Page 4 of Elven Throne

Only instead of the terror the rabbit normally felt, Rebecca found herself all but consumed by the pull of the magical storm’s intensity. So much raw power surging in one place, right at the heart of this battle she hadn’t even entered yet.

In that moment, she was convinced she would relinquish everything—and everyone—just to get her hands on the seed of that tremendous power and claim it for herself.

But in this, what might yet be Shade’s final battle, that was the worst possible thing that could happen.

Rebecca didn’t know if she could stop herself.

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Thenextsecond,Rebeccawas ripped painfully from the ecstasy ofwatching,her mind knocked around by the daunting force of Maxwell’s overwhelming irritation surging against her andthroughher out of nowhere.

She pressed herself back against the passenger seat beside him to ride out that first wave. The shifter didn’t even seem to notice.

Even if she’d wanted to, even with no other distractions, there was no way to pull apart the threads of churning rage and haste, frustration, and his desperate need to race out and fight. It all spilled from the shifter and crashed into Rebecca through their connection, rendering rational thought impossible.

No way to stop it, either.

The simultaneous comments from her teams through the comms didn’t let up, either.

“Hey, you think the weapons manufacturer felt like dabbling in augmented portal technology too? Figured they’d give the fucker a second shot?”

“Dude, that is now officially the most depressing thought I’ve had all week.”

“Seriously, what idiot would sell portal tech toEduardo?”

“Probably figured he’d just teleport himself to the bottom of the ocean or into an active volcano or something. No harm done and another moron off the playing field…”

Rebecca’s eyelids fluttered as her head sagged back against the seat cushion, her face bursting with the instant heat of fury that didn’t entirely belong to her. She sucked in a sharp, hissing breath, steeled herself against the storm of Maxwell’s emotions, and opened her eyes again.

Still unable to look away from the blinding column of swirling white light in the parking lot—the central convergence of every scrabbling stream of griybreki swarms bearing down on Shade Headquarters.

Maxwell had every right to feel the way he did. Eduardo was attacking their home, and sitting here in their vehicles, shouting guesses into the void about how specifically the bastard had managed it, wouldn’t change a thing.

But if the shifter didn’t rein in his volatile emotions pretty fucking quick, they’d eventually overwhelm Rebecca to the point of making her useless in this battle—just the next fight in an endless string of harrowing combat her task force wouldn’t survive without her.

She’d seen enough even from here to know that much.

As soon as the heat in her cheeks receded enough to no longer make her dizzy, she turned toward Maxwell still white-knuckling the steering wheel and going nowhere.

He needed to pull himself together. If he hadn’t managed it already, maybe he just needed a little push…

“…looks like he knowsexactlywhat he’s doing now.”

“That’s the part that fucking scares me.”

Then a thin, shrill voice rose through the comms above all the others, carrying more absolute certainty than it had ever carried before.

“It’s not magitek,” Nyx said. “That’s a blink.”

The turbulent crash of nearly seventy-five operatives talking over each other snuffed out instantly, replaced by a sudden, eerie silence of confusion and the awful weight of what Nyx’s statement implied.

All the unanswered questions and impossible unknowns that came with them.

No one had to ask for clarification.

Delivered as it was, straight from Nyx, the meaning was woefully clear.

She’d meant one ofherabilities. An inherent and uniquelykatariability.

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