17. Chapter 17

17

A n inhuman, blood-curdling shriek rent the air as the last of the mini-gang’s members fell to his knees in front of Rebecca five minutes later.

She hardly heard it as she stomped toward him, fueled by the raging fire of her own magic and the dark, surging ecstasy of finally being able to use it the way she’d been born to use it.

Breathing heavily through a grinning snarl, she followed up her final attack with a single burst of sizzling, hissing red battle magic that caught Boyd in the center of his chest and sent him sprawling backward onto the asphalt with a violent thump.

An enormous, charred hole had seared itself through his shirt and into the flesh beneath, hissing and sparking as thick black smoke rose like steam from his body where he lay.

He gasped like a landed fish, drawing in ragged breaths. The rasping sound of it was punctuated by the slow staccato click of Rebecca’s heels striking the asphalt as she approached him.

The same charred black smoke rose from the four other bodies of his equally screwed buddies scattered about the parking lot. None of them moved as Rebecca headed for their leader. None of them would ever move again.

Gasping and groaning, Boyd tried to push himself up off his back to face her with a little dignity, but the Cruorcian couldn’t hold himself up longer than a second before flopping back down to the asphalt.

In this moment, the only thing Rebecca saw was her intended target. A wrong that needed to be set right.

An enemy that needed to be eradicated simply for the fact that he and his guys had refused her generous offer to let them leave with their lives. Not to mention the fact that they’d attacked first .

The power of that damn artifact she still hadn’t identified in the guy’s hand called to her louder now than it had before all the fighting began. She’d been curious about it from the start, but now, the need to get her hands on that new magical thing, whatever it was, was impossible to ignore.

In this moment of lasting bloodlust and need, only one objective fueled her now.

Total eradication. Total vindication. The sweet, unmatched release of using her magic as freely and without concern as she’d been trained to use it so long ago.

The hiss and snap of still-burning flesh mixed with the clack of her heels, Boyd’s ragged breath, and the whispering song of Rebecca’s Bloodshadow spear swinging down through the air, glinting in its own hungry light before she settled its staggeringly sharp point beneath the Cruorcian’s chin.

He grunted as she lifted his chin toward her with the point of that spear and finally met her gaze for the first time since the rest of his little goons had fallen. He gazed up at her now, uncertainty in his eyes, and swallowed thickly.

Though Rebecca held her weapon perfectly still with the honed precision of control, the small movement of the guy’s Adam’s apple twitching against the tip of her spear sliced open the soft flesh at his throat anyway.

A dark bead of blood welled instantly before trickling down his throat and soaking into the collar of his ripped and charred t-shirt stained with blood and soot from their short-lived battle.

“Careful,” she growled, her voice ringing out in a multitude of different tones that did and didn’t belong to her under the battle rage and bloodlust to which she’d let herself succumb tonight. “Wouldn’t want you skewering yourself prematurely.”

He tried to deliver a low, incredulous chuckle, but it cut short. Even that small amount of movement opened another life-threatening cut in the flesh of his throat.

Not yet returned from the ecstasy of doing what she’d been born and bred, trained and molded and created to do, Rebecca fought for some last sliver of control over herself.

In these few seconds of tense silence between this moment and her enemy’s final end, all her senses had sharpened, her awareness honed to a keen point, taking in everything around her.

The scent of charred flesh cutting through the bitter, coppery tang of spilled blood. The rushing whir of her enemy’s haggard breath seeping in and out of his lungs. The frantic, pounding thud of his pulse racing at top speed now as he prepared himself for the worst .

Within this moment that stretched itself out into an eternity, Rebecca let herself stay here just a little longer. It had been far too long since she’d allowed herself this necessary pleasure. Far too long since she’d set herself free like this.

Yes, she’d caused more than enough damage here tonight, but By the Blood, had it been worth it.

She could have stopped there. She would have stopped there, allowing this final enemy to surrender willingly to her, to beg for his life, to recognize the error of his ways before he turned a new leaf and perhaps even gave her exactly what she wanted.

She could have controlled herself, if this one Cruorcian had allowed her the simple courtesy of giving up while he still had the chance.

But even with his ineffective associates lying lifeless in sticky, glinting puddles of their own blood and charred flesh, he still wasn’t smart enough to let this go.

He drew the brunt of her darkly simmering attention and all its pent-up rage back to himself when he opened his mouth again with a weak attempt to scoff at her through the blood dripping down his own face and the thick tendrils of black smoke still rising from the burn hole in his chest.

When he spoke, he had to catch his breath again before continuing with a sneer, “You can’t stop all of us. Maybe you saved one useless human tonight, but it’s not enough. It’ll never be enough.”

Rebecca settled her burning gaze on the guy’s face and sneered right back.

“It is tonight,” she said in those hundreds of tinny, echoing voices all moving through her as one.

The Cruorcian fully at the mercy of her Bloodshadow spearpoint snorted, his eyes starting to glaze over even as he spat out the words he had to have known would be his last. “Just what kinda hero are you trying to be, exactly?”

Rebecca’s gaze lingered on the grotesque madness of her deepest, darkest, strongest inherent power, and she felt absolutely nothing when she looked him in the eye again and replied, “I never said I was a hero. And no one’s gonna save you .”

He had to have known this was the end. No one in their right mind could have fought her like he had, could have watched her do the things she’d done behind this alley, and still expect to walk away from it all.

But some people just couldn’t accept their fate, even when it was staring them in the face.

With that, at least, Rebecca could more than sympathize.

Boyd reeled against the unavoidable awaiting him and summoned one last burst of strength and courage—or perhaps unabashed stupidity. With no other choice, he released one final battle cry into the thick, humid night air before he pushed himself off his back and conjured a final sizzling flare of crimson sparks and bloody tendrils writhing in his hand.

All it took was a flick of her wrist, the tiniest bit of movement, and Rebecca’s spear tip sliced into the guy’s throat, filling the air with its hauntingly pure song of devastation.

The tip of her spear disappeared into his throat and instantly spread along the guy’s flesh. Thick black lines of ancient power rippled across every inch of him like spiderwebbing cracks across a pane of glass.

In seconds, the dark threads of unholy light sucking all the life and light and the possibility out of the very air streaked across the Cruorcian’s face, down his bleeding throat, and over his collarbones. Into his chest, up his cheeks, into his eyes.

Rebecca couldn’t help but wonder what the guy saw in his final moments as her Bloodshadow magic stole the light of life itself from his eyes, seeping into them until nothing but gaping black holes remained.

His body went limp in seconds.

With another quick flick of her wrist, Rebecca drew her spear from his corpse and released it from her grasp. The entire weapon of dark-gray living power disappeared from within her hand, taking on a new form in whorls of thick black mist.

They drew all the light from the parking lot around her and what was left of it within the corpses of the unfortunate magicals who’d thought they could stand against something they could never possibly understand.

No one ever did.

When Rebecca drew in a slow, shuddering breath, all the flickering tendrils of smoke rising from the bodies bent in the air toward her before drawing themselves into her open mouth like steam sucked through a giant, invisible straw.

Then she finished inhaling her final, impossibly long breath, closed her eyes against the dark, ecstatic pleasure of doing what she was born to do, and didn’t think twice about her choices tonight.

It wasn’t like they’d been the best of guys, anyway.

With the fire in her veins settling down into normalcy again, Rebecca stalked toward the lifeless body of Boyd, his eyes now the shade of complete and utter lack. Of non-existence. Of nothingness.

The deepest black light within Rebecca’s own power.

The guy might have even looked peaceful lying there, staring straight up at the night sky, if it weren’t for the thin lines of black streaking up his neck and across his face.

The remnants of an ancient power that had taken what it was made to take .

After all that, she had to admit she felt significantly better. What a way to let off some steam in a relatively productive way, mostly beneficial results for the city of Chicago overall.

She’d stopped two muggings tonight, one of them perpetrated by a little gang of wannabe badasses playing with new toys in dark alleys. At least she’d saved the woman.

The woman …

Rebecca turned slowly toward where she’d last seen Purse Lady hovering in the air and trying to fight off a clown mirage.

Since Boyd had abandoned his hold on her, the woman had fallen back to the pavement. She was slightly dinged up with a few raw scrapes on her knees and a huge stain of muddy slosh from a pothole puddle coating her left side.

She still had her purse on her. The clown was gone. Beyond a light and fading strip of redness around her throat, she looked relatively unharmed.

Physically, anyway. That was probably as much as she could hope for.

Rebecca nodded at her. “You might wanna get out of here.”

The woman gaped back at her, terror swimming in her glassy eyes as she sucked searing gasps of breath into her lungs and clutched her giant purse to her chest even more tightly. “D-don’t come any closer. You…you s-stay away from me!”

“Hence my strong suggestion that you leave, lady,” Rebecca retorted. “I mean, unless you wanna hang around.”

The multi-toned timbre of Rebecca’s voice during the height of her power, used however briefly, had disappeared, replaced once more by the voice that sounded like her in all other situations.

It didn’t matter that Rebecca sounded normal again. This human had seen what she’d heard and heard a lot more.

She scrambled off the pavement, refusing to look away from the tall blonde woman dressed in black leathers and stiletto heels as she backtracked toward a particularly bright lamppost on the opposite side. Emitting little whimpers and squeaks of horror, she shot quick glances over her shoulder multiple times while she scuttled off.

Then she was gone.

Rebecca didn’t bother to check the woman had made it safely out of the parking lot. She still wasn’t done.

As she hovered over Boyd’s body, she studied the remnants of her magic inside him—magic that had become a part of him in death—and sighed.

“You’d think by now people would get it. When an elf asks for something, you fucking hand it over. ”

His arm lay outstretched across the asphalt, exactly as it had fallen. His wrist and hand had landed in yet another puddle in the enormous potholes dotting the empty lot.

Though it had loosened in death, the guy’s fist still closed halfway around the artifact he’d been using on Purse Lady.

The artifact that had stoked Rebecca’s curiosity so much, she’d used it to start a fight.

As she hunkered down to get a closer look at the item in his hand, the parking lot’s dim lights illuminated her reflection in the mucky film of water filling the pothole.

A reflection she almost didn’t recognize.

Her regularly dark, stormy-blue eyes now swirled with the same metallic silver that formed her shadow spear. Blonde hair draping over her shoulders and dipping toward the sides of her face still maintained a few streaks of bright silver and jagged, crispy black among the strands.

Blood, soot, char, dirt, and muck from other puddles had splattered across her cheeks, neck, shoulders, and upper arms.

No wonder Purse Lady had been so terrified. Rebecca looked like she’d just crawled out of some ancient Elven tomb.

After so long not having used her magic like this , turning it all back down inside her where it belonged took a little longer than she’d thought.

Certainly longer than it had back in the day, in another life, when she’d been forced to use this power—trained and programmed and molded to instill total command over herself and the legacy of her bloodline.

She couldn’t keep walking around the city looking like this, though.

Closing her eyes, Rebecca took another long, deep breath through her nose, tasting the remnants of her darkest magic on her tongue and in the back of her throat and swallowing it all down again before an even longer exhale.

The next time she looked at herself in the puddle of muck, she looked like she was the one who’d gotten mugged in a dark alley and barely escaped with her life.

Better.

Now no one else would see her for who and what she truly was. The magicals who had seen her weren’t telling anyone anything ever again. And Purse Lady? Well, no one would believe her anyway.

Mostly, Rebeca just wanted that damn artifact.

Something that could render even a garden-variety magical criminal capable of some seriously old-school magic like the casting circle and power runes Boyd had almost completed in front of a choking Purse Lady fighting off a demon-clown made of smoke and light ?

That was old-school Xaharí magic, right there. Not typically the kind one found on low-level thugs on the street.

Plus, it was something Rebecca had never seen before, which made it particularly rare.

She reached toward the Cruorcian’s slack fist, pried his slightly gray-tinted fingers open with her own, and took a moment to study the so-called artifact.

“A doll,” she murmured. “Seriously? We’re mixing old-world magic with Voodoo now? What the hell is this?”

Four inches long, narrow, and relatively humanoid-shaped without any other defining features, this little artifact was the cause of all this destruction out here in a back galley.

This was the reason Boyd had decided it was better to take his chances against her than to just hand it over. This little thing made of cloth and straw and a couple of tiny stones embedded in its raggedy head for eyes.

There had to be something more to it.

There always was.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone around anymore to ask about the doll’s origins or the specifics of its uses. But at least no one would stop her from taking it with her and investigating the thing a little further in her free time.

Worth a shot.

With a shrug, she closed her open hand around the clown doll—or whatever the hell this was—tightly squeezed her fist, and a puff of swirling dark-silver mist like mercurial gas seeped between her fingers.

When she opened her hand again, no trace of the artifact remained.

There were very few places to truly hide something valuable if one wanted to make it impossible to find. Rebecca had access to a few interdimensional tricks of her own.

So far, those tricks didn’t seem to have been affected much by her escape from Xahar’áhsh to create anonymous, low-key, undiscovered lives for herself in this world.

Just as she was about to stand, feeling particularly pleased with herself, her gaze landed on the Cruorcian’s open hand floating atop that filmy puddle in the asphalt.

Normally, Rebecca didn’t pay much attention to identifying marks of anyone she’d had a fun tussle with in the dark, but this particular mark she recognized.

This one had absolutely no business whatsoever being here.

Not in the Midwest. Not in Chicago. Definitely not in an empty parking lot at the end of a back alley in Burnside.

What the fuck had she just stepped in now ?