Page 12 of Elven Shadow

Rebecca caught sight of the first griybreki revealing himself on the ground floor of his gang’s hideout.

He was particularly toady, his enormously bulging eyes glowing a bright, acidic green over a thin-lipped mouth stretching almost as wide as the guy’s entire head. A terrible gargle emerged from the griybreki’s black-lined mouth, then it led the charge toward the double doors that still hadn’t finished swinging open all the way.

Before she knew it, the actual battle had begun, and Rebecca couldn’t get over how the hell they were supposed to pull themselves out of this one now.

As Aldous’s meaty fist crunched into Titus’s rock-hard gut to get the vuulbor out of the way, and dozens of jabbering, reeking griybreki spilled from the open doors into the dark, humid air, the perimeter of their protection wards strobed with neon-yellow light again, spitting and hissing and crackling.

None of the griybreki seemed to notice the building energy, but the magical flares pounded instantly into Titus’s back while he fought to keep Aldous at bay.

Instead of reaching for Aldous to draw him back with the tendrils of his blood magic, Diego changed course and ran straight toward the front doors. He sent his flickering whips of crimson toward the first of their enemy target racing outside into the night.

One large, particularly frog-faced griybreki shrieked in fury when the blood tendrils snatched him abruptly by the arms and around the ankles. One even clamped down around his neck before lifting him off the asphalt to dangle in the air.

His comrades flooding into the parking lot behind him skidded to a stop to study what they were up against, each of them screaming in multiple variations of rage and fear and bafflement.

Rebecca didn’t know what was worse—the dozens of enemy targets filtering out of the apartment complex or the obnoxiously large, howling, unthinking mass their leader had become.

She couldn’t tell which needed her attention more.

Titus could hold Aldous off for a while, sure, but not forever. Their leader clearly had no interest in standing out here where there was plenty of space and fresh air for this fight.

No, the green monstrosity just kept trying to either pummel through or lumber around Titus, but the vuulbor kept him at bay every time.

So when the griybreki hurtling out of their hideout made it around Titus’s hulking form and headed straight for the changeling beast, neither Aldous nor his team were fully prepared to protect him. Or themselves.

With a gurgling cry, the closest frogman not caught up in Diego’s blood magic launched himself with one hell of a leap toward Aldous. The same neon-yellow magic of the gang’s wards pulsed between his webbed, weirdly long-fingered hands as he sailed through the air.

The grotesque little creature would have made it, probably smacking against Aldous’s chest along the way, but it would have been a decent attack.

He didn’t get the chance.

Halfway through his leap, the griybreki’s battle cry strangled into a horrified scream.

An enormous wolf with thick, dark-gray fur leapt from the asphalt and clamped its jaws around the leaping griybreki’s foot.

The enemy shrieked in the air, incapable of catching himself in a landing. Instead, his face smacked into the asphalt, his scream instantly muffled by his face bashing across the parking lot.

The wolf with the creature’s foot in its jaws snarled and growled and violently shook its head, trying to rip the guy’s limb off as if he were nothing more than a giant, noisy chew toy.

Rebecca watched all the strangeness playing out around her and couldn’t settle upon a single moment within the chaos that would benefit from her help the most.

She summoned another orb of crackling red battle magic in her hand—the kind Shade had definitely seen before, the kind she might have even been somewhat famous for among certain parties—and launched it at the enemy.

The grotesque frogmen leaping through the open doors of their hideout through some sort of race-specific hole in their wards scrambled madly about in all directions to engage any number of Shade’s members fighting them off.

Some she hit, others darted out of the way.

And they just kept coming.

In seconds, the horde of nasty little creatures had grown impossibly large, gurgling and screaming their battle cries.

Rebecca knocked several of them to the asphalt with her first few attacks while Diego tossed explosive volleys of blood magic at the enemy.

Nyx popped in and out of existence all around them, targeting one griybreki at a time when she reappeared in front of them or behind them or two feet above them, seemingly out of nowhere. She grabbed hold of the grotesque little critters by the collars of their shirts or their shoulders or with a hand clenched tightly around a fistful of stringy hair, if they happened to have any, and threw them across the lot.

The gray wolf darted in and out of the fray, launching himself at one enemy target after the other, shaking them in its jaws like they were dead already before tossing them aside.

Aldous was too far gone to his transformation to understand the epic mistake he’d made. Clearly, the only thing in that hulking brute’s mind now was getting at the flickering glow of the apartment building lighting up the muggy night like a neon-yellow spotlight.

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