20. Chapter 20

20

W hen the next explosion tore through the compound, it became clear no one was getting out of this unscathed.

The second blast was even louder and more intense than the first, and it sounded much closer. Its ensuing shockwave trembled through the ground floor of the compound, shaking the walls and rattling windows, making the lights flicker violently overhead.

A shower of dust seeped from the end of the same hallway Maxwell had just been about to enter, followed seconds later by terse shouting in multiple voices and another smaller boom carrying as much damage as the first.

Random murmurs of conjecture and indecision floated around the common room, and still, no one moved. The free-hanging lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling swung madly under the force of multiple blasts, making the light surge all over the common room and sending shadows flickering violently in every direction.

Rebecca couldn’t have said what was happening right now, because no, she’d had nothing to do with it. But even amidst the blasts, Maxwell hadn’t stopped staring at her.

Another explosion rocked the compound, louder and closer.

Rebecca leapt to her feet, ready to meet Maxwell head-on if she had to. Because now it looked a hell of a lot like he was about to start pointing fingers and declaring who he thought responsible for this.

Something told her she was about to be the first person he singled out. She wouldn’t let him place the blame on her like this. She wouldn’t let him get to her.

A high-pitched, keening wail cut her off when the siren finally filled the common room with its deafening, rhythmic volume and bright red-orange light flashing in the open archway of each intersecting hallway .

Bit of a delay after the first blast, wasn’t it? But at least they knew their security alarm worked. Mostly.

Despite the siren overpowering every other sound, it felt like every magical in the place burst into chaotic action at once.

“Breach! We’ve been breached!”

“The compound’s under attack!”

“What kinda suicidal moron would attack us here ?”

Another explosion rent the air, this one powerful enough to send a rippling tremble through the floor. The ground bucked and jerked violently, as if this were an earthquake instead. Those standing upright staggered sideways, adding shouts of surprise and snarls and angry hisses to the chaotic din.

Nyx simply levitated off the ground by several feet, her eyes wide and flashing with violet light as her gaze flickered all over the room.

Rebecca stumbled into the couch’s armrest and quickly righted herself as the last tremors through the floor quickly faded.

When Maxwell finally stabilized himself again, he turned back toward the room and roared over the wailing siren, “We’re under attack! Find whoever you can in the building and get everyone to the garage!”

Then he spun around again and practically threw himself down the hallway.

When he disappeared around the corner, Rebecca could have sworn she saw two quick strobing bursts of silver light reflecting off the hallway walls. Then the light was gone, overpowered by the atomic-red blaze of the flashing security light as the alarm signal continued without fail.

The shifter was gone too.

But not for long, Rebecca knew. He’d find a way to somehow turn this on her, to try to make this her fault, just like he’d told her he would.

“Don’t give me a reason, elf.”

This definitely counted as a reason, didn’t it? Only Maxwell didn’t want to believe it could have been anything but Rebecca.

She had to ensure he didn’t start digging even deeper after this. More than that, she had to prove whoever was responsible for this attack had absolutely no affiliation to her whatsoever.

Which would be really hard to do if it ended up being one of her enemies instead of some disgruntled enemy target coming to seize vengeance on all of Shade as a whole. Rebecca had to figure out which one was which, because only then could she prepare for exactly how to handle the fallout.

Then she thought of her room and what she’d left there. Not just the hex doll, which she couldn’t let anyone get their hands on before she understood how to work it, but something else too. Something else far more personal and far more valuable.

And if anyone got their hands on it—anyone like Maxwell or any number of Rebecca’s enemies from her former lives finally coming for her—the game was up. She couldn’t hide who she was anymore after that.

So instead of barreling straight for the garage like they’d all just been ordered, she headed straight for the hallway into the residential wing and her private room almost at the very end of it.

The other operatives scattered with her almost at the same time, some of them darting down the hallway after Maxwell, others splitting off down the different branching hallways to look for other members who might’ve needed help.

Rebecca passed several of them on her power-walk down the halls of the compound’s residential wing. A handful of faces peeked out from open bedroom doorways to search the hall for clues. She ignored them all, well aware of the other operatives running and shouting behind her.

The order to get everyone to the garage was clear enough without her getting involved.

She had to make it to her room before anyone else did.

In the distance—and admittedly growing less distant by the second—more explosions rocked through the compound. Nothing had become quite so destructive yet that it interfered with the building’s electrical power, though overhead lights flickered with each resounding blast.

Over and over, the walls trembled, the ground shook, shadows danced across the walls, and the constant scream of the alarm siren blared through it all.

Right when she reached the door to her own room, another fierce explosion rocked the building. This one seemed to come from directly above her—seeing as the shockwave of the blast crashed down from the ceiling and nearly on top of her.

The ensuing roar of some unknown detonation—magical or otherwise—drowned out all other sound before it was instantly replaced by an endless ringing in Rebecca’s ears.

The entire hallway shook like a box of cookies rattling around in an overeager child’s hand. Plaster, drywall, and shaves of dust poured down on top of her as the ceiling fractured with a blistering crack from the blast.

The walls groaned and trembled beneath the pressure, and that snapping, crackling break in the drywall continued ahead of her along the ceiling and down the hallway.

As if the building were being ripped in half .

The surprising force of it sent Rebecca flying off balance. She staggered sideways, banging her hip and shoulder against the wall just beside her door. Then she sent a bolt of bright yellow security magic flaring around the door handle to open both physical and magical locks before pushing herself away from the wall and through the open door of her tiny room.

Stumbling inside, she found herself coughing violently at the giant cloud of dust and debris and drifting smoke ballooning into her bedroom from behind. She managed to shut most of it out when she slammed the door shut again behind her, though not all of it.

The lightbulbs freely dangling from the ceiling by thin ropes of frayed electrical wires swung madly above her, illuminating the dust clouds and drywall fragments as much as any of the furniture.

Maybe she shouldn’t have come back for this. Maybe it was a stupid move, potentially endangering herself to retrieve one simple personal item that didn’t even possess any real monetary value at all.

Nothing in Rebecca’s possession really did these days. Not anymore.

But she had no idea who was staging this current attack. She had no idea where they’d come from or what they wanted or what they would do after attempting to blow this compound and its inhabitants to smithereens.

It could have been a robbery or a random act of violence. The most likely scenario was that all this pain came at the hands of one of Shade’s many existing enemies amassed over the years. Even more so over the last six months alone.

No doubt Aldous hadn’t spent much time considering the implications of so many intentionally failed missions when the enemy targets hadn’t been properly dealt with or made sufficiently aware of the consequences for any attempted retaliations.

No, a guy like Aldous never thought about how his epic fuckups would come back to bite him in the ass. And now, those epic fuckups were very possibly already here.

Rebecca had always taken stock of what her consequences might eventually become. There was always a risk of making the wrong move. Of exposing herself. She was careful, but there was never a guarantee that whoever was behind this attack wouldn’t come searching through her room anyway.

She couldn’t let them find a damn thing.

As some kind of desperate battle waged above her on the second story, characterized by scuffling thumps and clomps of storming footsteps across the floor, more explosions blasted directly above Rebecca’s head to send even more debris sifting down through the ceiling panels to cover every surface in her room .

Rebecca dove toward the three-drawer dresser and yanked open the top drawer with both hands.

There was the hex doll nestled beside random bits of clothing, right where she’d left it. She stuffed the creepy-ass doll into her jacket pocket, then fumbled urgently around the rest of the drawer’s contents for the second thing she needed—maybe even the most valuable, most dangerous thing she could have possibly kept with her all this time.

It didn’t have any magical properties of its own, nor would it have been of any value to anyone else. The only power contained within the tiny wooden box existed in its sentimental value—a powerful reminder of where she’d come from and who she used to be.

Of who she could never let herself become again.

She really should have left it behind in her old life, along with everything else, but now just wasn’t the time to start complaining about it. She had to find the box and get the hell out of here before the rest of her private room caved in on itself.

Two more seconds of rifling through brightly colored t-shirts stuffed into piles of neat rolls produced exactly what she was looking for.

A simple, beautifully carved wooden box with a hinged lid, lacking design or embellishment.

The staccato crack of automatic gunfire—or someone else’s fun rendition of battle-magic blasts launched on repeat—filled the air.

Still, Rebecca had enough time for this.

She cracked open the box’s lid, caught a glimpse of dark silver and a wink of crimson inside, then quickly snapped the box shut again and stuffed it into her other jacket pocket.

That was all the reassurance she needed.

It was still safe.

Now it was time to get the hell out of here.

She didn’t bother to shut her dresser door or pick her way carefully across her room. Some unseen battle waged on the second story, directly above her, which might have seemed odd and perhaps even slightly coincidental—if she’d been anywhere else.

At this point, though, everything inside the Shade compound was fair game right now. Clearly.

Rebecca leapt across her room toward the door, stumbling again when another explosion wracked the foundations of the building. She skidded to a halt and scowled up at the ceiling.

This one didn’t come from directly above her like last time. Normally, she would have considered that a major plus, but at the moment, she suspected it meant there was more than one battle taking place within this repurposed factory building.

From the sound of it, though, whoever was fighting upstairs stood a decent chance of handling themselves.

Every member of Shade could handle themselves, which was what had gained each of them membership in the first place. It had also kept them alive before, during, and after some of the worst missions executed at Aldous’s command.

At least, most of them were still alive.

Just because they could handle themselves didn’t mean Rebecca was automatically exempt from involvement in this anonymous attack. False identity or no, she was one of them. She was Shade.

Despite having been on the run and in hiding for at least the last half of her long life, despite refusing to step into the role in which she’d always been told she had no choice, Rebecca Bloodshadow wasn’t a fucking coward. And when she gave her word—whether that came from a Bloodshadow Elf or from someone calling herself Knox, she always kept it.

After the final rattles of the last explosion settled, she regained her footing, threw open the door, and almost ran headfirst into the opposite side of the hallway when another bucking rumble nearly tossed her off her feet.

She slapped a hand against the wall to catch herself and instantly spun to head back across the compound, glancing down every other branching hallway and through every open door in case anyone had guessed staying inside was the safer way to go with this one.

They would’ve guessed wrong.

Instead of bolting straight across the building and through the common room on the ground floor, she stuck to the hallways and corridors winding around the compound’s perimeter. If anyone else was stuck in a room, or frozen in indecision, or still unsure what the hell was happening, she’d find them.

Plus, moving through narrow hallways made her a much more difficult target.

Most of the time.

When she made it past the smaller ground-floor armory marking just a few more minutes down this hallway until she could get down to the underground parking garage with everyone else, Rebecca also realized how close she was to Zida’s infirmary.

Full of damaged, wounded, recovering Shade members.

Who probably had no idea what was happening right now, and everyone else …

Everyone else, as far as she could tell, had already made it to the garage.

The shitty choice in front of her wasn’t really a choice at all. She had to make sure no one got stuck in there.

Even when more explosions and echoing scuffles now came chasing after her through the second story and the ceiling behind her, she probably had enough time.

Enough to dart through the infirmary door, clear the patients who needed to be cleared, and keep moving without wasting any time. Probably. She hoped.

No, she didn’t want to lead a task force or have any part in a fucking coup, but she couldn’t just leave them there.

So she moved.

And realized too late that she’d completely misjudged the integrity of the old, repurposed factory building and therefore how much time she actually had.

Before she’d crossed half a distance, the hallway filled with a trembling groan and crackling snaps.

Rebecca ran, but the ceiling above her gave way in the blink of an eye.

Plaster, insulation, panel boards, stripped wiring, dust, broken wood splinters—all of it came crashing down as the floor of the second story ruptured beneath the anonymous attack.

She skidded to a stop and spun away from the crumbling debris to shield her face from most of it. Seconds later, though the hallway filled with dust and smoke that only made the flashing red light posted along every hallway that much harder to ignore, the rubble settled.

The security alarm blared over and over, then something above her popped and burst. A spray of lukewarm water tainted with the sharp scent of high mineral concentration rained down through the open hole in the ceiling.

Coughing and waving the dust out of her face, she turned back toward the infirmary to find her way out blocked by one enormous pile of caved-in second floor quickly being hosed down by a burst pipe.

So much for having enough time.

Gritting her teeth, Rebecca marched forward across the rubble-strewn floor toward the giant pile of cave-in debris right in front of the infirmary.

A ridiculously large pile, in fact.

Far too large for a simple five-foot hole in the ceiling to have brought down with it.

She realized all this in half a second as she took her final step toward the debris pile, but it was half a second too late.

The toppled cave-in began to move .

Just a shivering tremble at first, like something at the bottom holding up the pile’s general shape was quickly losing strength, on the verge of buckling just like the ceiling.

Frowning, Rebecca tried to step around it.

Her platform pumps slipped dangerously on the thick coating of sawdust and dirt and powdered plaster mixed with sprays of water. With a hand against the wall to steady herself, she eyed the trembling debris and took one more step.

The rubble exploded. A hand launched from the center of the mess—all black and glistening, like it had been dipped in a bucket of tar—and snatched at her ankle.

With a hiss, she jerked her foot away and staggered backward along the wall to avoid being crushed against it by the menacing form now hauling itself up out from beneath the collapsed building parts.

Massive chunks of plaster toppled away down the pile. Dust clouds blossomed into the air all over again. The hulking form rose to its feet, stooped and hunched before slowly rolling up to fully straighten its posture.

Head fully upright. Giant, muscular shoulders rolled back. Every inch of its unnatural flesh covered in mottled black and gray and the occasional streak of white paint from where the spray from the busted pipe had already washed rivulets of the darkest coloring away.

But the thing’s hands, from fingertip to elbow, were one solid, unchanging tone of the darkest, deepest black.

The same pitch black that filled the entirety of the creature’s eyes.

Rebecca only noticed those eyes a second after her brain processed the fact that this seven-foot mountain of soot and charred rubble and manufactured muscle stood before her completely naked.

It would have been especially awkward if the thing had also possessed the detailed anatomy of any nude humanoid—or most of them—but there was nothing.

This thing was nothing more than a doll. An animated puppet created to obey. To seek and destroy.

And, apparently, to rise from the ashes and stop anything in its path.

Rebecca took another small step backward to fully eye the thing over from the top of its perfectly round, bald, pitch-black head glinting in the strobing flash of the red security light, and grimaced.

“Who the fuck’s been playing with homunculi?” she muttered.

No, this thing wouldn’t answer her. It had a mouth, sure, but that kind of mouth was generally not created to move or even to open. Not in a creation that looked like this .

She never would have believed anyone in the whole city of Chicago was stupid enough to screw around with this kind of magic. Clearly, she was wrong.

Whoever had created the homunculus in front of her now was without a doubt the perpetrator of this attack on Shade’s compound. But getting this creature to give up its maker would be impossible. Even if she employed certain…foolproof interrogation tactics. She’d learned them all during her decades of training.

More than that, though, she just didn’t have the time.

Rebecca had to get to the infirmary to help everyone out and away from here.

But now she had an enormous homunculus blocking her path, towering over her by at least a foot and a half.

The fact that she could see absolutely nothing in its pitch-black eyes didn’t mean anything. Rebecca knew the thing was staring right at her. It knew she was here.

And it wasn’t going to let her leave.