11. Chapter 11
11
“ R ebecca, stop !” Rowan bellowed through the forest, clearly no longer concerned about keeping the conversation private or who heard the emotion in his voice without the usual laid-back, casual, constantly joking notes.
Anyone who’d heard him shouting like this would know the Blackmoon Elf was pissed.
“You have no idea what you’ve just done!”
Wrong again.
Rebecca ignored him, her steady determination and confidence in her choices now fueled by Maxwell’s reassuring presence right behind her. That constant anchor of the shifter’s loyalty and readiness to remain at her side through it all, come what may, convinced her she was doing the right thing.
Their connection would have ensured she felt it if he thought otherwise.
As they neared the tree line, Maxwell caught up to her to move swiftly at her side, his voice low and subdued but entirely without judgment or frustration when he asked, “What happens next? What can I do?”
“Nothing yet,” she told him. “But when something does come up, trust me, you’ll be the first to know.”
The soft but distinguishable murmur of voices in the distance reached them as they moved swiftly through the trees and back toward Shade’s current magical prison beside the Polly L Bridge.
The shifter’s churning thoughts—confusion and a thirst for knowledge—tickled the back of Rebecca’s mind before Maxwell finally decided to place those thoughts aloud.
“To be clear, I have no idea what any part of that conversation actually meant or what it entails. But I can recognize an inflamed assembly when I see one. Tell me you have a plan for dealing with the fallout of that as well.”
She swallowed the instinctual lump in her throat that had always appeared whenever the Bloodshadow Council was mentioned, forcing it back down and commanding herself to release the ingrained response. There was no need for it anymore.
“Sorry, Hannigan. I can’t tell you that. Honestly, I’m just dealing with each new crisis as it pops up.”
“ That , I believe.” The rumble behind his words could have been the ghost of amusement. “And we have more than enough experience addressing crises in that particular manner.”
She snorted.
No shit, they had enough experience. More than enough. More than most could have handled had they been in Shade’s shoes.
How ironic, that Rebecca had spent so long on Earth, forcing herself not to act toward anyone the way she’d been trained and programmed and forced to act within the Bloodshadow Court, only to find that treating the Council the way she treated everything in this world garner her more success than ever.
Maxwell’s comment was more than a flippant observation poking fun at the constant chaos Shade had faced over the last several months. The words held weight and truth in them.
Their ability to meet each new problem as it arose, despite the lack of preparedness when it came to anticipating all the shit that had—and probably still would—drifted their way downstream, was one of the few things keeping the task force moving through even the most trying challenges. Challenges that would have shattered almost anyone else’s resolve.
And they would keep doing it until Rebecca was absolutely certain Shade could handle an indeterminate amount of time without their Roth-Da’al to help them through the future.
The forest gave no warning to its end before they found themselves at the tree line. Rebecca stepped through the last few trees to face the open land in front of the abandoned bridge. The voices that had steadily grown louder during their trek now rose in a clamor of rising frustration and a growing threat of physical calamity on the verge of breaking free.
Now, she had a perfect view of its source.
“Look at that,” she muttered, gesturing unnecessarily toward the scene with an open hand. “Talk about crises, and here’s another one.”
Shade’s Roth-Da’al and Head of Security couldn’t have spent longer than an hour in that trailer. Two, tops. Clearly, in their absence, the shit had already hit the fan.
The fifty operatives composing the four Shade teams that had first approached the bridge for the purpose of a single mission—only to find themselves in an unexpectedly different and far more compromising position—wanted absolutely nothing to do with Rowan Blackmoon or his elite battalion of Hakalini’ir elven soldiers. They’d made that perfectly clear.
A handful of them had broken away from the others to find as comfortable a spot as possible to sit and wait out their seemingly indefinite period of captivity beneath the magical dome and the elven soldiers’ ever-watchful gazes. Now, they sat in a scattered circle on the ground, propping themselves up with their gear, augmented weapons set to the side though still within easy reach if necessary.
No conversation rose from this smaller group, as far as Rebecca could tell. Whether they’d previously tried to mind their own business, every single one of them now watched the unfolding conflict with unwavering focus, eyes wide and bodies tensed to jump into action.
The majority of Shade’s operatives, however, had clearly had enough of their present circumstances, as well as any willingness to sit idly by and wait for Rebecca and Maxwell’s return. Nor did they hold back in making it perfectly clear to everyone else.
Scattered all along the line of Hakalini’ir soldiers standing guard along the dome’s inner perimeter, Shade operatives stood directly in front of those elves. With weapons in hand, they shouted at their captors and alleged enemies without holding back, wide eyes and flushed faces visible even beneath the soft light of the force field.
Fortunately, no one had yet aimed those weapons at a Hakalini’ir soldier.
If things kept going the way they were headed, though, it was only a matter of time before someone got the bright idea that training the barrels of powerful, new-and-improved Earthside weapons technology at the line of statuesque elves might add a bit more weight to the seriousness of the situation.
“We don’t need to know who you are to know we can’t trust you for shit! The fact that you showed up with that fucking traitor is all we need!”
“You think that’s gonna scare us into holding back? Standing there like a scarecrow without a fucking brain?”
“This won’t work forever! One of you’s gotta step aside to take a piss eventually. I wonder who’ll be first…”
“I swear to Christ, either you move your ass and stand aside, or I will make you move! Either way, we’re gonna get out of here, and you’re gonna watch us!”
“Just depends on how much you wanna get the shit kicked out of you when it happens!”
Dammit.
Rebecca knew this would happen eventually. She hadn’t expected her operatives to submit to this level of trembling tension bordering on complete chaos so quickly, though.
Part of that, she had to admit, was her fault. She’d already branded Rowan Blackmoon as a traitor and an enemy of Shade, publicly, in front of the whole task force and with all the formality her decision afforded the Roth-Da’al’s official decree.
She’d already primed these operatives to respond to any situation involving the Blackmoon Elf with hostility and, if necessary, aggression. This situation certainly rendered it necessary.
Then again, even if she hadn’t publicly brought Rowan’s betrayal and his failings to Shade’s attention, her teams would have figured it out on their own tonight, anyway. They’d all seen the Hakalini’ir lieutenant threaten Rebecca with a thrown spear that would have punched through her skull if Grak’s aim had been a fraction of a millimeter less precise.
They’d heard him demand the identity of their Roth-Da’al, and the ensuing threat of battle when she’d refused to play nice.
And then, of course, they’d all watched their captors respond in explicit, elven-soldier fashion to the Blackmoon Scion’s additional commands, once he’d revealed himself. The soldiers straight from Xahar’áhsh, who’d murdered not only Shade’s contacts and resources but also the hundreds of magical criminals operating under both Big Boss’s and the nameless bomb-maker’s command.
They all obeyed Rowan.
Shade might have been caught off guard by the whole thing, with few to no options for wiggling their way out of it, but they were far from stupid. They would have put two and two together anyway, realized Rowan had betrayed them all, and his reasons for doing so still wouldn’t have mattered.
They wanted nothing to do with the Blackmoon Elf they’d accepted as one of their own, despite all his faults, before he’d repaid them with treachery and deceit. They weren’t about to roll over and play good little prisoners for the soldiers he commanded.
Part of her wanted to rush into the center of the conflict and break it all up before anything else happened.
The other part of her, though, felt it was better to stay where she was for as long as she could, to see if these two groups could figure out how to work through it on their own. She wasn’t their babysitter. Her operatives weren’t children who needed reminders of the rules, or the dangers, or how to conduct themselves accordingly.
If she were in their shoes, she’d feel exactly the same way.
With Maxwell standing silently beside her—alert and tensed to jump in with the unnatural speed of a shifter, should someone take it too far—it felt like the right decision to hold back.
Even when her operatives doubled down on slinging taunts at those who’d followed orders to imprison them.
“What’s the matter, pal? Never learned how to think for yourself? How to figure out right from wrong?”
“Do you even know what the fuck you’re doing here?”
“Man, if I were you and I’d figured out what I’d really been doing this whole time, I’d drop that sparkly little blade on the fucking ground, walk right outta here, and take everyone else with me.”
“You’re fighting for the wrong team , buddy! If you can’t see that, you’re blind as hell!”
“Do you guys even have souls? How can you not give a shit about what’s going on here?”
“I don’t think they feel a goddamn thing.”
“Screw this, and screw you! Fight me or move, asshole. Either way, we’re not staying in this shithole with you another fucking minute!”
To their credit, the Hakalini’ir soldiers took the verbal assaults in stride, trained as they were to follow orders to the letter, under any and all circumstances, and ignore literally everything else.
Even from a distance, though, Rebecca could still see the soldiers’ gazes sweeping cautiously back and forth beneath the reflective gleam of their silver-crafted helms. Each of them watched both the Shade operatives scattered along their defensive line and the other Hakalini’ir soldiers within their motionless line of sight.
If one of them caved and moved in response, they would all move swiftly, without hesitation or mercy.
Rebecca had seen it before. Back then, she’d thought it one of the most beautiful displays of loyalty and unit cohesion she’d ever seen.
It was also part of what made the Hakalini’ir devastatingly effective.
Beside her, Maxwell leaned closer, dipping his mouth toward her ear and sending a rippling hot-and-cold shiver of pleasure and wary hesitation across her neck, down her spine, and into the tingling tips of her toes.
It was chilly out here, sure, but not that cold.
Now was not the time to let herself be distracted or consumed by the flaring heat and need their infuriating connection stoked in either of them.
The shifter’s words, however, remained entirely focused on the present situation.
“I would be happy to break this up in two and a half seconds,” he growled.
Raising an eyebrow, she turned her head to look up at him, well aware of the fact that her gaze stuck on his lips along the way before finally settling on his glowing silver eyes. “And a half?”
The slightest twitch between his eyebrows somehow delivered the same implication of a shrug, without the shifter moving a single other muscle as he studied her face. “Maybe three.”
She would have been more amused if this wasn’t such a tricky situation, with no room for amusement.
“Not just yet,” she replied before settling her full attention on the conflict in front of them. “If this pressure starts to break, through, then yeah. You have the green light.”
Even as he nodded, acknowledging her decision, the tingling heat of his silver eyes roaming freely across the side of her face made Rebecca feel more wholly exposed than she’d ever felt in his presence.
Emotions ran high for everyone all around, apparently.
What she didn’t anticipate was for that stoic wall of elven apathy being enough on its own to drive her operatives into an even greater frenzy, all by themselves.
The clamor of angry shouting from the Shade teams intensified in seconds, without any provocation from the elves. One operative—Tig, Rebecca thought, though it happened too fast to be sure—stepped back from the Hakalini’ir , aimed his magitek rifle at the line of soldiers barricading the dome’s interior border, and fired a single high-powered round.
The crack of weapons fire battled in the air with a blaze of fluorescent-green magical energy.
The burst of light hurtled toward the elven soldier directly in front of the shooter. The soldier reacted at the last second, with what looked to the naked eye like a mere twitch of his torso as he moved the tip of his gleaming silver spear just enough to deflect the augmented blast, and no farther.
With a delicate ping, the fluorescent-green shot ricocheted off the flat of the spear’s blade, adding a second explosion of fluorescent-green before the round launched into the ground instead.
An inch from the closest operative’s boot.
When the spray of erupting earth settled and the bright-green glow in the air fully disappeared, the perfectly aimed warning shot in response rendered the entire area deathly silent.
But that wouldn’t last long now.
Shit, this was only going to get worse.
Maxwell took a single step forward, ready to move in, but Rebecca stopped him with a gentle hand against his upper arm, ignoring the electrifying flare of energy jolting through them both at the contact. That was all it took to stop the shifter in his tracks.
“I’d say this is still only a yellow light,” she muttered, wanting to look at him but maintaining her gaze on the commotion so she wouldn’t miss a thing. “Let me see what a little common sense and rational thinking does for them first, huh?”
She left him at the tree line, also ignoring the breathtaking pain of walking away from the shifter. By now, she’d grown as accustomed to it as one grew to a chronic cough, though the pain maintained its steady intensity.
Maxwell snorted. “ I employ common sense and rational thinking…”
“Of course you do.” She looked over her shoulder to ensure he heard her. “Just…a different kind.”
It was the nicest way she could think to put it, but the safety of Maxwell’s feelings wasn’t currently her priority.
He did, however, stay put where she’d left him.
The renewed clamor of rising shouts from the operatives at the Hakalini’ir line erupted before Rebecca had power-walked half the distance.
“Are you fucking kidding me? You could’ve taken my damn foot off with that little stunt!”
“He wasn’t even aiming for you, asshole! It was going right past your head!”
“Who are you trying to impress here?”
“ Nothing you do is gonna make us like you!”
“Hey!” Rebecca shouted, zeroing in on Jay because he’d shouted last and she recognized his voice. “Stand down! Do you hear me, Jay?”
Probably, yes, but the growing dissension had already reached a fever pitch, and it seemed her operatives were past the point of controlling themselves.
As the inflammatory shouts continued, several operatives raised their own weapons to aim magitek barrels directly at Hakalini’ir helms.
“You think that’s funny, do you? How ‘bout we try again? See if you can do it a second time.”
“You wanna tango, buddy? Let’s fucking go!”
“Don’t think I don’t see you smiling behind all that armor! I’m gonna hit you so hard, you won’t remember what a smile is !”
Rebecca broke into a jog toward them, snarling in frustration and fighting the urge to summon her own battle magic powerful enough to sweep both sides off their feet at once.
But the whole goal was to avoid this turning purely physical, if possible.
“Tig!” she barked, closing in on the standoff. “Lower your weapon. Now ! Jay, if you don’t put that shit away in half a second, I will take it from you, and you’ll wake up on your back in the fucking dirt! Stand down!”
The closest operatives heard their Roth-Da’al, found her moving toward them at a speed somewhere between a brisk jog and an all-out run, and slowly came to their senses before lowering their weapons.
But some still just weren’t getting the memo.
Or they intentionally ignored it.