47. Chapter 47

47

W hen Rebecca turned, ready for a fight, she found the necromancer on the opposite side of the balcony, arms outstretched and head thrown back in concentration and the ecstasy inherent in using this kind of magic.

The spell he’d been weaving had manifested as an amorphous cloud of black unlight, churning with glittering specs as it matured into what would eventually become strong enough and deadly enough for the conjurer to unleash.

If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, if she hadn’t felt it within every cell of her being, Rebecca wouldn’t have believed this type of spell existed in front of her. Or that even a necromancer, for all their bad rap with death magic and turning it against the living, would have dared to attempt such a thing.

Not only was this guy attempting it, he’d almost succeeded in adulterating his own powerful energy into the magical equivalent of a deadly airborne virus meant for biological warfare.

The necromancer had given his spell enough of his own life-force spark to create an undead attack missile set to search and destroy. Once he eventually set it loose, he would direct it at the targeted individuals, who would have zero recourse to stand against it.

In other words, Rebecca and her team.

Thank the ancestors she’d gotten here just in time. And that the guy had been too busy powering up his spell to bother with her now.

Shoving herself away from the superpowered machine-gun cannon she’d finally disarmed, Rebecca stormed toward the necromancer, her Bloodshadow spear already summoned and glinting in her tight grip. “Hey!”

The necromancer’s hands lowered at her shout before he started to turn his head toward the elf crashing his spell-casting party.

Before he’d even gotten a good look at her, Rebecca’s spear tip plunged into one side of his throat and out the other in a spray of unnaturally dark necromancer blood. When she jerked back her spear, the necromancer crumpled to the balcony floor without a sound.

Then it was over.

It had to be over, which was what she’d assumed would happen, because that was how this kind of thing worked. A magical died and took all their unrestrained magic and unfinished spells with them.

But the churning cloud of noxious black specks like a swarm of fleck-sized insects, sparking here and there with bright purple and green, didn’t react to its caster’s sudden demise.

Instead, it rose higher and higher into the air, still growing.

By the time Rebecca realized she’d miscalculated, that she hadn’t produced the intended effect of putting down the necromancer and changing the tides for her team in this insane battle, the necromancer’s death cloud had already reached the theater hall’s ceiling.

Now, it had expanded to the size of the entire balcony on which Rebecca stood.

Alone.

With no backup plan to end the harrowingly powerful spell looming above them all, because it should have ended with its maker’s death.

She hadn’t stopped shit. This was still happening.

Even as the horrifying thought hit her, the death cloud continued to grow, stretching and elongating across the ceiling. Long filaments detached themselves from the larger mass, spreading in every direction around the theater hall.

The only reason she could see it this distinctly was because of her Bloodshadow magic. Not quite the opposite of necromancy but not all that different when it came to the general mechanics.

The necromancer had either been a complete idiot or a zealous fool, far more dedicated to his purpose than his own life.

In whatever ways he’d twisted his own magic to get the job done, he’d somehow added an extra fail-safe bonus, disconnecting himself enough from this massively dark old-world spell that it would continue to grow and spread until it had sucked all the life out of this theater hall.

And who knew how much longer it would continue after that, if at all.

Unfortunately, with the necromancer now dead, the magic he’d unleashed had no one to direct it.

An undisciplined, uncontrolled power like that did not discriminate.

Very much like a virus, the growing mass of death magic would do what it had been crafted to do, and it wouldn’t stop until it finished what it had started.

Dammit. Rebecca had always hated necromancers, especially those straight from Xahar’áhsh, which this one had so obviously been.

She was so focused on trying to figure out how something like this was even possible in the first place, it hadn’t occurred to her how quickly this kind of spell would jump into action.

A lot more quickly than she would have given it credit for.

Which became disastrously clear only a few seconds later when the constant rapport of magical gunfire from below petered out into a tense, confused silence.

Then rose the first few sputtering chokes and gasps from below.

No…

Rebecca rushed forward, ramming herself to a stop against the balcony’s railing to confirm with her own eyes what her gut had already figured out.

The undulating filaments of the death cloud had now dropped into the firefight below. Augmented weapons had already lowered.

Several weapons toppled from baffled hands as magicals reached for their own throats instead, tugging at shirt collars, pounding nervously on their own chests until they realized the air they tried to draw into their lungs had nothing to do with the tightness of their top buttons or any natural reaction of their own bodies.

It was the spell.

Two enemy combatants just inside the auditorium’s double doors fell first, crumpling to the ground with solid, echoing thuds. Another slithered to the slanted floor and rolled down it before coming to a lifeless halt, already dead.

The coughing and wheezing worsened, joined by searing and gasping hacks and grunts while every living being still inside the building fell beneath the ancient, deadly power of a necromancer’s final spell they couldn’t see.

And in the most basic sense, there was nowhere to go to escape its reach.

Rebecca knew the death cloud had already reached the members of her own team without having to see it. She’d already run out of time to reverse this thing, but if she hurried, she might be able to still do something .

Once again, she faced impossible odds and with an increasingly frustrating inability to clone herself and be in multiple places at once.

So how the fuck was she supposed to turn this thing off before it killed everyone, including her?

Then she felt the strangling hold of the death cloud’s reach taking root in her too, the tightness squeezing around her throat. The pressure in her chest. How damn hard it had suddenly become to breathe.

Oddly enough, it felt just like the homunculus poison that had coursed through her after such an equally stupid mistake in an unexpected battle against an unknown foe.

But Rebecca had found a way to reverse those effects once already.

What had helped her clear herself of the homunculus poisons so she could heal the magically necrotic wound that awful golem had left behind?

Consumption.

She’d recharged her own with the Bloodshadow magic she hadn’t allowed herself to use in so very long.

But there was no one here within range who possessed a spark powerful enough to undo the necromancer’s twisted spell. Even if the necromancer had still been alive, the spark of those who dealt in death magic was forever off limits to someone like her.

That conjured death cloud left to its own devices was too strong.

Rebecca’s lungs burned with the agony of trying and failing to draw as much breath as they needed.

Yes, the spell killing them all was incredibly strong, wielding power like she hadn’t seen in centuries and never before on Earth.

Enough power to run itself.

And magic always contained its own type of spark…

That was it!

She’d hoped to try such a thing with the explosive-ward traps set around the theater hall but had been denied the opportunity.

Now, while every member of her team succumbed beneath the death cloud’s ravenous destruction, every second lingering closer to the brink of death, Rebecca was up here on her own.

With no one around to stop her.

No one around to see her.

And no other choice, because death was not an option.

She summoned her Bloodshadow magic at the edge of the balcony, sagging against the railing as her legs gave out beneath the lack of air.

But she didn’t need breath for this. She had already proven that much once before.

Her limbs burned with the transformation of letting the full reach of her power out on display. Rebecca reached out toward the auditorium ceiling with her senses and her magic and the all-consuming hunger her darkest abilities craved at all times, even when she had enough control to consistently deny it.

She let it all go.

Her Bloodshadow magic latched onto the healthiest bit of life-force energy in her immediate vicinity—the thing that would feed her own power better and more fully than any other.

The death cloud writhed under the instant hold of her magic. It shuddered and flashed with darker unlight, straining against the call of something far darker and far more ancient than even a skilled necromancer’s twisted abilities.

Then she had it. The black-gray tendrils of her power curled around the deadly shadow winding its way through every other living thing in the room.

Rebecca opened her mouth, and when she inhaled, she took not oxygen into her lungs but the energy of another’s magic into her entire being.

One impossibly long, endless inhale—ravenous, consuming, desperate to feed and, in doing so, to destroy.

Slowly at first, ever so slowly, the dark, sparkling black cloud of unlight and death moved across the ceiling toward her. Threads of it peeled away from the larger mass to trail toward Rebecca’s open mouth like unraveling an entire sweater by a single thread.

She took it into herself bit by bit, strand by strand, and kept going.

It was nothing like consuming the full spark of a living being but more like a shot of instant energy. A snack. Something meant merely to whet her appetite, but that wasn’t the point now.

The point was to get rid of the necromancer’s spell before it fulfilled its purpose and got rid of her team.

The little pockets of darkness that had spread and dropped throughout the theater hall rose back into the air, trailing up and back toward the balcony where they’d been unleashed. Only this time, they returned to the Bloodshadow Heir’s open mouth, her head thrown back and her arms spread wide to take in as much as possible and then maybe even more, hoping it would be enough.

The rest of her awareness she hadn’t poured into draining the death cloud dry centered on sparing those remaining life sparks within every member of her team.

She wasn’t here to kill and consume indiscriminately. She was here to protect. To take within herself the thing that surely would have killed them all because she was the only one capable it.

Which made this the perfectly wrong moment for the constructed magical-energy bomb strapped in the middle of her three captured operatives to surge with another dangerous surplus of magic intense enough and unpredictable enough to double as a secondary torture device for everyone within close range.

The low whine of the surging bomb machine overloading with power needing to be released filled the auditorium. It drowned out the hacking gasps and coughs and gurgles of everyone on the ground floor still fighting for breath.

The whine rose in seconds, building once again into that deafening, debilitating roar as the lights all over the machine blinked with sporadic madness and that awful growl burst forth again.

If Diego and Titus had had enough air in their lungs to scream, Rebecca was sure they would have.

She might have protected herself from another onslaught, but she was too deep within the use of her Bloodshadow magic to focus on separating the sparks of her team from the life force inside the necromancer’s spell.

Her intention had been to consume every bit of energy in the building that didn’t belong to other Shade operatives. That intention remained and would continue to fuel her abilities until it was finished.

But now, while the power bomb surged and roared, crashing through Rebecca’s head like a hot poker skewering her brain and bringing tears to her eyes, she had no focus or energy left to differentiate between the necromancer’s spell and the energy surging off the wailing bomb in overwhelming excess.

Her Bloodshadow magic didn’t know the difference.

Life force was life force, and she had already handed her power the reins to consume what it wanted, as long as it didn’t belong to the Shade operatives under her protection.

It meant to take everything else, and that was exactly what it did.

The longer Rebecca’s endless inhale continued, the more wildly the magically overloaded bomb on the stage reacted. It blinked and strobed, growling and whining and rocking violently back and forth even with three captured Shade members strapped to its perimeter.

Almost as if the bomb had become self-aware and knew it was being consumed.

Rebecca was no more capable of stopping herself now than she’d been when this very same magic in her veins had decided it wanted to sample a non-existent homunculus spark, and look where that had gotten her.

But this? This was worse.

Rebecca had unleashed the hunger of her own power. She’d let it run free, and it took everything but what she’d specifically marked off limits.

The roaring bomb trembled and groaned, beeping and blinking and flashing, wailing until its various parts rebelled against the energetic theft.

Then the roar cut out. The low whine ended abruptly. The blinking lights inside the bomb cracked and burst, all the various magitek components crumbling in on themselves.

And still, Rebecca’s magic sensed more to be had.

So more was what it took.

Every casting-circle ward her team had discovered—and significantly more they hadn’t yet found—flared to life in a brilliant range of magical colors. In the walls, within the sloping cement floor, on all sides of the stage, and directly in front of the captured and bound operatives still strapped to the now empty and defunct bomb.

The walls and floors and ceilings strobed with all the magical booby traps set for the rescue team.

The full culmination of Bloodshadow power thrumming through Rebecca’s veins sucked each and every bit away, across the floor, through the air, up toward the balcony where an old-world necromancer lay dead in a crumpled pile.

The Bloodshadow Heir drew every last bit of energy into her open mouth.

Until every bit of magical light in the theater hall flickered and went out all at once.

A burst of electricity zapped somewhere below her, and someone yelped in response. Then came the sound of multiple bodies toppling to the slanted auditorium floor, and the overhead lights that had been off until this moment flickered and sputtered, buzzing in a pulsing rhythm until they popped. Light bulbs shattered, and everything around her went completely, utterly dark.

The last trailing filaments of magical energy from bombs and death clouds and a long-dormant generator somewhere close by drew into Rebecca’s open mouth until she had finally taken it all.

It was finished.

She tried to breathe normally again, but the energy surging through her all at once was more crippling than she’d expected.

There was a first time for everything.

She should have known that what happened next couldn’t possibly be ideal, even for her.

She should have prepared herself, but nothing could have prepared her for this.

Her legs gave out beneath her. With a cry of surprise and confusion, Rebecca thumped to her knees on the balcony.

There was so much…

So many different types of magic and power, energy and life force swirling through her simultaneously, each of them gifting her in their own way with renewed vigor and strength and glowing possibility.

It would have felt that way if she’d only consumed one of them the way she’d intended, but the conflicting sensations and the sheer amount she’d taken on in her last-ditch effort to save her team without preparing herself first overwhelmed her.

She had no control or awareness left to differentiate between all the growing, swirling bits of energy inside her. Nothing left to force them into a combined shape she could control.

Her only option now was to let it all run its course.

In seconds, she found herself wondering if it would even end at all, or if she’d acted far beyond her own capacity. She was too out of practice with this kind of volume.

Had she done herself in for good this time by protecting her team and overloading her own system beyond repair?

Soon, she could no longer hold herself up on her own anymore, kneeling there on the balcony, gasping as so much energy surged through her and tried to find a viable purpose for itself.

Rebecca toppled sideways, unable to catch herself at all, overwhelmed by an unyielding dizziness that tripled her vision and ushered in a fresh wave of churning nausea she couldn’t fight.

Then the coughing started. The seizing burn in her chest. The pressure that felt as though it would never let up. Not soon enough to catch her next sorely needed breath.

Her coughing grew more strained by the second, chest squeezing, throat constricted, the unwavering dizziness making it impossible to move, or think, or even try to help herself.

The entire awful, debilitating experience was all too familiar. As Rebecca lay on her side on the balcony, struggling to breathe, fighting back the panic threatening to overtake her again, other lights within the theater hall that hadn’t been in use before her team’s arrival now surged on with a brightening glow and a crackling buzz.

They illuminated the auditorium, top to bottom.

And here she lay, alone, shielded by the lip of the balcony, with no one there to help her. No one to even notice her struggle in what she was now sure were her last moments.

No, no, no, no…

Her racing heartbeat thudded in her ears like an overzealous war drum. How had she been so wrong? How had she failed to completely heal herself that night at the Old Joliet Prison, when she’d risked far more than she could afford to rid herself of the homunculus poison that had taken her down just like this?

How could she have missed the last traces of it that had clearly been lying dormant all this time, waiting for the moment she pushed herself just a little too far so it could finally take her out for good?

No other explanation made any sense.

Rebecca had miscalculated by epic proportions. She had doomed herself in her fights against Hector Faad’s homunculi, irrevocably changing her magic. And now, every time it was necessary to use it the way she’d used it now, it would fail her just like this.

She had failed to foresee the single weakest point in all her secrecy and careful planning, and now, the poison she’d thought she’d eradicated had returned with a vengeance, intent on wiping her out and rendering her useless.

Rebecca was done for.

If these resulted from using her Bloodshadow magic every time her only choice was to break her promise to herself and use it anyway, she couldn’t use it at all after this.

Now her vision faded, darkening and blurring not just at the edges but everywhere and all at once. The pounding of her heartbeat in her ears grew fainter, drowned out by constant ringing that eventually became the only sound.

Then she realized the inevitable truth.

She had tried so hard to be something she wasn’t, and in doing, so she’d killed herself.

And now no one would ever know the truth of what had happened.