Page 31 of Elven Shadow

Not a well-known concoction on Earth, but Zida was old-school Xaharí and had never done much of anything to keep that a secret.

The stuff Rebecca smelled on Aldous now was basically magical meth.

Which meant, inside the changeling, the stuff was as volatile as he was.

Maybe they deserved each other. A match made in self-righteous hell. The original paradise.

When Aldous finally stopped marching away from her and had crossed most of his office to return to the side of his throne, his hand settled down on the gleaming, oiled wood of the enormous chair’s back one more time. The movement made the chair itself look like the source of his power.

It honestly wouldn’t have surprised her if he really believed that too.

“Either way,” he snapped with a trying-to-be-casual shrug, “you still owe me for that weapon.”

Rebecca tilted her head with a sigh. “So no. Bringing you back alive just wasn’t enough.”

“You’re gonna do something else for me,” he sneered again. “And this time, you don’t have a choice.”

That wasn’t much different than any other time with him. Not really.

Aldous was a major prick, yes. But for now, putting up with him was better than the alternative.

Barely.

After drumming his fingers on the back of the chair again, for what felt like years, as if he were wracking his mind for the perfect punishment to Rebecca’s rejection, the changeling settled his glinting green gaze on her, and one side of his mouth twitched up in a sadistic grin. “What do you know about the Darkspawn?”

Holy shit. Was heserious?

“The Darkspawn,” she repeated with a soft chuckle and shook her head. “It’s a fun bedtime story. That’s it. And no, I’m not gonna come read it to you—”

“Oh, it’s so muchmorethan that,” he interrupted, his sickening grin widening by the second. “Not just a story. It’s real.”

For the first time since stepping into his office, Rebecca finallylookedat this guy calling himself their leader. What she saw in that moment concerned her more than any of his other pitiful attempts to control her so far.

He really did take himself seriously, even when talking about something as legendary, desperately coveted, and completely nonexistent as the Darkspawn.

She swallowed and muttered, “Bullshit—”

“I’m not finished!” he roared. “You will keep your mouthshutuntil I address you directly with a goddamn question!”

Great. Now she’d really pissed him off and had to deal with this other wannabe personality of his until he got rid of her.

At least she was no longer forced to continue a conversation she never wanted in the first place.

She would have had to turn around again to gauge the shifter’s reaction to this little outburst the way she wanted, but that seemed like a much better way to keep this tediously overblown conversation going a lot longer than it might have otherwise, and Rebecca had been over it about thirty seconds in.

So she stood her ground in the center of the office and waited for Aldous to deliver the final bitof his lecture.

“You’re powerful enough on your own to have taken out that weapon, I’ll give you that.” Aldous spat the words through a snarl. “But no one told you to do it, elf. You were not authorized to deliberately destroy that piece of magical property specifically selected to be recovered and returned here to me. You disobeyed our Head of Security, the one person you answer to when you’re out there running these ops. And most of all, you’ve been obnoxiously rude tome.”

The snide smirk and wiggle of his head accompanying that last statement brought an instant vision to Rebecca’s mind.

She could conjure a completely different kind of blade—the kind he’d never seen before and would never know how to combat—and break up that self-serving smirk with a nice red smile slashing across his throat instead.

The idea almost made her smile herself.

“All that put together?” Aldous continued, pacing around his office again. “Well, that’s a hell of a debt you’ve racked up in the last twelve hours alone. We don’t do very well with debts around here, do we, Hannigan?”

He glanced at Maxwell, addressing him for the first time through this whole ordeal, and Rebecca couldn’t help but follow suit.

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