Page 39 of Elven Shadow

Rebecca smothered her next smile with another slurping sip that still came dangerously close to burning her mouth, even with all the added cream, and ignored him.

It felt like forever ago that a bubbly witch with curly blonde hair and a smile for everyone and everything first showed Rebecca the best way to drink coffee in this world.

Thinking about her old life—or one of them, anyway, the one she’d led before the time had come to move on and make her way across the country until she’d found Shade—reminded her just how much of a fickle bitch time could really be.

Her brain told her the witch and all those experiences were from a lifetime before now, decades, when in reality, it had been only a few months shy of a year ago.

That witch had pink hair now, which she’d already changed the last time Rebecca had seen her. Back when the elf calling herself Rebecca Knox had run with a whole different kind of magical crew.

The kind Shade wouldn’t have particularly appreciated if Golden, Colorado and Chicago, Illinois had been a whole lot closer together.

That, more than anything else, had been Rebecca’s cue to take her leave.

That past wasn’t necessarily tied to the far more valuable secrets Rebecca kept now. Nor did it have anything to do with the new path she intended to walk here with Shade. Not to mention the current threats to all of it Aldous’s petulantly vindictive secret mission just for her had thrust upon her.

All of her pasts and different lives, no matter how congruent or disconnected, had to remain exactly where she’d left them.

Behind her.

Buried forever.

Because even slipping up a little right now and letting the wrong part of herself show at the wrong time could destroy everything she’d been fighting so hard to protect.

A delicate balance she had to maintain, both for her own sanity and to avoid the war she knew was coming. Eventually.

If those out there who’d been looking for her since the beginning ever found out where she was…

Before anything else, though, Rebecca had to figure out who Aldous had chosen as her damn shadow.

Which was also the point of coming down to the common room first thing in the morning. If she could track who moved where, who followed her down the halls or watched her from across the room at any given time, she could pin down exactly who to look out for in the coming days.

Being followed by someone ready and willing to do whatever Aldous told them to, reporting back to him whatever they saw Rebecca doing, would make her daily existence trickier than navigating a minefield buried in straw.

She couldn’t start her real work until she figured out who had been assigned to track her every move. Only then could she start feeding Aldous the information hethoughthe wanted while she labored in secret toward securing her own continued survival here.

And, by default, the survival of every other Shade member.

All because she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that very soon, Aldous would try to pull something he never should have considered. Something far worse than going full berserker in the middle of a semi-tactical operation, or knocking himself out cold in the process, or even injuring all the other operatives working for him.

Since Rebecca couldn’t just leave Shade without being followed and more likely hunted, she had to make the most of her time with the organization for as long as she continued to stay.

Which brought her back to that damn shadow and how the hell she was supposed to figure out who it was. Especially when there was hardly even anyone in the common room this morning.

No one had followed her here. No one stood back along the perimeter, keeping to themselves and trying to act normal while casting her occasional suspicious glances. Nothing had changed since she’d stepped into the common room other than Bor commenting on her morning sweet tooth.

Not what she’d expected at all.

She hadn’t even seen Maxwell yet, which was odd enough given his daily habit of being the first person to wake and the last person to turn in at the end of a long, hard day of vigilante justice and trying not to die.

As far as she knew, the shifter hadn’t shown himself today.

Asking around would only make her look that much more suspicious. So she took her coffee with her and headed across the building toward the only other location at Shade’s headquarters compound that could hold her attention for longer than five minutes.

In the last six months, she’d gone through at least a quarter of the surprisingly extensive collection of printed works and information Shade had maintained within the compound since before most of its current operatives could remember. Most of the books were copies of human stories, but there was a section specifically for magical volumes as well.

Not that Rebecca could glean any knowledge from that comparatively small collection that hadn’t already been drilled into her head countless times and trained into the core of her being over and over again. She could have been a living library in her own right, which was just another part of the problem.

It wasn’t just where she was from, to whom she had answered, or what part she’d played in the broader-scale politics she’d wanted nothing to do with. It wasn’t just the magic inherent in her that had been honed to an astoundingly fine edge, sharp enough to cut through worlds.

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