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R ebecca thought she was dead.
It would have made sense. Part of her had even expected it as the worst-case scenario, if she’d somehow failed.
But wasn’t death supposed to also be the end of pain?
Nothing but pain existed now, lancing through her body, igniting every nerve at once, even before she tried to move.
No, she wasn’t dead. That was the good news.
She had a feeling the bad news was still waiting for her to discover it.
Her throat felt ripped open from the inside when she coughed, and her muscles cried out in excruciating protest. Somehow, through the constant burn igniting her senses, she managed to draw in a searing breath.
Why was she so heavy ?
Then she realized the extra solid weight in her arms wasn’t hers…
Blinking through the agony of fully opening her eyes again, she looked down to find her arms still wrapped tightly around the healer’s body.
Not a corpse, either.
Zida, lying limp in Rebecca’s arms, would have looked convincingly dead if it weren’t for her violent shivering from head to toe and her quick, panting breaths.
They’d survived.
Rebecca forced her gaze away from the healer to take in their surroundings.
At first, the thick black smoke rising in every direction made it impossible to see much of anything. But when a gentle breeze blew across the parking lot and cleared enough of the smoke away, she got a perfectly unimpeded view.
Then she almost wished she hadn’t.
She and the healer sat in the center of a massive crater punched into the parking lot, right outside the compound’s front entrance. Though those double doors had shattered, glass shards strewn everywhere, and the metal frames hung askew on their partially remaining hinges.
Rebecca couldn’t see much more than that from down here, but what she could see in the distance over the jagged, crumbling lip of the crater told her enough.
Everything had been destroyed. Chunks of brick and cement ripped from the compound building now dotted the crater’s perimeter. Some teetered on the edge of tumbling down to join the elf and the daraku who, by all rights, shouldn’t have survived.
Glass shards, strips of metal, chunks of brick, and frayed wires filled in the empty spaces, mixed with dust and rubble and scattered tree branches.
The section of forest visible from her seat in the crater looked like it had been half-demolished by a wrecking crew, half-burned to the ground.
When the wind shifted, a brief shudder wracked Rebecca too as the sour stench of ozone and dangerously concentrated magic nearly spent wafted toward her.
She felt the remnants of it lingering in the air around her, in the wreckage of the blast, even in the bits of crumbled asphalt lying in the base of the crater with her.
Even the earth beneath her rippled with residual magic settling after such an incredible blast. As if the entire compound and surrounding forest, no matter how devastated, breathed a collective sigh of relief that it was finally over.
More than that, she noticed the silence. Cold. Penetrating. Absolute.
Even without being able to see across the rest of the parking lot, she knew the truth.
The griybreki swarms—the entire horde—were gone.
That was all she had time to notice before the agony of her body’s existence—the proof she still lived—screeched through her awareness again, demanding her full attention.
Rebecca sucked in a hissing gasp against the pain and tried to muffle her cry when the intensity simply became too much.
She was alive, sure, but she’d definitely been burned. Not all the way. Not out of existence, like the griybreki horde, but close enough.
A single glance at her bare arms, her shirt all but burned away, convinced her how bad it was—red and singed, most of it still smoking after the fact. Large swatches of skin, mottled with a combination of charred, blackened flesh and oozing remnants of that had melted into muscle.
Zida didn’t look any better.
The consuming glow of the healer’s magic was gone now, but her burns were almost as bad as Rebecca’s. The woman’s squinty eyes had returned to their beady blackness, though now she looked far older than the ancient healer Rebecca had come to know. Decrepit. Spent, empty.
The natural effects of powering herself up the way she had to end their battle—at her age and with so much life behind her and so little left ahead.
Zida wheezed out a rattling breath and turned her head a fraction of an inch to look up at the elf cradling her in her arms.
This was the woman’s deathbed, wasn’t it?
Or it would have been, if Rebecca hadn’t succeeded against nearly impossible odds.
“I had my suspicions, kid,” Zida wheezed, her voice a dry husk as every breath rattled in her chest. “But now I know what you are. I thought there were none of you left.”
“That makes two of us,” Rebecca replied, then coughed through the rawness searing her throat and almost screamed again beneath the pain.
They needed no more explanation than that.
Zida had proven herself as a Shi’il Taaríth of the daraku—a powerful and exceedingly rare anomaly among her kind. As far as the legends went, all shi’il lived as healers, but as a last resort at the eleventh hour, they possessed the ability to do what Zida had just done, if it meant protecting those in her care when all other options were exhausted.
Mutually assured destruction for the shi’il and for their enemies.
Only this one had had the Bloodshadow Heir to aid her in her cause.
And now Zida knew without a doubt who and what Rebecca truly was. No way to hide it anymore. No use pretending otherwise.
The sickening creak of burned flesh stretching tighter across the old woman’s face when she attempted a smile filled the back of Rebecca’s throat with a stinging burst of bile.
“Just you and me again, huh?” Zida asked, her eyelids heavy and drooping within her singed face. “Two legendary blockheads who shouldn’t even exist anymore.”
Rebecca grunted. “Legends are overrated.”
“So is this shit,” the healer croaked, sagging against her protector, on the verge of falling apart or dying, and they both knew it. “You tried. Didn’t work. So now’s the part where you leave and let me sneak out the back door. I’m done.”
“I’m not.”
Rebecca hardly had the strength to lift her hand after absorbing all the destructive energy of Zida’s uncontrolled power. Her Bloodshadow magic had filtered it through a protective burst, singling out every member of Shade to prevent them from being targeted like the griybreki, but it hadn’t left her in the best of shape.
Still, she’d pushed herself to greater limits than this before. Others had pushed her farther too.
It was immensely difficult but not impossible.
Just staggeringly painful and utterly exhausting when she tightened her grip with one arm around the healer as much as possible, setting her palm against the old woman’s rattling chest. She hovered her other hand over her own heart to heal two bodies that had nearly been fused together—and would have been, if her magic had been any less precise.
The pain of her own flesh stitching itself up from the inside—bone and sinew and muscle knitting together, layer after layer, beneath the golden-orange glow erupting in her palm—was even worse than what had returned her to consciousness.
All that existed in those moments as she worked, forcing her magic to continue over the overwhelming pain and the need in the back of her mind to finish this for both of them, Zida shivered and trembled in Rebecca’s arms. Hissing in sharp, seething breaths as Rebecca’s magic reversed the damage to her body bit by bit.
But the healer didn’t complain. She hardly made a sound.
When it was finally over, Rebecca knew she’d be fine. She’d done this thousands of times before. Nothing felt wrong or like it wouldn’t heal the way it was supposed to.
Zida looked like she had no problem accepting the healing either, despite her full-body trembling. But with her, looks could be deceiving.
The old daraku was so old, so far past her prime, she could have handled only so much anyway. Rebecca’s magic was powerful, but it drew the line at bringing others back from the dead. Or reversing the effects of age and the ultimate end that came for everyone, eventually.
Rebecca was about to try her voice again and ask how the healer felt, but a haggard, booming shout stopped her, followed by clattering chunks of rubble being shoved aside amidst heavy shuffling and intermittent clacks across the asphalt.
A second later, Bor’s hardened, battle-weary face, smudged with dirt and oily, dark-green griybreki blood, appeared to their left, just above the edge of the crater, his staff in tow.
The hunched giveldi stopped abruptly when he saw Rebecca sitting up against the wall of a crater with Zida still sagging against her. Wide-eyed horror rippled across his face as he glanced from Rebecca, to Zida, to the appalling depth of the crater and back to his Roth-Da’al once more.
Zida managed to keep her eyes open for longer than a few seconds when she turned her head toward Rebecca’s face again. Her breath no longer rattling, the wheezing gone. Tears shimmered in her beady black eyes, which now, Rebecca noticed with renewed awe, were lit brighter than their previously natural-black state by hundreds of specks of starlight-white that didn’t fade.
“Thank you,” the healer whispered.
Rebecca swallowed and found her voice. “I probably owed you one. Or five.”
Huffing out a laugh, the old woman relaxed fully against the Bloodshadow Elf with one arm still wrapped protectively around her and closed her eyes with a long sigh.
The eerie silence after that seemed to last forever until Bor shattered it with a heavy grunt from above.
Rebecca looked up to meet his gaze, surprised to find the old giveldi looking so deeply pained and concerned. She hadn’t thought anything could make him look at her quite like this. Clearly, she’d been wrong.
His scarred face twisted in apprehension. “Is she…”
“I’m not dead, you old roach, if that’s what you’re asking,” Zida groused, her eyes still closed. “I should be. Maybe even wanted to be. But this one has a knack for screwing up all my hard work.”
A hoarse bark of raspy laughter erupted from Bor before he leaned away from the edge of the crater, settling both hands atop his staff and leaning on it fully for support.
“As the Roth-Da’al commands,” he grumbled, sounding like his old, brusque, curmudgeonly self again.
But the gleam in his eyes told a different story.
Bor was relieved to find Zida still in one piece. If this had been anyone else, Rebecca would have said his emotions stopped there. But on him, it was hard not to see how thrilled he was by the knowledge.
Even if “As the Roth-Da’al commands” was the most praise and gratitude she would get from the old giveldi right now. Maybe ever.
It was enough.
Then Rebecca realized what else it meant. Not just Bor’s gruff appreciation he barely showed now that the worst was over.
It also meant he knew as well, just as much as Zida did.
That only a Bloodshadow Elf with the power of her lineage—a power that hadn’t existed in hundreds of generations, maybe thousands—could pull a shi’il of the daraku back from the brink the way Rebecca had pulled back the healer.
Even without seeing the proof of it, Zida resting in Rebecca’s arms at the bottom of the crater, he would still have known everything. He’d seen it. All of it.
Zida, Bor, and maybe Earl, if he’d been paying close enough attention, had had a front-row seat to what Rebecca had done. They’d been the only ones close enough to bear witness to her Bloodshadow magic used for so many different things at the end of this battle.
To protect Zida. To redistribute the damage of the healer’s explosive power. To shield all of Shade battling for their own lives.
And to heal both herself and the daraku right here in the aftermath.
Bor might not have reached the edge of the crater in time to watch that healing from start to finish, but he certainly saw the effects of it now.
Of course he recognized what Rebecca was after that. He and Zida had lived full lives, both in Xahar’áhsh and on Earth. Another old-worlder with more than enough knowledge and experience to recognize the legends when they came true in his own reality.
Even if he didn’t understand exactly what Rebecca was the way Zida did, he knew plenty now. More than enough to understand that Rebecca Knox was far more than who and what she’d claimed since first joining Shade.
That knowledge in the wrong hands was disastrous. Even in the right hands, it was remarkably dangerous for Rebecca and everyone else involved.
Bor didn’t seem to hold any of it against her now, though. Maybe he wouldn’t, after seeing Zida had survived.
It left one more potential loose end for Rebecca. One more possible threat to her own survival, left in another pair of hands that weren’t her own.
Right now, she couldn’t worry about what Bor might or might not do with this new knowledge. She’d saved the healer’s life. She’d saved all their lives.
Nothing else mattered.
For now, at least.
She was about to ask after the rest of her task force, but a sliding pile of rubble tumbled down over the edge of the crater, with Bor following close behind. He slipped and slid halfway down into the parking lot’s new, enormous pit before hobbling the rest of the way with the support of his staff until he finally reached them.
With another grunt, he extended a gnarled hand toward the healer, who finally opened her eyes with a weary smile and let the old giveldi gently haul her up out of Rebecca’s arms.
The moment Zida was on her feet, she toppled forward into Bor’s waiting embrace, letting out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a strangled, croaking cry of relief.
He wrapped his arms around her as she sagged against him, one gnarled hand gingerly patting her upper back as she buried her face in the crook of his neck.
Neither of them said a word. Words clearly weren’t needed.
Rebecca watched them, surprised and a little softened by this rare moment of tenderness between two of Shade’s oldest members who’d been around the longest. Who’d lived full lives in two different worlds. Who’d spent so much of it together within this very compound lying in ruins above the crater.
They were old and crotchety, sure, and they each took their jobs with the utmost seriousness. But none of that made them incapable of caring for one another just the same.
If anyone had told her this softer side to either Zida or Bor existed, Rebecca would have laughed in their face.
Now, if they hadn’t acted this way with each other at a moment like this, it would have disturbed her.
As if the universe had held everything else back to give these two ancient Xaharí their own uniquely private moment, the rest of the world beyond the crater made itself known.
Shouts rose from every direction as Shade operatives and support staff regained consciousness and then their balance as they picked themselves and each other off the destroyed ground.
They hollered at each other from across the parking lot, some of them making so much noise, Rebecca wondered if the blast had shattered their eardrums.
Then she realized none of the growing noise came through her comms. When she whipped the newest device—courtesy of the tech-genius gnome Bruce—out of her ear, she found the earpiece twisted and shriveled. Ruined.
No surprise there, really. Rebecca and Zida had hardly survived the explosion. How could a state-of-the-art magitek comms unit fare any better?
As more and more baffled and curious faces of her operatives appeared over the lip of the crater, Rebecca figured it was time to get back on her feet.
Only once she stood again, though, did she realize she stood in front of her task force nearly naked. Her shirt ripped and burned away to nothing but strips, her jeans tattered and hanging by threads at the waistline.
What she wore now wouldn’t have even passed as shorts in some places.
Nothing remained of her shoes.
The operatives converging on the crater seemed too baffled by recent events to notice. All things considered, it didn’t really matter in the face of having just saved them all from multiple threats in one go.
She didn’t see Maxwell anywhere.
Where was he?
The second she thought of him, she realized she’d felt his presence drawing closer since she’d risen to her feet. She felt him drawing closer still, with the warm tingle growing stronger as it surged across her skin and through her.
With the sensation of him came a burst of the shifter’s emotions, faint at first but steadily strengthening like everything else.
Urgency. Concern. Confusion. And a budding fear blooming into something like panic…