21. Chapter 21

21

T he creature loomed before her, its blackened form a silent promise of destruction. Rebecca’s pulse pounded in her ears. She had to act before the enormous thing made its move.

She knew it would. The nasty type of magic it took to create a thing like this always came with a purpose. A mission. Most likely to kill everything in sight, including her.

As long as the thing didn’t notice any of the patients still stuck in the infirmary, she could handle it. As long as nothing else distracted her, she could handle it.

But that had been harder and harder to guarantee lately.

The homunculus lifted one foot and stomped it down on the surface of the rubble pile trapping its other foot. More debris crumbled down from the center of the pile. The hulking black monster slid forward before pulling its other foot free, and Rebecca engaged.

A crackling, hissing orb of red battle magic appeared in both hands before she hurled them almost simultaneously toward her unexpecting foe.

The first struck the homunculus in the center of its chest with a deafening crack and punched a crater twice the size of her spell into the thing’s chest cavity.

Her second shot hit the homunculus in the face and sent its head and neck whipping backward. Lines of bright red light crackled across the creature’s entire body, lighting up the black and mottled gray from the inside.

The force of Rebecca’s attacks at such close range sent the top half of the thing’s monstrous body reeling backward, as if it were about to attempt a back handspring.

She waited for the rest of the thing’s body to follow suit—for its legs to slip out from under it and send the creature crashing back down into the quickly soaking pile of debris so she could be on her way.

That didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t.

The thing’s bare, pitch-black feet had somehow firmly planted themselves into the pile of caved-in ceiling that didn’t move an inch beneath the homunculus’s shifting weight. Like a life-sized rubber stretch doll, the thing’s torso bent all the way backward at an angle that would have snapped a living being’s spine in a hundred different places.

Something like the creaking groan of old trees in a furious autumn wind rose from the conjured monster before it swung its entire body upright again to stand there in front of Rebecca as straight and attentive as ever.

As if that wasn’t weird enough, the crackling red lines of her electric battle magic fizzled out across the thing’s body, darkening the enormous crater in the homunculus’s chest and the mashed pulp of its face.

Obviously, neither of Rebecca’s attacks had been particularly fatal. Not when her opponent was an autonomously moving amalgamation of someone else’s magic and therefore wasn’t technically alive enough to die in the first place.

That really should have been enough of a warning for her, but the next second, she got to watch the hole in the creature’s chest stitch itself back up again with expert precision, occasionally letting off another crackling red spark left over from her battle magic.

With a violent pop and a sickening crunch, the homunculus’s face broke apart before weaving itself back together again in the correct order. The quick, jerky movements of a mostly face-shaped head made her instantly think of blowing into a plastic water bottle to smooth out all the kinks.

Only she’d just used enough magic to destroy a thousand plastic water bottles all at once, and this non-living bastard had repaired itself in seconds.

Rebecca could have used those seconds to try sneaking past the thing, sure, but something told her the creature wouldn’t have hesitated to reach out and snatch her right off the hallway floor. The perks of not being fully alive, with a complete lack of pain receptors, fear, or any sense of self-preservation.

This wasn’t a normal enemy target.

It wasn’t normal, period.

Now fully restored, the homunculus took another slow, lumbering step toward her as if she’d never attacked it in the first place.

"Shit,” she muttered. “That doesn’t make for a very fair fight, does it?”

It was just a force of habit, talking to her opponents. Rebecca didn't know whether this faceless creature agreed or even had any opinions of its own.

But she did know there was no chance of reasoning with it. Nor could she take it down by any normal means.

That was going to be a problem .

More explosions ripped through the compound. The busted pipe above just kept spraying cold water down through the gaping hole in the ceiling, coating every surface with a slick sheen reflecting the consistent flash of the red security lights at either end of the hallway.

The homunculus trudged forward and had almost reached the bottom of the debris pile when it lifted both pitch-black hands toward her. As if the thing intended to catch her by the throat and strangle the life out of her right then and there.

Most likely, that wasn’t too far off from the homunculus’s intended purpose in the first place.

Gritting her teeth, Rebecca had to quickly weigh her options. Again.

She could turn back and waste even more precious time, leaving those in the infirmary to their own devices and risking Shade’s suspicion when they realized she was the only one of them not to show up in the garage during an assault on the compound.

Or she could stay here and fight this thing the only way she knew for certain would stop it long enough for her to get past. Maybe even rip it apart completely and put it down for good—if she was lucky.

But not once in the last fifty years had Rebecca used her Bloodshadow magic indoors, in a building full of other magicals, where the chances of someone stumbling upon this fight while Shade scattered through the compound to defend against such an attack and someone saw her were infinitely higher.

Even if a witness didn’t immediately recognize her for who and what she was, watching a Bloodshadow Elf be a Bloodshadow Elf wasn’t one of those things most magicals could witness and just walk away from after the fact. It wasn’t something easily forgotten, either.

Behind the oncoming homunculus and the mound of debris was the door to the infirmary.

No way to tell if anyone remained inside, but if they did, there was nothing to stop them from opening the door, noticing a close-quarters battle raging just beyond it, and catching a front-row view of Rebecca fighting off the lifeless creature with a kind of magic no one knew she had.

She glanced over her shoulder to see nothing but an empty hallway and the obnoxiously flashing red security light.

Or she could just not do either of those things, turn around in this hallway, and bolt out of the compound, out of Shade, and probably out of Chicago for good. Then she’d have to keep running when Aldous eventually discovered what she’d done.

Because in this hypothetical scenario, Shade’s one and only elf would be the only member of this task force to run away. In their minds, that would make her uniquely responsible for the final outcome of this assault on their headquarters.

Then Rebecca would be a dead elf walking either way, no matter where she went.

All fantastic choices.

Not.

Another explosion racked the compound, this one sounding much closer and on the ground floor this time. Maybe even coming from the end of this very hallway.

The homunculus skidded toward her down what remained of the debris pile, and Rebecca summoned a dark, swirling cloud of mercurial silver in her hand, its darkest whorls mirroring the pitch black of the homunculus’ hands all the way up to its elbows.

She gritted her teeth and steeled herself for the worst of it still yet to come. But it had to be done. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”

Who cared if anyone saw her now, right? Using Bloodshadow magic here, against her own rules, was better in the moment than dying right here in a pile of sopping-debris sludge from the caved-in ceiling.

Right?

But she’d already made her decision, so it really didn’t matter.

She lifted the swirling orb of dark silver in her hand, its light flickering with brighter silver and seeming to pull all the other light in the hallway toward itself.

With a quick flick of her wrist, that orb elongated in the blink of an eye, stretching and thinning until she held not some formless, swirling collection of magic but the cold, hard weight of a Bloodshadow spear in her hand.

The homunculus took another step forward, arms still outstretched toward her.

She plunged the butt of her spear onto the floor. A deafening crack rang out, pierced by the ringing clang of a metal that was not quite metal.

Beneath the force of her magic, the hallway tiles at her feet rippled, as if made of water instead. The ensuing shock of power spiraling away from the butt of her spear raced across the floor toward the homunculus, leaving behind spidering cracks of dark, lightless gray spilling over into black.

The homunculus just kept coming, oblivious to the threat it truly faced against a Bloodshadow Elf.

Then again, a creature that couldn’t think or feel for itself had nothing to fear from anyone—even someone who had the power to end it forever .

In seconds, the snaking black lines splintering across the rippling floor tiles reached the homunculus’ feet and instantly peeled themselves away from the floor to coil up the thing’s bare, mottled-black feet, ankles, and calves.

Without so much as acknowledging the trap, the blackened creature tried to take another step forward only to find itself rooted to the spot by her magic.

The next time it jerked against the bonds holding it there, another metallic, gong-like clang erupted from the rippling floor tiles and the black streaks of Bloodshadow magic before the entire whole floor jerked forward as well.

Rebecca’s spear nearly tugged itself out of her hand as it yanked her forward off balance. She tightened her grip and grabbed the shaft with both hands now, just to be safe, while fighting the homunculus’s attempts to break free.

Holy shit, this thing was strong.

That normally wouldn’t have posed much of an issue, certainly nothing bigger than Rebecca could handle, but it did beg the question as to the creature’s creator.

If a homunculus like this wielded this much strength on its own, its maker had to be one hell of a powerful magical.

That maker also had to be relatively close to maintain control over the thing—possibly even inside the building with them now.

Rebecca didn’t want to stand here fighting in the hallway long enough to find out.

She doubled down on the magic racing through her spear, working faster than she normally would have with magic like this. But that was only because she didn’t know how long she could hold something as strong as this faceless monstrosity in her grasp without going full darkness in complete battle mode.

This wasn’t the time or the place for that.

The snaking black tendrils stretching across the floor and rooting the homunculus to the spot quivered, thickened, and intensified their grip around the creature’s impossibly muscular legs. It couldn’t keep walking toward her, but it could still swipe at her with its giant arms.

A sharp, counterclockwise twist of her spear severed coiling ropes of shadow from her conjured weapon, leaving Rebecca mere seconds to act before the homunculus was sure to break free.

She darted forward, lifting her spear along with her, and raised the glinting blade sharper than the end of worlds as she ran. Then she lowered it toward the center of the mindless beast.

Those black outstretched hands swiped at her just as she’d expected—clawing at her teal tank top and briefly snatching at her wrist. Two pitch-black fingers brushed against her wrist, and a piercing cold unlike any physical freeze she’d ever known coursed through her wrist, down into her fingers, and up her arm toward her shoulder.

Staggering against the searing burn of something so impossibly cold, so impossibly lifeless, Rebecca cried out with a snarl and whipped her arms away from the creature’s reach. Then she swung her spear.

The Bloodshadow blade pierced through the creature’s unnaturally black flesh, meeting no resistance at all before it cleanly severed the homunculus’s arm. The limb thumped heavily to the dirty tiled floor covered in glinting puddles.

The next second, Rebecca’s swing rose and fell again in a different arc before she thrust her spear tip into the center of the homunculus’s chest, right where its fake heart would have been. The creature let out another creaking groan like an old tree bending in the wind.

It wasn’t quite a scream. The thing’s mouth didn’t open. It was more like the noise came from every inch of the homunculus’s form all at once.

Newly slivered threads of black raced away from Rebecca’s spearhead embedded in the homunculus and coursed through the thing’s torso, brightening into the swirling metallic silver that ate at the light around it as it moved.

In seconds, those snaking lines would fill every inch of the creature’s animated form and harden into a substance more impermeable than reinforced steel to render it inanimate and completely useless.

That was the plan.

But before her Bloodshadow magic could complete its work, before it had raced any farther than across the homunculus’s torso, the pitch-black arm Rebecca had sheared off at the elbow rebuilt itself and started to grow back.

She hadn’t noticed until that arm was almost completely regenerated, and by the time Rebecca saw it, it was too late to pull back.

The homunculus’s brand-new arm—and the brand-new hand sprouting instantly from the end of it—lashed out toward her. Its frigid, life-strangling grip wrapped around her forearm like a vice and squeezed.

Rebecca screamed.

She couldn’t jerk away from the hold on her arm because the magic of her Bloodshadow spear hadn’t yet completed its work. So she was forced to endure it all, enslaved to her strongest, deadliest magic until it had satisfied itself with its latest victim.

Only once before had she felt agony like this—one other time in her life, when she’d been certain Theodil had taken things too far, certain that her own horrifying power was going to kill her .

Then her instincts kicked into gear—desperation and magic and the sheer will to live taking over in a split second until it was entirely beyond Rebecca’s control.

Flashes of dark, mercurial silver light strobed around her, flashing brighter and leaping straight out of her body to pierce the homunculus’s flesh wherever the lights landed.

Part of her rational mind was aware of how much she’d just locked herself to the homunculus like this, imagining the kind of strange, deadly pincushion they must look like now from the outside.

If she hadn’t been so busy screaming beneath the excruciatingly cold burn of the thing’s hand on her arm—sending death and decay and the freeze of non-existence through her entire body—she might have laughed at the imagery.

But she could only hold on and let her darkest magic do the rest of the dirty work for her.

The silver of her darkest power coursed through the homunculus as well, pumped into it from dozens of silver spears like splinters of unlight cutting into the creature.

A second later, she felt the strength of the creature’s grip on her arm weaken. The fingers slackened. The power imbued into this conjured form of lifeless black and gray flesh filtered away, its vitality drawn right out of it through so many pinholes of mercurial silver light.

Then the homunculus’s animating magic—not quite a life force but more like a spell—wavered in the air between them for a moment. A cloud of black smoke shot through with mottled gray and white specks, like bits of ash blown about by a gentle breeze.

Rebecca couldn’t stop screaming.

She couldn’t stop her magic from doing what it did next, either.

This was its purpose. She’d just picked the wrong target.

But who in their right mind ever expected to fight a creature in any battle that didn’t actually possess its own spark of life?

That was exactly what this creature did not possess.

The speckled swarm of dust flecks and the darkness seeping from the homunculus’s flesh was not a sustainable source of life or power for anyone, including the homunculus itself.

Unfortunately, Rebecca’s magic didn’t discriminate. Even as she screamed beneath the creature’s hold on her arm, that lifeless dust cloud drew into her wide-open mouth as if it were any other lifeforce of any other living thing. Then it disappeared down her throat and inside of her in an instant .

For the first time in her life, even as the homunculus’s grip fell away from her wrist and the monstrosity’s body toppled backward onto the pile of debris to never move again, Rebecca was horrified by what her deepest, darkest, most powerful magic had done.

And she was terrified now of what came next.

Because none of that should have happened.

The second that inky cloud that was neither pure magic nor pure life worked its way down her throat, Rebecca was certain that both whatever she’d just consumed and everything else she’d eaten today were about to come violently back up again.

Clenching her fists, she tried to swallow down the oddly dry physical lump in the back of her throat. A lump that had to have come from trying to consume a spark that didn’t exist from a creature that had never truly held any life inside it in the first place.

The lump stuck, closing her throat, and then the pain hit her.

Nothing as immediately agonizing as that frigid, searing, all-consuming cold from the homunculus’s bare touch, but it was unbearable all the same.

A sharp ache in the pit of her stomach. That hardness there in the back of her throat. Then, when she tried to clear her throat and get things moving again, there was that rare, dull burn of not being able to draw her next breath.

What the fuck?

Another explosion wracked the building somewhere else nearby, but she hardly noticed.

Rebecca staggered backward, fighting to draw in another breath. Her mouth gaped open, and choking coughs escaped her, but she couldn’t get any more than that.

More shivering layers of dust and dirt and chunks of plaster drifted down from the open hole in the ceiling, and now she was clawing at her throat, trying to get something to move.

By the Blood, she’d just broken her own rule to use her magic as a last resort, and it had gone completely out of control in under five seconds beneath the homunculus’s grip. Her magic had taken over without her consent, filled her with something she already knew couldn’t sustain her, and now she was choking on it, right here in this hallway, with no way to get it out.

What an epic fucking joke if this was the way Rebecca Bloodshadow met her end—if this was how the Bloodshadow Court lost its one and only heir. Not to her stubbornness and refusal to become what they’d made of her but because her magic had turned on her at the last second.

She might as well have drunk poison after filling the glass herself.

It was almost funny .

Somewhere in the back of her awareness, as she gasped her breath and dropped to one knee beside the pile of rubble, other sounds rose in the hallway too.

Multiple voices all talking at once. A shout of surprise. Footsteps clomping both toward Rebecca and away from her as more explosions hurtled through the air and this part of the building trembled violently once more.

Then there were hands on her. Someone kneeling in front of her, trying to touch her, to move her hair away from her face, looking for the injuries causing such a devastating reaction without leaving a single clue behind as to what had done this.

More shouting. More footsteps. Then the figure in front of her brought something to Rebecca’s lips.

She slapped that administering hand away, tried to explain to her would-be rescuer that this wasn’t any ordinary wound—physical or magical. That she was going to drop dead any second now because there was no cure for a Bloodshadow Elf consuming another creature’s energy that was neither life nor death but something beyond them both.

As far as Rebecca knew, she was the first elf in history to make such a devastatingly stupid mistake. All because the homunculus had surprised her with a tight grip and a little pain.

She should’ve been able to handle it. Now she was done.

Was this really the end?

“Come on!” A gravelly voice that was half rasp and without gender reached her ears. “Drink this!”

Rebecca’s lungs were on fire now. Her throat felt as if it had already been ripped out, and the tears that had welled in her eyes from the pain and the effort of trying to breathe now spilled over.

She slapped the hand away again and would have told whoever it belonged to that literally nothing in anyone’s possession here could help her now. She’d already killed herself with such an elegantly unforeseen fuckup.

“If I didn’t know better,” the voice continued, “I’d say you want to die. Stop fighting me and drink it, elf. If this doesn’t work, then you can pass right on through the veil. But I won’t let you without giving it a hell of an effort first.”

The cold rim of a metal cup pressed against Rebecca’s lips. She couldn’t tell who it was or what she was being fed. She couldn’t see anything anymore; her vision had darkened to nothing but shadows and rough shapes now.

How long would it take her to finally die?

But she let the cup press tighter against her lips, and By the Blood, she drank. It was all she could do at this point .

“Yes, yes, yes. That’s it. All of it. Don’t stop. The faster you knock that back, the better off you’ll be.”

Easy to say when whoever the hell this was didn’t have two pairs of hands holding her own away from her face and a cold cup jammed up to her mouth. Not to mention an inability to breathe.

But Rebecca drank, tasting nothing and thinking in an odd moment of clarity that if someone had wanted to get rid of her without making it look like they’d gotten rid of her, now would be the perfect opportunity for an assassination.