8. Chapter 8

8

F or a moment, it looked like Rebecca might have accidentally stumbled upon Aldous’s self-destruct button—which tended to take out everything else within a square mile, too.

He choked on his next breath, lashes fluttering rapidly again as he seemed unable once more to decide between a sneer or an attempted smile. Maybe even a laugh.

There was still a chance he’d keep his cool somehow, but that only meant he would aim his full focus at a different target.

Like her.

And there was no telling what kind of screwed-up punishment his stunted little mind might cook up on its own.

Leaning closer, Aldous turned his head as if turning his ear toward a hesitantly shared secret. “What was that?”

She couldn’t help glancing at Maxwell again, even more amused now to find the shifter had already been diligently watching her after a response like that.

After shooting an exaggerated grimace toward the Head of Security, she answered Aldous’s question with, “Do you really want me to repeat it?”

The changeling’s nostrils flared, his teeth grinding together in his skull, the fronts of them bared in a snarl that looked more like the grin of an evil genius without the genius part. Then he sucked on his teeth with a wet squelch and murmured, “You’re going to regret that.”

Rebecca wrinkled her nose in mock hesitation. “You know, I really don’t think so.”

Aldous slowly lifted a clenched fist toward her, which now trembled.

He must have been working terribly hard to keep from turning into a rampaging moron three times his regular size in an office built above the common room, with a fantastically clear view from below of everything happening inside that office .

“I could take you out with a single move,” he snarled, brandishing his fist in her face.

Mentioning the fact that he hadn’t taken out a single griybreki tonight with a whole plethora of moves didn’t seem like a worthwhile expenditure of her own breath.

“With a single word, even,” he hissed, then glanced up at his Head of Security watching the entire exchange as if this kind of thing happened all the time.

Maxwell stiffened further, his scowl unchanged just like the tension in his jaw and his arms. But now there was an added flash of surprise in his gaze when he looked quickly away from Rebecca to stare at Shade’s leader instead.

Was that concern behind his eyes?

“I’m not here to argue with you on any of those points,” Rebecca told him firmly.

It would have been a fruitless endeavor, anyway. If Aldous believed he was made of the fucking blood of the old god Akskashirim, chances were no one in either world could ever convince him otherwise.

Which made him even more dangerous than she’d thought.

Stupidity was one thing. Willful ignorance disguised as zealous dedication? That was on a whole new level.

After glaring at her a moment longer, Aldous shook his fist in her face one more time, then spun around to walk back across his throne-room turned office.

Only when he’d removed himself from her personal space was Rebecca convinced Zida had juiced him up with one of her more virile potions to escort their commander that much more quickly out of his stupidity-induced recovery.

A hint of overly sweet, tangy orange laced with an undertone of formaldehyde wafted through the air behind Aldous’s swift departure across the room.

Not a well-known concoction on Earth, but Zida was old-school Xaharí and had never done much of anything to keep that a secret.

The stuff Rebecca smelled on Aldous now was basically magical meth.

Which meant, inside the changeling, the stuff was as volatile as he was.

Maybe they deserved each other. A match made in self-righteous hell. The original paradise.

When Aldous finally stopped marching away from her and had crossed most of his office to return to the side of his throne, his hand settled down on the gleaming, oiled wood of the enormous chair’s back one more time. The movement made the chair itself look like the source of his power.

It honestly wouldn’t have surprised her if he really believed that too .

“Either way,” he snapped with a trying-to-be-casual shrug, “you still owe me for that weapon.”

Rebecca tilted her head with a sigh. “So no. Bringing you back alive just wasn’t enough.”

“You’re gonna do something else for me,” he sneered again. “And this time, you don’t have a choice.”

That wasn’t much different than any other time with him. Not really.

Aldous was a major prick, yes. But for now, putting up with him was better than the alternative.

Barely.

After drumming his fingers on the back of the chair again, for what felt like years, as if he were wracking his mind for the perfect punishment to Rebecca’s rejection, the changeling settled his glinting green gaze on her, and one side of his mouth twitched up in a sadistic grin. “What do you know about the Darkspawn?”

Holy shit. Was he serious ?

“The Darkspawn,” she repeated with a soft chuckle and shook her head. “It’s a fun bedtime story. That’s it. And no, I’m not gonna come read it to you—”

“Oh, it’s so much more than that,” he interrupted, his sickening grin widening by the second. “Not just a story. It’s real.”

For the first time since stepping into his office, Rebecca finally looked at this guy calling himself their leader. What she saw in that moment concerned her more than any of his other pitiful attempts to control her so far.

He really did take himself seriously, even when talking about something as legendary, desperately coveted, and completely nonexistent as the Darkspawn.

She swallowed and muttered, “Bullshit—”

“I’m not finished!” he roared. “You will keep your mouth shut until I address you directly with a goddamn question!”

Great. Now she’d really pissed him off and had to deal with this other wannabe personality of his until he got rid of her.

At least she was no longer forced to continue a conversation she never wanted in the first place.

She would have had to turn around again to gauge the shifter’s reaction to this little outburst the way she wanted, but that seemed like a much better way to keep this tediously overblown conversation going a lot longer than it might have otherwise, and Rebecca had been over it about thirty seconds in.

So she stood her ground in the center of the office and waited for Aldous to deliver the final bit of his lecture.

“You’re powerful enough on your own to have taken out that weapon, I’ll give you that.” Aldous spat the words through a snarl. “But no one told you to do it, elf. You were not authorized to deliberately destroy that piece of magical property specifically selected to be recovered and returned here to me. You disobeyed our Head of Security, the one person you answer to when you’re out there running these ops. And most of all, you’ve been obnoxiously rude to me .”

The snide smirk and wiggle of his head accompanying that last statement brought an instant vision to Rebecca’s mind.

She could conjure a completely different kind of blade—the kind he’d never seen before and would never know how to combat—and break up that self-serving smirk with a nice red smile slashing across his throat instead.

The idea almost made her smile herself.

“All that put together?” Aldous continued, pacing around his office again. “Well, that’s a hell of a debt you’ve racked up in the last twelve hours alone. We don’t do very well with debts around here, do we, Hannigan?”

He glanced at Maxwell, addressing him for the first time through this whole ordeal, and Rebecca couldn’t help but follow suit.

The shifter pressed his lips firmly together, still scowling but obviously unwilling to remain silent when he’d been directly addressed. Offering a response was the very least he could do for not having said a damn thing this whole time.

“No, we do not,” he growled.

“There you go.” Aldous snapped his fingers and pointed at Maxwell. “He knows how things work around here. I think it’s time you learned the same lesson. So here’s what I’m gonna do.”

The changeling spun around at the far side of his office to pace in the opposite direction, his shoulders hunched and his arms pumping at his side as he turned his head in an oddly hunched way, like a deformed hyena stalking someone else’s carcass.

“I made you one offer already,” he snarled. “I gave you a choice. You made the wrong one. So this time, I’m not giving you a choice. Accepting this arrangement isn’t an option.”

Rebecca inhaled deeply through her nose.

Great. This idiot was still making the rules, and she was back to not saying a word about it and not giving a shit.

“Your next mission,” Aldous continued, “I’m assigning to you personally. There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the Darkspawn having finally made its way here. To Chicago. And you are going to find it and retrieve it for me.”

Bullshit.

“That’s not a deal,” Rebecca blurted. “That’s a death sentence. ”

“Not if you do what you’re supposed to this time and actually follow your orders,” he snapped. “Which you will do, for several reasons. The first being that if you don’t go after this artifact, if you don’t retrieve it, if you don’t bring it to me and lay it at my feet the way I expect you to… Well, then I’m afraid Shade will have no more use for you at that point. And in case you haven’t heard, this organization does not cater to buyer’s remorse.”

The sharp grunt beside the door sounded particularly loud.

From the corner of her eye, Rebecca caught the last two seconds of Maxwell pressing a fist to his mouth, pretending to cover what was clearly a forced cough.

Pretending to cover his disapproval, maybe even disagreement, but he sure as shit wasn’t going to say it out loud.

Aldous seemed completely oblivious to it. Then again, subtle cues of communication clearly had never been a strong suit.

“On top of that,” he continued, his self-serving smirk blooming into what counted as a victorious grin on his stupid changeling face, “you won’t be entirely alone. I’ve made sure of it.”

The sight of that smirk ruffled Rebecca’s composure even further when she noticed his bottom lip quickly regaining its dark-green hue and the unhealed scratches across his face smudging with lighter green where their natural state overpowered his human illusion.

The changeling had gotten himself so damn excited, he didn’t have enough leftover concentration to keep his ensemble of illusionary spellwork up to snuff. Now, the naturally green tint to his flesh spilled through in mottled splotches, darkening his features by the second as his pacing took on a mad, feverish pace.

“I’ve got you now, elf,” he continued, his limbs trembling as he shook a finger in the air. “I’ve got eyes on you. Your own personal fucking shadow, and they answer only to me . Everywhere you go, everything you do, they’ll be watching you. When you eat. When you sleep. When you take a shit. I’ll know about it. All of it!”

Aldous whirled on her, spit flying from his dark-green lips that now looked like over-inflated caterpillars around his mouth as his emerald eyes bulged from his head. “You’ll never see them coming. You won’t know who’s really watching you. Who you can trust. But I’ll know everything about you . Your entire existence is in my hands, understand?

“And it won’t stop until you’re right here!” He stabbed that finger down toward the floor at his feet. “On your knees, presenting me with the Darkspawn on a silver platter because I told you to and because I fucking own you ! ”

The changeling panted, his face bloated and flushed green like he was about to pop as he sucked all the extra spit back into his mouth and glared at her. “If you fuck this up, elf, I won’t be anywhere near as generous with you the next time.”

Rebecca had slipped her hands into the pockets of her black jeans during his diatribe, and she kept them there now as she stared daggers into Aldous’s skull.

This fucking changeling.

“Well?” he asked, raising an eyebrow before fully straightening and smoothing his hair away from his forehead with both hands. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

She could have said so many things. She could have threatened him right back. Hell, she could have ended the guy in the blink of an eye, eliminating all her most pressing obstacles, and no one here would have been able to prove a thing.

If Maxwell hadn’t been standing there by the office door with his hands behind his back, emotionless, gazing at nothing, like this kind of thing was a daily occurrence for him. She seriously hoped not.

The one thing that kept her in check was the realization that Aldous was completely serious.

She’d heard it in the timbre of his voice, felt it in the energies of ignorance and entitlement and truth spilling from his disgusting mouth.

The changeling had already assigned a shadow to watch her. The second he’d mentioned it, she knew that was something he’d done before sending for her tonight—so he’d have not only a threat but a promise to put into action should she refuse his initial vomit-inducing proposition.

Aldous’s way or the highway, and in this scenario, the highway had already been built.

Rebecca had a shadow she was unlikely to discover without detriment to herself or her own secrets, and if she failed to retrieve the fucking Darkspawn Aldous was so certain truly existed, he would kill her.

He would try, anyway. She’d stop him, of course, but that came with its own inherent risks. At the top of that list was the certainty that in order to stop him, she’d end up revealing exactly who and what she was, and it would happen at a time when she and Aldous certainly weren’t alone.

He’d make sure of it.

So what could she do now but stand here, take the abuse flying in her face with all the spit flung from his lips, and figure out how to get herself out of this unnecessary hole dug for her by a complete moron who thought he was better than her in every way .

Keeping her mouth shut was the most difficult part of this whole thing.

“Hmm?” Aldous asked, taking one more step toward her and turning his head to press his ear closer, as if he expected her to whisper some new secret in his ear. “Anything at all, elf?”

Rebecca glared at him.

Say nothing, and this would all be over…

“I asked you a fucking question!” His shout echoed through the office, followed by a tense silence that made her ears ring.

Then Rebecca nodded. “Just one thing, yeah.”

Aldous spread his arms. “Then let’s hear it. I’m waiting.”

She should just turn around right now and let him keep waiting. That was the smarter thing to do. The low-key thing. The best way to lie low and stay under the radar despite having already captured her commander’s attention in such a way that had led to this shitshow.

Rebecca knew all of this, but her rational mind and the passionate fire flaring through her blood were entirely at odds with each other now, and the fire won out—like it usually did.

She leaned toward the furious green changeling and sneered right back at him. “I don’t get on my knees for anyone. So you can go fuck yourself.”

The shocked outburst bubbling up the back of Aldous’s throat croaked and squeezed off in disbelief when she rounded it off with a middle finger just for him.

Spinning around to end this meeting on her own terms was apparently the last straw for him.

“Don’t you turn your back on me!” Aldous shrieked. “I haven’t dismissed you!”

“I’ve got work to do,” she barked. “You’ll have to dismiss me later.”

“If you fail me, elf, I swear I will slit your throat myself!”

“Noted.” Whether the changeling had heard her, Rebecca couldn’t tell. She didn’t care.

More importantly, if she didn’t get out of the same room with him, one of them would definitely end up getting their throat cut tonight, and it wouldn’t be her.

Aldous offered a final furious roar behind her before snarling at his Head of Security, “Get her the fuck out of here.”

While Aldous sputtered and fumed, unable to get over himself, Rebecca marched toward the office door still silently and expressionlessly manned by Maxwell.

He met her gaze with that same stoic mask, though something glimmered within his silver eyes that almost made him look impressed .

“What?” she murmured as she reached him. “Why are you looking at me like that? Oh wait, did you want some of this too?”

She swung a raised middle finger in the shifter’s direction this time because it was either that or a fist to his face when she really wanted to punch in Aldous’s instead.

Maxwell didn’t have a response for that, big surprise, but he also didn’t say anything else to Aldous or even look at Shade’s leader for some other sign or signal or perhaps a last word.

Instead, the shifter quickly followed Rebecca out of the office, pulling the door shut with little thought to how hard or how loudly that door banged behind them.

Then Rebecca stalked down the hallway on her own, heading for the double layers of staircases that would take her back to the ground floor and eventually to her personal quarters in the compound.

She wasn’t going to wait for the Head of Security to act on his own, seeing as Aldous still wanted something from her. His final words of, “Get her the hell out of here,” most likely did not extend as far as the entire building, this world in general, or even existence as a whole.

She wasn’t on his Make Dead list, just his shitlist.

Not that being on anyone’s calendar of enemies to kill and obstacles to eliminate had made much of a difference. One way or the other, Rebecca was still here.

Now she just had to deal with the green-skinned idiot who’d dropped her between a rock and a hard place, A.K.A. a myth and an impossible ultimatum.

All because she’d saved his life and brought their team back from the brink of destruction while Aldous suffered the consequences of knocking himself unconscious.

Just one more reason to support her firm belief that doing the right thing—that sticking her neck out for others, especially those she didn’t know personally—was just a brilliant fucking way to screw up all her plans.

And yet, she’d done it anyway.

All of a sudden, Maxwell was walking beside her in the incredibly narrow hallway and growled, “What the hell was that ?”

Rebecca slowed to look up at him and his perpetual scowl beneath those glowing, misty-looking silver eyes. “I know, right? Hey, thanks a lot for stepping in when shit got really weird.”

With a gruff sigh, he clenched his jaw and stared straight ahead. “I wasn’t part of the conversation. That’s not my job.”

“If only that were a solid foundation for a decent argument,” she said.

“You said you had it. That you could handle it yourself. ”

“Yeah, because no one felt the need to intervene,” Rebecca quipped. “Or to remind that piece of shit what appropriate superior-subordinate interaction looks like. I’m curious, though. When you see shit like that happening, is it just so shocking that you can’t bring yourself to move, or do you just like to stand there and watch?”

A low growl rose from his throat, and the next thing she knew, Rebecca had stopped short in the narrow hallway because the shifter now stood directly in front of her, his face almost as close up in hers as Aldous’s had been earlier.

His was definitely easier on the eyes and a whole hell of a lot more enticing, but still. Had no one in Chicago ever heard of personal space?

“This is the kinda shit that’s gonna get you killed,” he said. “This, right here.”

She held his silver gaze and slowly tilted her head, letting another smile twitch at the corners of her mouth. “Says the shifter who disappeared in the middle of a fight while everyone else was trying to keep our collective asses out of the fire.”

Maxwell blinked at her and took one of the tiniest steps backwards she’d ever seen. “That was different.”

Rebecca huffed out a laugh. “Okay, whatever helps you sleep at night, Max. From your complete lack of reaction during that meeting, something tells me you’re sleeping like a baby. Good for you.”

She shouldered her way past him, bumping up against his hardened bicep as he crossed his arms.

Despite her technically bodychecking him, the shifter didn’t budge an inch.

Like a fucking tree, this guy.

A tree that could plant itself firmly in the safety of Shade’s HQ when everything was in order and the boss made disgustingly unwanted advances on certain Elven members who’d had far more experience in legit wartime battles than ninety percent of the magicals in this place.

But when it came to actual battles out there in the field, or the parking lots of abandoned apartment buildings, Maxwell the shifter was a fart in the wind.

Wherever he’d disappeared to while Rebecca and the rest of their team had tried not to die, he obviously felt something about it. And it wasn’t pride.

Any other day, Rebecca might have taken a special interest in that fun little mystery.

Right now, though, she had much more important things to occupy her time and her mental energy. Which meant leaving the shifter behind her in the dust without giving him an opportunity to clear up any misconceptions.

Not that Maxwell thought that was very important in the first place, clearly .

In a way the changeling couldn’t possibly understand, Aldous had unwittingly put her in an impossible position, and now Rebecca had to work on making the impossible possible just to maintain her own personal status quo.

Sure, maybe the Darkspawn really did exist. Maybe it wasn’t just a myth after all. If it was real, she could absolutely find it. That was, after all, one thing at which Rebecca Bloodshadow had excelled most of her life—finding things others couldn’t.

The only problem was the one tiny detail of Aldous’s ultimatum being her soon-to-be-assigned constant shadow, whoever the hell they turned out to be.

She couldn’t do what she needed to do to find the Darkspawn somewhere in the city if someone was always there with her looking over her shoulder. Whether that someone was determined to report everything back to Aldous or eventually decided to keep their mouth shut about it wouldn’t matter.

Because to do what she did, Rebecca had to pull out a few tricks no one knew about. Certain types of inherent magic no one could ever know about.

Otherwise, whoever discovered these secrets she’d managed to hide for so long would instantly know exactly who and what she was.

That kind of knowledge in Aldous’s head? That would get the entire organization killed. Every last Shade member. No surrenders, no peacemaking, no questions. And if one person knew who she was, that shit would spread like wildfire across the city, and then the only magicals she despised more than a complete moron like Aldous Corriger would finally find her.

They would hunt her down, undo all her years of hard work and dedication to making a life for herself as an effective nobody. If that happened, Rebecca would be better off dead at that point anyway.

No way in hell would she let any of that happen.

She just had to figure out exactly how to weasel her way through the loopholes on this one, because what Aldous hadn’t explicitly said made this far more complicated on top of everything else.

His analogy about buyer's remorse had been pretty shitty, but the sentiment had still made itself clear.

Meaning once you were a part of Shade, you were always a part of Shade. Backing out, escaping, leaving an organization like this behind just wasn’t an option.

Unless you preferred spending the rest of eternity six feet under.

Rebecca couldn’t envision herself dying for this organization, no matter the circumstances.

Now she stood in the center of multiple options, all of which ended in death or worse if she didn’t execute her next moves perfectly and without being caught .

She’d always appreciated a challenge, but this was a special kind of screwed.

How fun.