Page 6 of Elven Shadow

Nearly every window now on this side of the building had illuminated with the brilliant glow of intense war magic.

“Two minutes.” Now Aldous sounded bored.

Not a good sign.

If one positive thing came out of this tonight, at least the entire team had a real-time countdown until everything went to shit.

“Come on…” Rebecca whispered, glancing back and forth between Maxwell and the building’s north wall now entirely warded.

With another flash of violet light and an acrid tang like effervescent vinegar shooting straight up her nose, Rebecca noted Nyx’s return with a muttered, “You told him?”

“Of course I told him. What did youthinkI was doing?”

“Why isn’t he doing anything about it?”

From their position, Rebecca couldn’t tell if Maxwell had opened his mouth to deliver the news of this new minor setback—a setback the entire team had already predicted but which their oh-so-confident leader had immediately rejected.

Instead, he’d simply claimed Edwardo the griybreki was too stupid to ever consider launching that kind of magical firepower either around their compound or at any incoming enemy.

He was wrong. Again.

Maxwell needed to say something about it. Like two minutes ago.

For all Rebecca’s intense staring at the shifter Head of Security and hoping for him to do his job too, there was zero sign of Maxwell alerting Aldous to this change of plans.

Which admittedly had not come from Aldous himself but would still screw them over nonetheless.

So why hadn’t he said anything yet?

“One minute, you lazy son of a bitch!” Aldous screamed. “And then you’re out of time and out of chances. If you don’t do this now, you’re gonna wish you were—”

“Wards!” Leonard shouted from his position on the opposite side of the parking lot.

Then the mage staggered into view, eyes wide and mouth agape as his trench coat fluttered in another breeze. He stabbed a finger repeatedly like a drawn blade toward that side of the building and nearly tripped over his own loafers. “Defensive wards at a hundred percent along the south wall!”

Finally, Maxwell moved. But it wasn’t to prepare Aldous for a quick pivot in strategy.

Both the shifter and Shade’s changeling at the helm turned in surprise toward the bumbling mage.

Leonard barely avoided eating the asphalt after he tripped again. Quickly righting himself, he drew in a gasping breath to add, “They’re not gonna—”

“Fuck you, Edwardo!” Aldous screamed. “You had your chance. Now I’m gonna piss in your ancestors’ skulls when I’m done with you!”

Before he’d finished his taunting bellow of a challenge, Aldous had already started his own transformation.

First with his voice, which finished off the final verbal middle finger at Edwardo with a low, thundering growl almost interchangeable with a lion’s roar.

It was a voice far too many sizes too big for Aldous’s natural stature, but the changeling had ways to fix that too.

His entire body bulged around itself all at once, like a giant fist had appeared to squeeze him from throat to ankle, every other section of the changeling bursting at the seams and spilling out through the cracks.

His relatively scrawny neck tripled in size before his hips and thighs followed suit. They ripped right through the seams of the guy’s dark-gray dressslacks that didn’t go well with any of his cheap knockoff suit jackets, no matter what color. While thickening out into individual tree trunks, each of Aldous’s legs elongated in seconds to triple in length as well.

The rest of his awkwardly misshapen body rose away from the asphalt, his mouth gaping open like that of a freshly landed fish, complete with a swollen lower lip in a grotesque shade of dark, noxious black-green.

From that disgustingly gaping mouth of his came another trembling roar, the ferocity of which now matched the repulsive thing into which he was still transforming.

When Aldous took his first slow, lumbering step forward as this new thing, his chest and shoulders had broadened considerably with a sharp, ripping slice through the fabric of his sports jacket. The cheap cloth shredded itself on the changeling’s suddenly monstrous frame, hanging off an elbow or a shoulder in frayed tatters.

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