Page 68 of Elven Shadow

His guys all moved in at once.

Blazing flashes of multicolored light split through the air, casting violent shadows across the asphalt and stretching up against the brick walls on either side of the alley’s mouth.

Rebecca dodged and ducked and spun away from every single launched assault, springing off her feet as if she’d hidden springs in her stilettos.

Then she saw the Cruorcian move.

Hewas the attack dog. The one his boss sent out when no one else could get a thing done. He was the only real threat.

The second his eyes exploded with crimson light beneath the ridiculously huge brim of that fedora, Rebecca stopped dodging, planted her feet, and faced him head on.

It was nothing more than reflex now—all those decades of training and sparring and drills honed into her over and over and over again.

Sneering, the Cruorcian drew his arm back and flung it toward her with another flash of blood-red light around his body.

Rebecca summoned the only kind of magic that was sure to stop a Cruorcian in his tracks. Blood against blood.

And, of course, she had a little something extra he simply didn’t.

A swirling sphere of dark silver light like liquid mercury appeared in her palm.

The Cruorcian tossed one hand toward her, chucking bolt after bolt of his own reanimated blood drawn from some open wound she couldn’t see.

By the time the shards of blazing red slivers like tiny spears reached her, Rebecca swept her hand in front of herself, and her silver orb bloomed to three times its size, shielding her from the guy’s blood daggers.

Each one of them pinged off her magic like pebbles trying to take down a tank.

An unbelievably swift-moving tank in three-inch heels.

The Cruorcian was quick to follow up with a second attack. He’d already caught her off-guard once before.

Rebecca had been counting on his assumption he could do it again.

She spun away from the last of his blood daggers, flicking her wrist and the dark silver orb with it.

By the time she faced him again, that orb had become the long spear of dark, blazing Bloodshadow.

Just as three more whipping coils of the Cruorcian’s crimson tendrils that had proven their strength in burning her lashed toward her face, Rebecca swung her spear down in a blurred arc.

Her weapon glinted in the darkness, simultaneously pulling all the light toward itself to gobble it all up in an instant.

The slicing whisper of an impossibly sharp blade cut through the air and right through the Cruorcian’s blood-magic coils like they were water.

There was hardly any sound at first when that impossible blade made of magic severed clean through someone else’s.

Half a second later, all three of those outstretched tendrils of whipping, lashing, blood magic dropped to the asphalt, one right after the other. Each one let out a slow, low-pitched whine that quickly grew into a shrill squeal, like a wet glass bottle tossed into the fire before it exploded and shards scattered in every direction.

Only the shards in this case were bits of blood magic.

Then Rebecca settled on her feet again, swung the tip of her Bloodshadow spear back down at her side, and watched for what came next.

The Cruorcian’s severed tendrils writhed and whipped about on the ground for a few seconds before the stunned Cruorcian finally recognized what had been done to him.

An almighty screech of pain and horror and rage burst from his gaping mouth before he dropped to his knees right there in front of Rebecca and the pieces of his own magic she’d cut from his physical person.

After that came a long, low, keening wail.

The others gaped at her and the Bloodshadow spear at her side.

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