16. Chapter 16

16

W hen Rebecca finally emerged from the opposite end of the alley, her stiletto heels clacking away, the scene before her made her pause.

Not many did, but this was one for the books.

The woman with the giant purse hung suspended in the air above the empty lot, her limp feet dangling a yard above the asphalt and the rest of her body almost entirely slack. Her wide eyes bulged in her head, her cheeks and neck red and swollen, as if someone had grabbed a hold of her by the throat to lift her up off her feet.

Definitely magic involved, but what Rebecca didn’t immediately know how to categorize was the startling image of a garishly costumed clown hovering in the air directly in front of the woman.

As if clowns weren’t ridiculous enough without any real purpose, this one seemed to be made of smoke.

Thick, bluish-gray smoke with speckles of color in the fuzzy pom-poms protruding from the thing’s costume; the enormous, round rubber nose; and the tight, wild curls flaring away from its head in all directions, marked with subtly translucent rainbow stripes.

Whatever kind of ridiculous new magic this was, it held the woman by the throat in mid-air. She couldn’t seem to stop staring at the clown, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her mouth worked quickly open and closed, but no more sound came out.

The smoke clown, on the other hand, was incredibly animated, rearing its head back with a soundless cackle before swiping outstretched hands left and right. No more solid than the streams of mist rising up off the city streets on a warm summer’s night.

If the woman could have moved or screamed every time the smoke clown swiped at her, the parking lot would have been a hell of a lot louder. But apparently, she’d lost her only ability .

Rebecca eyed the stupefying scene and tilted her head. “Well this is new.”

At the sound of her voice, the five other idiots in the parking lot all jumped to attention, as if physically struck, and turned their seething glares onto her.

“What happened to you?” one of them asked. The Cruorcian eyed her up and down much like the human woman had, and his sneer intensified. “You’re on the wrong side of town looking like that. Though there’s a whole strip of cheap motels just right down that way.”

His cronies sniggered and jostled each other.

Judging by the growling whine of his voice, Rebecca pegged him as their ringleader. Allegedly named Boyd.

She inhaled deeply, let it all out in a long, exacerbated sigh, and spread her arms, “I don’t get why everyone has a problem with my clothes…”

Then she gestured toward the human woman still hanging three feet in the air, who now clawed at the non-existent grip tightening around her throat. “ This is the kinda thing that should be consistently more important. Across the board.”

“What do you know about it, huh?” The sniveling, deathly skinny troll wearing a newsboy cap in garish plaid of burnt-orange and puce over a legit three-piece suit jerked his head up at her.

From where she stood, Rebecca could have sworn that suit was corduroy. “Not a whole lot, honestly. Maybe you didn’t hear me when I said this was new, but hey. I would love to hear what the hell’s going on.”

“None of your fucking business, elf,” Boyd snapped, to which his goons responded with a volley of slightly louder laughter than before.

Like they were trying to convince themselves she didn’t want to mess with them .

“Right. I see where you’re going here with this one.” Rebecca nodded slowly. “You’re trying something out for fun. Different type of mugging scenario. Hell, maybe you just wanna play with a human for a bit before you dump her body in a ditch somewhere. I get it.

“They really don’t ever find the bodies. Because no one goes looking for magical suspects responsible for magically perpetrated crimes.”

Boyd’s incredibly thick eyebrows bunched even closer together to make him look like someone had slapped an enormous furry caterpillar across the bottom of his forehead. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Now normally,” she continued, “I wouldn’t give a shit about whatever you guys do in your spare time for fun. Seriously. The only reason I’m out here is to literally go looking for trouble, and you guys are making that super fucking easy. To be fair, I can’t let this one go just yet. I gotta know what this is first. ”

She pointed at the misty cloud of illuminated magic shaped like a see-through clown, which hadn’t stopped swiping at the terrified woman, cackling soundlessly and shoving its illusionary face right up into hers before starting all over again.

The head idiot of this five-guy team hissed, then glanced at his yes-men—either for backup or some kind of explanation—but they all returned his gaze with blank cluelessness before he spun back toward Rebecca. “I told you it was none of your business. What part of that don’t you fucking understand?”

“Oh no, I understand just fine.” She brushed off his comment with a wave of her hand. “I know what you said. What I don’t know is what that clown-thing’s doing over there. So you can either explain to me what that thing is, because I am insanely curious.”

After holding his gaze a moment longer, Rebecca shrugged and glanced across the parking lot. “Or I can just, you know, drop all five of you right here and then figure it out for myself. Up to you guys, really. I’m game either way.”

Boyd blinked rapidly, then shook his head and snorted like a dog shaking cold water off its coat. “Yeah, okay. Fuck off.”

Turning back toward his goons, the guy nodded in Rebecca’s direction. “Get rid of her.”

Then he pulled his other hand from the pocket of his baggy jeans, his fist clenched tightly around something Rebecca couldn’t quite make out.

Bingo.

When none of his buddies moved, Boyd the Cruorcian snarled at them. “What did I say? Go!”

Without explicitly being singled out, two of his witless thugs, a giant and a blackhorn, stepped toward Rebecca, sneering and snarling and chuckling in a way that was probably supposed to intimidate her.

The guy on the right even pounded a fist into his own hand, like he really thought that would work.

Someone had been watching way too many old gangster movies.

“Come on, fellas.” Rebecca cocked her head and took a step forward. “How hard is it just to tell a girl what kinda special toys you’re using, huh? It’s a simple question.”

“You couldn’t handle this one, sweetheart,” Gresh growled. His low chuckle ended in a particularly unflattering snort.

“Well shit.” Rolling her eyes, Rebecca headed toward them, her heels clicking across the asphalt. “I didn’t wanna have to go about it this way, but everyone’s being so fucking stubborn and playing hard to get tonight, and I just—”

Gresh conjured a spell in one hand and tossed it at her before she’d even finished.

The sizzling crackle of magic hissed through the air, joined by a brilliant flare of brilliant orange light and an admittedly impressive heat level.

But Rebecca was faster.

She jerked her head to the side and took one pivoting step away from these back-alley mutts, and the spell sailed past her face with less than an inch of room to spare before it exploded against the corner of the alley wall behind her.

The magical blast erupted against the brick, cracking off huge chunks and sending them scattering across the empty parking lot.

Rebecca slowly turned back toward this group of geniuses and clicked her tongue. “You really haven’t gone up against a lot of people with actual reflexes, have you?”

Their leader Boyd had approached the silently terrified woman dangling mid-air, and now he held the unknown object away from his face and toward his apparent victim. “Quit dicking around. I said get rid of her.”

When all the other weirdly dressed criminal buffoons turned to look at her again, Rebecca let a quick smirk flicker across her lips as she jerked her head up at the group in a silent challenge.

Five hyped-up hotheads fighting in an alley over the same human caught in their trap. This was more like it.

So much better than a terrified guy in a ski mask who couldn’t hold still long enough to aim correctly.

“Well?”

The troll stepped toward her first, clearly determined to get it this time with the same attack launched at the same target.

Rebecca sidestepped his second launched blast of crackling blue light, then pivoted and spun away from the bolts of crackling bright-green light striking toward her from the warlock. The blast snapped at her three-inch stilettos, then another, and another.

Each magical bolt cracked again and again into the asphalt at her feet, all of them a second too late because Rebecca was already way ahead of them.

“What are you doing? Fucking dancing with her?” Boyd roared, simultaneously focusing on the hovering woman as he began some spell requiring an impressive number of complicated gestures with his free hand. “We got shit to do! Move it!”

The Cruorcian’s third crony stepped forward to join the other too, most of his face hidden beneath the shadows of a dark-gray fedora that looked way too big for his head and proportionately his entire body .

Rebecca noticed him moving toward her as she sent her own flares of bursting red battle magic toward the others, not really trying to hit them. More than anything, she was grateful for the opportunity to get in a little exercise while she could.

That distracted her just enough from checking out the details of any of these other guys following Boyd’s orders before the dude in the fedora stepped up to the firing line and tilted his head slightly back.

The devious glow of crimson light in his two blazing red eyes illuminated the rest of his face a split second before he launched his blood magic into the fray and directly at her.

Rebecca shot off her last blast of bright-red battle magic a split second too late and only managed to block the first crack of the Cruorcian’s blood-magic coils lashing against her forearm.

The instant crack of his power against her bare flesh echoed across the parking lot with another burst of red light. Then the Cruorcian pulled his arm back, and his coiling tendrils retracted into his hand again.

Rebecca staggered off balance, more surprised by the packed punch of his attack than hurt by it. With a hiss of her own through clenched teeth, she grabbed her left wrist below where the Cruorcian had hit her and briefly studied the raw, red ring of seared flesh forming a damn near complete circle.

“That was just a warning,” the troll in the nasty corduroy suit shouted before sniggering with his buddies. “Now’s your chance to turn around and walk away, toots! Maybe you’ll use that pretty head of yours next time and think about what you’re doing before you jump into somebody else’s game without an invitation.”

She couldn’t help it. Rebecca barked out a laugh and hovered her other hand over the circle of seared flesh around her wrist.

Ruddy golden-orange light bloomed in her open palm. She swiped it slowly up her wrist and forearm, her magic darkening and deepening into a blood-red thicker than the Cruorcian’s most powerful abilities.

Gritting her teeth, she looked up at the four stunned criminals and one Cruorcian currently ignoring her in lieu of casting some other spell on the human.

All four of these dipshits stared at Rebecca’s arm as she finished passing her hand over it. Their eyes widened when the seared ring of flesh on her wrist blackened completely, shriveling under her own magic like so much charred meat burnt to a crisp over a spit.

The pain of her healing magic was all part of her birthright. It was nothing new .

After where she’d come from and what she’d done just to get to this point, the pain didn’t mean a thing.

But the surprise and confusion on these idiots’ faces, followed by realization as the facts clicked into place and then terror as they realized what a massive shitstorm they’d just walked into, was satisfying enough. Rebecca probably wouldn’t have felt her whole arm getting hacked off at the elbow at that point, if it had been necessary.

It wasn’t.

The blackened ring of her skin burst apart, huge flakes of charred, dead flesh peeling away from the rest of her to float off across the parking lot in the next breeze.

Then she raised her eyebrows and grinned. “Touché.”

“What the fuck?”

“Uh…Boyd?” the troll asked. “We, uh…we might have—”

“I don’t give a shit,” Boyd snarled. Sweat gleamed on his forehead as he continued the complicated hand gestures of his fancy spell. A round seal of sickly green-yellow light grew darker in a summoned casting circle between him and the floating human woman. “Just take care of it!”

His guys all moved in at once.

Blazing flashes of multicolored light split through the air, casting violent shadows across the asphalt and stretching up against the brick walls on either side of the alley’s mouth.

Rebecca dodged and ducked and spun away from every single launched assault, springing off her feet as if she’d hidden springs in her stilettos.

Then she saw the Cruorcian move.

He was the attack dog. The one his boss sent out when no one else could get a thing done. He was the only real threat.

The second his eyes exploded with crimson light beneath the ridiculously huge brim of that fedora, Rebecca stopped dodging, planted her feet, and faced him head on.

It was nothing more than reflex now—all those decades of training and sparring and drills honed into her over and over and over again.

Sneering, the Cruorcian drew his arm back and flung it toward her with another flash of blood-red light around his body.

Rebecca summoned the only kind of magic that was sure to stop a Cruorcian in his tracks. Blood against blood.

And, of course, she had a little something extra he simply didn’t.

A swirling sphere of dark silver light like liquid mercury appeared in her palm .

The Cruorcian tossed one hand toward her, chucking bolt after bolt of his own reanimated blood drawn from some open wound she couldn’t see.

By the time the shards of blazing red slivers like tiny spears reached her, Rebecca swept her hand in front of herself, and her silver orb bloomed to three times its size, shielding her from the guy’s blood daggers.

Each one of them pinged off her magic like pebbles trying to take down a tank.

An unbelievably swift-moving tank in three-inch heels.

The Cruorcian was quick to follow up with a second attack. He’d already caught her off-guard once before.

Rebecca had been counting on his assumption he could do it again.

She spun away from the last of his blood daggers, flicking her wrist and the dark silver orb with it.

By the time she faced him again, that orb had become the long spear of dark, blazing Bloodshadow.

Just as three more whipping coils of the Cruorcian’s crimson tendrils that had proven their strength in burning her lashed toward her face, Rebecca swung her spear down in a blurred arc.

Her weapon glinted in the darkness, simultaneously pulling all the light toward itself to gobble it all up in an instant.

The slicing whisper of an impossibly sharp blade cut through the air and right through the Cruorcian’s blood-magic coils like they were water.

There was hardly any sound at first when that impossible blade made of magic severed clean through someone else’s.

Half a second later, all three of those outstretched tendrils of whipping, lashing, blood magic dropped to the asphalt, one right after the other. Each one let out a slow, low-pitched whine that quickly grew into a shrill squeal, like a wet glass bottle tossed into the fire before it exploded and shards scattered in every direction.

Only the shards in this case were bits of blood magic.

Then Rebecca settled on her feet again, swung the tip of her Bloodshadow spear back down at her side, and watched for what came next.

The Cruorcian’s severed tendrils writhed and whipped about on the ground for a few seconds before the stunned Cruorcian finally recognized what had been done to him.

An almighty screech of pain and horror and rage burst from his gaping mouth before he dropped to his knees right there in front of Rebecca and the pieces of his own magic she’d cut from his physical person.

After that came a long, low, keening wail.

The others gaped at her and the Bloodshadow spear at her side .

The troll in the corduroy suit and newsboy cap sucked on his teeth, looking quickly back and forth between the devastated Cruorcian kneeling in front of his severed magical bits and their relatively useless leader of a Cruorcian still casting his indecipherable spell on the poor woman locked in a terrified stupor with that smokey clown laughing in her face.

“Since when has there been a fucking elf in Chicago?” he snapped.

“Since right now,” Rebecca replied flatly. “As far as you’re concerned.”

She stepped forward and brought the deadly sharp point of her spear up beneath the Cruorcian’s chin as he knelt in front of the broken pieces of himself. With the tip of her spear, she forced the guy to look up at her, careful not to skewer him through the face in the process.

“I would really love to know the story behind that fun new toy of his over there,” she told him, jerking her head toward Boyd.

The warlock’s gaze barely flickered in that direction. “Boyd?”

“Jesus Christ,” the Cruorcian snarled. “Do I have to do everything myself?”

His minions didn’t answer, though, seeing as they were all caught up by the very real and present threat of a genuine Bloodshadow Elf holding them all at spearpoint.

Which, of course, the Cruorcian didn’t notice until he’d completely turned away from the woman in the air to eye Rebecca.

When he did, the surprise of seeing his decimated Cruorcian kneeling beside three other majorly terrified goons-for-hire made him back away from the human altogether. He lifted both hands in concession before growling, “What do you want ?”

“Well, it started with just wanting to know where that lady’s clown came from and what you’re trying to do with it. But now I’m feeling a little ignored and kinda pissed off. So how do you think we’re gonna fix that?”

“Shit, lady,” he said, his poor attempt at a snigger catching in his now-breathless throat. “Are you for real?”

Rebecca’s smile twitched. “Last time I checked. Now let’s talk about how you think we can rectify this little…problem you fellas got yourselves into tonight.”

The small gang’s leader and the other three dudes still on their feet eyed each other warily. The Cruorcian, however, was too wrapped up in the pain and horror of his severed magic to be of much use to anyone now. Which was the point.

She waited for what felt like a sufficient length of time for anyone to offer a few suggestions. No one did.

If these guys hadn’t learned to think as quickly on their feet as they tossed around attacks, that was their own damn fault .

Rebecca wasn’t a babysitter.

“That’s fine,” she said. “Here’s my suggestion. I’m gonna give you guys two choices. First, you can hand over that fun little toy making the human do…whatever she’s doing over there. I heard you talking about testing it out, and I gotta admit, I really wanna see what else it can do.

“So you can make it easy on yourselves, hand it over, and save everyone the trouble, or …you can try to keep it, fight me for it, and I’ll end up taking it from you anyway. Your call.”

Now that she’d given an actual choice, which was the most she could offer, Boyd seemed to regain his mental faculties enough to scoff at it. “You’ve totally fucking lost it.”

“And you’re not the first person to tell me that,” Rebecca quipped. “The jury’s still out. So what’s it gonna be?”

With a snort, he gestured to his stupefied underlings. “This is the part where you learn to stay out of other people’s business. If you want what’s ours, you’re gonna have to take it from us.”

His buddies seemed surprised by this being their leader’s final decision, but they didn’t argue with them.

Rebecca grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Then, lifting the tip of her Bloodshadow spear, she pointed it directly at Boyd and winked. “Let’s dance.”

The little gang shuffled on their feet, shooting each other confused looks.

The Cruorcian in charge let out a not-so-encouraging battle cry and leapt toward her first, leading the way.

The rest of them, minus the Cruorcian, recovered quickly from their shock and surprise.

Then they dove after their head idiot, flickering magical attacks in varying colors bursting at their fingertips—whirling fireballs and crackling bolts of light, blades and whips and explosions and whatever else they’d trained themselves to drum up for a fight like this.

It didn’t escape Rebecca’s notice that Boyd still held tightly to the unidentified object controlling the human woman and her clown, refusing to put it away even for a fight.

Now that she’d given them a chance, she was entirely justified in taking whatever she wanted after the fact.

More than that, Rebecca could finally unleash all her pent-up frustration on this ignorant little crew of asshats without fearing what it might do to her reputation and the continued secrecy of who and what she really was.

After this, it wouldn’t matter anyway .

She didn’t plan on giving any of them a chance to spread the tale of the Bloodshadow Elf starting back-alley brawls in Burnside because Rebecca didn’t plan on leaving any of them alive after this.

She also failed to consider the fact that anyone else might have been watching her from the shadows of the alley, just beyond her reach.