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R ebecca’s blood burned through her, the ravenous hunger of her Bloodshadow magic and her darkest power yearning to be unleashed.

To be set free upon the battlefield.

To consume the lives of her enemies before Shade fell, and Blue Hells take anyone who disapproved of the Bloodshadow Heir doing what had to be done.

No matter who or what saw her.

By the time she’d taken a dozen steps across the parking lot toward the largest concentration of fighting, her instinctual need to enter the chaos and bend it to her will had nearly overwhelmed her.

She didn’t hand over the reins until she was almost upon one of the largest streams of griybreki surging in an endless flood of puckered gray skin, slapping webbed feet, and guttural, yammering mouths lined with tiny, razor-sharp teeth she’d once heard could chew through damn near anything, if given the chance.

As she approached the writhing column of hyped-up frogmen nearly scrambling over each other in their haste to get to the blazing white storm of magical vortex straight ahead, Rebecca followed the line of surging bodies back toward its origin.

Some unseen jump point hidden in the woods around the compound’s perimeter, most likely where Eduardo himself had thought best place it.

The griybreki hardly seemed to notice her existence, even when she drew so close, they could have leapt at her all at once and overpowered her with their sheer numbers. A few glowing yellow or electric-green eyes flickered her way as the frogmen drew past her like a herd of stampeding grassland beasts, but none of them changed course to target her instead.

Herd mentality, swarm mentality… It was basically the same thing, wasn’t it?

At least it would make what she did next quite a bit easier than she’d expected.

One more step forward, and all knowledge of where she was, and why, and how much was still at stake fled her mind beneath the raging surge of protective fury and her magic’s irresistible need to take what it was owed and fuel itself for more.

The orb of swirling mercurial silver struck through with bright bolts of silver, spewing showers of black sparks from her palm, existed for a fraction of a second before one sharp flick of Rebecca’s wrist commanded that orb into her Bloodshadow spear.

By the time she tightened her grip around that unmatched weapon of glinting Bloodshadow steel, cold and hard and unforgiving against her flesh, she was already running headfirst into the stream of swarming frogmen.

The quickest way past them into the white-hot storm of magic up ahead was through .

Rebecca’s spear cut through everything that moved within her reach. Only after she’d pierced at least a dozen griybreki necks, opened a dozen more bellies and tossed their bodies across the asphalt behind her, did some of the griybreki tear away from the swarming column to come at her head-on.

She sliced through them all like a steak knife through warm butter. Dark and swift as the night around them. Silent as the shadows racing across the lot from the launched battle magic and blazing magitek weapons up ahead.

The fastest and deadliest thing here tonight, and nothing could stop her.

Nothing could stand against the Bloodshadow Heir sweeping toward the compound as exactly what she was. Nothing more and nothing less.

Her previous fear of being seen at her most terrible didn’t exist tonight. She didn’t give a damn about who recognized her magic or saw her use it in ways that should have been impossible for anyone else, because they were.

Rebecca raced against the clock, her only goal cutting down any and all obstacles in her path toward the nexus of the white-hot storm she couldn’t keep her eyes off for longer than a few seconds at a time.

The swirling vortex of power and energy calling her ever closer.

When she was halfway there, the storming column pulsed with a shudder of rippling energy, brighter and fiercely hotter than before.

Maxwell had said this thing would explode, eventually, and he was right.

Rebecca had to get there first, to keep the fallout where it belonged. To make sure her operatives didn’t blow right along with it when the time came.

She didn’t know who had created that storm. Maybe Eduardo. Maybe his griybreki in such overwhelming numbers. Or one of the bastard’s associates who might have helped with the portal technology he’d set like snares around Shade Headquarters.

It made no difference.

The only thing that mattered was reaching it before the storm reached its peak, with nowhere else to go but out along an unavoidable path of destruction.

She wasn’t foolish enough to think she could keep that burning white column from exploding. That part couldn’t be stopped.

She just had to be inside it when it did. At its very center, the source of all this awful power, to mitigate as much of the damage as possible when it finally lost control.

If Rebecca got blasted to bits in the process, fine. She could heal herself, and she was certain she’d healed herself from far worse than whatever this storm might do to her.

But the effectiveness of her healing magic didn’t mean a damn thing if her only options were to either heal her entire task force all at once—an impossible feat, even for her—or watch most of them die while she chose who to save first and who to forsake by default.

That was no choice at all. She refused to let it get that far.

Finally, she broke free of the griybreki swarm spilling around her, throwing the last dying frogman off the end of her spear and ignoring his last wetly gurgling croak. Then she spun back toward the white-hot vortex of power, swirling and shuddering and ready to burst once it could no longer contain itself.

Battle magic ignited the air above her with streaks of sizzling red and crackling purple. Churning fireballs of every color. Neon-blazing magical rounds from augmented weapons. Plus a handful of yammering griybreki bodies catapulting across the battlefield, cartwheeling through the air with gangly arms and legs flailing, garbling their final shrieks before the end.

Rebecca fought her way through all of it, drawing ever closer to the blinding white column of blazing energy, doing her best in the split seconds she was provided to either cut down the frogmen in her path and toss them aside, or to lead larger numbers of them away from the compound. Sometimes both.

She dodged a massive orb of yellow-brown attack magic belching from the mouth of an augmented grenade launcher. Then she spun and stuck her spear through a chubby griybreki hopping from foot to foot as he prepared to leap at one of her operatives.

Always, she moved closer, bit by bit, drawn to the light and the heat of that storming column while sowing cold and darkness and death in her wake.

Then she was almost upon the storm, standing at the outermost edge of its blistering heat while the vortex churned endlessly just a few yards in front of the old factory’s front doors.

Magitek rounds strobed through the open second-story windows above her, whistling and keening through the air before they found their targets in scrambling griybreki. Even more rushed in to take the fallen’s places, as if the buggy little cretins had no idea what had happened. Or they just didn’t care.

What were one or two or a few dozen bodies compared to the thousands throwing themselves at the compound building, or the survivors left to defend it from the inside, or the combat operatives who’d finally returned to help?

Still, so many more of them ran straight for the blinding nexus of storming magic in front of the building, and they just kept coming.

As far as Rebecca could see, not a single griybreki throwing itself into the white-hot vortex made it out again, but that didn’t tell her what this was. It could have been anything. Another portal. A trap. A swift death, though hardly painless.

Shouts from above distracted her as someone in one of those second-story windows—it looked like Adam but could have been anyone in the chaos—chucked his empty weapon through the window toward the half-dozen griybreki scrambling up the building’s exterior wall.

The firearm smacked the first frogman full in the face and sent him dropping like a stone to the asphalt below, taking four others with him in their tumbling, screeching descent.

The Shade members left behind to defend against Eduardo’s unexpected ambush still fared better than Rebecca would have expected.

But it didn’t mean they could keep this up forever.

They’d already been at it for hours, and Shade simply didn’t have the numbers to throw at their enemy like Eduardo did. That asshole’s advantage now was nothing but numbers.

The white-hot storm pulsed again, pushing a wave of searing heat outward. A trembling roar of unstable magic shuddered through the air and the earth and everything in between.

Rebecca raced headlong toward the swirling outer layer of blinding light. She couldn’t have stopped when she heard the bellowing war cry rise from directly in front of the building’s entrance, even if she’d tried.

But she did glance that way to catch a brief glimpse of something she would never forget.

It was Bor, defending his position in front of the glass double doors with his heavy staff clenched tightly in both ancient, gnarled hands.

He handled the weapon like someone five hundred years younger, moving with quick, efficient steps within a small ring of combat he never left. Rebecca hadn’t seen a giveldi engage in battle before, but the short-lived sight of him phasing in and out of existence as he moved in a surprisingly fluid and deadly dance didn’t surprise her.

Shade’s cook even phased through two griybreki barreling straight toward him before he spun around, re-materializing, and cracked both their skulls with the twirling ends of his staff moving so quickly, they became a constant blur.

A deafening boom and hiss rose beside Bor as the business end of an ancient, bulky blunderbuss exploded in the hands of an even older gnome fighting at Bor’s side. The fired shot of blistering orange light—and more sparks than seemed entirely safe for the shooter—careened from the weapon and into two more griybreki surging toward the compound’s front doors.

By the time that shot finished with them, the griybreki toppled to the asphalt with a spray of thick dark-green blood, both of them missing their heads.

Only then did Rebecca recognize Earl wielding the blunderbuss—the last Shade member she would have expected to still be capable of fighting at all, given his age.

Then she was at the outer limit of the vortex’s blazing white light, with no more time to watch the compound’s defenders who’d already been at this way too long.

All that mattered now was getting to the center of this blinding, staggeringly hot magical storm.

Now that she’d made it, Rebecca found herself with an entirely new obstacle.

She couldn’t see anything inside.

All around her, the streams of griybreki threw themselves at the churning column of light, one after another. They darted toward it in such quick succession, the frogmen looked more like one enormous single organism—an endlessly stretching snake winding its way toward the nexus of all this power amidst the battle.

Every gray-skinned creature barreling headlong into the storm instantly met its end. The larger ones were thrown away from the churning outer layer the second they touched it, launched backward across the battlefield only to be trampled beneath the unyielding webbed feet of their fellow frogmen. None of whom seemed to notice.

The smaller griybreki were incinerated on contact. Even the ashes of their instantly obliterated bodies disappeared beneath the surging heat of unstable energy.

Rebecca had no idea why the frogmen never stopped or drew back, but the time for solving such a mystery had long since passed.

The blinding white storm howled with violent intensity increasing by the second. Streaks of blazing lightning bolts erupted from the vortex’s center, seemingly at random, striking griybreki both nearby and farther out in the swarms.

Any of them touched by the bolts were pummeled to dust, as if that lightning now surged straight from the fucking sun…

Squinting against the glare, Rebecca fought for even the smallest glimpse of what lay at the storm’s center, but it was impossible.

She had to get closer.

Skewering griybreki with her Bloodshadow spear whenever they drew too close and tossing them aside amidst the continuing melee, Rebecca moved closer. Pushing herself through the first outer layer of searing heat and blinding light until she could no longer tell the difference between where she was and where she was going.

Then she had to close her eyes against the agonizing glare. The heat only intensified with every slow, determined step.

All her focus centered on moving forward, no matter what, until she realized how terrible the heat had become—how impossible to see anything around her now.

It was too much to bear.

Too much for anyone else, anyway.

The storm trembled with another devastating shudder. More lightning strikes blazed outward all around her, turning their griybreki targets to dust and narrowly missing Rebecca in the process.

Something told her they were random misses and not intentional. Whatever powers of luck and protection were on her side, though, wouldn’t last forever.

The earth trembled again beneath her boots, her entire world reduced to the glare of such intensely powerful magic burning its white light all around her. She couldn’t have oriented herself to retrace her steps and get out of here if it had occurred to her to do so.

Then the swirling debris swept up but not yet burned away by the magical storm cleared, like rain clouds blowing past the moon to reveal its light, and she received a brief, fleeting view through the whipping heat.

All the way to the vortex’s center.

There was someone in there. Someone instantly familiar despite how impossible it seemed.

By the Blood, it was Zida!