Page 9 of Elven Shadow

The previously vibrant tendrils of her silver light stretching like a dark web across the building’s north wall shuddered violently. The threads of ward magic placed there by the enemy pulsed with violently bright neon yellow, strobing faster and faster.

Then those wards turned the strength and purpose of Rebecca’s magic against itself—like an opponent standing upright on both feet, taking blow after devastating blow with bare fists only to absorb the damage before redirecting it all at the one who’d previously thought they were winning.

The strands of dark-silver light buckled first in the center where they’d begun, then out along every individual thread of Rebecca’s magic. Each tendril crunched and crumbled, splitting away bit by bit to then blow away in so many pieces like ashon the wind.

Each shattering crunch would have been like a blow to Rebecca’s core if it hadn’t happened so quickly and all at once.

Instead, the force of her magic’s destruction crumbling away from the building hit her like hundreds of tiny pinpricks.

With a grunt, she doubled over, holding herself around the middle like she could somehow keep the pain from farther spilling out with her bare hands.

Staggering backward, Rebecca waited for the agony to subside, knowing it would, still wondering how long she would stand there with her mouth gaping open before her lungs decided to start working again.

Then her breath finally returned in a raw, searing gasp. She sucked in more of it, once, twice, three times, then forced herself to straighten and glared at the last fading remnants of her most powerful magic.

Decimated by the encompassing web of defensive wards in strobing neon yellow.

These griybreki knew their shit when it came to wards. Or at least Edwardo did, and his crew had executed their own protection with perfect precision.

There was no seam to slip through. No weak point on which her team could successfully focus the pressure of a combined attack.

Not for Shade. Not unless they had an entire army at their backs—an army composed only of soldiers who could pierce through the web of magical security like this the way Rebecca had, and only if they did it at exactly the same time.

Shade was just a gaggle of overconfident bullies playing in the fucking sandbox in comparison.

But it was all Rebecca had at the moment.

At least now she knew whatwouldn’twork.

Recovered now from that near-crippling blow to her magic, Rebecca stood fully upright again and made her way around the side of the building toward the front.

The ground trembled beneath her feet with every step, heedless to the blonde elf leaping nimbly across the asphalt.

Around the corner, Aldous stomped about, swinging his impossibly massive arms in all directions, pounding the ground, buffeting away anything and everything in his path. The bloated, beefed-up changeling bellowed like a beast driven mad by rage and hunger and instinct.

The whole time, The Thing managed somehow to also escape the efforts of his actual team—the magicals who were on his side, for all intents and purposes—to keep him away from the building’s front doors.

Now that they knew about the wards, breaching the griybreki compound and storming the gates, as it were, had become a moot point.

That didn’t stop Aldous.

All brawn and no fucking brain, this guy.

Diego, Leonard, and Titus had joined their disaster of a commander in the parking lot, each of them ducking and sidestepping and shouldering each other out of the way to stay beyond his indiscriminate reach without actually letting themselves touch him.

The last time a Shade member had tried to physically hold Aldous back during one of his rampages, they’d lost three fingers. Permanently. And those fingers still hadn’t been found.

“See?” Leonard shouted as he leapt away from almost being crushed beneath one of Aldous’s enormous green feet leaving a crater in the asphalt where the mage had just stood. “Thisis why I asked about a Plan B! But no. Nobody wants to listen.”

“Nobody wants to listen to you bitch about it now, either!” Diego snarled as he practically ran backwards to get out of the way.

Aldous stomped after him, slobbering and snarling and swiping his huge, meaty hands at everything that moved.

“What is hedoing?” Nyx asked.

Her high-pitched voice caught Aldous’s attention, and he let out another furious bellow before stomping after her instead.

The katari disappeared in a flash of purple light and reappeared several feet away, closer to the front of the building. “Is hestilltrying to get through the front doors?”

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