Page 7 of Elven Shadow

With no new clothes for this hulking beast to change into, the guy’s equally grotesque gut flopped out over what little remained of his dress slacks, bare, dark green skin exposed and wobbling under the pressure of moving this hulking mass of jiggling flesh and spit and terrifying power.

Or, at least, the powerwouldhave been terrifying if Aldous actually knew how to wield it in the first place.

This guy was a total nutjob, drunk on the power of having been appointed Shade’s leader, ignorant to his countless shortcomings, and diametrically opposed to rectifying any of them through hard work, training, discipline, or getting a fucking grip.

Which made him not much more than a giant, grunting, slobbering mountain of flesh with no intelligence whatsoever folded into the blueprints.

Rebecca only had one response in mind for this guy’s idiocy.

Fucking changeling.

Aldous’s baffling transformation occurred in the span of two and a half seconds, leaving his team gaping at him like a bunch of rookies still as green behind the ears as his skin.

Thanks to their leader’s magical road rage, Edwardo didn’t have to lift a finger.

Aldous was about to blow this mission wide open all on his own.

Now, with their leader having transformed himself into a pea-brained giant with the sole purpose of physical destruction and blind rage and not a whole lot else, they were fucked.

When Aldous The Thing took his next step forward, grotesquely misshapen toes the size of nectarines having ripped themselves out of his shoes, the entire parking lot trembled.

The front of the apartment building shuddered. Windows rattled in their frames. Lights inside flickered dangerously.

A thick crack appeared on the far-left side of the building’s front wall, spidering rapidly up the building’s corner to at least the eighth floor with a deafening crunch and crackle.

Somewhere nearby, either inside the building or in another relatively close parking lot, a car alarm wailed, quickly followed by three or four more in a pathetic attempt to alert locals to potential physical threat.

Then Rebecca and her team had no choice but to jump into immediate action, all without a plan now because that plan had just gone to shit.

Nyx acted first.

A static burst pulsed away from her in a tingling shockwave with a strobe of deep violet light as she shouted at the top of her lungs, “North side wards confirmed! We can’t go in there now!”

Aldous roared again, still building momentum with his hulking mass toward the building’s entrance, drowning out nearly every other sound.

“He can’t hear you from here,” Rebecca shouted, pointing at Maxwell.

Hovering two feet off the ground now, Nyx let out a series of nervous whines as she flitted back and forth in the air, then disappeared again with a pop.

She reappeared beside Maxwell once more and dropped both feet to the ground a second later when Aldous’s tree trunk of an arm swung back toward her.

It would have knocked her out of the air and knocked her unconscious if he’d made contact, but she dropped just in time and practically threw herself face first to the asphalt to avoid the blow. “They have wards! He said they wouldn’t have wards!”

After nimbly avoiding Aldous’s other enormous arm swinging out of control like a crane with a hand-shaped wrecking ball attached at the end, Maxwell landed gracefully on both feet, steadying himself in a crouch, and growled, “Obviously, he was wrong!”

Once Rebecca caught sight of Leonard, Diego, and Titus all closing in toward Maxwell, Nyx, and The Thing in front of the apartment building, she gazed up at the windows along the north-facing wall.

All of them strobing with that neon-yellow light. Pulsing with flickers of crackling ward magic that had now fully completed its circuit around the entire building.

It certainly gave the impression of complete protection, anyway.

Aldous had given these shitheads plenty of advanced warning and more than enough time to successfully erect these wards without interference.

Like a fucking idiot.

But just in case, Rebecca summoned an orb of deep silver light in one hand and flicked out her wrist.

The conjured magic moved with her, instantly elongating and hardening until she held not an orb but a six-foot spear, glinting like folded steel under the dim streetlamps of the parking lot and reflecting the neon-yellow ward magic now glowing within every window in front of her.

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