Page 94 of Elven Shadow

Rebecca just kept gasping and coughing, sucking in breath after glorious, undying breath as her lungs blazed anew with fresh agony and even more tears spilled from her eyes.

Her vision returned more slowly than she would have liked, but it couldn’t have been more than another twenty seconds before she managed to blink around and finally focus her gaze on her unexpected rescuer who’d appeared seemingly from nowhere.

At first, she couldn’t place those bulging eyes behind remarkably thick spectacles, the white stringy hair, the pinched and wrinkled face fixing a perpetual scowl of disapproving scrutiny on everything around it.

Then it finally dawned on her.

“Holy shit,” she croaked. “Zida.”

The old daraku flashed Rebecca a gummy grin that would have been entirely toothless but for the two upper canines that remained in her mouth. A wheezing chuckle escaped her, then Zida thumped Rebecca on the back again, this time with much more force, before pushing herself to her feet.

“Well, look at you. A little water works wonders, eh?”

An ogre with a long, orange-brown mohawk stood uncertainly in the hallway, shirtless and shoeless with someone else’s unconscious body in his arms. He looked back and forth from Rebecca, to Zida, then ahead of them down the hallway again before clearing his throat.

“Should we, like…get out of here?” The guy looked like he was about to point in that direction if it hadn’t been for the unconscious dwarf in his arms, who Rebecca recognized as Hank.

Apparently, she still hadn’t regained consciousness after her last failed mission with Aldous.

“You know,” the ogre added, “just in case shit goes sideways, or…”

“Despite your horrific use of improper grammar, Archie,” the daraku croaked in response as she pointed a gnarled, hooked finger at him, “I’m inclined to agree with you. We need to boogie.

“Look alive, people!” Zida shouted at the infirmary’s open door. “We’re gettin’ out of here!”

Only three other Shade members had been in the infirmary, and they all came shuffling out now with wide eyes, gazing around in baffled, awestruck silence as they joined Zida and Archie, in the hallway.

Then Rebecca finally remembered what she would have already done if she hadn’t been so caught up by fighting a homunculus on her way out and almost killing herself.

“We need to get to the garage,” she said. “Now.”

“Holy shit.” A bruised troll newly emerged from the infirmary stood directly over the pile of rubble, gaping and pointing at the limp, black-and-gray-mottled form of the fallen homunculus. “What the hell isthat?”

“Don’t fucking touch it!” Rebecca leapt toward him and stopped, startled by the sound of her own voice, still so raspy and devoid of its usual sarcastic—and at times expressionless—energy.

Her abrupt movement made the troll stagger backward anyway. He frowned at her, then quickly looked to all the other magicals in the hallway for possible explanations as to what the hell was wrong with the elf.

Rebecca pointed at him and slowly shook her head. “Just…don’t. We really need to move.”

Despite feeling four more pairs of eyes on her, Rebecca veered around the pile of caved-in ceiling debris, which fortunately didn’t move this time withhands bursting out to snatch at her ankles. Then she quickened her pace down the hall.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, huh?” Zida snapped. “You heard the elf. Move your asses!”

After what she’d just been through, Rebecca didn’t bother trying to hide the flickering smirk appearing on her lips. Six long months with Shade—too long, in her opinion—and this was the first time she’d required the services of the task force’s resident healer.

After today, though, she didn’t think the old daraku was as bad as everyone else generally made her out to be. As long as the old woman hadn’t been lying through her two teeth and forced something other than water down Rebecca’s throat to save her life.

There was only one way to really know for sure, and that way only required time and a little more patience.

In minutes, it became clear the collapse of the ceiling in the infirmary hallway was not an isolated event within the compound. Rebecca and the other recovering magicals passed another half-dozen similar debris piles, though not all of them came with busted pipes or giant killer homunculi waiting beneath the cave-in to pop out at passing survivors.

Whoever had orchestrated this attack was clearly capable of pulling it off on a very large scale.

Rebecca just hoped she hadn’t spent so much time screwing around with mindless, lifeless magical automatons that she’d completely missed the real action in the garage. Assuming, of course, Shade’s current assailant—or assailants—had found the bulk of the task force gathered there in the first place.

She could just see Maxwell’s face in her mind now—the dark suspicion behind his silver eyes, the hint of a sneer curling his full upper lip—when he finally found her after all this was over. The shifter would jump at the opportunity to blame Rebecca forthistoo. To question her. To use this as one more weapon in his arsenal of idiotic reasons to keep a close eye on her.

To follow her too closely for her liking.

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