29. Chapter 29

29

R ebecca’s eyes snapped open, her vision flooded with light and the green hues of Aldous hovering above her, bearing down against her upraised forearm with the cold weight of his dagger clasped firmly in hand.

The tip of his blade left a stinging kiss at the hollow of her throat. That pain returned right alongside all the other pain of her beaten body pouring back into her all at once.

She hadn’t felt this much, this intensely since before she’d ended her training.

Even against the pulsing agony of the wounds in her forearm, the ache of every muscle she’d all but forgotten, and the slowly loosening tightness squeezing around her lungs, she still had her strength surging back into her.

She tried to wrest her right arm free, but at some point during her brief descent into unconsciousness, Aldous had crawled higher up her body to keep bearing down on her.

His knee dug into her upper arm where her bicep met her shoulder, pinning her against the concrete.

Great. She’d just gotten another giant dose of magical adrenaline at the perfect time to save her life, all so she could be fully aware of what was happening right before he plunged that blade into her throat.

No fucking thank you.

But her hands were tied. She had no physical weapon to reach for, even if she could have reached it, and with one arm pinned beside her, a few bursts of attack magic shooting from her fingers weren’t going to hit the guy kneeling on top of her.

Time slowed with unbelievable clarity.

The other Shade members roared at her from every direction, shaking their fists, hopping about in anticipation, fueling the communal battle frenzy and bloodlust. Not to mention the thirst for revenge they all wanted against Shade’s former leader. All of it together spurred them on with astonishing ferocity.

Everything echoed in her ears and banged around inside her skull while she struggled against the bastard on top of her with no means of getting him off.

No viable means without the potential of exposing herself.

A growling snigger tumbled from Aldous’s gaping mouth as he pressed down on the dagger against her forearm with both hands now, leaning farther forward. The fact that he hadn’t killed her yet was a fucking miracle.

She wouldn’t let that go to waste. But it meant risking everything.

Still, dying was a hell of a lot worse for her than being discovered.

It had to be done.

With her left arm still raised and trembling under the effort of keeping one leering, sweating blade from bearing all the way down toward her and her right arm pinned by her side beneath Aldous’s strategically placed knee, Rebecca had to break her own promise to herself.

Only for a second.

With a twitch of her fingers and a quick flick of her wrist, a crackling orb of dark-gray, lightless energy burst to life in her palm before elongating into a Bloodshadow spear that wasn’t supposed to have existed in the first place.

The power of her released magic flooded through her at the exact second the tip of her materializing spear—with a blade sharper than any known to the physical plane, sharp enough to cut through worlds—launched itself at a forty-five-degree angle from her fist clenching down around it.

And speared straight through Aldous’s back.

In that split second of victory, Rebecca felt everything as if she were the spear itself wielding the elf and not the other way around.

She felt everything inside Aldous—skin and fat and muscle punctured clean through, before sinew and cartilage, capillaries and bone. She felt each individual vertebrae of his spine blistering apart beneath her finely honed edge, spilling spinal fluid into blood and flesh and ruptured material.

She never did quite reach the base of his skull.

Then Aldous screamed.

It wasn’t like any other scream from any other, enemy or innocent or devastated, mourning soul.

It was a scream of presence and existence. The final attempt to shout into the void with all the strength and fury he had left that he existed. That he was here , in this moment, made of matter and memory and, for now, incomprehensible levels of pain .

If the circumstances had been different, if Rebecca didn’t have an audience, she would have finished it to completion, and Aldous Corriger would have been wiped from this plane of existence entirely.

Instead, before his scream finished ripping from his throat and echoing across the garage, Rebecca called her Bloodshadow magic back.

The spear disappeared with a burst of dark mercurial silver and ravenous unlight leaving no trace at all.

The gleaming blade toppled from Aldous’s open hand and clattered onto the cement somewhere beside her head.

Rebecca bucked beneath the limp weight on top of her.

As incapacitated as he was, the guy’s body was remarkably easy to toss aside.

Aldous tumbled off of her to roll away across the concrete.

Because she hadn’t finished the job with her spear, he was either dead already or would be soon. Rebecca wasn’t taking any chances. She had to leave him like that.

Snarling, she rolled off her back, scrambled to all fours, and snatched up Aldous’s blade. Then she leapt at him, dagger raised in both hands now as she came down at this waste of space from above.

Aldous’s glowing green eyes and wide, gaping mouth waited for her, surprise and confusion flooding through him at how drastically the tables had turned.

In the end, the greatest bit of strength and courage this moron had probably ever exhibited in his life culminated in an effort to lift one hand in front of his face, as if he could ward off the elf hurtling toward him the way she’d kept him at bay.

She saw the light fade from his eyes and the spark of life wink out of him before she ever reached him, but it wasn’t like she could stop.

Rebecca came down on top of him with all her frustration and rage buoyed by how close she’d just come to this very same end.

Almost the same.

Her legs crashed down onto Aldous’s torso before the rest of her immediately followed through, bringing his own blade slicing down through the air with enough momentum to bring down a beast ten times his size.

The air filled with a thump and sickening crunch as the dagger and both her hands pierced through the guy’s chest, ripping flesh, splintering bone, slicing through such flimsy membranes into a heart that had already stopped beating.

Then it was finished.

Only when silence filled the garage after that did Rebecca realize she’d let out a battle cry of her own; the last residual echoes of it still floated around her before she finally released her grip on Aldous’s dagger and toppled sideways off him.

She rolled to the side, gasping for breath, and wondered if she’d be able to pick herself off the ground again after the most recent wave of magically induced adrenaline had run its course.

All she wanted right now was to close her eyes and drift off—assuming that the next time she did, she would actually wake up again. Right now, that didn’t necessarily come with a guarantee.

But she’d gotten rid of one massive problem, both for herself and for Shade as a whole. The corpse was lying there beside her on the concrete in a quickly growing pool of its own blood.

Her only stroke of luck at this point—the only thing that might stave off more questions than she could convincingly answer—was that she’d thought to also leave proof of a killing blow.

Hopefully, no one else had been paying too much attention to her seemingly useless hand pinned at her side. For all intents and purposes, she’d ended Aldous with his own blade through the heart, and that was all anyone else had to know.

Despite wanting to drift back into unconsciousness, despite knowing it was probably the most dangerous thing she could do right now, given her current state, it wouldn’t have been possible anyway. Her heart leapt and danced with every new shout and cheer rising from multiple dozens of Shade members all around her.

The next thing Rebecca knew, she was sitting upright on the floor, almost able to support herself in that position but not quite.

A million hands fondled her all over, it seemed, and the next image to darken her vision, though not particularly pleasant, reminded her that she was still alive and kicking.

For now.

Zida’s puckered scowl protruded from her heavily wrinkled face. She looked Rebecca over, her dark eyes flickering across her current patient’s face. “Cutting that one a little close, wouldn’t you say?”

Rebecca let out a weak snort. “You mean only mostly reviving someone with your special kinda happy gas that only works in waves?”

“I did say it was a band-aid, didn’t I?” The old woman’s clawed hands tugged at Rebecca’s limbs with surprising strength.

Then Rebecca was on her feet, one arm wrapped around the healer’s shoulders as she stumbled across the garage .

She couldn’t focus on any one thing in her vision. Magicals hustled back and forth, shouting and jostling each other and cheering amidst so many simultaneous conversations impossible for her to decipher.

Rebecca had just thrust herself far more into the spotlight than she’d planned or even wanted, but that spotlight had now been smashed to pieces. Maybe this meant she could finally catch a break for a little bit.

“We’re going back up to the infirmary now, right?” she murmured, focusing most of her attention on not letting her legs give out. “Because I can tell you right now, even a bed under your care sounds like the perfect thing.”

“I’m gonna call that your attempt at a compliment.” Zida grunted and gauged the activity in the garage as she led Rebecca toward the foot of the stairs. “But that’s not where I’m taking you. Not now, anyway.”

“What?” Rebecca tried to look up at the old woman leading her along, but that break in her concentration made her wobble before another coughing fit seized her. “Why wouldn’t I—”

“You really stepped in it now, didn’t you? There’s no rest until this thing gets seen through to the end. Not for any of us, and certainly not for you. You won’t be free of this until a decision’s been made.”

“What decision?” Rebecca cleared her throat and tried not to lean too heavily on Zida as she concentrated far too hard on lifting her leg to step onto the first stair. “The threat’s over. Aldous is gone.”

“Oh, sure,” Zida replied, her head bobbing on her wiry neck enshrouded in more wrinkles and folds of drooping skin. “The immediate threat. You get credit for that one, kiddo. No doubt about it. But every closed door opens a new one in a different direction. Shade can only have one door open at a time, if you catch my drift.”

They made their slow, laborious way up the stairs while the echoes of excitement and eagerness and celebratory disbelief faded behind them.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rebecca asked.

“It means this fun little organization we’ve all promised our lives to doesn’t have a fucking head at the moment.” Zida scoffed and shook her head. “Unless we wanna wait around for someone else to come in and stick their own on top of the rest of this body, we gotta take care of it ourselves. From the inside.”

“Great. Pick a new leader.” Rebecca had to stop talking so she could focus on breathing and climbing steps. All three at once didn’t seem possible. “Put me in a bed. I don’t need to be there for it.”

“As fun as that would be, you’re wrong. You’re the one who removed that head, elf. So while the rest of us figure out who we’re putting up on that pedestal next to call the shots from here on out, we also gotta figure out what to do with you . ”

Rebecca paused in the stairwell with her arm around the old woman’s shoulder, her other hand pressed against the wall beside her. “What do you mean, ‘what to do with me’? Everyone in this place wanted the same thing. I’m just the one who happened to do it, and that was only because he attacked me .”

“Doesn’t really matter.” Zida tugged Rebecca farther up the staircase with another grunt. “Rules is rules. Though I can say I’ve never seen the rules play out into something quite like this before.”

“So I acted in self-defense, and I get a ruling for my troubles?”

“More or less,” Zida said with a shrug.

“As in, like, deciding on my punishment?”

“Punishment, reward.” Zida dismissed it all with a careless wave of her claw-hand, which was made particularly awkward and cumbersome with Rebecca’s arm wrapped around her shoulders. “Trust me, if you stick around as long as I have, you’ll see they eventually turn out to be the same thing in the end.”

“Cut off the head, and now I’m on the chopping block for it?” Rebecca muttered, her voice rasping with exhaustion. “Perfect.”

Zida stopped short to look up at her, dark eyes glittering and unreadable. “Right now? I’d say it’s a fifty-fifty split for you, elf. Maybe you get lucky. Or maybe…you don’t.”