10. Chapter 10
10
B efore Rowan could take a fourth furious step that would have closed the distance between them, a dark blur streaked across the cramped trailer in the blink of an eye, sending up a violent scuffle of loose paper, dry leaves, and churning plumes of dust in its wake.
Then Maxwell stood between them, blocking Rowan’s view and his furious path toward Rebecca with a devastatingly low, warning growl ripping through his chest.
“Not another step, elf,” he snarled.
Fortunately for his own physical well-being, Rowan stopped short and glared at the shifter before glancing over Maxwell’s shoulder at her. “Again? After all this? Has your guard dog already forgotten who’s in charge here?”
“That’s the thing about shifters,” Rebecca quipped, sneering back at the man she no longer recognized. “They have their own definition of who’s in charge, and they stick to it. Good luck trying to convince him of anything else.”
The emotionally charged pulse of magic in Rowan’s hand had completely disappeared, regardless of whether he’d intended to use it.
He didn’t try to threaten Maxwell, either, but he did look the shifter up and down with a snort. “I don’t even know what kinda time patience that would take.”
Despite the intended insult, though, Rowan did step back, either to gain a safer distance from Maxwell or a better view of Rebecca. Maybe both.
Surprisingly, Maxwell didn’t push any further with his warning toward the Blackmoon Elf or his usual over-protectiveness of Rebecca, which now felt like the perfectly necessary amount.
But Rowan continued from a distance, clearly trying to ignore Shade’s Head of Security stepping in only when it seemed necessary to prevent coming harm to his Roth-Da’al.
“What I’ve already told you still stands. And it won’t change. Whether you believe it doesn’t make a bit of difference.”
“In theory only,” she snapped, brushing aside the thought with a flippant wave of her hand. “And in practice for the last thousand years, sure. But only because they’ve had everyone else convinced that they’re the ones with all the authority. They have none. That’s what they learned today, and it’s a painful fucking lesson, but I’m done keeping my mouth shut.”
“That’s your choice. But I thought you were also done running, because that’s exactly what you’ll have to keep doing if you don’t just come back and—”
“ Stop !”
The trailer rang with her shout, and to her surprise, Rowan actually stopped.
Maxwell stepped to the side and turned slightly to regard her with wide eyes. If it surprised him that she’d lost her cool during this conversation, the only thing he knew was that Shade was in serious trouble, that they would be for quite some time if Rowan’s predictions were accurate, and that their Roth-Da’al was doing everything she could—short of abandoning her task force and Earth altogether—to protect them.
She forced herself to hold Rowan’s gaze, swallowed, and shook her head. “I won’t come back. They wanted an answer from me. It sounds like you want the same answer from me. But I said no to you first, and I said it to the Council. That should be enough, but apparently, it’s not.”
“So you’ll just stay here and let all of Agn’a Tha’ros fall to ruin? Let your legacy crumble beneath its enemies? And your conscience will still be clean?” The pained defeat in his voice was a rare occurrence for him, this Blackmoon Elf who’d treated only a handful of things in his life as anything other than a tool or a game for his own amusement.
No, Rebecca didn’t want the capitol city of their people to fall. She didn’t want to see the deaths of the Agn’a Tha’ros Clans, hundreds of thousands of elven lives snuffed out beneath the swift and deadly stroke of their enemies.
She just didn’t want to be the only one who stood a chance of stopping it.
She didn’t want the prophecy. She didn’t want the Shadowed Seat. And she sure as hell didn’t want anything she knew waited for her in Xahar’áhsh.
That Rebecca Bloodshadow was gone.
But Rowan’s judgment of her, disguised as a desperate plea, reminded her that he did care about what happened. He did care for Agn’a Tha’ros and its Clans, for the survival of the elven kingdoms in Xahar’áhsh. Maybe, in some unknown way much smaller and harder to find than it once was, he even cared about her .
But it wasn’t enough.
No rumor, prophecy, threat, or plea was enough anymore. If the Mystic had seen the future and called it prophecy, and if that prophecy truly was coming true now, Rebecca had to be absolutely certain.
She didn’t want to see the look in Rowan’s eyes when he heard her next words, but she forced herself to stare him down anyway. He deserved that much, at least.
“You’re doing what you think is right for the people who trust you to protect them,” she said. “I get that. I understand, because I’m doing the same thing.”
“Then you see how—”
“But I will not make any decision or offer any commitment until I have all the information I need first. So far, all I have is speculation and whispered hearsay and a whole lot of fearmongering the Council’s trying to dress up as irrefutable fact. I will agree to nothing. I need to know exactly what’s happening in Xahar’áhsh. Which armies are actually moving and where. I need proof that war is coming and that Agn’a Tha’ros stands directly in its path.
“If it is, and if I’m to take any part in it, then I also need to know exactly what the prophecy says. Or it won’t matter anyway.”
Rowan opened his mouth to keep arguing, but he stopped himself. Whatever realization he’d just had transformed his expression, the anger and desperation to convince her melting away beneath the arrival of a new perspective.
Then, huffing out a sigh, he dropped his arms at his sides and nodded. “You’re right.
Rebecca blinked at him. No way in hell was this real.
“Don’t do that,” she said with a bitter laugh. “Don’t try to convince me you’re giving up all of a sudden and that I’m in the clear. I don’t buy it for a second.”
“Probably because that’s not what I’m doing,” he retorted and folded his arms. “What I am doing is agreeing with you. Because you’re right. There hasn’t been any real proof. I’ve seen the hordes gathering across the plains. I’ve seen the destruction left behind in ravaged villages. I’ve heard stories from the locals. But there’s a limit to how seriously you can take the ramblings of old orcs over halfway into their cups at the taverns. Beyond that, there’s no proof at all.”
This was not what she’d expected.
He’d completely flipped his stance, suddenly and without any reasonable cause that she could see.
She’d be an idiot to take him seriously now just because he’d said she was right.
After studying him warily from the corner of her eye, Rebecca glanced toward Maxwell, who was already staring at her.
No surprise there, but there was no disapproval in the shifter’s eyes. No doubt or distrust. Only open curiosity strengthened by his desire to know the truth.
But she felt it as clearly as if he’d spoken it out loud:
‘I don’t know what to think, either. Might as well hear him out.’
No, it wasn’t a direct thought with words, but Maxwell’s energy, and the slow pulse in his silver eyes, and everything she felt through their connection might as well have been put into those exact words.
The mere idea that he would want to listen to anything Rowan Blackmoon had to say, not to mention him pressing her to let the elf speak, defied everything she thought she knew about the shifter.
But what could it hurt to hear Rowan out? Worst-case scenario, she’d discover him lying through his teeth. Again.
All things considered, the worst-case could’ve been much worse.
“I have no idea what you’re trying to pull right now,” she said, returning her gaze to the Blackmoon Elf, who now looked very much like he was cooking up another one of his schemes as that infuriatingly knowing smirk returned to his lips. “If you keep bullshitting me, I swear on the ancestors…”
“Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m being absolutely serious. If I haven’t found enough proof to convince me , I can promise you the Council hasn’t, either. With the elders on their side, they’ve all been making a big deal out of this whole thing, calling it duty and destiny and fate, without anything else to support those claims beyond Agn’a Tha’ros’s blind faith in the elders knowing best. And you said it yourself. It’s always been done a certain way.”
“Which is the exact argument you used against me just a second ago,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“Forget everything I said about that,” he said. “You know better than anyone how hard it is to think straight right after the Council tells you you’re useless and all you’ve accomplished means absolutely nothing. I was pissed.”
“And now you’re not?”
She had no idea what to make of this sudden switch in him. She couldn’t trust Rowan with much of anything. He’d made that clear. Now she wondered how much she could trust his state of mind on top of it.
“No, I’m still pissed. But that’s not my point,” he said with a chuckle. Then he turned away from her—and Maxwell standing dutifully between them—to thoughtfully pace toward the far end of the trailer. “The point is that, all things considered, no one knows anything. It’s been a long time since anyone has known .
“Agn’a Tha’ros’s has been flying blind longer than anyone wants to acknowledge. That doesn’t change the fact that they have no real proof. Neither do I.”
He spun back toward her, flashing that dangerously gleaming grin.
“Yeah, join the club,” Rebecca muttered.
“Maybe he didn’t hear me…”
“No, I heard you just fine,” she said. “But I don’t see—”
“I haven’t seen the prophecy ,” he interrupted before trudging back toward her, this time without any indication that he intended to threaten her into understanding. “ You haven’t seen the prophecy. And I know for a fact that no Blackmoon still alive today has seen it either.”
Rebecca scowled at him until it finally dawned on her. “Which means no one has any idea what it actually says…”
“Not anyone who would still be alive to correct a few misinterpretations passed down from Mystic to Mystic before one of them decided it pertained to us and started telling everyone about it.”
Which meant, whether or not the enemies of the Bloodshadow Court were already marching on Agn’a Tha’ros, the prophecy could still have absolutely nothing to do with it. Or with Rebecca and Rowan. Or with the grave and unbearable duty they’d both been raised to believe was their only purpose in life. Their destiny.
She wanted to believe him, to shove all her suspicion and doubt aside and jump onto the train of impossible hope Rowan was clearly riding. But there was still too much at stake.
And she still didn’t know if anything he’d said was genuine or true or even partially based in reality.
The idea, however, did warrant further thought and examination.
“Well then that’s what comes next,” she said. “We find the prophecy. Read it for ourselves. If the elders butchered it somehow along the way, got something wrong, we’ll know exactly how, if not why.”
Rowan’s grin returned, accompanied by a playful shrug as he raised an eyebrow. “It would be a nice little surprise to keep up your sleeve for using against the Council…”
“Only if they got it wrong,” she murmured.
There was always a chance the prophecy in question had been misinterpreted. There was also still a chance it hadn’t.
Either way, Rebecca had to know before she could decide which world needed her the most. Because now, with so much doubt hanging over the whole thing, it wasn’t just the fate of Agn’a Tha’ros and Xahar’áhsh on the line anymore.
She had Shade to think about too. Chicago. All of Earth.
But viewing that prophecy with her own eyes was undoubtedly the best place to start.
“So, where is it?” she asked.
Rowan had already started pacing away from her again, but her question made him stop. After several seconds, he slowly turned around to offer a clueless shrug. “That’s…another hurdle to jump.”
He was trying to drag her around in circles on purpose with this. She might actually kill him for it this time.
“Rowan…” He obviously knew something, and not knowing it herself or how much of a threat it might pose made her cheeks flush with another flare of heated anger and expectation. “Tell me where it is.”
“I can’t. Not specifically. They used to be stored just outside the city, but all the true records went missing in all the chaos before, during, and right after the Gateway was opened again. All that talk about what the Dalu’Rázj intended to do with historical records or evidence of any power but his own kinda swept everyone up in a panic to preserve what they couldn’t afford to lose. But then, you know, he was defeated. So I guess it turned out all right in the end.”
Rebecca had already tuned out his babbling. “What do you mean they went missing ? Did someone steal them?”
“I highly doubt that,” he said. “No, I mean they were moved. But if someone did steal them, they can keep it all. At that point, I’d say they’d earned it.”
Here he was, getting distracted and going off on tangents that had nothing to do with the actual point. If he kept it up much longer, she didn’t know if she could keep such a tight grip on her anger.
She took a deep breath, her frown darkening as she watched him. “When you say missing…”
“Missing as in someone ordered to protect the prophecies and all the other sacred records moved them from where they were to wherever they are now .” He stopped pacing and looked directly up at her again, his eyes filled with the kind of mischief she had come to dread at this point. “A lot has changed. I told you things back home were bad.”
“Bad enough to move the sacred archives without anyone knowing where they went? That’s one hell of an understatement.”
“The Council tried to find them,” he continued, “but they gave up searching a while ago. Which is good news for us, because I think I know where that particular prophecy may have ended up.”
“Still not very convincing,” Rebecca muttered. “Or reassuring.”
Maxwell snorted, folded his arms, and said nothing.
Yeah, if she were in his position, watching this whole circus unfold from the outside looking in, she’d think this was a total shitshow too. She still did, but Maxwell’s inherent separation from the whole thing afforded him the luxury of being able to laugh at it.
“Then tell me where that is,” she prompted, expending far more effort than she wanted to hold her frustration at bay. Now that there was an actual next step, it seemed far more viable than anything else this far.
Still, she was willing to beat the information out of him, if it came to that.
She wouldn’t enjoy it, but she would do it.
The Blackmoon Elf just kept pacing across the far end of the cramped trailer, his smile widening by the second as he cooked up his own plans.
“Jesus Christ!” Rebecca barked. “Did you hear me? If you know where to find it—”
“It won’t be easy to track down,” he blurted, lifting a hand toward her to keep her quiet and shaking it in her direction as he kept working through his thoughts out loud. “To be perfectly honest, it’s gonna take every bit of focus we have. Time and energy. Resources. Dedication. We’ll need a lot more of that than anything else to pull off something like this. Can’t afford to be distracted by anything else until we find it. That’s the key. No delays. No interruptions.”
He stopped and spun toward her yet again, offering a curt nod and grinning like a lunatic, as if he’d just discovered secrets of the universe. “It’s not impossible…”
His gaze darted briefly in Maxwell’s direction before the manic excitement plastered across Rowan’s face softened, melting into something more like understanding and sobering realization.
Was that regret she saw there beneath it all too? Or pity?
“But this is important,” Rowan added, his voice now soft and low again with genuine seriousness. “And especially to you. So I’m willing to help you look for it. Once we find the damn prophecy, Rebecca, whatever decision you make after that, please believe me when I say I will respect it. And I will understand.”
He darted one more glance toward Maxwell, then quickly looked away again in an effort to cover it up.
But not before Rebecca noticed an odd mixture of relief, gratitude, and inexplicably disheartening concern swirled together into one majorly uncomfortable knot sinking toward the pit of her stomach.
Rowan Blackmoon didn’t do or say anything he didn’t want others to see or hear. Everything was one performance stacked on top of another for him.
But looking at Maxwell as he offered to help her with the prophecy? As he’d promised to respect whatever decision she made once they succeeded
That, she knew, was different. That wasn’t supposed to have been seen by anyone.
Or maybe it was only meant for Rebecca…
Since when did Rowan give a shit about Maxwell’s involvement in anything? What was he trying to say by looking at the shifter like that?
Trying to puzzle out the intentions and motives behind anything Rowan Blackmoon did, trying to understand him at all in the first place, most of the time, would drive even the most patient observer into madness.
Rebecca didn’t have the energy for it. More importantly, she didn’t have the time.
She did know that until one prophecy from a Mystic of Agn’a Tha’ros gone from the land of the living for longer than she’d been alive was in her hand, she couldn’t and wouldn’t make any decision regarding the Bloodshadow Council, their self-serving demands for her return, or the myriad consequences she would face if she still refused to obey that order.
An order which, at its core, held no authority over her whatsoever. It never had, and it never would.
“Then before anything else,” she replied solemnly, watching Rowan scuffling back and forth across the trailer, “we get eyes on the prophecy. Anything short of that is pointless.”
“Absolutely,” he blurted, clearly still distracted with his attention split between their conversation and his new pet project of planning and scheming.
“Though, admittedly, I’ll need a little more time to get things together. It’s not a straight-shot thing, tracking down these records. There’s at least…” He counted on his fingers. “…four or five steps, each of them leading to the next only once they’ve been completed. It’s gonna take a bit to pinpoint that first step and get ready for it, but once we’re there, finding the prophecy’s location is just a matter of not giving up before we get there.”
“Point being,” she added, “that you still need more time before you’re ready to do this. Great. So do I.”
Rebecca spun away from him, meeting Maxwell’s gaze again, and nodded toward the door before heading that way herself.
The steady rhythm of Rowan’s pacing footsteps abruptly cut off. “I’m sorry?”
“You didn’t leave me with a whole lot of options, Blackmoon,” she said without slowing or turning to look at him. “If you thought you screwed us over by wiping out Shade’s entire network in just a few days, this little stunt of yours tonight just took things to a whole new level as far as our enemies are concerned.”
Maxwell was already at the trailer door, opening it with a quick flick of his wrist and holding it open for her as she approached.
“I hardly see how,” Rowan called after her, his chuckle uncharacteristically tight and uncertain. “My Hakalini’ir handled two criminal birds with one specialized ambush before you even got here. We did you a favor .”
“No. A favor would’ve been clearing every obstacle while leaving our contacts and resources intact. But half the magicals you’ve murdered in this city were the wrong ones, and you still failed to touch every threat.”
Rebecca stormed through the door, still unable to pinpoint the greatest cause of her anger. There were simply too many culprits to identify only one.
What she did know, however, was that she was in no position at the moment to head off on this wild magical goose chase with Rowan for the Bloodshadow prophecy. Not now. She and Shade still had to clean up their side of the street.
Word of Big Boss and his new magitek-bomb-building ally meeting their unexpected end tonight would spread like wildfire throughout Chicago the second another outside party discovered what had happened.
And they would discover the deaths of two major crime bosses in this city, plus the bulk of their forces, if not the details of how or exactly when or even who was responsible.
Then the power vacuum of Chicago’s magical underground would only intensify, while other criminals scrambled to fill the void, and anyone greedy for power and control made their moves against anyone still standing in their way.
For Shade, that meant Kordus Harkennr and his forces had just been bumped up by an alarming degree on their threat meter.
And there was still Eduardo on the back burner.
If Rebecca took off now to partner with the enemy Rowan had made of himself, to go traipsing after that prophecy without any guarantee of how long it would take or if they would even be successful, she’d be leaving Shade all on their own to pick up the pieces of the Blackmoon Elf’s stupidity. They’d be forced to suffer the consequences of something they shouldn’t have had to face.
She had to stay with her task force long enough to ensure she’d be leaving them in their own capable hands, with as few looming threats as possible, without Rebecca there to help them fight off the worst of it.
She had to make sure they were prepared enough to defend themselves in her absence for however long this prophetic side journey might take.
That part, regardless of Rowan and his Hakalini’ir holding her and her teams hostage tonight, was non-negotiable.
The short set of groaning, mostly rotted wooden steps leading from the trailer to the forest floor wobbled violently beneath her hurried footsteps. Then her boots crunched down onto the thick bed of night-dampened underbrush and dead leaves.
Maxwell’s silent descent mere feet behind her brought a brief, tiny smile to her lips despite her frustration. He hadn’t bothered to close the door behind them—a small, wordless, not-so-subtle middle finger to the Blackmoon Elf who’d just dug his own proverbial grave by playing Elven Warlord and Dictator in a world he hardly understood.
“Wait!” Rowan called after them, hurried footsteps pounding across the inside of the trailer before eliciting the most violent groan of all from the stairs. “Rebecca! That’s not how this works! Do you hear me? You think you get it, but it’s not that simple!”
Sure it was.
After everything she’d just put herself through, she saw things more clearly now than she had in ages. The next steps were laid out before her in perfectly logical and necessary order, and she would do what she had to do to successfully complete each of them before she took a single step toward searching for this prophecy as Rowan’s temporary ally.
Because now, that was all he was to her. That much she knew without a doubt. The certainty of it filled her with a surprising sense of freedom she hadn’t enjoyed since the day he’d reappeared in her life and steered them both along an unending crash course toward destroying everything she’d fought so hard to build.
“I’m serious about this,” he called after her again, his urgently bumbling footsteps through the underbrush creating far more noise than Rebecca and Maxwell combined. “There’s more than one caveat here! And no matter what you think, you still don’t have all the facts. You need to hear me on this!”
No. She absolutely did not need to hear him out or listen to any of his warnings.
Why would she, after everything he’d done?
Rowan thought he knew exactly how everything worked, that he’d spent the necessary time and put in the required man hours back home in Agn’a Tha’ros as the Blackmoon Scion and with the Council.
In the elven capitol, that might have been true. He could easily have elevated himself through hard work, study, training, and dedication to reach the level of knowledge and understanding he seemed so certain he possessed.
The fact remained, however, that he’d also spent all that time letting himself be brainwashed by the Bloodshadow Court and its Council, turning against himself and inevitably against Rebecca.
Even with all he knew about what the Bloodshadow Court had done to her for decades and what they would still do to her if she returned—how they still fully intended to use her toward their own aims—he’d betrayed everything at the core of their friendship and of what had made them such a perfect team in the beginning.
But here, in this world, Rowan Blackmoon was a fool.
Rebecca meant to show him with perfect clarity just how wrong they all were about who she was and what she was truly capable of, all on her own.