Page 182 of Elven Crown

With no one around to stop her.

No one around to see her.

And no other choice, because death was not an option.

She summoned her Bloodshadow magic at the edge of the balcony, sagging against the railing as her legs gave out beneath the lack of air.

But she didn’t need breath for this. She had already proven that much once before.

Her limbs burned with the transformation of letting the full reach of her power out on display. Rebecca reached out toward the auditorium ceiling with her senses and her magic and the all-consuming hunger her darkest abilities craved at all times, even when she had enough control to consistently deny it.

She let it all go.

Her Bloodshadow magic latched onto the healthiest bit of life-force energy in her immediate vicinity—the thing that would feed her own power better and more fully than any other.

The death cloud writhed under the instant hold of her magic. It shuddered and flashed with darker unlight, straining against the call of something far darker and far more ancient than even a skilled necromancer’s twisted abilities.

Then she had it. The black-gray tendrils of her power curled around the deadly shadow winding its way through every other living thing in the room.

Rebecca opened her mouth, and when she inhaled, she took not oxygen into her lungs but the energy of another’s magic into her entire being.

One impossibly long, endless inhale—ravenous, consuming, desperate to feed and, in doing so, to destroy.

Slowly at first, ever so slowly, the dark, sparkling black cloud of unlight and death moved across the ceiling toward her. Threads of it peeled away from the larger mass to trail toward Rebecca’s open mouth like unraveling an entire sweater by a single thread.

She took it into herself bit by bit, strand by strand, and kept going.

It was nothing like consuming the full spark of a living being but more like a shot of instant energy. A snack. Something meant merely to whet her appetite, but that wasn’t the point now.

The point was to get rid of the necromancer’s spell before it fulfilled its purpose and got rid of her team.

The little pockets of darkness that had spread and dropped throughout the theater hall rose back into the air, trailing up and back toward the balcony where they’d been unleashed. Only this time, they returned to the Bloodshadow Heir’s open mouth, her head thrown back and her arms spread wide to take in as much as possible and then maybe even more, hoping it would be enough.

The rest of her awareness she hadn’t poured into draining the death cloud dry centered on sparing those remaining life sparks within every member of her team.

She wasn’t here to kill and consume indiscriminately. She was here to protect. To take within herself the thing that surely would have killed them all because she was the only one capable it.

Which made this the perfectly wrong moment for the constructed magical-energy bomb strapped in the middle of her three captured operatives to surge with another dangerous surplus of magic intense enough and unpredictable enough to double as a secondary torture device for everyone within close range.

The low whine of the surging bomb machine overloading with power needing to be released filled the auditorium. It drowned out the hacking gasps and coughs and gurgles of everyone on the ground floor still fighting for breath.

The whine rose in seconds, building once again into that deafening, debilitating roar as the lights all over the machine blinked with sporadic madness and that awful growl burst forth again.

If Diego and Titus had had enough air in their lungs to scream, Rebecca was sure they would have.

She might have protected herself from another onslaught, but she was too deep within the use of her Bloodshadow magic to focus on separating the sparks of her team from the life force inside the necromancer’s spell.

Her intention had been to consume every bit of energy in the building thatdidn’tbelong to other Shade operatives. That intention remained and would continue to fuel her abilities until it was finished.

But now, while the power bomb surged and roared, crashing through Rebecca’s head like a hot poker skewering her brainand bringing tears to her eyes, she had no focus or energy left to differentiate between the necromancer’s spell and the energy surging off the wailing bomb in overwhelming excess.

Her Bloodshadow magic didn’t know the difference.

Life force was life force, and she had already handed her power the reins to consume what it wanted, as long as it didn’t belong to the Shade operatives under her protection.

It meant to take everything else, and that was exactly what it did.

The longer Rebecca’s endless inhale continued, the more wildly the magically overloaded bomb on the stage reacted. It blinked and strobed, growling and whining and rocking violently back and forth even with three captured Shade members strapped to its perimeter.

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