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E ven after more than a thousand years of this life, Rebecca Bloodshadow had grown to believe some time ago that she still wouldn’t live long enough to see the end of the world—on either Earth or Xahar’áhsh.
But right now, sitting in the Honda Civic’s front passenger seat while Maxwell Hannigan barreled down the dark highway, it sure as hell felt like the end of the world.
Shade Headquarters was under attack—unprotected, unfortified, empty of everyone who stood a chance at turning the tides back in their favor. With just over seventy-five combat-ready operatives split among multiple vehicles hot on the Honda’s tail, they just might have a chance.
If they weren’t already too late.
That slimy bastard Eduardo would get everything he had coming to him. One way or another, he’d pay for making this brazen move against Shade while they were at their most vulnerable.
Whether that went quickly and painlessly for him, or as a long, drawn-out nightmare of agony and pleading for the end, depended entirely on what Rebecca and her operatives found when they got there.
For the sake of all the non-combat magicals and support staff they’d left at Headquarters for the last twenty-five hours, she hoped with everything in her for Eduardo’s quick and painless end.
Beside her in the driver’s seat, Maxwell scowled through the front windshield, his silver eyes blazing with urgency and blistering rage, flashing brighter every time a highway streetlight strobed past the windows at dizzying speeds.
Pushed to its limits, the Honda’s engine let out one chugging belch after another, the vehicle weighed down even further by Tig, Shell, Theo, and Murray crammed into the back seat. Even then, the creak of the leather-covered steering wheel in Maxwell’s double-handed grip and the ominous popping of his knuckles as that grip tightened by the second rose above every other sound.
Comparatively, it sounded more like fired gunshots during their oppressively silent race across Chicago. They’d just come from a deafening bevy of live weapons fire, and they were sure to enter another battle with more of the same to come.
No one said a word.
What could any of them possibly have to say?
None of it would affect their current circumstances. None of it would change the coming horrors into which they now raced. None of it would save their home or those they’d left behind within it.
Anything Rebecca might have said certainly wouldn’t improve matters, either. The only thing spiraling through her mind, over and over again, matching Maxwell’s chaotic driving, would end up destroying what little morale remained after what her teams had just been through beside the abandoned Polly L. Bridge.
That didn’t stop her from thinking it over and over anyway.
She felt like a traitor. Like an elven madwoman willingly leading her teams to their own brutal deaths, like lambs to the slaughter.
The fact that none of her operatives would have agreed with the sentiment did nothing for the churning knot of fear and guilt twisting in her gut, hardening and serving up a roiling nausea she couldn’t ignore the closer they came to the repurposed old factory that had served as Shade’s Chicago Headquarters for decades.
The endlessly horrifying possibilities of what they might find there when they finally arrived made the wait that much worse. Especially when all her operatives speeding down the highway after Maxwell were already exhausted, battle-weary, hungry, disoriented, and just as terrified of showing up at the compound’s latest battle too late to make any difference at all.
Thanks to Rowan Blackmoon and his elite battalion of Hakalini’ir elves under that fucking dome, plus an unexpected attack by the Azyyt Ra’al, which none of Rebecca’s operatives would have survived if she hadn’t summoned the brutally deadly force of her most powerful Bloodshadow magic.
If she hadn’t displayed it out in the open, at the eleventh hour, for everyone to see.
They’d wrapped that up less than half an hour ago, which meant the teams were running into this new danger at their absolute worst. Unrested. Unprepared. Unable to do a damn thing about it but pray to whatever gods might listen that this wouldn’t be the end for all of them.
For any of them…
The utter helplessness the situation imposed made Rebecca want to scream. To seethe and rage and struggle against such a thing, because feeling it only proved how little control they truly had over how the rest of tonight would pan out.
But screaming the pent-up frustration in a full vehicle, with Maxwell behind the wheel, wouldn’t exactly put anyone in a better frame of mind to face Eduardo and his griybreki swarms.
And if anyone saw their Roth-Da’al losing her shit over what could very possibly be the greatest all-consuming threat Shade had ever faced to date, what the hell would any of them have left to draw on once they finally arrived?
Even in a high-speed chase after an enemy already fifty steps ahead of them, there was barely enough time to think, let alone strategize an effective battle plan. By comparison, every other chaotic, last-minute decision Rebecca had made for her task force seemed tame and outrageously organized.
This was a total shot in the dark.
By the Blood, what an ironic twist of fate.
If the Azyyt Ra’al’s contingent hadn’t attacked Rowan’s forcefield dome of “conflict resolution”, Rebecca and her operatives would still be there, forced to endure such close -quarters with the Blackmoon Elf and his Hakalini’ir for that particular spell’s remaining twenty-four hours. Cut off entirely from the rest of the world. Held against their will.
And they never would have discovered the current attack on Headquarters until it was far too late.
Until everyone they’d left behind was dead and the compound reduced to rubble.
No matter how desperate the situation was now, at least they still had a chance. That was something, but Rebecca just couldn’t shake the feeling it still wouldn’t be nearly enough.
Maxwell operated the Honda like a stoically determined lunatic, pushing a hundred and ten down the highway as his death grip on the steering wheel tightened further. He hardly slowed when he pulled onto the upcoming exit ramp and almost sent the Honda tipping over sideways to roll down the embankment just a few miles from Headquarters.
Hissing, Rebecca braced herself against the passenger-side door.
Maxwell snarled and manipulated the steering wheel, jerking it back and forth, hand over hand, to steer them out of their squealing fishtail.
Then the vehicle crashed back to center and straightened again before Maxwell floored the gas for the final stretch to the compound.
Theo groaned in the back seat. Everyone else sighed heavily or adjusted their smooshed positions, focusing only on what had to be done once they finally reached their destination.
They still had another mile of road ahead of them when the first flashes of light reached them through the darkness. A brilliant blaze of launched battle magic streaming through the air in front of the compound.
Maxwell didn’t take his foot off the gas for another half-mile, when the anarchy surrounding Shade HQ came more clearly into view.
Then he slammed on the brakes.
Another blistering shriek of squealing tires cut through the night, filling the Honda with the acrid scent of burning rubber while plumes of smoke and dust rose behind them. The vehicle lurched to a sickening halt along the shoulder, bumbling and bumping almost into the woods lining the road.
Rebecca and their four backseat passengers pitched violently forward before slamming back in their seats.
“What the fuck?” Maxwell growled, staring straight ahead as he killed the engine with a merciless jerk of the keys in the ignition.
The other team vehicles skidded, swerved, and crunched to their own disorganized stops behind the Honda, each of them sending up another thick plume of dust and dirt in its wake.
For as urgently as they’d driven this far, there seemed a complete lack of motivation to leave the vehicles and join the battle for the compound as quickly as possible.
Rebecca couldn’t blame anyone for their hesitation.
She felt it too, while they all just sat there in their coughing vehicles, staring down half a mile of empty road in the darkness. Staring at the flashes of light in the distance battling with ominous shadows through the trees and across the asphalt.
Every face turned toward home, reflecting those same flashing lights in the night sky that joined the horror in over four dozen pairs of glinting eyes.
“What the hell is that?”
“Holy shit…”
“How the hell did this happen?”
“There’s no way anyone’s still alive in there. I mean…right?”
The simultaneous exclamations in horrified murmurs and shocked whispers filled the teams’ synced comms. Only when Maxwell grunted did the side commentary fall silent.
That didn’t mean any of them had a clue as to what was happening up ahead.
The endless chaos cluttered every square inch of the Headquarters property, most of it centered in the parking lot and through the trees lining the premises but inching closer and closer to the building by the second. At first, it seemed impossible that what they saw was real.
But the longer the teams gaped at Eduardo’s staggering griybreki assault waiting for them, the clearer it became that this was very real. And it was happening right here, right now.
Eduardo and his griybreki hadn’t simply staged an attack on the compound.
This was a hostile takeover.
Streams of surging griybreki swarmed across the landscape from multiple directions—countless grotesquely stunted, gray-skinned little cretins. Hundreds of enormous, buggy eyes glowing bright green or obnoxiously fluorescent yellow. Razor-sharp teeth gnashing in slobbering mouths as the frogmen ranted and babbled and screeched their guttural language, mixing it with a grotesquely adulterated version of English. Enormous, bare webbed feet slapping nonstop across the asphalt.
From hundreds, maybe thousands, of griybreki feet, the combined sound created a constant, slapping rush echoing around the compound—like a high-pressure waterfall spewing over the edge of a rocky cliff onto even more stone beneath.
The roar was deafening. Add to that the crackle, sizzle, and hiss of battle magic launched through the air and the cracking rapport of augmented weapons fire, and it was impossible to hear anything else.
Rebecca couldn’t even hear herself think.
Only the mind-numbing insanity up ahead existed now—such an unreal, shockingly bizarre sight, it would have been easier to believe she’d hallucinated the whole thing.
Constant streams of griybreki swarms five to six frogmen wide charged in from various pockets around the property’s perimeter. Rebecca counted six separately swarming forces, though visibility behind the compound’s main building remained nonexistent from their current position.
Thousands of the nasty little frogmen barreled toward the compound in one of these streams, fueled by their mission, their battle lust, and their fellow idiots all scurrying forward in an endless, heaving wave from unseen origin points hidden in the surrounding woods.
That wasn’t even the worst of it.
When Rebecca widened her eyes, the scene before her morphed slightly, as if she’d been staring at a painting for too long and could no longer see the entire piece the way it had been created.
Those half-dozen columns of scrambling, shrieking, bumbling griybreki almost looked like streams of energy moving across the ground, all of them surging inward to converge on one enormous, blindingly bright, white-hot center of powerful energy and concentrated magic. Swirling like a tornado funnel in the parking lot only a few yards away from the compound’s front entrance.
No matter what the magic around them did or how it reacted, the streams of griybreki just kept coming. As if their numbers were as endless and infinite as the wind.
Even when those at the front of their attacking columns disappeared within the burning light in the parking lot, the other frogmen neither slowed nor seemed to recognize those ahead of them weren’t coming back out.
Rebecca couldn’t stop staring at the very center of the chaos, that blistering column of white light swirling in the parking lot and rising higher than the building behind it.
Even from here, she felt the unimaginable power radiating from the central storm of magical energy, the blindingly white funnel too bright to look at head-on.
The quickening pulse of all that unnaturally formidable power blazing away made her breathless, captured her in its cruel grasp, and refused to let go.
It was one of the most beautiful fucking things she had ever seen.
“Jesus Christ,” Theo murmured, his voice rising with perfect clarity through the silence of the comms. “Where are they all coming from? It just doesn’t stop…”
Then, as if the seal on their silence had been broken to unleash their combined thoughts aloud, everyone spoke at once.
“Is that even real?”
“It’s like he just…opened up half a dozen fucking portals all over the woods.”
“Wait, that’s not even possible, right?”
“Possible for someone , maybe. But how did Eduardo manage it?”
The sudden outburst of speculation filled the comms, making it impossible to differentiate between dozens of smaller simultaneous conversations. Or maybe they were all the same.
Rebecca still had nothing to say.
At this point, everything she heard over the comms seemed like a viable possibility, especially now that they were here, watching this insane attack unfold.
Not that the truth of how Eduardo had managed this even mattered. The devastating effect was the same, either way.
“…I thought the guy was a total moron this whole time, but now he’s pulling this shit?”
“How can Eduardo handle even one portal, let alone six?”
“He can’t. Probably picked up a few tricks from someone else, more likely.”
“Yeah, that’s where my money’s at. He didn’t manufacture the arms shipment we took off his hands. No way did he make this happen on his own…”
Somehow, Rebecca managed to drown out the constant noise from her operatives, focusing instead on the blinding, white-hot pillar of light rising from the parking lot, frozen by the sight like a rabbit caught in a snare.
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.