13. Chapter 13
13
L istening to it was almost as horrible as having been there herself.
It didn’t help that while Maxwell relayed to Shade’s council everything he and Rebecca had witnessed at the Old Joliet Prison, Rebecca couldn’t stop watching the others’ faces.
Surprise, discomfort, horror, outrage. She watched the exact process of her own emotional evolution playing out across the expressions of everyone sitting around the table in front of her desk. Even Bor offered more of a reaction than his usual gruff muttering.
This wasn’t going over well with any of them. And that was the point. No one in their right mind could listen to something like this and remain calm and devoid of emotion. Not when Harkennr had built his new empire and let it take root in their city.
Now and for the last six months, admittedly, Rebecca definitely considered Chicago to be her city.
“The tunnels led right back up to the surface,” Maxwell continued. “We encountered neither Harkennr’s forces nor any other deterrent along the way, but I have already been advised that these tunnels will not be a viable point of entry for us in the future. Not for a covert breach op, at any rate. Which is what I imagine will be part of what we discuss next.”
He turned slightly in his chair. “Anything the Roth-Da’al would like to add?”
The office descended into tense, disbelieving silence, and it took Rebecca a moment to realize he was opening the floor for her. She blinked and nodded back at him. “Thanks, Hannigan.”
Was there anything she wanted to add to his disturbingly detailed verbal report of their visit to the Old Joliet Prison?
The better question was what didn’t Rebecca want to add? There were so many things she could say right now, including all the dirt and even darker secrets she’d discovered about Harkennr the first time around, centuries ago. About the unbelievable lengths he would go to when he really wanted something. About just how awful the warlock could truly be.
But she didn’t go there.
She couldn’t.
Any privileged information she might share would lead to questions of how she knew, and that would require her admitting that she’d known Harkennr once upon a time, back on the old world. So much of her knowledge about Shade’s new adversary was still intertwined with the part of Rebecca’s old story that involved the Bloodshadow Court and her escape from it.
Besides, she could argue none of that was relevant to their current situation. This was Chicago, not Agn’a Tha’ros, or even Ryngivát. Harkennr was their next-door neighbor, for all intents and purposes. His work here, endangering local magical civilians, was bad enough without bringing anything else into it.
So many pairs of eyes settling on her face, giving Rebecca their undivided attention, made it more difficult to begin than she’d imagined.
Finally, she cleared her throat and figured she had to start somewhere.
“Bottom line, for the purposes of this meeting, is that now that Hannigan and I have seen what we’ve seen inside Harkennr’s facility and made it out of there alive with Nyx, there’s no way we can just leave it at that. We can’t sit back, put our feet up, and let Harkennr continue what he’s doing with all his ‘test subjects.’”
“They’re not test subjects,” Rick muttered. Even with his black-and-red mottled skin, he looked pale after Maxwell’s account. “They’re victims.”
“Exactly The way I see it, Shade’s responsibility extends as much to Chicago’s civilians as it does to the other organizations we’ve allied with in the past, plus all of our previous and current contacts. I know we focus a lot on how to keep the really awful shit from happening in the first place, but when we can’t, we still owe it to those who can’t fix things themselves.”
When she finished, the same crushing silence settled around her council table again. She hoped it was from the shock and not that everyone else just didn’t understand what she was saying. Or worse, that they didn’t agree with her.
She forced a cough into her fist and added, “That’s my opinion on it, anyway. But you’re here because I want to hear yours too.”
“Well shit,” Zida piped up first. “You’ve got my vote, kid. Not that we’re actually voting, but there’s no two ways about this. We need to take him down.”
Slowly but surely, the others started to move again as if coming back to life, first with dazed nods and then with glances exchanged around the table.
“Exactly,” Whit said. “We go after Harkennr, and we break up his operation however we can. Every single bit of it.”
“That’s all very valiant and everything,” Bor interjected, “but if we go after this múrg now, unprovoked, and after he let Knox and Hannigan go, we’ll be the ones starting a war.”
“Harkennr already fired the first shot in that war on us when he took Nyx,” Rebecca said.
Bor stroked his hairless chin and glowered at her, but he didn’t argue.
Everyone else still looked more than eager to hear what else she had to say on that particular topic.
“Listen,” she said, “I know it seems like we’ve evened things out. Hannigan and I made a mess at the prison the first time we were there. I can admit that much, and it was entirely our mistake. Then Harkennr took Nyx, and we got her back. It looks like everything’s been settled. That we can go back to normal, and none of us the worse for it.
“But our visit with him today? Today was only a ceasefire, I promise.”
“He did invoke the vri-túl’ak with you at his table,” Zida muttered.
“Subtly and barely,” Bor grumbled. “But he did.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca said. “No one invokes vri-túl’ak if they don’t intend to continue the battle afterward. Honestly, we were incredibly lucky to get Nyx out of there in one piece, saying nothing about the two of us.”
She gestured between herself and Maxwell. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the way things panned out today. But we can’t move forward expecting that to be the status quo. Otherwise, we might as well hand Harkennr all our weapons and defenses and even the keys to this compound right along with them.”
“Did he let anything slip about what he might do next?” Rick asked. “To us, I mean.”
Maxwell leaned back in his chair, the metal creaking beneath his weight, and folded his arms. “No. The bastard’s too slippery for that.”
“But I do expect him to make a move,” Rebecca added, “sooner rather than later. Whatever that might happen to be. Especially after all his efforts to lull us into complacency first with such a hospitable reception. Make us feel just comfortable enough that we won’t see him coming.”
“Absolutely his style,” Maxwell grumbled.
“You say all this like you have some kind of proof for it,” Zida said.
“No proof beyond what we saw in there today,” Rebecca replied.
“So then how do you know?” Whit asked.
Shit.
Rebecca had been so focused on getting them to see the danger here and to take it seriously enough to act on, she’d forgotten how easily that would lead people to this exact question.
How did she know?
Because she knew Harkennr, and again, that was one more piece of information she couldn’t afford to divulge or explain just now.
“I just have a feeling,” she said.
Zida snorted. “Sure, kid. I used to have feelings all the time. Then I got old.”
Not helping.
But she did have to come up with more of an answer than just her feelings , though her instincts were usually spot on. Except these days, Rebecca’s instincts seemed to be a little more colored by her past than the present warranted.
No one was ever supposed to know a thing about her previous work with Harkennr, but what she was dealing with now was new and uncharted territory. This issue with Harkennr in the present was a much more pressing issue than any one of her past lives before Shade, including the one she’d spent with the warlock.
“Beyond that,” she added, “it does us more good than harm to be especially cautious with this. Trust me, I’m with the rest of you when it comes to what needs to be done. We have to stop him. We have to get those magicals out of that prison, and we have to use whatever means necessary to keep him from doing it again.”
“Sounds like you’ve got something in mind already,” Bor grumbled.
“It’s starting to come together, yeah.” Then Rebecca turned toward Whit and nodded. “Whit, I want you to put a recon team together, and for the foreseeable future, this team needs to be on Harkennr’s trafficking convoys twenty-four-seven.
“I wanna know how many people he’s got abducting these civilians. How often new truckloads are delivered to the prison. Where they come from. Where they’re going. Hell, how often they stop for a pee break. Everything you can find.
“And this is recon only. Do not engage. But in the next forty-eight hours, I wanna know everything there is to know about those new incoming shipments, the regular routes, timing, absolutely everything.”
Whit set his jaw and returned her nod. “I’m on it.”
“Knowing exactly how he’s doing all this is one thing,” Rick said. “But if we’re going up against this guy in any way after that, we’ve got one other serious logistical problem.”
All eyes turned onto the blackhorn, making him look slightly nervous beneath the attention. But when Rebecca and Maxwell both gestured for him to continue, that seemed to buoy his confidence enough.
Rick cleared his throat. “This guy’s outfitted better than pretty much every other operation we’ve seen. It sounds like he’s got way more resources than we do, which isn’t saying much, but this one’s big. There’s a lot at risk and a whole hell of a lot to lose. If we’re gonna do this right, Shade needs some serious upgrades first.”
Bor grunted and tapped a hand on the table. “Ain’t that always the truth of it.”
“You’re right,” Maxwell replied, “and it’s something that’s been on my mind as well. We’ve had a few improvements recently, but nothing that brings us anywhere close to evenly matched.”
Rebecca shot him a sidelong look, because now they were discussing what they needed to get this done. She’d hoped they would. She just didn’t have any ideas at the moment for helping her task force fix that single but crucially important issue.
“We do have the weapons cache from the docks,” she said, “but I agree, it won’t be nearly enough.”
“Don’t those count as an asset in and of themselves?” Bor asked.
“We can’t liquidate a stolen weapons cache to fund a sting op against the prison,” Maxwell said, centering his wide-eyed gaze on the cook in disbelief. “It’s one thing to use our acquisitions in the field, but selling them and putting that kind of weapons technology back on the streets just to fund an attack? That it’s completely counterproductive.”
“We’re not selling those weapons,” Rebecca added. “That defeats the purpose of having taken them.”
Zida puffed out a sigh and shrugged. “I assumed this was a brainstorming session.”
“That’s exactly what this is,” Rebecca told her. “I want any and all ideas out on the table, because that’s how we figure out what needs to be done next.”
“Except selling off a few fancy weapons.”
Rebecca couldn’t help but smirk at the healer. “Right. Except that. Does anyone have any other brainstorming points to put out there?”
Her council’s response was what she’d expected it to be—blank looks and silence as everyone peered around the table, waiting for the next best option to come from someone else’s mouth. But nothing cropped up, and the silence soon became as cloying as the urgency of this new and dangerous situation in which they found themselves.
Rebecca swiveled back and forth in her chair, wracking her own mind for possibilities.
Her gaze fell on the center drawer of her desk, and she almost leaped out of her chair when she remembered what she’d postponed to investigate later.
“All right,” she said. “Everybody keep thinking on this question, and in the meantime, there is one lead I’d like to look into before anything else.”
She reached into her pocket where, just a few hours before, she’d previously felt the weight of two matching stone figurines from Harkennr. This time, her fingers closed around the equally cool metal of the last item she’d placed there.
As she drew it out, Maxwell leaned slightly toward her with a confused frown. “Do I know about this lead?”
“We’re about to find out.” She pulled the key from her pocket—the key that had jammed the center drawer of her desk and fallen to the floor during the last council meeting—then held it up in front of her like a first-place trophy for everyone to see. “Does anyone know what this opens?”
She couldn’t help a growing smile as she scanned the council’s faces. Someone here had to know something about the keys Aldous had crammed into his desk drawers. If not, they were flying blind here, and Rebecca couldn’t imagine anything worse.