Page 6 of Elven Throne

Beyond the gurgling shrieks and yammering of the griybreki swarms—now ten times louder outside the vehicle—beyond the hissing explosions of battle magic joined by endless sputtering echoes of augmented weapons fire, the air crackled with a staggering intensity of powerful magical energy in the distance.

Rebecca sucked in a hissing breath through her teeth, overwhelmed by the veracity of such power like she hadn’t felt in so very long. Certainly not on Earth. For the briefest moment, she sagged against the side of the vehicle and tried to cover it up by pushing the passenger-side door shut beneath her weight.

The dizzying effect of everything she felt swirling through the air only lasted a fraction of a second before she recovered herself, but it was clearly long enough for Maxwell to have noticed.

“What is it?” he asked, his voice barely audible over the muffled explosions in the distance and the constant background clatter of magical warfare.

She tried to look at him, to let him see in her eyes that whatever it was, she could handle it. But her gaze had already fallen again onto the churning column of burning white light rising from the compound parking lot like the beam from an unseen alien spaceship touching down to Earth.

Aliens would have been a preposterous explanation, but she still couldn’t look away.

The physical sensation of Maxwell watching her was unavoidable too. His calculating silver gaze elicited another flash of tingling heat in her cheeks as she took two small, staggering steps forward, her eyes glued to that blinding light.

She felt him watching her. Wondering at her reaction. His concern that she knew something he did not and might not reveal any of it to him before they headed in to join their operatives in breaking up Eduardo’s siege.

What was she supposed to tell him, if she could even bring herself to speak right now?

That whatever that blazing column of burning-white light was, it called to her, drawing her to it like a moth to the fucking flame? That something inside that deadly vortex of concentrated magic felt more familiar than anything she’d encountered in this world over multiple centuries?

That she had no idea exactly what it was—the most concentrated, fearful, awful power she’d felt on Earth thatdidn’tcome from her?

She could see nothing but the blazing light from this distance. All she knew was what she felt, nothing else.

How did she explain that to anyone, even to Maxwell? Even through their connection?

The next second, all thoughts of the shifter, of their operatives moving in around the compound’s perimeter, of Eduardo and his griybreki horde throwing everything they had at Shade’s home—all of it disappeared.

Rebecca floated forward down the dirt road, leaving everything else behind, aware only of the power she felt from that burning-white light and her certainty that whatever existed at its center was terrible and incredible and that shehadto get there…

“Rebecca.”

If her name on Maxwell’s lips hadn’t already stopped her in her tracks, the warm weight of his hand settling on the back of her arm certainly would have. As soon as she remembered she wasn’t alone, sensation and awareness all crashed back into her.

Including everything she felt radiating off the shifter in waves, pulsing into her as if they wereheremotions and reactions instead. His curiosity and confusion mixed together in a heavy blur. His concern for her, tampered as it was by a different sort of confusion and a little fear.

Hehadto be feeling her attraction to that glowing thing at the center of so much blinding white light. He had no idea what it was. Neither did she. But now that he felt what flowed through Rebecca, a good deal of his confusion and hesitation must have stemmed from his own residual attraction to that same light.

Whether he realized it came straight from Rebecca or he harbored his own shifter’s curiosity of it as well.

She didn’t shrug away from beneath his hand, and he didn’t remove it yet. The question he once might have voiced but no longer needed to hung in the air between them, flavored by the even stronger sentiment their strange connection revealed.

He didn’t want her to walk headfirst into that magical storm all on her own, especially when neither of them knew what it was.

“If I could name it,” she murmured, “I would. It’s not Eduardo. That’s all I can tell you.”

“It won’t hold—”

“It’ll hold long enough.”

With great effort, Rebecca tore her gaze away from the roiling mass of storming white magical energy and looked up at him again. The tingling surge of their connection—still always strengthened somehow by gazing into the shifter’s glowing silver eyes—now felt like a welcome relief compared to the intensity of staring at that burning storm and the way itcaptivatedher.

“And I’ll be there to hold back the worst of it when that thing finally goes off,” she added. “Because you were right. It will.”

“And after?” The frown darkening his features remained much longer than it usually did. Either he’d given up trying to hide his emotions from her behind that stony mask of apathy, or he no longer could.

She couldn’t tell which she preferred, only that the shifter’s concern for her overwhelmed everything else.

Why did he look so…sad?

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