Page 170 of Elven Shadow

That all Rebecca would ever be and do amounted to stepping up onto the dais of the Shadowed Seat and taking her place so someone else wouldn’t be forced into such a position, just like her.

Fuck that. She wouldn’t let it happen.

No matter what kind of decision she made, someone always ended up getting screwed. Rebecca’s aim now was to make sure the terrible side effects of her decisions endangered the fewest number of people possible.

The best way to do that was to get out on her own and fix this. To make herself whole again, healed and back at full power, when Shade needed a good leader now more than ever before.

She just really fucking hoped this last dose of Zida’s potion wouldn’t wear off before she could get the job done.

Or she might not ever step foot inside Shade headquarters again.

42

Rebecca clung to the shadows, slinking toward the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Old Joliet Prison.

How fitting that Harkennr would choose such a place as his headquarters in this world—an old, defunct, abandoned prison rumored to be haunted by the spirits of human prisoners who’d died inside its walls. Maybe murdered, maybe not.

Now that she was here, this could go one of two ways for Rebecca.

Either she turned tonight into a game-changer for her life and her power, using her Bloodshadow magic to heal herself before she could finally dig her heels into leading Shade back on track, or she’d made one awful, deadly miscalculation, and the Old Joliet Prison would end up becoming her prison as well.

The first in a long line of prisons yet to hold her throughout her indefinite future—if she was wrong.

Priority number one tonight was siphoning enough energy from someone else’s life spark to heal her ravaged body and put herself back together again. Coming in at a close second was her personal objective of discovering whether or not Harkennr and his gang holed up within these tall, dank stone walls were affiliated in any way with the Azyyt Ra’al.

Plus, once she confirmed whether her new “friend” posed as much of a threat to her secrets as Rebecca suspected, she could then eliminate that threat to herself and to Shade, all in one go.

But only once she healed herself, and it had to be tonight.

Or she would fall in the process, fail, and forfeit all their lives right then and there.

So many things could still go wrong, especially in her weakened state.

She had to pull this off perfectly.

The closer she crept to the prison’s perimeter fence and the ineffectually dim light pooling beneath the occasional streetlamp that hadn’t been updated in decades, the stranger this place felt. The morewrongthe energy permeating the old property became.

Scaring off humans with legends and story traditions of the spirits of trapped prisoners haunting the property was one thing.

Actually hearing those voices all crying out in agony and desperation, pleading for their lives and for mercy in a variety of tongues, screaming beneath the tortures inflicted upon them, was something altogether different.

Those voices in the night air did not belong to the lost, untethered spirits of the dead, no matter what race.

The owners of those voices were very physical, very real, and very much still alive.

Rebecca reached the perimeter fence on the building’s east side where the property was darkest, away from the south end now serving as the entrance to Harkennr’s outpost.

Until Rebecca had successfully healed herself, she couldn’t reveal her presence. No one could know she was here.

Once she had the poison out of her body and was free of both the homunculus’s touch and debilitating effects of consuming its not-spark, it didn’t matter who saw her. They’d be dead before they realized she was coming for them, anyway.

With a quick flick of her wrist and a burst of dim, dark-gray smoke, Rebecca tightened her grip around her Bloodshadow spear and tilted her weapon forward.

The blade made no sound as it sliced effortlessly through the metal wire and barbed spikes. One, two, three, four swift cuts, and she’d opened a hole large enough for her to slip inside the perimeter.

The second she did, an explosion of keening wails and elevated screams burst from inside the old prison’s walls.

Rebecca ran toward the building’s brick wall ahead of her, searching the darkness for signs of pursuit.

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