Page 18 of Elven Shadow

“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 hisskull?”

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,” shemurmured.

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

Rebecca pointed at Aldous.

“It’s not what I wastryingto 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 thinkyou’regonna 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 aboutherinstead.

Like he had the fucking right to tellherwhat she was in for.

“Where the hell didyougo, 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.

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