27. Chapter 27

27

T he homunculi had been Hector’s all along. That sneaky son of a bitch had unleashed them himself, betraying the entire task force with his twisted dark alchemy.

For what?

“How’s it feeling, by the way?” Hector asked her, still presumably staring at her arm. “Not so great, by the looks of it. I have to say, your capabilities far exceeded my expectations. I must know how you did it.”

Behind him, Aldous gaped like a landed fish, his blazing emerald eyes bulging from his head as whatever grip he still maintained on his everyday human illusion disappeared and his fully green-tinted changeling skin emerged in full view.

He glared at the back of Hector’s black hood, his fists clenching so tightly at his sides and his knuckles now leaning more toward the lighter washed-out color of mint ice cream.

“Come now,” Hector continued. “Let’s see it…”

He stopped halfway between the staircase and Rebecca and spread his arms. “Before I finish this, I really must know how you did it, elf. Five homunculi in quick succession like that with, I can only assume, absolutely no idea who had created them or why they’d been sent after you.”

Rebecca snorted. “Well now we all know the answer to that first part, don’t we?”

The garage exploded with confused whispers and murmured surprise. Aldous’s personal assassin—or errand boy, or whatever he was to their commander—had all but explicitly confessed to attacking the compound himself.

For what? Simple curiosity?

Through the growing noise, Aldous finally broke through his frozen bafflement and stunted disbelief. A furious cry burst from his gaping mouth as he stomped after Hector .

“Don’t you dare turn your fucking back on me!” he screeched, arms outstretched as if he could grab Hector’s throat and strangle him from several feet away.

Which he could.

The changeling’s arms shot straight out, elongating like stretchy rubber from the sleeves of his suit jacket until they’d shot within inches of where Hector’s neck should have been beneath the hood.

“I fucking own you!” he screamed. “And this is how you treat me? Like I’m some fucking peon —”

The rest of it happened in a flash all at once.

At first, Rebecca thought Zida’s fun little wakeup vile was starting to lose its potency and these were the side effects, but no. This was actually happening.

With a hard-set grimace, Maxwell took off after Aldous at an urgent clip.

Aldous’s outstretched hands at the end of his impossibly long reach clapped together where Hector should have been standing.

But Hector had already dissipated in a puff of churning black smoke and shadow, disappearing just before the changeling would have caught him from behind.

Within the black smoke cloud, he moved in the blink of an eye to reappear ten feet away, directly in front of Aldous, with a billowing swirl of curling tangles of shadow.

Aldous still hadn’t registered the change before he shrieked, “ I am your —”

His shout cut off in a squeaking choke as Hector materialized practically right on top of him, one black-gloved hand already squeezing down tight around Aldous’s throat, further crushing his vocal cords and windpipe by the second.

Rebecca could have sworn she’d heard vital body parts snapping in the nurúzhe’s grip.

Then again, it could’ve just been wishful thinking.

With a frenzied growl, Hector shoved Aldous backward across the garage, nearly lifting the changeling off his scrabbling, shuffling feet as they both barreled toward the wall beside the staircase landing.

“Seven years , Aldous!” he roared. “Seven years doing your bidding. Reporting to this shitheap of an organization. Dirtying myself with the constant stench of it. Day in and day out! And I gave decades of serving you before that. A lifetime, some might even say.”

Another choke burst from Aldous’s gaping mouth when his back rammed up against the wall. But even if he’d had the presence of mind to speak, that was now impossible .

Still growling, Hector crushed the changeling’s throat between his hand and the wall and lifted upward. That one heave lifted Aldous completely off his feet before Hector pinned him there. The air filled with Aldous’s strangling croaks and the squeaking scuff of his cheap knockoff leather loafers bashing and scraping uselessly against the concrete behind him.

“I did everything for you!” Hector bellowed. “More than you can possibly imagine. And you toss me aside for a fucking elf ?”

What the fuck?

This was about jealousy ? About Aldous personally summoning Rebecca to his office the other night to proposition her for a grotesque little one-on-one trade in certain unmentionable favors before assigning her to a suicide mission that would most likely ensure her death, whether she succeeded or failed?

She almost laughed at the realization, but then more movement from several other locations across the garage at once distracted her.

First, Zida lurched away from Rebecca’s side with a rasping, creaking cry before stumbling forward.

Three of Maxwell’s five-man security team moved in, converging around Hector and Aldous with their weapons drawn and lips curled back into snarls, ready for action.

No way… Were they in on this too?

Had the security team been in cahoots with the freakish nurúzhe this whole time?

Next came the hollow click of firearms readying to engage.

Hector shot his free hand toward the closest security guy. A ball of roiling, noxious black smoke burst from his gloved fingers and pummeled the first guy in the throat before coiling around his entire neck.

The guy dropped his weapon to claw at his throat with both hands, fighting to tear off the strangling hold where there was nothing but shadow and air and the nurúzhe’s special brand of death magic crushing his airway.

A second later, the guy dropped to his knees, choking and gasping.

Another security guy got off a single fired shot before he too was captured in another strangling chokehold of coiling black shadow and anti-light. Then a third dropped the same way.

Through it all, Hector’s focus remained deviously on Aldous, as if he’d merely lifted his hand to scratch an annoying itch as he squeezed the life out of the master he’d felt had betrayed him.

“You don’t deserve any of it!” he snarled. “You never have! You don’t even deserve this . But I want to make sure you hear me, Aldous… Everything you built, everything you stood on my back to achieve for yourself, will be ash by the time I’m—”

A streaking blur raced across the garage.

Hector sucked in a searing gasp, then arched backward, his head whipping away from Aldous and the wall until his hood started to slip from over his forehead.

Behind him stood Maxwell, pressed so close against the nurúzhe from behind that the back of Hector’s head knocked against the shifter’s right shoulder while Maxwell loomed over him to snarl something in the guy’s ear.

What Rebecca wouldn’t have given in that moment to hear exactly what he’d said.

Then the shifter stepped back, pivoting as he jerked his hand away from Hector’s lower back.

A wet, slicing pop and splatter filled the air as flesh and shards of bone and shredded guts spilled from the enormous hole through Hector’s black hoodie.

A whispering sigh that sounded oddly like relief seeped from Hector’s open mouth before he dropped.

Aldous dropped with him, the soles of his shoes slapping against the ground before his knees buckled and he collapsed against the wall, hacking and wheezing.

The security guys on their knees and clawing at their throats did the same, falling forward under the life-affirming release as Hector’s black smoking chokeholds disappeared in a swarm of gray specks.

Maxwell still hadn’t moved. He remained where he’d stopped, slightly turned away from Aldous against the wall, his open hand still outstretched even after he’d pulled it from the center of Hector’s torso.

The shape of his hand now resembled more of a claw—his shifter’s fingertips were as rounded and dull as any human’s despite being covered in nurúzhe gore halfway up his forearm.

Rebecca liked to think the shifter had also added a handful of lupine claws to that one-handed attack, though the idea of Maxwell piercing through an entire living body like that without using a shifter’s inherent blades at his fingertips was equally impressive.

No one in the garage moved a muscle, save Zida, who had taken all this time to shuffle forward toward the far wall to finally reach Aldous so she could make him her next patient.

The changeling blubbered and choked, repeatedly and unsuccessfully pushing himself to his feet before his weak limbs gave out and sent him crashing back to the floor. He stabbed a finger at Hector, his green eyes wide and blazing.

“Get him!” he shrieked. “Now! Put him down! Stop him! This…this fucking traitor! I want him finished ! ”

Maxwell shook out his hand, spraying chunks of Hector across the cement before wiping most of it off on the leg of his jeans. “Already taken care of.”

“Get him! Destroy him!” Aldous screamed. “Put him down like the fucking animal he—”

The changeling collapsed on himself again, babbling incoherencies now as Zida hovered over him, poking and prodding with one clawed hand while the other rummaged around in her fanny pack for whatever the hell a throttled but otherwise unharmed changeling might have needed.

Aldous had to be more in shock than physically maimed. Unfortunately, the healer did her job anyway and tended to his physical well-being as her profession dictated.

Rebecca couldn’t stop staring at the enormous hole ripping through Hector’s guts and then his hoodie, the whole thing perfectly visible where he now lay motionless on his back.

Better yet, when her eyes finally shifted a few inches, she found Hector’s face fully exposed for the first time, his hood having been knocked back with his dying gasp to reveal something not dissimilar from what she’d imagined his face to be.

The guy was entirely bald—whether naturally or by choice was anyone’s guess. A dark spot stood out on the center of his shaved head. Some kind of marking or tattoo, probably.

The rest of his head and face all the way down his neck was a dull, lifeless cement-gray, eerily similar to the Shade of the still-darkening handprint around Rebecca’s left wrist.

Those had definitely been his homunculi.

At least Hector was out of the picture now. The pitch-black orbs of his eyes remained wide open where he’d collapsed, and the obsidian black they’d held in life had now washed out to the same monochromatic gray as his flesh.

A wave of dizziness crashed over her. Rebecca swayed on her feet, trying to steady herself.

Damn. The sight of blood and guts like this didn’t normally make her woozy. She’d seen way worse than this before.

Then again, Zida had said the effects of that special empty vial wouldn’t last forever. This could have been the start of it wearing off.

Sucking in a /deep breath, Rebecca took a lurching step forward and lifted a hand.

“Not that I want to ruin the mood,” she croaked, “but I think—”

“ You !” Aldous screamed, shoving a finger toward her before the healer knocked it aside to keep tending to his quickly bruising throat in incredibly varied shades of green now. “ You did this! ”

“Not even a little,” she said, then had to stop to catch her breath.

This was really fucking bad. If she couldn’t control her body, stay on her own two feet, or even stay conscious long enough to have a full conversation, there was no telling how this night would end up.

Most likely, it would be terrible for her whenever she came to afterward.

“I just…need a quick word with the daraku.”

“You’ll be fine awhile yet,” Zida barked without looking away from Aldous. “It comes in waves, elf. Just suck it up.”

Rebecca let out a weak, shuddering snort and finally regained her balance long enough to hold perfectly still and let the rest of the vertigo fade.

Very rough waves, clearly.

“I want her seized!” Aldous screeched from the ground, still thrusting a finger in Rebecca’s general direction. “Now! Take her! We should never have let this elf bitch through our doors. This is all her fault!”

Rebecca tensed, reaching out with her senses to take the general temperature of the garage again.

To her surprise, even after everything that had happened tonight—including Hector’s deeply disturbing claims that he’d attacked the compound with his homunculi to root her out —not a single Shade member moved to obey the changeling’s command.

Some stared at Aldous’s most humiliating tantrum of all. Others gaped at the smears of blood drying on Maxwell’s hand, or the puddles of guts flecked with chips of bone lay around the dead Hector on the floor.

Some even gave Rebecca a confused look. Confused, maybe, by her sudden decline in physical fortitude.

Or maybe they were all waiting for her to do something. To fulfill whatever part of Leonard and Diego’s plan she’d refused to accept because she just didn’t want any of this.

That became even more apparent through Leonard’s gawking expression when Rebecca finally found him among the others. The mage shot a pointed look in Maxwell’s direction, then in Aldous’s, and as if that weren’t obvious enough, he tossed a hand back and forth between himself and Rebecca as well.

Code for: “Now looks like a really great time, so are we going to fucking do this or what?”

This was simultaneously the absolute worst timing and probably the best Shade’s rebels were going to get. Aldous was already down. His defenses had been obliterated. He thought he was safe.

The entire task force had gathered down here, all of them already armed, and sure, they could let their commander believe it was only because he’d ordered it to be so. If that was part of the plan she’d flat- out ignored.

But Rebecca felt like shit. She might have been dying. Maybe something totally different, who knew? Maxwell and his security team hadn’t turned against anyone but Hector so far.

Maxwell’s actions, however, suggested the shifter was still deeply devoted to upholding several main points within his job description, specifically protecting the life and physical well-being of Shade’s commander. So this could still go either way.

Maxwell and his guys had been at that first library meeting. They’d turned against one of their own when Hector had clearly become more dangerous to the entire organization than not. They might still be on board with wrapping up this fun little coup and calling it a day.

Or they might still be batting for the other team.

Specifically the guy the rest of Shade was trying to overthrow.

The changeling man-baby sobbing in a puddle against the wall because someone had wrapped a hand around his throat.

Besides, after that bombshell of a demonstration on Maxwell’s part, as evidenced by the body on the floor with a giant hole ripped through its middle, the rest of Shade’s operatives were probably even less likely to want to stand up to something like that, no matter how many times over they collectively outnumbered the Head of Security and his team.

“What a fucking night, huh?”

Rebecca scanned the sea of faces—some of them blurring in her vision—for the owner of that voice. When she found Diego, he was staring at her just like Leonard, his eyes wide as he not-so-subtly jerked his head in Aldous’s direction and lifted his fully loaded assault rifle in both hands.

No. Absolutely not.

Whatever he wanted her to do, Rebecca was in no shape to step up and do it. Forget that she had specifically left herself out of the planning phase so she wouldn’t have to deal with this right now.

So she wouldn’t accidentally wind up being the center of attention all over again—or at the center of this rebellion that looked a lot closer to taking place now that the perfect opportunity had presented itself after the distraction of one serious attack on the compound none of them could have foreseen.

Yes, if Rebecca had had her sights on stepping up to get rid of Aldous herself, she certainly could have done it right now.

Not when she felt like this. Not with the entire task force armed to the teeth in the garage. Not with Shade’s entire security team among them.

Definitely not with Maxwell Hannigan now staring right at her, like he was just waiting for her to make a move so he could grind her into dust afterward.

It was impossible to read his stony expression. Part of her thought he was giving her the same look at Leonard and Diego—that it was now or never.

The other part of her, though—the part specifically trained to assess threats in every possible scenario—wondered if that look wasn’t pure warning instead.

Daring her to try something now, with the window for an in-house takeover wide open.

Promising he would do whatever it took to stop her, and Rebecca was rather partial to not walking around with a giant, gaping hole through her middle.

Just how far would Maxwell go to keep her at bay?

Was Rebecca really willing to risk her physical safety against a shifter who could do to her what he’d done to Hector just because someone needed to get this show on the road?

The only thing she knew for certain was that this had to be done now , or the rebels’ opportunity to get rid of Aldous and improve Shade would pass them by.

If she didn’t act now, Rebecca knew exactly what awaited her—Aldous, with his slimy grasp tightening around her by the day, forcing her into impossible missions just to feed his ego. Every step she took would be under his control, and any hope of freedom would be crushed.

She had to make her move, or she’d be right back where she’d started—trapped, with no way out.