2. Chapter 2

2

S he really should’ve trusted her gut.

Even with the best-laid plans and an effective team operating under effective leadership, something could always still go wrong. And nothing Aldous touched was ever effective.

This was exactly why Rebecca made it a point not to trust any plan, or any leader, or any idea a hundred percent.

Especially this pretentious asshat.

“Four minutes!” Aldous bellowed.

At the same time, Nyx twitched beside Rebecca, the flares of static around her petite frame thickening the air and filling Rebecca’s nose with the scent of ozone.

“Shit,” the katari muttered in her high-pitched voice. “Fourth window from the front. Sixth floor. They’re mobilizing.”

Rebecca tore her gaze away from Aldous and Maxwell—standing like a couple of idiots in front of the apartment building—to search for the designated window.

Muted puce and muddy-brown lights flickered in the window, flashing and strobing while a neon-yellow glow rose from somewhere inside, intensifying and growing brighter by the second.

“Dammit,” Rebecca muttered. “They have wards. I told him they’d have fucking wards.”

“First window, second story,” Nyx said, her voice rising toward a feverish pitch with every word as her violet eyes flickered across the north side of the building. “Ninth window, eight floor. Holy shit, it’s spreading way too fast. We won’t be able to—”

“I don’t need a play-by-play, Nyx.”

The katari blinked furiously, her expression now blank with cluelessness. “But what do we—”

“Go tell him .” Rebecca tossed a hand toward Maxwell and Aldous.

“Three minutes!” the changeling shouted. “Now you’re really starting to step in it, douchebag. Get down here! Show your guys what a real standoff looks like!”

“ Now ,” Rebecca hissed.

Nyx let out a high-pitched squeak of surprise that sounded more like a yelping puppy before the static electricity surrounding her popped and sparked. With a quick flash of violet light, she disappeared.

A second later, she reappeared directly behind Maxwell with another flash.

The shifter didn’t so much as flinch before he slowly, calmly looked over his shoulder at her.

Nyx whispered her warning about the enemy’s mobilizing magic inside the apartment building, and their Head of Security merely flicked his gaze across the side of the parking lot until it landed on Rebecca.

Another illuminating flash of silver crossed his irises, glowing in the darkness.

Like she was the one to blame for all this.

At least now he knew what they were up against.

Rebecca returned her attention to the north side of the building, where the neon-yellow lights of some fairly technically complicated wards she didn’t completely recognize were currently being erected around the griybreki private hideout.

Nearly every window now on this side of the building had illuminated with the brilliant glow of intense war magic.

“Two minutes.” Now Aldous sounded bored.

Not a good sign.

If one positive thing came out of this tonight, at least the entire team had a real-time countdown until everything went to shit.

“Come on…” Rebecca whispered, glancing back and forth between Maxwell and the building’s north wall now entirely warded.

With another flash of violet light and an acrid tang like effervescent vinegar shooting straight up her nose, Rebecca noted Nyx’s return with a muttered, “You told him?”

“Of course I told him. What did you think I was doing?”

“Why isn’t he doing anything about it?”

From their position, Rebecca couldn’t tell if Maxwell had opened his mouth to deliver the news of this new minor setback—a setback the entire team had already predicted but which their oh-so-confident leader had immediately rejected .

Instead, he’d simply claimed Edwardo the griybreki was too stupid to ever consider launching that kind of magical firepower either around their compound or at any incoming enemy.

He was wrong. Again.

Maxwell needed to say something about it. Like two minutes ago.

For all Rebecca’s intense staring at the shifter Head of Security and hoping for him to do his job too, there was zero sign of Maxwell alerting Aldous to this change of plans.

Which admittedly had not come from Aldous himself but would still screw them over nonetheless.

So why hadn’t he said anything yet?

“One minute, you lazy son of a bitch!” Aldous screamed. “And then you’re out of time and out of chances. If you don’t do this now, you’re gonna wish you were—”

“Wards!” Leonard shouted from his position on the opposite side of the parking lot.

Then the mage staggered into view, eyes wide and mouth agape as his trench coat fluttered in another breeze. He stabbed a finger repeatedly like a drawn blade toward that side of the building and nearly tripped over his own loafers. “Defensive wards at a hundred percent along the south wall!”

Finally, Maxwell moved. But it wasn’t to prepare Aldous for a quick pivot in strategy.

Both the shifter and Shade’s changeling at the helm turned in surprise toward the bumbling mage.

Leonard barely avoided eating the asphalt after he tripped again. Quickly righting himself, he drew in a gasping breath to add, “They’re not gonna—”

“ Fuck you, Edwardo !” Aldous screamed. “You had your chance. Now I’m gonna piss in your ancestors’ skulls when I’m done with you!”

Before he’d finished his taunting bellow of a challenge, Aldous had already started his own transformation.

First with his voice, which finished off the final verbal middle finger at Edwardo with a low, thundering growl almost interchangeable with a lion’s roar.

It was a voice far too many sizes too big for Aldous’s natural stature, but the changeling had ways to fix that too.

His entire body bulged around itself all at once, like a giant fist had appeared to squeeze him from throat to ankle, every other section of the changeling bursting at the seams and spilling out through the cracks.

His relatively scrawny neck tripled in size before his hips and thighs followed suit. They ripped right through the seams of the guy’s dark-gray dress slacks that didn’t go well with any of his cheap knockoff suit jackets, no matter what color. While thickening out into individual tree trunks, each of Aldous’s legs elongated in seconds to triple in length as well.

The rest of his awkwardly misshapen body rose away from the asphalt, his mouth gaping open like that of a freshly landed fish, complete with a swollen lower lip in a grotesque shade of dark, noxious black-green.

From that disgustingly gaping mouth of his came another trembling roar, the ferocity of which now matched the repulsive thing into which he was still transforming.

When Aldous took his first slow, lumbering step forward as this new thing, his chest and shoulders had broadened considerably with a sharp, ripping slice through the fabric of his sports jacket. The cheap cloth shredded itself on the changeling’s suddenly monstrous frame, hanging off an elbow or a shoulder in frayed tatters.

With no new clothes for this hulking beast to change into, the guy’s equally grotesque gut flopped out over what little remained of his dress slacks, bare, dark green skin exposed and wobbling under the pressure of moving this hulking mass of jiggling flesh and spit and terrifying power.

Or, at least, the power would have been terrifying if Aldous actually knew how to wield it in the first place.

This guy was a total nutjob, drunk on the power of having been appointed Shade’s leader, ignorant to his countless shortcomings, and diametrically opposed to rectifying any of them through hard work, training, discipline, or getting a fucking grip.

Which made him not much more than a giant, grunting, slobbering mountain of flesh with no intelligence whatsoever folded into the blueprints.

Rebecca only had one response in mind for this guy’s idiocy.

Fucking changeling.

Aldous’s baffling transformation occurred in the span of two and a half seconds, leaving his team gaping at him like a bunch of rookies still as green behind the ears as his skin.

Thanks to their leader’s magical road rage, Edwardo didn’t have to lift a finger.

Aldous was about to blow this mission wide open all on his own.

Now, with their leader having transformed himself into a pea-brained giant with the sole purpose of physical destruction and blind rage and not a whole lot else, they were fucked.

When Aldous The Thing took his next step forward, grotesquely misshapen toes the size of nectarines having ripped themselves out of his shoes, the entire parking lot trembled .

The front of the apartment building shuddered. Windows rattled in their frames. Lights inside flickered dangerously.

A thick crack appeared on the far-left side of the building’s front wall, spidering rapidly up the building’s corner to at least the eighth floor with a deafening crunch and crackle.

Somewhere nearby, either inside the building or in another relatively close parking lot, a car alarm wailed, quickly followed by three or four more in a pathetic attempt to alert locals to potential physical threat.

Then Rebecca and her team had no choice but to jump into immediate action, all without a plan now because that plan had just gone to shit.

Nyx acted first.

A static burst pulsed away from her in a tingling shockwave with a strobe of deep violet light as she shouted at the top of her lungs, “North side wards confirmed! We can’t go in there now!”

Aldous roared again, still building momentum with his hulking mass toward the building’s entrance, drowning out nearly every other sound.

“He can’t hear you from here,” Rebecca shouted, pointing at Maxwell.

Hovering two feet off the ground now, Nyx let out a series of nervous whines as she flitted back and forth in the air, then disappeared again with a pop.

She reappeared beside Maxwell once more and dropped both feet to the ground a second later when Aldous’s tree trunk of an arm swung back toward her.

It would have knocked her out of the air and knocked her unconscious if he’d made contact, but she dropped just in time and practically threw herself face first to the asphalt to avoid the blow. “They have wards! He said they wouldn’t have wards!”

After nimbly avoiding Aldous’s other enormous arm swinging out of control like a crane with a hand-shaped wrecking ball attached at the end, Maxwell landed gracefully on both feet, steadying himself in a crouch, and growled, “Obviously, he was wrong!”

Once Rebecca caught sight of Leonard, Diego, and Titus all closing in toward Maxwell, Nyx, and The Thing in front of the apartment building, she gazed up at the windows along the north-facing wall.

All of them strobing with that neon-yellow light. Pulsing with flickers of crackling ward magic that had now fully completed its circuit around the entire building.

It certainly gave the impression of complete protection, anyway.

Aldous had given these shitheads plenty of advanced warning and more than enough time to successfully erect these wards without interference.

Like a fucking idiot .

But just in case, Rebecca summoned an orb of deep silver light in one hand and flicked out her wrist.

The conjured magic moved with her, instantly elongating and hardening until she held not an orb but a six-foot spear, glinting like folded steel under the dim streetlamps of the parking lot and reflecting the neon-yellow ward magic now glowing within every window in front of her.

But it wasn’t steel. It wasn’t any type of metal known either to Earth or to Xahar’áhsh.

No, this was something special.

Something Rebecca had sworn she would keep to herself; being discovered with it would undo everything she’d been working so hard to keep under wraps for the last few decades.

In a pinch, though, nothing else available to Shade even came close to half the strength of this glinting silver spear in her hand—the edge of its nearly invisible blade sharper than any purely physical edge could ever match.

Plus, there was no one here to see it.

She had to make sure.

The nexus of a large, full-building web of wards like this was always the weak point, unavoidable with a weave of this size.

Rebecca just had to find it before their time completely ran out.