Page 21 of Elven Shadow

Rebecca stretched both long legs across the couch’s cushions, crossing one ankle over the other as she casually propped herself up with an elbow and forearm on the cracked and splitting armrest. Then she watched and waited.

Something was definitely about to happen, and she didn’t want to miss a second of it.

She counted twenty-three other Shade members in the common room tonight. That accounted for a little over two-thirds of the organization’s total ranks living and working out of this repurposed steel factory, doing whatever they had to do to get by.

She didn’t know all their names, and she didn’t plan to, either. She only really interacted with the magicals who made up the tactical team from their belly-up bust tonight.

For whatever reason, she’d executed more operations with that specific six-man team—plus Aldous—more than any other combination of Shade’s operatives, and eventheydidn’t know her beyond what she could offer the unit in pursuit of their various objectives.

That was already more than enough.

The more people thought they really knew her, the more dangerous it was for them to know her at all.

And the more dangerous it was for Rebecca to risk being seen and recognized and discovered.

Names, however, weren’t necessary for recognizing the murmurs of malcontent and dissension moving through the ranks, especially when every conversation she overheard tonight touched on internal frustrations and insubordinate loathing in some form or fashion.

That included discussions of Shade’s most recent failure in the field, which Rebecca had expected everyone in the compound to have already heard about by the time she’d entered the common room tonight.

“Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. You’re telling me he tried to blow up a bomb?”

“I mean, that’s basically what happened…”

“So you guys went in for absolutely nothing…”

“Couldn’t even pick up the fucking weapon. They’d already turned it on…”

“Hell of a close call, man.”

“Too close. If I could walk out of here today, I would. I’m fucking done with this…”

“I wouldloveto find the motherfucker who raised that asshole. Can’t actually be genetic, can it? That kinda stupidity, I mean. It’s gotta be a side effect of something else, right?”

“If something doesn’t change real soon, we’re not gonna make it. None of us…”

“He’s gonna get us all killed for, like, literally nothing. That ain’t what I signed up for…”

“Seriously, I’m fine.” Leonard entered the common room, powerwalking at a furious pace as if that could get him far enough away from Nyx following closely on his heels.

She proved him wrong by disappearing from the hall into the common room with a pop and reappearing two feet in front of him in a flash of violet light.

Leonard yelped and staggered backward, but Nyx seemed far more concerned with imparting her own words of wisdom.

“You have to talk tosomebodyabout it,” she said. “Why not just let Zida take a look? What’s the worst that can happen?”

“The worst that could happen…” Leonard echoed with a snort. “Are you serious? I can’t believe you’re actually asking me that right now.”

Frowning, Nyx tilted her head and studied his face. “You can’t believe I care about you getting hurt out there?”

“Thisis the worst that could happen!” he shouted, sweeping his bloody arm in the shredded sleeve of his leather trench coat toward the common room.

Now everyone else lounging around here in the middle of the night had abandoned their own conversations to eavesdrop on Leonard and Nyx’s.

Rebecca would have done the same if she hadn’t already been watching them from the start.

“Everything that happened tonight,” the mage continued, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “That’sthe worst, okay? It already happened, and yeah, it could’ve gone a totally different way. I mean, any worse than this, and we’d all be dead!”

Instead of fixing him with her wide violet eyes, Nyx gaze now darted around the common room, taking in the sight of almost a two-dozen other magicals all listening quite intently to their conversation turned argument.

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