5. Chapter 5

5

T he blazing neon-yellow light was so bright, Rebecca couldn’t see a thing as she darted not toward the van like she’d instructed but straight for the building.

They were out of time.

The whisper and thump and searing, crackling heat bursting through the building’s front doors overpowered everything else.

She just kept running, a volley of her own battle magic at the fingertips of both hands now and ready to launch at the enemy.

It was the only breach in the griybreki defenses she and the rest of her team were going to get.

But it didn’t look like she would get there in time to save Shade’s dumbass of a leader.

The whole world felt like it moved in slow motion.

The searing blast of energy from the apartment building unfurled like a mushroom cloud and burst through the open glass doors, shattering that glass and taking thousands of tinkling shards with it.

All of it headed straight for Aldous’s stupid fucking head.

Rebecca darted to the side at the last second, gritting her teeth in a snarl of effort. She dropped to her knees and slid across the asphalt to avoid the worst of the flying glass and shredded metal springing outward in a wide ripple with the blast wave.

All she cared about was her battle magic and her aim.

One, two, three, four enormous, thickly churning orbs of crackling red destruction launched from her hands, aimed right for the center of those open doors and the source of the attack belching out of the building.

She heard Aldous’s next furious bellow in his overblown, overdone monster voice .

She heard Diego snarling against the strain as deeply glowing crimson lines streaked through the blinding yellow-white of the explosion like lightning through storm clouds.

She heard the screeches and gargling screams of even more griybreki falling under a different attack before Leonard shouted, “Goddammit, why are you—”

The earth beneath them all trembled violently, a thunderous boom echoing in all directions.

More glass shattered in the windows. The screech of twisting metal was unignorable.

The light of the explosion still drowned out most other visuals, but Rebecca could have sworn she’d seen her launched attacks heading right where she’d meant for them to go with damn near perfect precision.

The enormous shudder through the earth felt like it should have caused more damage, but she didn’t stop to wonder why it was different.

With her legs burning through her ripped jeans, she scrambled back to her feet. Then another dull explosion rocked the area. She couldn’t stop to look at the damage she’d wrought. She didn’t have time for that shit.

Instead, she spun around and took off toward the rest of her team and the butter-yellow van waiting patiently for the Shade members to get the hell back into it before they got themselves killed out here.

More griybreki screamed and threw themselves forward at an enormous, slightly familiar shape sprawled across the pavement right in front of the building.

As Rebecca ran, the little frogmen’s grotesque bodies hurtled through the air away from the form she now recognized as Aldous.

“We gotta go!” she shouted. “If he’s hit—”

“He ain’t!” Diego roared through clenched teeth as he lifted both outstretched arms. “But if we leave him here, we’re fucked.”

The changeling’s hulking mass of mindless, slobbering beast that had fucked their entire mission inside and out rose off the asphalt—arms, legs, and an enormous, overflowing gut wrapped up in the powerful, deadly coils of the Cruorcian’s blood magic.

Rebecca’s eyes widened when she realized Diego was trying to magically lift their leader away from the worst of the danger, but she kept running toward the van.

Leonard voiced her concerns before she’d had the chance to recognize them.

“We can’t fucking get him in the van like that !” he screamed, tossing shards of golden light at the oncoming griybreki like an endless arsenal of throwing knives .

“No shit, genius,” Diego hollered back. “He won’t be like this much longer.”

Rebecca chucked more hissing, snapping, blazing red battle magic at the enemy still somehow racing after what was left of the team, despite her efforts to blow their heavy-duty firepower in the lobby to smithereens.

She thought for sure that would have been enough to take them down, or at least to distract them from the battle so the Shade team could actually retreat.

Why the hell wasn’t it enough?

Then she couldn’t help it. She had to turn around for a final look at the apartment building. Why hadn’t her attack done anything? It didn’t make sense.

But she didn’t get to study the building’s lobby like she’d wanted.

Because now blocking her view was an intensely concentrating Diego storming diligently across the parking lot, hands outstretched as the tendrils of blood magic lashing from his fingers like writhing, living claws now dragged an unconscious but quickly shrinking changeling with him.

Aldous had lost consciousness, obviously, or he would have been struggling and flailing and threatening Diego with imminent death.

Behind him, Leonard threw spell after spell, knocking back the oncoming rush of enemy targets and snarling at the effort, his trench coat billowing around him, his teeth bared in a rictus of urgency and fury.

The apartment building behind them started humming again, another light growing inside the lobby with that strobing intensity of neon-yellow light.

Rebecca gaped at the whole thing.

Had she seriously fucking missed?

When the low hum of the super-powered magical blast reached another fever pitch, she started to think they were completely out of options.

A hoard of disgusting little frogmen surged across the parking lot from all directions now, and if they didn’t reach the Shade team first, this next blast from their insane magic-cannon would wipe the whole thing out.

With Aldous out of the picture, Nyx and Titus in the van, Maxwell who the hell knew where, Diego and Leonard almost running out of steam, and Rebecca’s own destructive magic clearly fucking useless, they’d never make it in time. The van was just too far away.

An ear-splitting screech rose behind her, drawing closer with impossible speed, and Rebecca spun around to see that very same Volkswagen bus barreling across the parking lot toward her like all their lives depended on it.

Because they did.

The next thing she knew, the bus skidded to a sliding halt, rubber tires squealing furiously across the asphalt with a cloud of dust and acrid smoke leaving stains across the pavement. Through the open driver’s-side window, Maxwell shouted behind the wheel, “Get the fuck inside!”

At the same time, the van’s rear door sheared open to reveal a wide-eyed Nyx inside, beckoning everyone closer.

“Go, go, go. Hurry! Come on!” the katari urged.

Rebecca turned her back on the van to help fight off the surges of enemies gaining on the team despite Leonard’s best efforts to hold them at bay.

With a roar of frustration, Diego swung his whole body toward the van, hauling along his extended coils of blood magic—and Aldous, now fully shrunken down to size—right along with him.

“Whoa, whoa, careful!” Nyx shrieked. “He’s—”

Their leader’s body thumped violently into the back of the van, followed by Diego hopping up inside and shouting, “Move your asses!”

Rebecca ducked a slobbering creature throwing itself at her. Then she spun on instinct and punched it in the back of the head to send the grotesque critter flying across the pavement.

“Get out of here!” she shouted. “There’s not enough time before—”

“No, no, no, no! Don’t fucking listen to her !” Leonard let off one final blast of magic and spewed out a wide net of thick, glistening golden ropes that acted like an actual net when it landed on a group of three more griybreki scrambling toward them.

The creatures screamed in confusion and pain and rage as they battled with the webbing of magical lines.

Leonard spun toward the van and darted past Rebecca, glaring at her.

“Why the fuck would you say something like that?” he snarled before leaping up into the van.

“Move it, elf,” Maxwell snapped behind the wheel.

No one had to tell her twice, but it still seemed like a complete waste of time, even when Rebecca launched herself toward the van’s open door and dove inside.

As she did, the whine from the enemy’s magical RPG launcher hit its fevered pitch, signaling readiness for one more attack.

“Drive, man, drive!”

“Go, go, go, go!”

“What the fuck are you waiting for? Get us out of here!”

Rebecca heard the team shouting at Maxwell. She felt the van lurch clumsily beneath her to race across the parking lot. She heard the furious howls of the creatures behind them, none of whom wanted their enemy to escape.

And she still couldn’t let herself believe her team could actually get away this time .

As the van hurtled toward the far end of the parking lot, bouncing violently over potholes and lumps in the asphalt, she could only stare at the apartment building’s open front doors, waiting for the inevitable to happen and catch up with them.

“What is your fucking problem?” Diego snarled at her.

Rebecca shook her head. “I don’t get it. That thing should’ve fired by now. It should’ve—”

The air burst with a deafening boom and the explosive force spewing through the front doors of the apartment building. The shockwave spread across the parking lot like wildfire, shaking the foundations of the entire building until it looked like the whole place was about to come down.

Dust and glass shards and plaster and debris careened after the van, blasting against its side as Maxwell drove as fast as he could away from the damage.

The rest of the team inside the vehicle cried out in surprise, holding onto the seats in front of them or the door handles or what little else existed to keep them from tumbling all over each other.

Most of their efforts were unsuccessful.

The blinding neon-yellow explosion of magic strong enough to take them all down at once—the final blast Rebecca had been waiting for—never came.

Instead, crackling red light flashed through the building’s lobby, skewering the flickering, dying glow of the magic cannon and the protective wards before another boom exploded across the parking lot.

The walls of the lobby started to crumble.

The falling debris spilled out of the open doors in a ballooning cloud of dust and smoke, blocking all other visuals.

The team’s getaway ride lurched out of the parking lot, veered around the corner, and continued at ridiculously high speeds, all thanks to the shifter now behind the wheel.

Everyone crammed into the back of the VW bus and currently conscious stared at their target site—the parking lot, the abandoned apartment building, and the surrounding area quickly filling with rubble and thick smoke and what looked a whole lot like flames rising in the distance.

While Maxwell understandably had to focus on the road, he snuck quick glances back at their battleground through the rearview mirror before snarling, “What the hell was that?”

“It worked,” Rebecca muttered.

“The fuck are you talking about?” Diego whipped his baseball cap off his head to run a hand through his sweat-drenched hair, then returned the cap to its place. “None of that worked. Are you kidding me? The biggest failure of a mission I’ve ever seen in my life. ”

“Well, yeah.” Rebecca shrugged and finally pulled her gaze away from the destruction quickly fading in the distance. “But it stopped their next attack. I’m pretty sure none of us would be sitting here talking about it if they’d gotten off that second shot.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Maxwell growled from behind the wheel. “That was the weapon Aldous wanted. We didn’t get our hands on it.”

“Looks like nobody’s getting their hands on it now,” Nyx murmured with a nervous giggle.

The rest of the team responded with varying degrees of tense, conditional amusement. The katari was right. They’d just destroyed the insanely powerful weapon Aldous had ordered them out here to acquire in the first place. There was no way it had survived those explosions.

The amusement didn’t last long, though. That tended to happen when an entire team had almost been destroyed by yet another epic failure of a mission they’d destroyed all on their own.

Rebecca settled her gaze on Aldous’s limp form sprawled across the floor in the back of the van.

This fucking changeling!

His body had returned to its natural size and shape. What remained of his cheap suit now lay in stretched-out tatters across his body. Knocked unconscious like this, all his magic and illusions were rendered useless.

Which meant the changeling skin he normally covered in illusion now exposed its truest shades of green that matched his glowing eyes—when they were open—and the dark black-green of his hair.

“How’d you knock him out like this?” she asked, looking up at the rest of the team without knowing whom to address specifically.

The others looked around too until the majority of their gazes settled on Diego.

“You were screaming to get him out of the way,” he said. “So that’s what I did.”

“Great. That still doesn’t answer the question.”

“You didn’t see that giant crater he put in the asphalt?” Leonard asked, then pointed quickly at his head for emphasis and added, “With his skull ?”

Frowning, Rebecca shot Aldous another wary look, but the changeling wasn’t coming to anytime soon. Whether or not that boded well for any of them was still yet to be seen.

“You mean you knocked him unconscious so he wouldn’t screw us any harder,” she murmured.

Diego hissed in discomfort and turned, looking quickly over his shoulder at Maxwell behind the wheel. “That’s not what I said. You shouldn’t say it, either. That’s not even what I did.”

Rebecca pointed at Aldous.

“It’s not what I was trying to do, okay?” Diego amended. “It just happened. But it worked, didn’t it?”

Yeah, a whole lot of recent mistakes had turned out more like happy accidents than the results of talent and dedication and skill. Not exactly something Rebecca found worthy of her pride, but at least they weren’t dead.

Leonard cleared his throat. “He won’t be happy when he wakes up and finds out we had to fall back empty-handed. That won’t be fun for any of us.”

In the front, Maxwell snorted. “You think you’re gonna have it bad.”

At first, it sounded like the shifter might have been talking about himself. But trying to get a rise of pity from other Shade members for having Aldous’s confidence as the changeling’s Head of Security wasn’t happening. Not after a failure like this.

Rebecca looked up into the rearview mirror and found the shifter staring at her through its reflection.

As if he’d been talking about her instead.

Like he had the fucking right to tell her what she was in for.

“Where the hell did you go, anyway?” she asked.

The others frowned at her unsolicited change of subject, but Rebecca kept staring at Maxwell’s reflection.

If he hadn’t been driving their getaway car, she was sure he would have tried to stare her down with his silvery shifter eyes.

Rebecca raised her eyebrows. “No answer for that one, huh?”

Maxwell merely scowled back at her, and when he returned his gaze to the road again, he left it there.

Staring contest officially over, apparently.

He definitely knew he’d screwed up. He had to know. Wherever the guy had gone after wolfing out, he wasn’t proud of it. That much was clear.

Rebecca had no idea what might have kept Maxwell away from their fight for as long as it had during some pretty crucial moments. The shifter had his secrets, sure. How could he not with a scowl like that? But it didn’t really matter.

They’d still failed their mission. Shade was still a total joke with Aldous at the helm, and they were still crawling back toward headquarters now with their proverbial tails between their legs.

Still, if Maxwell insisted on not-so-subtly insinuating that Rebecca would be paying some kind of price for her actions at the target site—like blowing up the deadly, destructive, insanely powerful magical weapon Aldous wanted for himself and saving all their lives because of it—she could play that game right along with him, sure. No problem.

She’d been raised on playing games like that, after all. Some of them had been as messed up as this completely fucked mission. Most of them, admittedly, had been even more dangerous.

B y the time they returned to Shade’s official secret headquarters outside Roseland, Aldous still hadn’t regained consciousness.

Rebecca wasn’t particularly worried. If the changeling’s head was as thick against asphalt as it was against common sense, he’d be just fine.

Aldous was collected out of the van after Maxwell parked in the stuffy underground garage attached to the old steel factory that hadn’t been used for almost half a century. Not by humans, anyway.

Shade’s current healer Zida, who even from a distance looked like a walking corpse, moved around the rear of the van to extricate their leader with a flurry of sparks in her hands and a mostly levitating gurney behind her.

Without a word, she cast every member of the team multiple condescending scowls as she settled the changeling the way she wanted him on the gurney, then spun on her heels and hauled Aldous away behind her.

“I don’t get it.” Diego stared after them. “Not even a, ‘Hey, glad y’all made it back in one piece.’ But she’s gonna give us the stink-eye like that when he gets himself knocked around on a mission?”

“Who knows what goes through that old daraku’s mind at any given time,” Leonard said with a shrug. “As long as she keeps her mitts off me , I’m fine with it. All good here. No healer needed.”

Rebecca cocked her head at the mage, frowning at the slashes in the sleeve of his trench coat and the blood that had since welled through them. “Looks like you might, though. Unless you wanna find a better method for healing.”

Diego looked sharply up at her as they all filed out of the van, eyed her up and down a few times, then clicked his tongue. “You offering healing magic too now, elf? ‘Cause…what? Blowing up our acquisition wasn’t enough for you?”

She fixed him with a deadpan stare—the kind that had, once upon a time, practically defined Rebecca and her roles within other groups in other parts of the world; groups now far behind her out of necessity and the changing times .

The Cruorcian wanted to know if she could heal, and he wanted to be a smartass about the whole thing. Fine.

He had no idea.

And he would always have no idea because that was the point.

One massively important, crucial point she couldn’t afford to screw up. Especially now.