3. Chapter 3

3

N o matter how long she’d trained or how hard she’d fought to master this kind of magic—let alone how perfect her aim had become—there was no greater risk than using it now.

No greater consequence than what Rebecca faced if anyone saw her performing this old-world spell. Even the deadly threat of Bloodshadow magic gone wrong, if she wasn’t careful, would still be preferable to the hell unleashed on two worlds if she gave herself away and exposed who she truly was.

But Aldous had forced her hand. If she didn’t act now, the Shade team wouldn’t last long enough to get the necessary intel through more…traditional means.

It didn’t matter whose ship she was on; Rebecca refused to go down with any of them.

Hissing through clenched teeth, Rebecca drew back the spear of her magic and launched it with deadly precision toward the center window on the fifth story—as close to dead-center on the north wall as she could get.

In front of the apartment building, the rest of her team shouted, snarled, and shrieked against the deafening bellows belching from Aldous’s mouth as his disgusting, brainless recreation of himself charged blindly into anything and everything around him.

Rebecca was aware of the noise but could only focus on her spear.

Its tip—sharp enough to puncture the veil between this world and the next, the living and the dead and everything in between—pierced through that center window with nothing more than a quick flash of silver light and a slicing whisper.

All else was silent while the window’s glass still hadn’t caught up to the reality of physics in this world and what this type of magic did to it .

Another silver flash, then the spear’s sturdy shaft disseminated into a crackling spiderweb of its own, lancing through threads of the griybreki intricately laid protective wards and entwining itself within them.

Like hundreds of individual sentient ribbons, all moving independently and still as one, the tendrils of her magic wormed their way through the wards’ layers.

Even in the darkness in the middle of the night, the sight of it was exhilarating.

It always was for Rebecca.

A patchwork of undulating threads in dark, pulsing silver spread across the north wall, coiling around and strangling and feeding off the griybreki wards, as if this part of her was a predator all on its own.

A web of such powerfully ancient magic from a time and place so far gone, it hardly existed anymore.

Not merely the web on its own but the spider too. The hunter. The warrior. The bloodthirsty goddess on the prowl for the overlooked weak points within her prey.

All the other blustering chaos around her now in this fucked-up failure of a mission faded for the briefest moment in the space between breaths, which seemed to draw out for an eternity.

She was only aware of herself down here and her magic up there, threading through the enemy’s, both separate from her and still a part of her as it pulsed and coiled and weaved.

She felt almost dizzy with the ecstasy of it.

Then the moment shattered, just like the window she’d pierced with the spear of her magic.

She’d been wrong.

The previously vibrant tendrils of her silver light stretching like a dark web across the building’s north wall shuddered violently. The threads of ward magic placed there by the enemy pulsed with violently bright neon yellow, strobing faster and faster.

Then those wards turned the strength and purpose of Rebecca’s magic against itself—like an opponent standing upright on both feet, taking blow after devastating blow with bare fists only to absorb the damage before redirecting it all at the one who’d previously thought they were winning.

The strands of dark-silver light buckled first in the center where they’d begun, then out along every individual thread of Rebecca’s magic. Each tendril crunched and crumbled, splitting away bit by bit to then blow away in so many pieces like ash on the wind.

Each shattering crunch would have been like a blow to Rebecca’s core if it hadn’t happened so quickly and all at once.

Instead, the force of her magic’s destruction crumbling away from the building hit her like hundreds of tiny pinpricks.

With a grunt, she doubled over, holding herself around the middle like she could somehow keep the pain from farther spilling out with her bare hands.

Staggering backward, Rebecca waited for the agony to subside, knowing it would, still wondering how long she would stand there with her mouth gaping open before her lungs decided to start working again.

Then her breath finally returned in a raw, searing gasp. She sucked in more of it, once, twice, three times, then forced herself to straighten and glared at the last fading remnants of her most powerful magic.

Decimated by the encompassing web of defensive wards in strobing neon yellow.

These griybreki knew their shit when it came to wards. Or at least Edwardo did, and his crew had executed their own protection with perfect precision.

There was no seam to slip through. No weak point on which her team could successfully focus the pressure of a combined attack.

Not for Shade. Not unless they had an entire army at their backs—an army composed only of soldiers who could pierce through the web of magical security like this the way Rebecca had, and only if they did it at exactly the same time.

Shade was just a gaggle of overconfident bullies playing in the fucking sandbox in comparison.

But it was all Rebecca had at the moment.

At least now she knew what wouldn’t work.

Recovered now from that near-crippling blow to her magic, Rebecca stood fully upright again and made her way around the side of the building toward the front.

The ground trembled beneath her feet with every step, heedless to the blonde elf leaping nimbly across the asphalt.

Around the corner, Aldous stomped about, swinging his impossibly massive arms in all directions, pounding the ground, buffeting away anything and everything in his path. The bloated, beefed-up changeling bellowed like a beast driven mad by rage and hunger and instinct.

The whole time, The Thing managed somehow to also escape the efforts of his actual team—the magicals who were on his side, for all intents and purposes—to keep him away from the building’s front doors.

Now that they knew about the wards, breaching the griybreki compound and storming the gates, as it were, had become a moot point .

That didn’t stop Aldous.

All brawn and no fucking brain, this guy.

Diego, Leonard, and Titus had joined their disaster of a commander in the parking lot, each of them ducking and sidestepping and shouldering each other out of the way to stay beyond his indiscriminate reach without actually letting themselves touch him.

The last time a Shade member had tried to physically hold Aldous back during one of his rampages, they’d lost three fingers. Permanently. And those fingers still hadn’t been found.

“See?” Leonard shouted as he leapt away from almost being crushed beneath one of Aldous’s enormous green feet leaving a crater in the asphalt where the mage had just stood. “ This is why I asked about a Plan B! But no. Nobody wants to listen.”

“Nobody wants to listen to you bitch about it now, either!” Diego snarled as he practically ran backwards to get out of the way.

Aldous stomped after him, slobbering and snarling and swiping his huge, meaty hands at everything that moved.

“What is he doing ?” Nyx asked.

Her high-pitched voice caught Aldous’s attention, and he let out another furious bellow before stomping after her instead.

The katari disappeared in a flash of purple light and reappeared several feet away, closer to the front of the building. “Is he still trying to get through the front doors?”

“Yeah, maybe don’t lead him right to them just yet, huh?” Diego shouted.

She gaped at him with wide eyes, then disappeared again with a soft pop and more strobing purple light that smelled like ozone and tasted like vinegar soda.

“The wards are up,” Maxwell growled. “So we look for the weak link. Titus, hold here and keep him away from the building til we’ve found the nexus.”

Rebecca stepped toward the shifter and cleared her throat. “Hey, you might wanna rethink—”

“Leonard, Diego,” he continued, clearly ignoring her on purpose, “run interference only if you see griybreki exiting the building. Do not engage before that.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Rebecca tried again. “I already—”

“Nyx, you’re up top.” Maxwell nodded at the katari. “Scout for our breach point along the roof—”

“Dammit, there is no breach point!” Rebecca shouted.

The entire team gaped at her, everyone frozen in vapid disbelief .

Then Titus let out a rumbling chuckle that startled them all out of it. “We’re fucked now.”

Maxwell wouldn’t even look at the guy.

Instead, he glared at Rebecca, his upper lip twitching in the beginning of a new snarl reserved just for her.

Under different circumstances, she might have thought him relatively good-looking. For a shifter. But he still followed orders from the biggest magical reject in history, so that kind of detracted from the whole package.

“And who told you to look for a breach, elf?” he snarled.

Huffing out a humorless laugh, Rebecca shrugged. “No one. But it’s a good thing I don’t wait around for someone else to tell me what to do. Otherwise, you’d be sending this whole team into a death trap right now, and that makes you just as bad as him.”

Wrapped up in a staring contest with the shifter, she gestured toward Aldous still rampaging around the parking lot, howling furiously as he now dragged the remains of a crunched streetlamp around with him, one of his toes stuck through the cage of the shattered light fixture.

Sparks and ear-splitting squeals rose from the end of the metal pole dragging along behind him while, bit by bit, the rest of its cement base crumbled away with every step.

“You’d better not be bullshitting me,” Maxwell spat.

“No, I think we’ve all had enough of that for a lifetime, don’t you?” she quipped.

“How do you even know there’s no breach point?” Diego asked, running a hand through his disheveled dark hair as he jogged back toward the team, skipping aside to avoid the end of the broken lamppost. Then he jammed his hat back on his head and jerked the brim down one more time.

“I already checked,” Rebecca replied blandly.

“Bullshit. No one can check that fast.”

“Nyx, did you see this?” Leonard asked.

Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, Nyx picked at the hem of her velvet zip-up hoodie as her terrified gaze flickered from one magical to the next. “I mean, I was with her, and then I wasn’t, because I had to tell Maxwell about the wards, but he wasn’t doing anything about them, and he never told me what to do next, so I—”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Rebecca muttered with a nod at the katari. “You’re all just gonna have to take my word for it, okay? I already checked, and I promise you, if I didn’t find a breach point, it doesn’t exist.”

Maxwell stepped toward her, appearing in her personal space so quickly and without warning, she almost reeled away from the sudden intrusion .

Instead, Rebecca drew her head back, meeting the shifter’s gaze with a wordless challenge he clearly found just as intimidating as she found his.

Not at all.

“That’s not good enough,” he growled.

She wanted to dare him to try something—anything—but the clock was ticking.

Rebecca had used a kind of magic no one else in Shade had seen and couldn’t verify, all to keep the team from killing themselves over a new, last-minute plan almost as terrible as Aldous’s. The team would just have to get over it and deal.

The time for debating the reality of it came to an end when a low, multi-toned hum echoed across the parking lot, punctuated by Aldous’s reverberating footsteps coming to a slow halt.

“What’s that?” Leonard asked.

The rest of the team seemed to notice the new sound all at once. Everyone turned away from their haphazard huddle to face the front of the apartment building.

Which now glowed with a solid neon-yellow light, fuzzy around the edges but quickly clarifying and building in intensity as it also grew in size, moving its perimeter slowly away from the building’s edges to encompass more space.

“Looks like they’re planning something,” the mage added, tilting his head.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Diego snapped. “What the hell kinda—”

Aldous’s next bellow cut him off, reverberating through the parking lot.

The low hum of the griybreki gang’s wards rose in pitch as the energy of their magical shield just kept growing.

No breach point, no, but it looked like Aldous was about to make one for them.

Based on what Rebecca knew of similar technically advanced wards, anything that came at that field of energy from the outside wouldn’t last longer than a second before being repurposed into a steaming pile of blood and guts. Maybe ash, if they were lucky.

Judging by the astounding speed with which Aldous the hulking, brainless beast now took off straight for the front of the building—with none of his team in position to stop him—Rebecca realized they had just run out of time.