Page 93 of Elven Shadow

Rebecca staggered backward, fighting to draw in another breath. Her mouth gaped open, and choking coughs escaped her, but she couldn’t get any more than that.

More shivering layers of dust and dirt and chunks of plaster drifted down from the open hole in the ceiling, and now she was clawing at her throat, trying to get something to move.

By the Blood, she’d just broken her own rule to use her magic as a last resort, and it had gone completely out of control in under five seconds beneath the homunculus’s grip. Her magic had taken over without her consent, filled her with something she already knew couldn’t sustain her, and now she was choking on it, right here in this hallway, with no way to get it out.

What an epic fucking joke if this was the way Rebecca Bloodshadow met her end—if this was how the Bloodshadow Court lost its one and only heir. Not to her stubbornness and refusal to become what they’d made of her but because her magic had turned on her at the last second.

She might as well have drunk poison after filling the glass herself.

It was almost funny.

Somewhere in the back of her awareness, as she gasped her breath and dropped to one knee beside the pile of rubble, other sounds rose in the hallway too.

Multiple voices all talking at once. A shout of surprise. Footsteps clomping both toward Rebecca and away from her as more explosions hurtled through the air and this part of the building trembled violently once more.

Then there were hands on her. Someone kneeling in front of her, trying to touch her, to move her hair away from her face, looking for the injuries causing such a devastating reaction without leaving a single clue behind as to what had done this.

More shouting. More footsteps. Then the figure in front of her brought something to Rebecca’s lips.

She slapped that administering hand away, tried to explain to her would-be rescuer that this wasn’t any ordinary wound—physical or magical. That she was going to drop dead any second now because there was no cure for a Bloodshadow Elf consuming another creature’s energy that was neither life nor death but something beyond them both.

As far as Rebecca knew, she was the first elf in history to make such a devastatingly stupid mistake. All because the homunculus had surprised her with a tight grip and a little pain.

She should’ve been able to handle it. Now she was done.

Was this really the end?

“Come on!” A gravelly voice that was half rasp and without gender reached her ears. “Drink this!”

Rebecca’s lungs were on fire now. Her throat felt as if it had already been ripped out, and the tears that had welled in her eyes from the pain and the effort of trying to breathe now spilled over.

She slapped the hand away again and would have told whoever it belonged to that literally nothing in anyone’s possession here could help her now. She’d already killed herself with such an elegantly unforeseen fuckup.

“If I didn’t know better,” the voice continued, “I’d say youwantto die. Stop fighting me and drink it, elf. If this doesn’t work, then you can pass right on through the veil. But I won’t let you without giving it a hell of an effort first.”

The cold rim of a metal cup pressed against Rebecca’s lips. She couldn’t tell who it was or what she was being fed. She couldn’t seeanythinganymore; her vision had darkened to nothing but shadows and rough shapes now.

How long would it take her to finally die?

But she let the cup press tighter against her lips, and By the Blood, she drank. It was all she could do at this point.

“Yes, yes, yes. That’s it. All of it. Don’t stop. The faster you knock that back, the better off you’ll be.”

Easy to say when whoever the hell this was didn’t have two pairs of hands holding her own away from her face and a cold cup jammed up to her mouth. Not to mention an inability to breathe.

But Rebecca drank, tasting nothing and thinking in an odd moment of clarity that if someone had wanted to get rid of her without making it look like they’d gotten rid of her, now would be the perfect opportunity for an assassination.

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Thesecond Rebecca thought she couldn't swallow any more—when she thought she would pass out from lack of oxygen and whatever the hell else was seeping through her body now, moving like deadly sludge through her veins because she’d consumed a fucking homunculus—the metal cup jerked away from her lips.

Her throat still burned as the last drop slid down, and her body convulsed with the taste of magic and death swirling in her veins like poison.

It took her a moment to realize the cup was gone because she’d finally opened her mouth for one long, endlessly searing gasp that actually drew breath into her lungs for the first time in what felt like years.

“There you go…” The scratchy voice had returned. “I knew that was all it took. Just keep breathing ‘til you can tell me what the fuck you just tried to do to yourself.”

A heavy hand came down against Rebecca’s back for a few coarse slaps in quick succession, like they needed to dislodge something physical from her throat as well.

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