Page 10 of Elven Shadow

“Yeah, maybe don’t lead himright to themjust 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 interferenceonlyif 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, thereisno 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 checkthatfast.”

“Nyx, didyousee 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’tdoinganything 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, ifIdidn’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.

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