Page 92 of Elven Shadow

She hadn’t noticed until that arm was almost completely regenerated, and by the time Rebecca saw it, it was too late to pull back.

The homunculus’s brand-new arm—and the brand-new hand sprouting instantly from the end of it—lashed out toward her. Its frigid, life-strangling grip wrapped around her forearm like a vice and squeezed.

Rebecca screamed.

She couldn’t jerk away from the hold on her arm because the magic of her Bloodshadow spear hadn’t yet completed its work. So she was forced to endure it all, enslaved to her strongest, deadliest magic until it had satisfied itself with its latest victim.

Only once before had she felt agony like this—one other time in her life, when she’d been certain Theodil had taken things too far, certain that her own horrifying power was going to kill her.

Then her instincts kicked into gear—desperation and magic and the sheer will to live taking over in a split second until it was entirely beyond Rebecca’s control.

Flashes of dark, mercurial silver light strobed around her, flashing brighter and leaping straight out of her body to pierce the homunculus’s flesh wherever the lights landed.

Part of her rational mind was aware of how much she’d just locked herself to the homunculus like this, imagining the kind of strange, deadly pincushion they must look like now from the outside.

If she hadn’t been so busy screaming beneath the excruciatingly cold burn of the thing’s hand on her arm—sending death and decay and the freeze of non-existence through her entire body—she might have laughed at the imagery.

But she could only hold on and let her darkest magic do the rest of the dirty work for her.

The silver of her darkest power coursed through the homunculus as well, pumped into it from dozens of silver spears like splinters of unlight cutting into the creature.

A second later, she felt the strength of the creature’s grip on her arm weaken. The fingers slackened. The power imbued into this conjured form of lifeless black and gray flesh filtered away, its vitality drawn right out of it through so many pinholes of mercurial silver light.

Then the homunculus’s animating magic—not quite a life force but more like a spell—wavered in the air between them for a moment. A cloud of black smoke shot through with mottled gray and white specks, like bits of ash blown about by a gentle breeze.

Rebecca couldn’t stop screaming.

She couldn’t stop her magic from doing what it did next, either.

This was its purpose. She’d just picked the wrong target.

But who in their right mind ever expected to fight a creature in any battle that didn’t actually possess its own spark of life?

That was exactly whatthiscreature did not possess.

The speckled swarm of dust flecks and the darkness seeping from the homunculus’s flesh was not a sustainable source of life or power for anyone, including the homunculus itself.

Unfortunately, Rebecca’s magic didn’t discriminate. Even as she screamed beneath the creature’s hold on her arm, that lifeless dust cloud drew into her wide-open mouth as if it were any other lifeforce of any other living thing. Then it disappeared down her throat and inside of her in an instant.

For the first time in her life, even as the homunculus’s grip fell away from her wrist and the monstrosity’s body toppled backward onto the pile of debris to never move again, Rebecca was horrified by what her deepest, darkest, most powerful magic had done.

And she was terrified now of what came next.

Because none of that should have happened.

The second that inky cloud that was neither pure magic nor pure life worked its way down her throat, Rebecca was certain that both whatever she’d just consumed and everything else she’d eaten today were about to come violently back up again.

Clenching her fists, she tried to swallow down the oddly dry physical lump in the back of her throat. A lump that had to have come from trying to consume a spark that didn’t exist from a creature that had never truly held any life inside it in the first place.

The lump stuck, closing her throat, and then the pain hit her.

Nothing as immediately agonizing as that frigid, searing, all-consuming cold from the homunculus’s bare touch, but it was unbearable all the same.

A sharp ache in the pit of her stomach. That hardness there in the back of her throat. Then, when she tried to clear her throat and get things moving again, there was that rare, dull burn of not being able to draw her next breath.

What the fuck?

Another explosion wracked the building somewhere else nearby, but she hardly noticed.

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