Page 124 of Elven Shadow

Zida snorted and tossed a hand in the air. “Smartass.”

Then the old woman disappeared through a small door in the back of the infirmary.

Rebecca got a brief glance of what looked like a supply room doubling as a disturbingly disorganized office before Zida pulled the door shut behind her.

Still fighting to fully catch her breath despite no longer climbing stairs or shuffling down hallways, Rebecca finally had a chance to study the cut from Aldous’s blade.

It was a straightforward slice, not so deep to be debilitating but enough of an injury that there should have been a good deal of blood.

There was none.

The only thing hinting at Rebecca being a living being who should have bled from her wounds was a single bead of thick, viscous red—so dark, it was almost black—barely seeping from her flesh at the end of the long slash across her forearm.

A slash that had almost landed right across the dark-gray handprint seared around her left wrist.

Even more concerning was the fact that when she gingerly prodded that knife wound, there was zero pain. That dark bead of blood that wasn’t quiteblood—not the way it should have been—welled and grew before trickling down her forearm. It only journeyed a few centimeters before congealing into something that definitely shouldn’t have been seeping from a wound.

On top of how awful she felt right now, how hard it was to breathe, how much she’d been coughing, and how exhausted she’d become, that lack of pain was particularly alarming.

Then she poked experimentally at the darkening gray handprint and hissed.

No pain there, either.

No sensation at all.

Far worse than deadened nerve endings, though, was the sensation against her exploratory fingertip—not of her own poisoned flesh on her wrist and forearm but of something hard and cold and lifeless.

Her own flesh felt more like smooth stone beneath her fingers.

Definitely not good.

She shot a quick glance toward the door to Zida’s office, behind which echoed rummaging thumps and scuffles while the healer searched for supplies and grumbled unintelligibly to herself.

Meaning Rebecca still had a few more moments of privacy.

She was almost positive Zida wouldn’t find any poison on Aldous’s blade. No, she couldn’t prove it at the moment, but her gut told her she would have been just fine if her only injury had gone from Aldous’s attack.

What ailed her now was all because of the homunculus and, more specifically, Rebecca’s dumbest mistake in decades.

In a moment of weakness and surprise, she’d let her Bloodshadow magic take over to consume the un-life within the homunculus searing its own special mark down into her flesh. That should never have happened. She should never have lost control like that. She should have known better.

She did know better, but for all intents and purposes, Rebecca was certain she’d basically poisoned herself.

If that were true, then there was still a chance she could un-poison herself. Not completely, though. Not here and now with only the healer around, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to use her Bloodshadow magic against anyone in Shade.

Aldous had been an exception, of course. Ending him the way she did had been a matter of life and death. Self-defense. There was a stark difference between doing what she had to do to protect her own life and turning against an innocent magical inside this building because she didn’t want to wait for an appropriate victim.

She’d have to deal with consuming the homunculus’s dark alchemy instead of an actual lifeforce later, when she could get out of the compound on her own and undo the idiotic mistake she’d made.

Right now, though, she could heal the creature’s handprint on her flesh, which also clearly affected the knife wound. Maybe that would help alleviate the rest of her physical ailments.

It was worth a shot. Especially when something told her Zida wasn’t going to find anything in her backup stores of potions and regents and healing supplies that catered specifically to either a Bloodshadow Elf or damage done by a homunculus that had been crafted and conjured solely to hunt Rebecca down and take her out.

She wasn’t exactly thinking at her clearest, no, but she had to dosomething. This wasn’t the first time she’d had to heal herself after a fight. She just had to make sure no one else saw her using the Bloodshadow magic necessary to get the job done.

Grunting at the effort of moving her own body, she pulled her injured left arm into her lap and got started. Her right hand shook as she hovered it over her poisoned wrist and forearm, but that was all she needed to let what healing magic she did possess take over.

The dark, swirling silver light of her Bloodshadow magic—of her lineage and her birthright—bloomed in her right palm to sear away the infection burrowing through her flesh.

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