Page 2 of Elven Shadow

Maxwell was the first to step forward after their leader. No surprise there. “Everyone knows the plan.”

“It’s a shit plan,” Rebecca muttered. “Evenyouknow that.”

The shifter turned slightly to look over his shoulder at her, his eyes narrowing with a brief flash of silver as a low growl escaped him. “And we all have a job to do. That includes you, elf.”

Then he stalked across the parking lot after Aldous without another word.

“I’m telling you guys,” Leonard whispered once Aldous and Maxwell were out of earshot, shaking his head. “This isn’t gonna work.”

As the team fell in line anyway, Diego tugged his baseball cap farther down over his forehead to hide the deep, glowing red of his eyes, then shot the mage a sidelong glance. “You think we don’t all know that already? This whole thing is shit. But you heard Mr. Head of Security over there. We all got a job. And I’m not trying to get my ass handed to me by the dude in charge likeyoualmost did.”

Leonard glared back at him. “You think Iwantedthat?”

“Better get moving.” The low, rumbling voice from behind made everyone else take an involuntary step forward to move out of the way. Titus was one of a kind—giant as hell, built like a fucking tank, and almost as impenetrable.

Rebecca just hoped for his sake that the vuulbor was as immune to Aldous’s stupidity as he was to nearly every other form of attack, magical or otherwise.

Pursing her lips, she stepped forward with the others, producing a streaking crackle of crimson battle magic in one hand. “Let’s get this over with, then.”

With Aldous taking an arrogant twenty-foot lead and his shifter Head of Security stalking off after him, the other five Shade members followed suit, quickly fanning out across the lot to take their designated positions.

Rebecca kept her mouth shut through sheer force of will, which was almost more painful than the epic failure she knew their leader was about to drag them through tonight. Not for the first time, either.

It wasn’t because she was afraid of the changeling, like Leonard and Nyx were. Once upon a time, Rebecca wouldn’t have hesitated to shut Aldous’s mouth for him and teach the guy a lesson he desperately needed; if it ended up saving innocent lives in the process, that was a bonus.

She didn’t hold back out of some misplaced sense of order and duty, either, like Maxwell. The shifter was a stickler for the rules and wound up tighter than the extra coil of firing wire she’d once found in Shade’s basement armory.No doubt about it.

He’d been that way from the very beginning, from the second Rebecca had stumbled into Shade’s sights and found herself passing their tests and surviving “initiation”.

Honestly, the shifter’s diligent carrying-out of orders and obeying all the rules had at first made joining Shade’s ranks fairly attractive.

All because Rebecca had assumed six months ago that she’d be joining a cause meant to sweep Chicago’s streets clean of the magical scum too slippery for the Magical Judiciary Council’s grasp.

Misplaced magicals bringing justice and a hell of a fight to the overlooked criminals who thought the laws of the human world didn’t apply to them and the Xaharí laws of the old world wouldn’t catch up to them.

Yeah, it had seemed like the perfect way to stay busy. To give back a little where she could. To keep her head down, out of the spotlight and out of broad public speculation.

Fighting underground battles in the dark of night against the kind of deviant assholes who kept their shady business on the down-low and out of the public eye in the first place—this should have been a perfect fit for her.

Clearly, that wasn’t the case.

But she kept her mouth shut anyway because it was safer. It kept her relatively anonymous. Just another grunt following orders, another cog in the giant machine of living on Earth as a magical from a different world.

Rebecca didn’t say a thing because it kept Aldous from noticing her any more than he had to. It kept her from drawing Shade’s attention, it kept others from looking too closely, and it kept all her secrets neatly bundled and stashed away where no one would ever even think to look.

She kept her mouth shut because opening it would open the door to who and what she was, and once it was open, it could never be shut again.

Best to keep it all locked away, even if it meant going along with Aldous’s bullshit plans like she’d been doing with Shade for the last six months.

Now that the team had broken away from each other in the parking lot, Rebecca cut to the right with Nyx to flank the building’s northern wall and keep a lookout for movement from the side exits or around back.

Why Aldous still thought he could successfully pull off a mission like this without endangering Shade’s members and without making himself look like a complete ass was beyond her.

Why not just get the hell out now?

The answer was simple.

Six months of running with this crew, and now Rebecca was just in too deep to back out.

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