Page 71 of Elven Shadow

She could have controlled herself, if this one Cruorcian had allowed her the simple courtesy of giving up while he still had the chance.

But even with his ineffective associates lying lifeless in sticky, glinting puddles of their own blood and charred flesh, he still wasn’t smart enough to let this go.

He drew the brunt of her darkly simmering attention and all its pent-up rage back to himself when he opened his mouth again with a weak attempt to scoff at her through the blood dripping down his own face and the thick tendrils of black smoke still rising from the burn hole in his chest.

When he spoke, he had to catch his breath again before continuing with a sneer, “You can’t stop all of us. Maybe you saved one useless human tonight, but it’s not enough. It’ll never be enough.”

Rebecca settled her burning gaze on the guy’s face and sneered right back.

“It is tonight,” she said in those hundreds of tinny, echoing voices all moving through her as one.

The Cruorcian fully at the mercy of her Bloodshadow spearpoint snorted, his eyes starting to glaze over even as he spat out the words he had to have known would be his last. “Just what kinda hero are you trying to be, exactly?”

Rebecca’s gaze lingered on the grotesque madness of her deepest, darkest, strongest inherent power, and she felt absolutely nothing when she looked him in the eye again and replied, “I never said I was a hero. And no one’s gonna saveyou.”

He had to have known this was the end. No one in their right mind could have fought her like he had, could have watched her do the things she’d done behind this alley, and still expect to walk away from it all.

But some people just couldn’t accept their fate, even when it was staring them in the face.

With that, at least, Rebecca could more than sympathize.

Boyd reeled against the unavoidable awaiting him and summoned one last burst of strength and courage—or perhaps unabashed stupidity. With no other choice, he released one final battle cry into the thick, humid night air beforehe pushed himself off his back and conjured a final sizzling flare of crimson sparks and bloody tendrils writhing in his hand.

All it took was a flick of her wrist, the tiniest bit of movement, and Rebecca’s spear tip sliced into the guy’s throat, filling the air with its hauntingly pure song of devastation.

The tip of her spear disappeared into his throat and instantly spread along the guy’s flesh. Thick black lines of ancient power rippled across every inch of him like spiderwebbing cracks across a pane of glass.

In seconds, the dark threads of unholy light sucking all the life and light and the possibility out of the very air streaked across the Cruorcian’s face, down his bleeding throat, and over his collarbones. Into his chest, up his cheeks, into his eyes.

Rebecca couldn’t help but wonder what the guy saw in his final moments as her Bloodshadow magic stole the light of life itself from his eyes, seeping into them until nothing but gaping black holes remained.

His body went limp in seconds.

With another quick flick of her wrist, Rebecca drew her spear from his corpse and released it from her grasp. The entire weapon of dark-gray living power disappeared from within her hand, taking on a new form in whorls of thick black mist.

They drew all the light from the parking lot around her and what was left of it within the corpses of the unfortunate magicals who’d thought they could stand against something they could never possibly understand.

No one ever did.

When Rebecca drew in a slow, shuddering breath, all the flickering tendrils of smoke rising from the bodies bent in the air toward her before drawing themselves into her open mouth like steam sucked through a giant, invisible straw.

Then she finished inhaling her final, impossibly long breath, closed her eyes against the dark, ecstatic pleasure of doing what she was born to do, and didn’t think twice about her choices tonight.

It wasn’t like they’d been the best of guys, anyway.

With the fire in her veins settling down into normalcy again, Rebecca stalked toward the lifeless body of Boyd, his eyes now the shade of complete and utter lack. Of non-existence. Of nothingness.

The deepest black light within Rebecca’s own power.

The guy might have even looked peaceful lying there, staring straight up at the night sky, if it weren’t for the thin lines of black streaking up his neck and across his face.

The remnants of an ancient power that had taken what it was made to take.

After all that, she had to admit she felt significantly better. What a way to let off some steam in a relatively productive way, mostly beneficial results for the city of Chicago overall.

She’d stoppedtwomuggings tonight, one of them perpetrated by a little gang of wannabe badasses playing with new toys in dark alleys. At least she’d saved the woman.

Thewoman…

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