Page 178 of Elven Shadow

Maybe he’d hurt her later, maybe not, but the enormous gray wolf finally closed his jaws around the half-ogre’s thick neck with unnatural force. With a quick jerk of his head and a sickening crunch, he broke the half-ogre’s neck between those powerful jaws.

The screaming stopped, but the damage had already been done.

And now Rebecca had to fight way too many enemy combatants at once. How the hell she was supposed to do thatnowwas anyone’s guess; she couldn’t use her Bloodshadow magic anymore. Not with Maxwell here. Not where he could see it with his own eyes only to question her mercilessly about it later.

The breach alarm wailed high and low. Several more floodlights clicked on along the prison’s exterior wall. Then the first of Harkennr’s soldiers to reach the intruders converged upon their position behind the vehicle.

With another hiss, Rebecca summoned a churning sphere of crackling red battle magic in her hand and darted into the fray without so much as attempting to form a new plan.

The shit had already hit the fan; there was no use trying to pretend otherwise.

She surprised the first few soldiers rounding the rear of the utility vehicle as she darted out from behind it. The first guy got a face full of her battle magic that sent him careening backward across the prison yard with a pained shriek before he slumped to the ground somewhere beside the building’s entrance.

A high-powered whine rose in pitch and exploded in front of Rebecca’s face. She stopped short and reeled away from the blast of silver, violet-tinged magical energy bursting from the muzzle of one augmented magitek assault rifle.

The blast crashed into the side of the utility vehicle a second before the entire thing erupted with a deafening explosion, a widening blast of unbearable heat, and a plume of thick, dark smoke. Shards of shredded metal and shattered plexiglass sprayed everywhere like deliberately fired shrapnel.

Rebecca ducked and kept running through the scattered wreckage falling out of the sky and plunking down into the grass all around her. The bodies of Harkennr’s frontline soldiers moved sporadically in the explosion’s aftermath, though several of them recovered their senses quickly enough to squeeze off multiple rounds of augmented weapons fire or their own intrinsic magical attacks summoned for personal use.

She dodged the sporadic burst of magical weaponry launched her way, but she couldn’t keep that up forever.

Moments later, the front doors of the Old Joliet Prison were flung wide open, and another dozen armed enemies spilled into the yard while that damn breach siren just kept wailing and the blindingly bright searchlight in the guard tower swept back and forth across the smoking dirt and patches of flaming grass.

The extra soldiers of Harkennr’s private army weren’t even the worst part.

When those doors opened, the worst part increased in volume and intensity—all those screams, shrieks, sobs, and desperate wails coming from inside the prison itself, from all the imprisoned victims held against their will and used for ancestors only knew what kind of terrifying new experiments Harkennr was up to these days.

The cries from inside were overwhelming.

Rebecca could hide from enemy targets. She could lie in wait and pick them off one by one if she wanted. But she could do nothing against the sound of so much agony erupting from inside the prison.

She couldn’t alleviate the pain of dozens, if not hundreds, of captured magicals held prisoner for one sick bastard’s private experiments. Nor could she stop herself from feeling all of that agonized, miserable energy shooting into the yard with the screams and pleas for mercy and release.

Cries begging for death.

The weight of it stopped her in her tracks.

Rebecca sucked in a raw, jagged breath, trying to pull herself back together.

She wasn’t supposed tofeelanyone else’s pain. That part was entirely new. What the hell was Harkennrdoingto them?

What was the sound doing toher?

Flashes of fire and pain and misery bombarded her memory from all sides, past, present, and future. Seconds later, it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between the memories she’d tried to obliterate decades ago and the reality of her current situation, the very real danger facing her in the here and now.

For a moment, Rebecca almost let herself believe she was back in Ryngivát, with Kordus Harkennr himself, torturing herself all over again while she pretended to be someone else for entirely different reasons.

Entirelydarkerreasons…

Another crackling line of magitek weapons fire burst through the darkness in her general direction, casting streaks of noxious green light across the dead grass while shadows lengthened and shortened all around her.

Another vehicle exploded somewhere on the other side of the prison yard, though whether that was a result of the enemy’s friendly fire in the chaos, some other malfunction, or Maxwell’s uninvited intrusion, there was no way to tell.

It was hard enough to see anything within the billowing smoke and scattered bursts, especially when she hadn’t had time to formulate a contingency plan for someone crashing her private infiltration mission.

Rebecca reached the next vehicle and ducked beneath a crackle of blazing yellow magic bursting from the spinning turret mount on the back of the vehicle, its operator hauling the entire machine in her direction. But the fired shots went so wide, she had a feeling he couldn’t see her in the darkness.

All the smoke and debris from the explosions and the scattered shreds of shrapnel from who knew what filling the air only added to the chaos and made it impossible to tell what was happening anywhere.

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