Page 8 of Elven Shadow

But it wasn’t steel. It wasn’t any type of metal known either to Earth or to Xahar’áhsh.

No, this was something special.

Something Rebecca had sworn she would keep to herself; being discovered with it would undo everything she’d been working so hard to keep under wraps for the last few decades.

In a pinch, though, nothing else available to Shade even came close to half the strength of this glinting silver spear in her hand—the edge of its nearly invisible blade sharper than any purely physical edge could ever match.

Plus, there was no one here to see it.

She had to make sure.

The nexus of a large, full-building web of wards like this was always the weak point, unavoidable with a weave of this size.

Rebecca just had to find it before their time completely ran out.

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No matter how long she’d trained or how hard she’d fought to master this kind of magic—let alone how perfect her aim had become—there was no greater risk than using it now.

No greater consequence than what Rebecca faced if anyone saw her performing this old-world spell. Even the deadly threat of Bloodshadow magic gone wrong, if she wasn’t careful, wouldstillbe preferable to the hell unleashed on two worlds if she gave herself away and exposed who she truly was.

But Aldous had forced her hand. If she didn’t act now, the Shade team wouldn’t last long enough to get the necessary intel through more…traditional means.

It didn’t matter whose ship she was on; Rebecca refused to go down with any of them.

Hissing through clenched teeth, Rebecca drew back the spear of her magic and launched it with deadly precision toward the center window on the fifth story—as close to dead-center on the north wall as she could get.

In front of the apartment building, the rest of her team shouted, snarled, and shrieked against the deafening bellows belching from Aldous’s mouth as his disgusting, brainless recreation of himself charged blindly into anything and everything around him.

Rebecca was aware of the noise but could only focus on her spear.

Its tip—sharp enough to puncture the veil between this world and the next, the living and the dead and everything in between—pierced through that center window with nothing more than a quick flash of silver light and a slicing whisper.

All else was silent while the window’s glass still hadn’t caught up to the reality of physics in this world and what this type of magic did to it.

Another silver flash, then the spear’s sturdy shaft disseminated into a crackling spiderweb of its own, lancing through threads of the griybreki intricately laid protective wards and entwining itself within them.

Like hundreds of individual sentient ribbons, all moving independently and still as one, the tendrils of her magic wormed their way through the wards’ layers.

Even in the darkness in the middle of the night, the sight of it was exhilarating.

It always was for Rebecca.

A patchwork of undulating threads in dark, pulsing silver spread across the north wall, coiling around and strangling and feeding off the griybreki wards, as if this part of her was a predator all on its own.

A web of such powerfully ancient magic from a time and place so far gone, it hardly existed anymore.

Not merely the web on its own but the spider too. The hunter. The warrior. The bloodthirsty goddess on the prowl for the overlooked weak points within her prey.

All the other blustering chaos around her now in this fucked-up failure of a mission faded for the briefest moment in the space between breaths, which seemed to draw out for an eternity.

She was only aware of herself down here and her magic up there, threading through the enemy’s, both separate from her and still a part of her as it pulsed and coiled and weaved.

She felt almost dizzy with the ecstasy of it.

Then the moment shattered, just like the window she’d pierced with the spear of her magic.

She’d been wrong.

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