Elven Lies (Court of Rebellion #3)

29. Chapter 29

29

R ebecca had every faith in her team’s ability to tackle Harkennr’s victim-storing warehouse. But now that they were here, about to launch the first attack, she had second thoughts about the six rescued prisoners who’d agreed to fight with them.

Beside her, the witch Maddie focused on the front of the warehouse, her wide brown eyes welling with tears. The augmented rifle Shade had given her trembled in her hands.

While they had only a few seconds left before the breach team got into position and signaled it was time to move in, Rebecca couldn’t help but sidle up beside the witch and whisper, “You’ve already gotten us this far. You don’t have to move in on this with us. It’s okay to sit this one out, if you want.”

The witch clenched her jaw, clearly trying to steel herself even just to offer a reply, then turned toward Rebecca with grim determination despite the tears shimmering in her eyes. “I’m fine. There’s no way I’m sitting this one out. My sister’s in there, and everyone else who wasn’t lucky enough to get out tonight like I was. I have to do this, Roth-Da’al.”

Rebecca admired the witch’s conviction. She hadn’t expected the woman to take her up on the offer now that they were so close to executing this last-minute addition to their operation tonight.

But the smart thing would have been to order Maddie to stand down and hang back until the Shade teams got the full measure of how this would pan out once they engaged.

She could have made the order, and it would have been obeyed.

Whether Maddie or any of the other rescued prisoners recognized the history of the Roth-Da’al title, though, she’d clearly used it on purpose. She meant to follow Rebecca and her teams into this battle, no matter what. She meant to free her sister and as many of the others as possible, because sitting out and waiting for someone else to get the job done would have been far more excruciating.

Against her better judgment, Rebecca nodded and left it at that. They were already here. It was too late to change anyone’s mind.

“Just stay close,” she whispered. “The breach team goes in first to give your sister and the others a fighting chance before we can get them out of there. We’re staying out front to buy them time. Understand?”

“I won’t let you down,” Maddie replied with a curt nod. Her voice had stopped trembling, but it didn’t mean much.

No, Rebecca didn’t expect the witch to let her down at all tonight. Fortunately, she wasn’t counting on these battered, malnourished, terrified, and infuriated victims of Harkennr’s mad plans for anything beyond seizing their chance.

A few more decent fighters were welcome, but Rebecca knew the only things they wanted were to see their friends and loved ones and all the other prisoners liberated while seizing their own opportunity to exact revenge. The best that could come out of this was that none of these six extra last-minute fighters would jeopardize this much larger rescue mission and that they wouldn’t do anything to make it even more difficult than it was already going to be.

Rebecca hadn’t had the heart to tell them no when they were ready, willing, and mostly capable of joining in. She recognized all too well their anger and their need to regain their own power through action.

Though Maxwell hadn’t said a thing since they’d taken their positions in the woods along the warehouse’s west side, she still felt his apprehension and wariness battling with his compassion for these victims as fiercely as her own.

When had doing the right thing become such an undeniable risk?

Rebecca met his silver gaze in the darkness. Maxwell dipped his head in acknowledgement.

They were in this together—all three Shade teams, the six prisoners rescued from Harkennr’s transport vehicles, Rebecca, and Maxwell.

No turning back now.

A faint crackle emerged from the comms, which they honestly should have utilized so long ago but had only just recently had the means to order and outfit every Shade team with a fully functional set. Then Zane’s voice murmured through the comms in Rebecca’s ear.

“Breach team in position. We’re ready when you are. Only two guards.”

“When they both reach the widest point in their routes,” Maxwell added, “one on the west side, the other on the east, we’ll bring the Breach Team’s cover. Alpha Team, prepare for a full frontal assault on my mark.”

“Copy that,” Ben replied.

Then every team counted down the tense seconds as the two guards on foot patrol met in the middle of their routes directly in front of the warehouse’s centered entrance, waiting for them to diverge in opposite directions again.

Rebecca watched diligently, aware of the rest of her team out here waiting for the right moment. Beside her, Maddie let out a slow, shaky sigh, but at least her borrowed weapon had stopped trembling.

Blue Hells, could these patrol guards move any slower?

Their footsteps offered the only sound in the darkness. Then, once they inched ever closer to the farthest point on their route and stopped to search the quiet night, it was time. The western guard turned around to begin the slow pass back toward the center.

“Alpha Team!” Maxwell’s voice crackled through the comms. “Give ‘em all you got. Move!”

The tree line surrounding the front of the warehouse exploded in a flurry of unleashed battle magic and augmented weapons fire. A churning, bright purple swirl of electrifying light barreled straight for the guard Rebecca and her team had so diligently watched and sent him flying backward toward the building.

His scream cut off the second he thumped against the warehouse’s outer wall with a metallic clang of his body against the corrugated steel siding, the sound of which disappeared beneath the erupting chaos.

Feeling Maxwell at her side and hoping Maddie and the other volunteers would follow closely, as instructed, Rebecca leapt to her feet with the rest of alpha team spread out along the tree line and moved in. Firing her weapon at the dirt inches from the warehouse wall, she scanned the area for movement.

If it hadn’t been for the civilians held in that warehouse, she would have peppered the building with live rounds. But this mission was more delicate than most. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if the magicals they’d come to liberate got caught in the crossfire.

The darkness blazed with multicolored lights from streaming magitek weapons fire and battle magic flying from open hands—orange lightning bolts, silver darts like daggers, green flame, and sizzling blue funnels cracking into dirt and walls.

One of the warehouse’s mounted floodlights buzzed and popped with a deafening crack before the light went out and the busted glass scattered into the dirt.

As Alpha Team pressed forward by the second, firing non-stop as the distraction Bravo needed to get to the prisoners, a loud, clicking boom echoed through the night.

The strategically placed floodlights filled the front of the warehouse with a blinding blaze, and a blaring alarm rose and fell three times before cutting out. By then, Harkennr’s forces stationed at the warehouse already spilled out of the building to return fire and defend their base.

Rebecca’s instincts took over, and she stopped thinking about what was happening and why they were here. She entered the fray like a soldier, like a sharply honed blade forged and crafted for a single purpose. Nothing else existed.

The warehouse’s front doors flew open with a bang to let out a streaming surge of enemy targets, armed and already firing their weapons the second they stepped outside.

On the east side, a garage door opened, clunking and clanging on its automatic mechanisms before someone sent a brilliant burst of crackling yellow augmented weapons fire straight into the door. The attack fried the entire system with a burst of yellow-brown smoke. The garage door shuddered to a grating halt with only three feet of open space above the ground.

But not before half a dozen Harkennr soldiers squeezed themselves underneath to enter the battle.

Rebecca fired round after round from her augmented assault rifle as enemy targets streamed toward her from various exits around the warehouse. She didn’t see faces or races or the weapons her opponents operated or what type of magic they used.

She only saw the battle, the enemy, and her operatives—the constant movement around the battlefield like a living game board, each piece moving in real time with far more deadly stakes than a game of Xaharí chess.

She only saw herself against the evil Harkennr’s forces represented and carried out even here at the warehouse.

She saw her need to win and to deliver a massive blow to the sadistic warlock she’d believed she’d left behind in her old life forever. The only half-buried piece of her past against which she could physically fight and for a purpose beyond saving her own skin.

Bodies fell everywhere beneath the chaos. Shouted orders rose above the intensifying whine of magitek weapons powering up, the crackling hiss of battle magic careening through the air, the crackling colors of magical light contrasting with both the darkness beyond the battle and the blindingly bright floodlights illuminating the violence everywhere she looked.

All the noises echoed back to her through the comms should have been a distraction but somehow weren’t. Hearing the screams of the enemy falling there, desperately barked orders to act against the assault, the confusion and frustration as Harkennr’s soldiers tried to pin down the Shade teams to hit them hardest, all echoing back to her through the comms as well as across the night air only made her feel that much more connected to her operatives.

As if she’d finally mastered existence in multiple places at once—standing here firing her own blazing magitek rounds at anything that moved her way but also running across the battlefield with Ben and his smaller team flanking from the east, or hidden behind the tree line Zane and the rest of the breach team as they waited for their perfect moment to infiltrate the warehouse.

Rebecca was everywhere with each one of them, all at once, as if it were always meant to be this way, As if this was what she’d been missing and had only now just discovered it in an impromptu assault on Harkennr’s warehouse.

When a blaze of orange grew in her periphery, Rebecca leaped aside to narrowly avoid the full-body hit from the blazing battle magic. She stumbled sideways but hardly felt the sting of the attack that had clipped her shoulder at the last second.

Without thinking, she spun and fired a heavy stream of automatic rounds at her attacker, lighting up the space around her with violent crimson strobes, without a single concern as to how long her weapon would serve her before it jammed or otherwise failed.

Without any thought for the ache in her shoulder or the renewed blaze of pain there when she spun around and raised her weapon toward the next enemy bearing down on her.

“Breach Team to Alpha.” Zane’s called through the comms. “We have our opening. Moving in.”

Through the blazing, crackling, exploding chaos around the warehouse, Rebecca caught sight of her breach team, with Zane at the lead, racing from the eastern tree line in tight formation, weapons raised and prepared to fire only at those who got in their way.

They headed straight for the partially open garage door and disappeared one by one as they slid beneath the three-foot opening to get inside and head straight for the civilian prisoners.

So far so good. For as little preemptive planning as her teams had had for this operation, they’d been surprisingly successful in the first few minutes.

Knocking down as many of the dozens of enemy targets still streaming out of the warehouse to enter the fight, Rebecca moved closer to the building, taking the battle toward any of Harkennr’s sick puppets who hadn’t yet brought it to her.

And they just kept coming. Thankfully, the number of individuals stationed here wasn’t nearly as large as those manning the old prison’s security and defenses. These magicals were disorganized and scattered, much slower to react.

But as the fighting continued, Rebecca realized just how many enemy combatants were here—how many magicals Harkennr had already gotten his hooks into in Chicago alone. She hadn’t given the sadistic warlock or his powers of persuasion nearly enough credit.

A screaming half-giant barreled straight toward her, tossing his empty weapon aside in the process, arms outstretched and features contorted in a mindless snarl. Rebecca had to put four high-powered rounds into the guy before he finally dropped two feet in front of her, then she spun to zero in on the next most immediate threat.

That was when the low, sputtering whine of heavy augmented assault machinery split through the constant din of screaming opponents and snarling magicals and the crackle and hiss of attack magic and augmented artillery.

The familiar cadence of that low whine—quickly rising in pitch with a vibrating force she soon felt in her teeth—made her stop. Twice before now, she’d encountered this same powerful, deadly magitek force preparing to unleash itself on her and her operatives.

Why hadn’t anyone told them this was part of what they faced?

Her teams hadn’t had the time or the resources to efficiently reconnoiter the warehouse and its resources, and how would half a dozen terrified, furious, and vengeful newly liberated civilians know about the deadly high-powered weaponry in possession of this warehouse? They were civilians, not soldiers.

Plus, until now, the enemy forces stationed here likely hadn’t had cause to employ such a weapon. But they were employing it now.

As Rebecca scanned the warehouse’s exterior, searching for the source of that familiar whine powering up an insanely deadly machine against which her teams had barely stood a chance in the past, a spray of magitek rounds in her direction disrupted her focus. She sidestepped the blast, turned on her attacker, and took him down with a stream of automatic fire, which gained her another few seconds of searching.

A heavy metallic click and grind came from above. She looked up to see the light glinting off metal as it moved on the roof.

Another enormous and arguably deadly high-powered assault weapon on a swiveling mount, this time settled on the warehouse roof and manned by a Harkennr soldier in black sweats and a ski mask. He tugged on the weapon’s steering as the powering whine rose louder with a squeal of metal hinges turned sharply in new directions.

Then the weapon’s operator heaved down on the controls against the swiveling mount, bringing the weapon’s barrel closer and closer to centering its mark on the battle below.

A blazing orange light bloomed in the center of the cannon’s barrel, growing ever brighter and deadlier as the weapon’s system powered up toward full capacity.

“Heavy artillery on the roof!” Rebecca shouted, hoping her teams picked it up through the comms amidst all the other deafening chaos of battle. “Take it down!”

“Tig!” Maxwell shouted, though Rebecca couldn’t tell if she heard him more through the comms or somewhere beside her. “Target the roof. Get that weapon offline.”

Tig offered no verbal confirmation, but it wasn’t necessary. He responded immediately by refocusing his firepower toward the roof and one more enormous, highly deadly piece of magitek machinery that made any other mission priority for Shade impossible to execute.

Blazes of strobing purple light streaked toward the top of the warehouse, buzzing and cracking against the edge of the roof and sending crackling bolts of purple across the building’s exterior in quickly successive bursts. Unfortunately, Tig hadn’t yet taken the best position from the ground to accurately reach his new target.

His attacks either fell short or were thwarted by the edge of the roof before they could do any damage. That didn’t stop him from continuing his assault while the operatives around him automatically repositioned themselves to provide cover fire from all sides.

Rebecca’s gut sank like a stone as she watched the rest of it all play out, as if in slow motion. If they couldn’t bring that heavy artillery down in the next few seconds, her teams would be fighting a completely different battle down here just to keep from being obliterated by a high-powered war machine they couldn’t reach.

Then there would be no cover fire for the breach team and all the civilians they’d gone in to recover. There would be no additional firepower to deal with unknown enemy numbers inside the warehouse, not to mention the Harkennr soldiers who’d already joined the battle out front.

They’d really stepped in it with this one. Beyond fighting as hard as they could until no more fighting remained, Rebecca didn’t see any other way out of this.

She couldn’t get to the roof in time, not when their teams on the ground still needed her firepower. Bloodshadow magic was out of the question. It would be seen here from every direction by both her Shade operatives and Harkennr’s forces. No one else among her teams here on the ground could afford to divert their cover fire just to keep Rebecca from taking a deadly hit while she powered up in a seemingly impossible spell no one knew she could perform.

Plus, there was no guarantee she could reach it from here.

The pros and cons flashed through her mind in an instant before Rebecca turned to take down two other Harkennr soldiers gunning for her, Tig still desperately trying to neutralize the heavy artillery on the roof, even when it looked like Shade might not be able to call this one a win tonight.

Honestly, it looked like they’d bitten off more than they could chew.

With growing horror, Rebecca recognized the sound of that heavy artillery weapon finishing its power-up, and the blazing orange within the cannon’s barrel reached a blistering peak before the first debilitating shot was finally fired.

Orange light sprayed across the ground in front of the warehouse, sending up buffeting sprays of dirt and shattered glass from the windows and floodlights in its wake. Screams rent the air as the rooftop gunner still struggled to seize full control over aiming such a deadly weapon from above on a swiveling mount.

Rebecca caught a brief flash of her own operatives diving for cover at the last second while the deadly orange stream punched through the ground, powerful magitek energy ripping through everything it touched—so far with nothing left to stop it.

They were screwed.

She had no opportunity to get away from the fighting on the ground so she could stop the assault cannon from above.

Her automatic rifle grew painfully hot in her hands as she fired at the enemy targets continuously coming at her in a seemingly endless wave.

Then a massive explosion rocked the interior of the warehouse, followed immediately by a second. The ground trembled, throwing combatants on both sides off balance as the warehouse’s remaining windows burst outward in an exploding storm of glittering shards and heat. The partially raised garage door blew off its hinges and caught an enemy soldier in its path, sweeping the guy along with it before it crashed into the woods.

The air filled with thick black smoke and the orange and yellow flicker of natural fire now added to the mind-numbing crash of multicolored magical light and crackling, electrifying magitek rounds lighting up the darkness.

A stream of bodies emerged from the blasted-open garage door, spilling out of the smoke billowing from the opening. Rebecca turned that way and almost opened fire before she realized who they were.

Some of them had found weapons inside. Most barreled out of the warehouse, unarmed, looking just as terrified of and confused by the raging battle out here as by their previous circumstances in the warehouse. Some screamed non-stop as they raced ahead into the battle, with no idea where they were going or who was on their side.

Rebecca couldn’t blame the prisoners for losing their minds during a situation like this, but she hadn’t expected them to give under the pressure of sheer terror and turn this already blistering firefight into pure chaos.

One of the freed prisoners who’d armed himself with an augmented pistol—most likely taken from his captors—stepped forward, his expression a blank mask of shock before he lifted the pistol, took aim at nothing in particular, and fired shot after shot.

A Shade operative had to rescue the guy from his own shock before he seriously hurt those trying to help him or himself.

With the fires from the explosion blazing inside the warehouse, freed civilians running amok with no clue how to fold themselves into the battle, the high-powered heavy artillery cannon spewing orange destruction from the roof, and more enemy soldiers getting in their way than Rebecca had expected, the realization finally settled in with growing horror and despair.

Rebecca and her teams—not to mention the prisoners they’d come to liberate—most likely wouldn’t be getting out of here in one piece. If they got out of here at all.

And she was the only one who could make the final call as to what Shade did next.