Page 119 of Elven Shadow

But her hands were tied. She had no physical weapon to reach for, even if she could have reached it, and with one arm pinned beside her, a few bursts of attack magic shooting from her fingers weren’t going to hit the guy kneeling on top of her.

Time slowed with unbelievable clarity.

The other Shade members roared at her from every direction, shaking their fists, hopping about in anticipation, fueling the communal battle frenzy and bloodlust. Not to mention the thirst for revenge they all wanted againstShade’s former leader. All of it together spurred them on with astonishing ferocity.

Everything echoed in her ears and banged around inside her skull while she struggled against the bastard on top of her with no means of getting him off.

No viable meanswithoutthe potential of exposing herself.

A growling snigger tumbled from Aldous’s gaping mouth as he pressed down on the dagger against her forearm with both hands now, leaning farther forward. The fact that he hadn’t killed her yet was a fucking miracle.

She wouldn’t let that go to waste. But it meant risking everything.

Still, dying was a hell of a lot worse for her than being discovered.

It had to be done.

With her left arm still raised and trembling under the effort of keeping one leering, sweating blade from bearing all the way down toward her and her right arm pinned by her side beneath Aldous’s strategically placed knee, Rebecca had to break her own promise to herself.

Only for a second.

With a twitch of her fingers and a quick flick of her wrist, a crackling orb of dark-gray, lightless energy burst to life in her palm before elongating into a Bloodshadow spear that wasn’t supposed to have existed in the first place.

The power of her released magic flooded through her at the exact second the tip of her materializing spear—with a blade sharper than any known to the physical plane, sharp enough to cut through worlds—launched itself at a forty-five-degree angle from her fist clenching down around it.

And speared straight through Aldous’s back.

In that split second of victory, Rebecca felt everything as if she were the spear itself wielding the elf and not the other way around.

She felt everything inside Aldous—skin and fat and muscle punctured clean through, before sinew and cartilage, capillaries and bone. She felt each individual vertebrae of his spine blistering apart beneath her finely honed edge, spilling spinal fluid into blood and flesh and ruptured material.

She never did quite reach the base of his skull.

Then Aldous screamed.

It wasn’t like any other scream from any other, enemy or innocent or devastated, mourning soul.

It was a scream of presence and existence. The final attempt to shout into the void with all the strength and fury he had left that he existed. That he washere, in this moment, made of matter and memory and, for now, incomprehensible levels of pain.

If the circumstances had been different, if Rebecca didn’t have an audience, she would have finished it to completion, and Aldous Corriger would have been wiped from this plane of existence entirely.

Instead, before his scream finished ripping from his throat and echoing across the garage, Rebecca called her Bloodshadow magic back.

The spear disappeared with a burst of dark mercurial silver and ravenous unlight leaving no trace at all.

The gleaming blade toppled from Aldous’s open hand and clattered onto the cement somewhere beside her head.

Rebecca bucked beneath the limp weight on top of her.

As incapacitated as he was, the guy’s body was remarkably easy to toss aside.

Aldous tumbled off of her to roll away across the concrete.

Because she hadn’t finished the job with her spear, he was either dead already or would be soon. Rebecca wasn’t taking any chances. She had to leave him like that.

Snarling, she rolled off her back, scrambled to all fours, and snatched up Aldous’s blade. Then she leapt at him, dagger raised in both hands now as she came down at this waste of space from above.

Aldous’s glowing green eyes and wide, gaping mouth waited for her, surprise and confusion flooding through him at how drastically the tables had turned.

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