Page 89 of Elven Shadow

And, apparently, to rise from the ashes and stop anything in its path.

Rebecca took another small step backward to fully eye the thing over from the top of its perfectly round, bald, pitch-black head glinting in the strobing flash of the red security light, and grimaced.

“Who the fuck’s been playing with homunculi?” she muttered.

No, this thing wouldn’t answer her. It had a mouth, sure, but that kind of mouth was generally not created to move or even to open. Not in a creation that looked likethis.

She never would have believed anyone in the whole city of Chicago was stupid enough to screw around withthiskind of magic. Clearly, she was wrong.

Whoever had created the homunculus in front of her now was without a doubt the perpetrator of this attack on Shade’s compound. But getting this creature to give up its maker would be impossible. Even if she employed certain…foolproof interrogation tactics. She’d learned them all during her decades of training.

More than that, though, she just didn’t have the time.

Rebecca had to get to the infirmary to help everyone out and away from here.

But now she had an enormous homunculus blocking her path, towering over her by at least a foot and a half.

The fact that she could see absolutely nothing in its pitch-black eyes didn’t mean anything. Rebecca knew the thing was staring right at her. It knew she was here.

And it wasn’t going to let her leave.

21

The creature loomed before her, its blackened form a silent promise of destruction. Rebecca’s pulse pounded in her ears. She had to act before the enormous thing made its move.

She knew it would. The nasty type of magic it took to create a thing like this always came with a purpose. A mission. Most likely to kill everything in sight, including her.

As long as the thing didn’t notice any of the patients still stuck in the infirmary, she could handle it. As long as nothing else distracted her, she could handle it.

But that had been harder and harder to guarantee lately.

The homunculus lifted one foot and stomped it down on the surface of the rubble pile trapping its other foot. More debris crumbled down from the center of the pile. The hulking black monster slid forward before pulling its other foot free, and Rebecca engaged.

A crackling, hissing orb of red battle magic appeared in both hands before she hurled them almost simultaneously toward her unexpecting foe.

The first struck the homunculus in the center of its chest with a deafening crack and punched a crater twice the size of her spell into the thing’s chest cavity.

Her second shot hit the homunculus in the face and sent its head and neck whipping backward. Lines of bright red light crackled across the creature’s entire body, lighting up the black and mottled gray from the inside.

The force of Rebecca’s attacks at such close range sent the top half of the thing’s monstrous body reeling backward, as if it were about to attempt a back handspring.

She waited for the rest of the thing’s body to follow suit—for its legs to slip out from under it and send the creature crashing back down into the quickly soaking pile of debris so shecould be on her way.

That didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t.

The thing’s bare, pitch-black feet had somehow firmly planted themselves into the pile of caved-in ceiling that didn’t move an inch beneath the homunculus’s shifting weight. Like a life-sized rubber stretch doll, the thing’s torso bent all the way backward at an angle that would have snapped a living being’s spine in a hundred different places.

Something like the creaking groan of old trees in a furious autumn wind rose from the conjured monster before it swung its entire body upright again to stand there in front of Rebecca as straight and attentive as ever.

As if that wasn’t weird enough, the crackling red lines of her electric battle magic fizzled out across the thing’s body, darkening the enormous crater in the homunculus’s chest and the mashed pulp of its face.

Obviously, neither of Rebecca’s attacks had been particularly fatal. Not when her opponent was an autonomously moving amalgamation of someone else’s magic and therefore wasn’t technically alive enough to die in the first place.

That really should have been enough of a warning for her, but the next second, she got to watch the hole in the creature’s chest stitch itself back up again with expert precision, occasionally letting off another crackling red spark left over from her battle magic.

With a violent pop and a sickening crunch, the homunculus’s face broke apart before weaving itself back together again in the correct order. The quick, jerky movements of a mostly face-shaped head made her instantly think of blowing into a plastic water bottle to smooth out all the kinks.

Only she’d just used enough magic to destroy a thousand plastic water bottles all at once, and this non-living bastard had repaired itself in seconds.

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