Page 110 of Elven Shadow

Another dark chuckle escaped him. “I never imagined it would have takenfive. Yet here you stand, still breathing, still looking relatively intact. Except for thatwrist…”

Though his face remained hidden within the hood, Rebecca felt his pitch-black eyes directed toward her left arm.

The first thing she did was fold her arms to hide the marks as casually as possible and try her best to glare right back into a pair of eyes that were impossible to track.

Holy shit.

The attack. The explosions. The homunculi.

Hector was behind it all.

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The homunculi had been Hector’s all along. That sneaky son of a bitch had unleashed them himself, betraying the entire task force with his twisted dark alchemy.

For what?

“How’s it feeling, by the way?” Hector asked her, still presumably staring at her arm. “Not so great, by the looks of it. I have to say, your capabilities far exceeded my expectations. I must know how you did it.”

Behind him, Aldous gaped like a landed fish, his blazing emerald eyes bulging from his head as whatever grip he still maintained on his everyday human illusion disappeared and his fully green-tinted changeling skin emerged in full view.

He glared at the back of Hector’s black hood, his fists clenching so tightly at his sides and his knuckles now leaning more toward the lighter washed-out color of mint ice cream.

“Come now,” Hector continued. “Let’s see it…”

He stopped halfway between the staircase and Rebecca and spread his arms. “Before I finish this, I really must know how you did it, elf. Five homunculi in quick succession like that with, I can only assume, absolutely no idea who had created them or why they’d been sent after you.”

Rebecca snorted. “Well now weallknow the answer to that first part, don’t we?”

The garage exploded with confused whispers and murmured surprise. Aldous’s personal assassin—or errand boy, or whatever he was to their commander—had all but explicitly confessed to attacking the compound himself.

For what? Simple curiosity?

Through the growing noise, Aldous finally broke through his frozen bafflement and stunted disbelief. A furious cry burst from his gaping mouth as he stomped after Hector.

“Don’t you dare turn your fucking back on me!” he screeched, arms outstretched as if he could grab Hector’s throat and strangle him from several feet away.

Which he could.

The changeling’s arms shot straight out, elongating like stretchy rubber from the sleeves of his suit jacket until they’d shot within inches of where Hector’s neck should have been beneath the hood.

“I fucking own you!” he screamed. “And this is how you treat me? Like I’m some fuckingpeon—”

The rest of it happened in a flash all at once.

At first, Rebecca thought Zida’s fun little wakeup vile was starting to lose its potency and these were the side effects, but no. This was actually happening.

With a hard-set grimace, Maxwell took off after Aldous at an urgent clip.

Aldous’s outstretched hands at the end of his impossibly long reach clapped together where Hector should have been standing.

But Hector had already dissipated in a puff of churning black smoke and shadow, disappearing just before the changeling would have caught him from behind.

Within the black smoke cloud, he moved in the blink of an eye to reappear ten feet away, directly in front of Aldous, with a billowing swirl of curling tangles of shadow.

Aldous still hadn’t registered the change before he shrieked, “I am your—”

His shout cut off in a squeaking choke as Hector materialized practically right on top of him, one black-gloved hand already squeezing down tight around Aldous’s throat, further crushing his vocal cords and windpipe by the second.

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