Page 11 of Elven Throne

But not for much longer.

Zida stood against the violent storm of her own power, her tiny fang-like teeth fully exposed in an endless snarl of effort and fury. The woman’s arms stretched out wide to either side, trembling visibly as she drew all this awesome and terrifying power out of herself to hold thousands of griybreki at bay.

Both the eye of the storm and the source of it.

But Zida was old, not nearly as strong or capable of withstanding her own magic like this as she once might have been. Her ability to maintain control over her own immense power was already quickly waning.

As if in response to this realization, the storm shuddered again with a chaotic flicker before launching more randomly striking bolts of white-hot light than ever before. The earth trembled and groaned beneath the awful force quickly losing stability.

Zida’s hold over it all faded even faster, and Rebecca almost thought she was too late.

Somehow, though, the old healer redoubled her efforts with a violent shout Rebecca couldn’t hear over the storm’s howling. But the trembling and flickering stopped, once more temporarily soothed as the healer drew more strength from yet another hidden, untapped reserve of it.

Until she reached the very last of it and spent it all up. That would happen very soon.

A massive bolt of searing light crackled away from Zida’s body and up through the storm, jerking erratically before it finally released itself. It cracked against the side of the compound building with a thunderous crash.

A massive chunk of the outer wall broke away, barely heard over the shouts of the Shade members still inside and down below warning others to get out of the way.

Shit.

Rebecca really hadn’t considered she would find one of her own inside this storm, or how it might have factored into what still had to be done.

“Zida!” The raw, destructive power around her seared her throat, and even when she tried again to shout the healer’s name, her voice was still swallowed by the storm’s constant, deafening roar.

Whether the old healer noticed her didn’t matter anymore.

Zida’s unleashed power or no, this storm would still reach its breaking point, and very soon.

Rebecca couldn’t make the old woman stop. Nothing could. But she could still keep the inevitable eruption from destroying everyone and everything surrounding Headquarters. That part hadn’t changed.

She could still save them.

And she’d have to trust that the rest of her task force could handle their own survival just a little longer until Rebecca managed the rest.

She had to get there.

Only when she took her next step did the next boundary within so many churning layers of the storm make itself known to her. She moved through the glow and snarled beneath the instant influx of searing heat and centrifugal force nothing else could have withstood it.

Debris whipped around her too quickly to recognize, the heat stinging her skin and setting off every instinctual alarm of survival. The fiery blaze buffeting against her almost threw her off balance, but Rebecca thrust the head of her Bloodshadow spear into the asphalt to hold herself steady.

Nothing would turn her back.

Even as she used her spear to keep her footing with every slow, harrowing step forward, all the heat and light and the blistering, swirling force of Zida’s magic fought against her. As if it wanted nothing but to turn her back and keep her away.

Which was the whole point.

Rebecca fought against all of it as she pushed herself forward, step by agonizing step. She couldn’t stay uprightandfight against the unstable magic at the same time, even if it hadn’t been Zida at the center of it all.

The heat and bone-crushing power worsened by the second, but she kept pushing. All time and progress disappeared until she thought she’d almost gotten used to the pain.

Then she noticed the blackened strips of charred flesh along her arms and the layers of skin disintegrating along the backs of her fingers to blow away in the whipping wind. A wind hotter and more searing than any natural force on either world, as far as she knew.

At this rate, the storm would kill her far before she reached the healer teetering on the edge of her own self-control.

It seemed she couldn’t have moved any slower toward that center, but when the blistering heat forced Rebecca to draw on her healing magic with every step—reknitting flesh and muscle and sinew just fast enough to keep from being stripped down to the bone—the speed of her approach was cut in half.

And still, she pushed forward through all of it, every inch of her burning beneath this magic and Rebecca’s own determination to continuously heal herself.

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