4. Chapter 4

4

S he couldn’t turn back the clock, and nobody else could possibly move fast enough to avert the oncoming disaster.

But Rebecca tried anyway, throwing a finger in Aldous’s direction as the last second ticked. “ Stop him !”

Only once the last-minute cry had left her lips did she realize she probably should’ve been more specific.

Several things happened all at once, every action executed in a perfect synchronicity of chaotic self-preservation.

Aldous let out another deafening bellow, thick strings of spittle spewing from his open mouth as he swung back a fist the size of an oven.

Nyx leapt toward Titus and slapped her tiny purple hands down onto his bulky shoulder before they both disappeared with a pop and a crackle of static electricity colored purple.

Leonard turned away from the group and sprinted in the opposite direction, briefly looking back over his shoulder every few steps.

Diego looked up from beneath the wide, dark brim of his hat, his eyes flashing with crimson light just a few shades darker than their normal blood-red glow. He reached out with both hands toward the front of the building, sending violently lashing whips of dark-red magic spewing from his outstretched fingers as he raced forward.

All Rebecca noticed of Maxwell’s reaction was a low snarl, but then the shifter had disappeared almost in the blink of an eye.

Towing an otherwise impossibly heavy bit of cargo like Titus, Nyx burst back into existence directly in front of the apartment building’s glass double doors.

Titus stumbled to catch his balance after being desperately teleported across the parking lot and had no more time than that to prepare for the blow swinging straight for his head .

Aldous’s hulking green fist connected with the side of Titus’s shaved dome with an almighty crack.

Nyx shrieked and darted out of the way to avoid the physical blowback.

The vuulbor didn’t move beneath Aldous’s brainless fury while the changeling’s fist came down into Titus’s face instead of the front doors of the apartment building.

But that was no longer the team’s only concern.

Aldous bellowed in range at having been thwarted by one of his own.

At the same moment, the double doors of the apartment building’s front entrance swung open on their own with a burst of neon-yellow light strobing across the parking lot and a bellow of multi-toned, reverberating battle cries coming from inside the building.

Rebecca caught sight of the first griybreki revealing himself on the ground floor of his gang’s hideout.

He was particularly toady, his enormously bulging eyes glowing a bright, acidic green over a thin-lipped mouth stretching almost as wide as the guy’s entire head. A terrible gargle emerged from the griybreki’s black-lined mouth, then it led the charge toward the double doors that still hadn’t finished swinging open all the way.

Before she knew it, the actual battle had begun, and Rebecca couldn’t get over how the hell they were supposed to pull themselves out of this one now.

As Aldous’s meaty fist crunched into Titus’s rock-hard gut to get the vuulbor out of the way, and dozens of jabbering, reeking griybreki spilled from the open doors into the dark, humid air, the perimeter of their protection wards strobed with neon-yellow light again, spitting and hissing and crackling.

None of the griybreki seemed to notice the building energy, but the magical flares pounded instantly into Titus’s back while he fought to keep Aldous at bay.

Instead of reaching for Aldous to draw him back with the tendrils of his blood magic, Diego changed course and ran straight toward the front doors. He sent his flickering whips of crimson toward the first of their enemy target racing outside into the night.

One large, particularly frog-faced griybreki shrieked in fury when the blood tendrils snatched him abruptly by the arms and around the ankles. One even clamped down around his neck before lifting him off the asphalt to dangle in the air.

His comrades flooding into the parking lot behind him skidded to a stop to study what they were up against, each of them screaming in multiple variations of rage and fear and bafflement .

Rebecca didn’t know what was worse—the dozens of enemy targets filtering out of the apartment complex or the obnoxiously large, howling, unthinking mass their leader had become.

She couldn’t tell which needed her attention more.

Titus could hold Aldous off for a while, sure, but not forever. Their leader clearly had no interest in standing out here where there was plenty of space and fresh air for this fight.

No, the green monstrosity just kept trying to either pummel through or lumber around Titus, but the vuulbor kept him at bay every time.

So when the griybreki hurtling out of their hideout made it around Titus’s hulking form and headed straight for the changeling beast, neither Aldous nor his team were fully prepared to protect him. Or themselves.

With a gurgling cry, the closest frogman not caught up in Diego’s blood magic launched himself with one hell of a leap toward Aldous. The same neon-yellow magic of the gang’s wards pulsed between his webbed, weirdly long-fingered hands as he sailed through the air.

The grotesque little creature would have made it, probably smacking against Aldous’s chest along the way, but it would have been a decent attack.

He didn’t get the chance.

Halfway through his leap, the griybreki’s battle cry strangled into a horrified scream.

An enormous wolf with thick, dark-gray fur leapt from the asphalt and clamped its jaws around the leaping griybreki’s foot.

The enemy shrieked in the air, incapable of catching himself in a landing. Instead, his face smacked into the asphalt, his scream instantly muffled by his face bashing across the parking lot.

The wolf with the creature’s foot in its jaws snarled and growled and violently shook its head, trying to rip the guy’s limb off as if he were nothing more than a giant, noisy chew toy.

Rebecca watched all the strangeness playing out around her and couldn’t settle upon a single moment within the chaos that would benefit from her help the most.

She summoned another orb of crackling red battle magic in her hand—the kind Shade had definitely seen before, the kind she might have even been somewhat famous for among certain parties—and launched it at the enemy.

The grotesque frogmen leaping through the open doors of their hideout through some sort of race-specific hole in their wards scrambled madly about in all directions to engage any number of Shade’s members fighting them off.

Some she hit, others darted out of the way.

And they just kept coming .

In seconds, the horde of nasty little creatures had grown impossibly large, gurgling and screaming their battle cries.

Rebecca knocked several of them to the asphalt with her first few attacks while Diego tossed explosive volleys of blood magic at the enemy.

Nyx popped in and out of existence all around them, targeting one griybreki at a time when she reappeared in front of them or behind them or two feet above them, seemingly out of nowhere. She grabbed hold of the grotesque little critters by the collars of their shirts or their shoulders or with a hand clenched tightly around a fistful of stringy hair, if they happened to have any, and threw them across the lot.

The gray wolf darted in and out of the fray, launching himself at one enemy target after the other, shaking them in its jaws like they were dead already before tossing them aside.

Aldous was too far gone to his transformation to understand the epic mistake he’d made. Clearly, the only thing in that hulking brute’s mind now was getting at the flickering glow of the apartment building lighting up the muggy night like a neon-yellow spotlight.

Titus was more than busy trying to keep Shade’s leader away from said building, which grew increasingly more difficult by the second as the neon-yellow wards kept growing around the building’s perimeter. Its constant energetic hum rose louder and higher in pitch with no sign of abating.

“Doesn’t look like they’re stopping anytime soon,” Leonard shouted from farther back in the parking lot.

“Well don’t just stand there like a useless lump,” Diego roared back.

At the same time, two particularly thick, heavy whips of his writhing blood-magic coils pulled a massively huge griybreki off its laughably large feet, his arms outstretched toward the target. In one swift, abrupt motion, the Cruorcian clenched both hands into fists, his entire body surging with crimson light.

The griybreki in the grip of his magic was powerless to withstand the force.

The next second, the struggling, choking, gasping little ghoul met its final end with a thick, heavy pop. A spray of red, noxious-green and putrid-yellow ooze, and chunks of skin and bone exploded in all directions, peppering the griybreki’s comrades with pieces of himself splattering across the asphalt and pinging back toward the building.

“Maybe time for a retreat?” Leonard hollered.

“I can’t believe you’re actually suggesting that right now!” Diego spat back before he was forced to duck beneath the enormous snarling wolf leaping through the air toward another enemy target .

“Anyone have eyes on Edwardo?” Rebecca shouted, lunging away from a gurgling, hissing griybreki leaping toward her with his hands outstretched and an oddly glowing blue tint to his razor-sharp front teeth as he snarled.

The gross little frogman missed her completely, then found himself sprawling face-first across the asphalt after Rebecca’s crackling, hissing bolt of attack magic seared a hole through his back the size of her fist.

“Anyone?” she shouted again.

“Man, fuck Edwardo,” Diego hissed. “You’re the one who said to keep our fearless leader away from the building.”

More like brainless leader.

Rebecca didn’t have the opportunity to share her thoughts out loud, because Aldous was apparently one-hundred-percent committed to making this mission a complete failure in every way.

The enormous changeling who’d had fashioned himself in the likeness of this monstrous, colossal thing stomped about, now splattered with the red, green, and sickly yellow of way too many griybreki insides dripping off his bulbous nose and that fat, protruding lower lip of dark green dripping with saliva.

Nyx flickered back into existence in the air in front of him, trying to catch his attention.

His enormous hands swatted at her, and she let out a terrified squeak before popping out of existence again to somewhere hopefully safer.

The hoard of griybreki surged together in a renewed volley toward Aldous The Thing, yammering and gnashing their teeth and gargling their battle cries.

They were no match for the guy.

He picked each attacking little cretin up off the ground the second they came within reach before hurling each one blindly across the parking lot.

“Watch the wards!” Rebecca shouted. She really hoped the rest of her team had been paying attention to the quickly growing barrier of neon-yellow light pulsing like a heartbeat as it stretched and broadened and grew farther and farther away from the building’s physical structure.

Her hope came slightly too late, just like her warning.

With another trembling roar of mindless rage, Aldous clawed at a griybreki that had managed to climb up the guy’s gargantuan calf and thigh to start stabbing its laughably tiny blade at the green monstrosity’s gut.

The squirming frogman yelped when that enormous green fist closed around him to jerk the creature off his own wobbling form before chucking it away with a reverberating howl.

That throw just happened to be aimed directly at Titus .

The griybreki screamed as he hurtled through the air and smacked right into Titus’s face. His scrawny arms wrapped instantly around the vuulbor’s thick neck and shaved head as he gargled and hissed and choked under the impact of being chucked like a hand grenade.

Blinded by his surprise attacker’s entire body clinging to his face, Titus boomed something unintelligible and stepped back, his arms flailing as he slapped at the enemy blocking his vision.

“Titus!” Diego shouted, reaching out in horror toward the one member of their team who’d always been the biggest, most intimidating guy they had—until Aldous completely lost his shit tonight.

At the same moment Diego tried to ensnare Titus in his lashing blood-coils bursting twenty feet away from his hands to keep the big guy away from the deadly wards, Aldous’s enormous green fist closed around a griybreki launching himself through the air.

His fingers also closed down around Diego’s magic to trap the Cruorcian’s blood tendrils in the same grip.

“Watch your—oof!” Diego jerked forward, launched off his feet by the yards of blood tendrils extended from both hands when Aldous threw them and the enemy across the lot.

Purple light strobed around him a second before Nyx winked into existence in his path, caught him in her arms by grabbing him around the middle, and disappeared again.

Several yards farther back in the parking lot and much closer to their getaway van, they both reappeared before Nyx set the Cruorcian down for a less deadly crash-landing that sent them both staggering forward.

One Shade member saved, but now no one was close enough or could move quickly enough for Titus.

Still fighting furiously with the griybreki clawing at his face and head for a better grip, the big guy staggered backward toward the growing field of neon-yellow magic.

Rebecca took off at a dead run toward him before he lit himself up like a New Year’s Eve party on their enemy’s surprisingly powerful security wards.

But then a blur of streaking gray hurtled into her from the side, catching Rebecca just above her hip and sending both her and the wolf careening across the asphalt in the opposite direction.

Just as Titus barked out a rumbling laugh and tossed the offending griybreki off his face, the horrifying crack and ensuing sizzle and sparking hiss of him staggering backward into the neon-yellow wards momentarily brought the entire fray to a standstill .

Titus tried to cry out, but the force of so much energy pulsing through his body made it impossible. His every muscle clenched and convulsed as lines of crackling yellow surged across his skin, piercing through flesh and bone and everything else.

Nyx had almost been fast enough. She popped into existence right in front of Titus a second before the big guy stopped bucking under all the energetic force pumping through him.

When it was finally over, Titus stood there for a moment, staring blankly ahead as thin streams of bitter, acrid smoke rose from every inch of his body. Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he toppled forward to hit the asphalt like a felled tree.

Then Nyx spun around in time to see Aldous’s hulking form crashing toward her and Titus lying on his face and the strobing dome of words still growing away from the perimeter of the apartment building. She squeaked again and disappeared.

Roaring mindlessly, Aldous swiped at nothing but air where she’d just been before a volley of three griybreki all wearing matching bomber jackets in a grossly clashing mashup of black leather and neon stripes raced through the open doors.

“Great, now we’re really fucked!” Lennard shouted as he blasted the closest enemy away from him with a wall of blistering golden light. “Maybe time for that retreat now ?”

Diego leapt out of the way as the frogmen triplets were knocked away with a sweeping blow of Aldous’s arm in his direction. The Cruorcian ducked their flailing limbs, grabbed one of them with his tendrils of blood magic, and hurled it back at the building’s entrance with a snarl. “ You wanna be the one who explains to Aldous when he comes back that Titus got himself fried and we just left him here?”

The griybreki he’d hurled through the front doors sailed into the building with a terrified squeal that ended abruptly as he crashed into the far wall of the lobby and thumped down to the floor.

The sight of those wards not attacking an incoming projectile shooting back through those doors sparked something in the back of Rebecca’s mind. It was almost impossible to put her finger on what that was within all the chaos.

Then, throwing more blasts of fiery red bursts at any and all griybreki in her path, she turned her attention to the building’s open doors and realized what had to be done.

Under different circumstances, she might have suggested their next move to Maxwell so he could give the order. But the shifter was nowhere to be seen, as either a wolf or a man, and someone had to do something .

“Nyx, get Titus out of here!” she shouted instead.

“What are you, nuts?” Diego snarled from across the parking lot.

Rebecca ignored him. “Diego, clear a path to the van!”

He scowled at her while his words betrayed the expression. “Yeah, might be time for a fucking retreat.”

Leonard gaped at him in disbelief.

“Leonard!” Rebecca shouted, instantly stealing his attention. “How much cover fire can you bring down at once?”

“A lot!” the mage hollered once he flung another slobbering, gargling griybreki away from him. Then he tossed a free hand toward the front of the building and Aldous still barreling toward it. “But not enough with him like that !”

“Well cover us anyway!” she hollered. “Everybody else, get back to the van!”

Nyx had already done exactly that with an unconscious Titus in tow. The Volkswagen bus rocked violently beneath the big guy’s weight suddenly appearing in one of the back seats when the katari deposited him there.

Rebecca looked diligently around for any sign of Maxwell having shown his face again to keep up the fight. Still nothing.

Before she could ask anyone else where their shifter Head of Security had disappeared to, a howling wail rose from the inside of the apartment building. The entire swollen perimeter of crackling neon-yellow wards stretched away from the building by a good six feet.

Rebecca recognized the sights, sounds, and more importantly the feeling in the air of an insanely dangerous weapon powering up in seconds.

Then she realized, in a moment of dumbstruck and baffling realization, that their team didn’t need to find a non-existent breach point in the wards. The enemy had already opened one for them.

It just also happened to be the point of exit for enemy foot soldiers to surge out of their hideout for a physical battle in the parking lot.

If she was right, those open doors and the hollow space in the wards existing momentarily between them was about to also serve as the pre-made barrel of what was undoubtedly about to be a magical RPG launched straight out of the apartment building’s lobby.

Aldous stood right there in front of those open doors, howling and roaring like an idiot and making it too damn easy for the enemy to target him with the very thing he’d come here to steal.

“Move, move, move!” Rebecca shouted. “We gotta get him out of—”

She’d thought they’d have more wiggle room, but the griybreki proved her wrong when the enormous and insanely powerful weapon in the building’s lobby detonated.