Page 72 of Elven Shadow

Rebecca turned slowly toward where she’d last seen Purse Lady hovering in the air and trying to fight off a clown mirage.

Since Boyd had abandoned his hold on her, the woman had fallen back to the pavement. She was slightly dinged up with a few raw scrapes on her knees and a huge stain of muddy slosh from a pothole puddle coating her left side.

She still had her purse on her. The clown was gone. Beyond a light and fading strip of redness around her throat, she looked relatively unharmed.

Physically, anyway. That was probably as much as she could hope for.

Rebecca nodded at her. “You might wanna get out of here.”

The woman gaped back at her, terror swimming in her glassy eyes as she sucked searing gasps of breath into her lungs and clutched her giant purse to her chest even more tightly. “D-don’t come any closer. You…you s-stay away from me!”

“Hence my strong suggestion that you leave, lady,” Rebecca retorted. “I mean, unless youwannahang around.”

The multi-toned timbre of Rebecca’s voice during the height of her power, used however briefly, had disappeared, replaced once more by the voice that sounded like her in all other situations.

It didn’t matter that Rebeccasoundednormal again. This human had seen what she’d heard and heard a lot more.

She scrambled off the pavement, refusing to look away from the tall blonde woman dressed in black leathers and stiletto heels as she backtracked toward a particularly bright lamppost on the opposite side. Emitting little whimpers and squeaks of horror, she shot quick glances over her shoulder multiple times while she scuttled off.

Then she was gone.

Rebecca didn’t bother to check the woman had made it safely out of the parking lot. She still wasn’t done.

As she hovered over Boyd’s body, she studied the remnants of her magic inside him—magic that had become a part of him in death—and sighed.

“You’d think by now people would get it. When an elf asks for something, you fucking hand it over.”

His arm lay outstretched across the asphalt, exactly as it had fallen. His wrist and hand had landed in yet another puddle in the enormous potholes dotting the empty lot.

Though it had loosened in death, the guy’s fist still closed halfway around the artifact he’d been using on Purse Lady.

The artifact that had stoked Rebecca’s curiosity so much, she’d used it to start a fight.

As she hunkered down to get a closer look at the item in his hand, the parking lot’s dim lights illuminated her reflection in the mucky film of water filling the pothole.

A reflection she almost didn’t recognize.

Her regularly dark, stormy-blue eyes now swirled with the same metallic silver that formed her shadow spear. Blonde hair draping over her shoulders and dipping toward the sides of her face still maintained a few streaks of bright silver and jagged, crispy black among the strands.

Blood, soot, char, dirt, and muck from other puddles had splattered across her cheeks, neck, shoulders, and upper arms.

No wonder Purse Lady had been so terrified. Rebecca looked like she’d just crawled out of some ancient Elven tomb.

After so long not having used her magic likethis, turning it all back down inside her where it belonged took a little longer than she’d thought.

Certainly longer than it had back in the day, in another life, when she’d been forced to use this power—trained and programmed and molded to instill total command over herself and the legacy of her bloodline.

She couldn’t keep walking around the city looking like this, though.

Closing her eyes, Rebecca took another long, deep breath through her nose, tasting the remnants of her darkest magic on her tongue and in the back of her throat and swallowing it all down again before an even longer exhale.

The next time she looked at herself in the puddle of muck, she looked likeshewas the one who’d gotten mugged in a dark alley and barely escaped with her life.

Better.

Now no one else would see her for who and what she truly was. The magicals whohadseen her weren’t telling anyone anything ever again. And Purse Lady? Well, no one would believe her anyway.

Mostly, Rebeca just wanted that damn artifact.

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