way down the short steps off the dais, heading toward the jumbled knot of so many operatives all vying for a chance to congratulate Rowan in person, or introduce themselves, or leave their own personal bit of commentary on his performance tonight.

As Shade’s commander, she had a duty to officially swear him in, so to speak. That wouldn’t happen until later, but it would raise a few red flags if she didn’t at least acknowledge his victory before calling it a night.

When she’d almost reached the outer edges of the entire task force crowding around the elf, those closest noticed her approach right on cue. Rebecca didn’t have to say a thing or even gesture for her operatives to make way.

Intrinsically, they all knew where she was headed and why. Each person stepped aside at the perfect moment, silently clearing a path for their Roth-Da’al.

By the time she crossed into the center of the now defunct casting circle and stopped in front of Rowan, she was already scowling at him and found herself unable to stop.

The imminent danger had passed. There was no longer any threat of his accidental death at her hands. She’d realized that while making her way toward him.

Now Rebecca’s relief at finding him alive had solidified into a hot, churning mass of rage boiling in her gut, seething up her throat and shooting so painfully into her clenched jaw and behind her eyes that all she wanted to do was scream at him.

He was alive.

Which meant now she could be this pissed off at him for having manipulated her into this exact situation she’d been trying to avoid. She should have known he’d waltz right in here to play her with something like this.

Now, because he’d passed The Striving, they were stuck together.

Once he’d noticed her heading toward him, Rowan’s smirk had remained all the way until the moment she stopped in front of him. A small shadow of dark circles under his eyes remained, and he looked a little paler than usual, but beyond that, he seemed more or less unharmed.

His experience tonight hadn’t changed his careless attitude in the slightest. That would have been a bonus.

Forcing herself to act the official part of the Roth-Da’al she was, Rebecca offered him a firm nod of acknowledgement filled with all the decorum of someone in her position who had never before seen, met, or even heard of her organization’s newest initiated member.

“Congratulations, Blackmoon,” she said, her voice low and stiff beneath the effort of forcing down her anger. “You survived.”

Rowan’s smile flickered even wider beneath a confused frown. That expression could have been completely serious or just another one of his meaninglessly joking tics. “Why do you look so pissed off? Did I fail to meet your expectations?”

Holding his gaze might have been one of the hardest things she’d ever done, especially while every bone in her body screamed at her to turn around and run away and put all this behind her forever.

“Not at all,” she replied simply. “Welcome to Shade.”

When she thrust out her hand, Rowan laughed but took it anyway, and they shook.

“You’ll swear your oath first thing in the morning,” she added.

That dangerous, deadly, disarming grin of his returned as he chuckled again, his hazel eyes glinting beneath the gym’s overhead lights someone had switched on again. It could have been the lighting, of course, or simply Rebecca’s imagination, but the color seemed to return to his cheeks a lot more quickly now.

When he tried to pull away from their handshake, however—taking it as seriously as he took everything else, which was not at all—Rebecca refused to let him go.

Rowan’s smile disappeared. He tried one more time to subtly release her hand without letting anyone else see the struggle. But with such a diligently observant crowd watching their interaction, there wasn’t much he could do.

A deeper flush bloomed high in his cheekbones, barely noticeable to those who didn’t know where to look. But Rebecca did.

That was realization dawning on his face, and it momentarily changed his entire demeanor.

“Wait,” he murmured, tilting his head away from her as he held Rebecca’s gaze. “My oath? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Rebecca leaned toward him and raised her eyebrows. Now that she had his full attention, she could show him what a shitshow he’d just created for both of them. “It means I own your ass.”

Then she squeezed his hand just a little harder and a little tighter, feeling his knuckles grind together within her grasp.

Yes, she definitely wanted to make it painful for a few seconds—a warning she knew Rowan would understand, though he held her gaze and offered no other outward sign signal of pain or hesitation.

But he was getting the message.

Without another word, Rebecca released him, stepped aside, and marched across the other half of the training gym toward the double doors and the hallway beyond. The other magicals standing around Rowan stepped aside or backed away to give her room. No one tried to stop her.

Godammit, yes, it was official now. She had just initiated the elf—the one person in her entire life it had hurt her the most to stay away from for as long as she had—into the organization Rebecca now led.

Into the task force for which she was wholly responsible.

And she was the only one who also had to deal with the consequences of it.