12. Chapter 12
12
“ I told you this would happen!” Burke shouted, his eyes blazing with contempt and his field weapon holding steady no more than six inches from the closest elf’s face. “But you morons just don’t wanna listen, do you? Pull down the goddamn wall!”
Rebecca summoned a final burst of speed, darted toward Burke, and grabbed him by one arm and the back of his jacket before hauling him away from the Hakalini’ir line in a single pivoting move. When she released him, Burke staggered across the trampled dirt to regain his balance, fighting to keep a grip on his firearm before he turned back toward her with a furious snarl. And froze.
Rebecca knew what was necessary here. Despite their vastly differing methods and priorities, she understood both opposing forces in a way they didn’t even understand themselves.
That didn’t make it any easier.
Faster than anyone else could think to react, she slid to a halt between them, sliding a few inches farther across loose, upturned earth on her haste, and spread her arms wide.
A flaring burst of dark, swirling mercurial silver crackling with flashes of blinding silver streaks erupted around her in a dazzling display of power. The hissing, sparking crack of it echoed toward the trees.
A bit of her Bloodshadow magic on display, but only to grab everyone’s attention before she bellowed, “ That’s enough !”
It certainly seemed to be.
The shouts cut off abruptly. Furious snarls turned toward her and vanished when they recognized their Roth-Da’al. Firearms jolted in surprise before slowly lowering away from their targets.
Once more, everything was silent and still. Rebecca hoped it would be enough, because anything more than this would only further harm the task force she’d been trying this whole time to protect.
But at least she had their attention.
“Everyone stand down!” Her voice rang out with surprising strength across the open land beneath the shimmering dome. “That’s an order!”
Those who hadn’t yet fully lowered their weapons did so now, followed immediately by any Hakalini’ir soldier who hadn’t resumed their original stoic position along the barricade line swiftly lowering spear butts to the ground with heavy thumps in the dirt, or sliding nearly drawn elven blades back into their scabbards with a whisper of elven-crafted steel against pristinely oiled leather.
Rebecca scanned the faces of her operatives who’d momentarily lost themselves to the heat of standing down an enemy and the tension of so many unknowns stacked one on top of the other. Then, she finally let the churning halo of black and dark-silver light sparking with silver flashes fade from around her body until she’d snuffed it out entirely.
After all, it was only meant as a warning. So far, it seemed sufficiently effective.
“This is not why we’re here,” she added, raising her voice to be heard by everyone. It was surprisingly easier to do, out in the open without the benefit of walls around them to amplify the sound. She probably had Rowan’s damn energy dome to thank for it.
“The situation is far from ideal. I know. But trying to muscle our way out of it won’t do us any good. In fact, I can promise you it’ll make things worse for everyone. I won’t order you to kiss and make up, but you will put down your weapons, and you will wait this out for however long it takes until I say otherwise. Shade will not be the ones to start new conflicts. Tonight or any other night. That’s not what we do.”
She’d really hoped to appeal to her operatives’ recovered pride in their recent successes, that it might return them to their senses. Because the alternative was either shaming them or physically overpowering them into putting down this fight they thought they wanted and walking away.
She would have been lying if she’d said she didn’t want teach Rowan Blackmoon and his Hakalini’ir an unforgettable lesson tonight, using the very same physical methods. But the overwhelming relief of seeing her operatives take her seriously, recognize the sense in her words, and finally stand down was enough.
Until Tig broke the silence with a snarl.
“They’re Blackmoon’s ,” he spat, turning his scathing glare onto Rebecca. “They follow the traitor’s orders, and they’re the ones at fault here!”
The sobering reality of that frigid truth cut through Rebecca’s core and dragged the rest of her goodwill down into a swelling abyss inside her. It sank like a block of ice tied to an anchor, all the way to the bottom.
He wasn’t wrong.
Gritting her teeth, she drew her shoulders back and offered Tig a curt, solemn nod. “Correct. It was them, and they did act under Blackmoon’s orders. That does not make this the time for whatever sense of vengeance or retribution you think you’ll achieve like this. Not tonight.”
“So you want us to just let it go?” Jay asked, his voice cutting across the semi-darkness and trembling with rage, the pain impossible to miss behind his brown eyes. “Forgive and forget and act like nothing ever happened? Like hundreds of innocent lives weren’t just snuffed out in the last week alone for no other fucking reason than they knew us?”
“It might feel that way,” Rebecca replied steadily, struggling to make her breathing match the same certainty in command, though her roaring pulse in her ears seemed only to increase the longer this poorly timed discussion continued. “But that’s not what I’m saying. There will be justice, I promise you. It won’t happen this way. All things considered, I don’t see how starting a fight with a military force from a world none of you have ever seen, after we’ve failed more than once to stop them or even remotely slow them down, is going to make any of you feel better about a damn thing.”
Because starting an actual fight with the Hakalini’ir of Agn’a Tha’ros would inevitably land every single operative on their asses with serious, potentially mortal injuries, zero pride or dignity left intact, and even less satisfaction when these elven soldiers were through with them.
Not that a fight would have satisfied her operatives anyway, which they would eventually come to realize. Still, she wanted to spare them that embarrassing, dangerous, and inevitably excruciating realization, if she could.
For a moment, it seemed she’d done exactly that.
Then Burke tightened his grip on his weapon, shot an aggressively hateful glare at the closest elven soldier, and addressed his Roth-Da’al with an inflammatory sneer.
“They can’t get away with this,” he snarled. “They don’t even belong here. And we’re supposed to just sit back and let them keep at it, with no consequences? How is that right, after everything they’ve done? I can’t believe we’re even having this conversa—”
A violently loud, growling snarl—like thunder crashing against tumbling stone—rippled through the night air, blocking out all other noise at once.
Burke looked that way in stunned curiosity.
The dark blur streaking across the ground from the tree line and drawing a churning billow of kicked-up dirt in its wake took any other words right out of the half-changeling’s mouth.
The next second, Maxwell loomed over the half-changeling, delivering another snarl down into the operative’s face with a fist clenched around the front collar of the guy’s shirt.
“You are not,” he growled. “This conversation should have never begun. Your Roth-Da’al gave you an order, half-changeling, and if you don’t shut your mouth and follow that order, what I give you will be worth complaining about. If you can still speak. Is that clear?”
Burke’s heavy, clicking swallow as he held the shifter’s gaze was the only other sound rising above the whisper of leaves rustling in the breeze.
“Sir,” he said softly, failing to keep his voice from breaking at the very end.
Maxwell held onto the guy a moment longer, silver eyes strobing violently as he eyed Burke up and down in disgust. “Excellent choice.”
Then he hauled the half-changeling away from the Hakalini’ir barricade line by the same fistful of the guy’s shirt, practically flinging him away from the elven soldiers before releasing him.
“That way,” he barked. “Move! And don’t you dare stop.”
This time, Burke had no problem following orders without talking back. He trudged forward, gripping his firearm loosely in only one hand now, his gaze trained on the dirt in front of his boots.
With quick, heavy snorts, Maxwell stormed toward the other instigators, one at a time, hauling Jay away from the elves in the same manner before releasing him to join Burke. By the time he reached Tig, though, the troll had already taken several steps back, released his field weapon to let it dangle at his side by its strap, and lifted both hands in concession.
The shifter snarled at him just the same, then nodded toward the other two with an angrily threatening jerk of his head. “So why are you still standing here?”
Tig spun away, stormed after the other two operatives who shared his fate, and didn’t say another word.
Maxwell watched them diligently for the next several seconds, then headed back down the line of elven soldiers, snarling at a few of them as he passed despite the fact that not a single elf had moved a muscle.
His silver gaze swept across the rest of the Shade members all watching events unfold with wide eyes and grimly set jaws. Though no one else dared to speak up, and all weapons once more either aimed downward toward nothing at all or were left alone altogether to hang from their straps.
Then the shifter stalked back up the barricade line the way he’d come, pausing only when he reached Rebecca’s side.
He leaned slightly toward her, still eyeing the entire turnout of Shade operatives and Xaharí elves, and muttered, “If you categorize that attempt to exchange rounds as a yellow light, I draw the line at insubordination and breaking rank when an operative defies his Roth-Da’al’s orders and tries to argue his way out of his duty to the entire unit. Then it’s green.”
Rebecca inhaled deeply through her nose, choking back a wry laugh but failing to stop a tiny smirk flickering at the corner of her mouth. “That’s fair.”
Maxwell sighed, still watching both sides in case anyone else felt like trying something, but she could have sworn he leaned even closer now, almost pressing himself against her side, as he dipped his head closer to her ear. “Perhaps we ought to define the boundaries in more detail. Preferably also in writing.”
She snorted. “Oh, sure. You know what? Let’s just step out now for a leisurely stroll and toss a few ideas back and forth as they come to us. You know, one of those nice long brainstorming sessions. Then we’ll go find a cute little cafe and write everything out in an organized list over tea.”
When she finally looked up at him, Maxwell’s singular response was to lean slightly away again to fix her with a deadpan stare.
No, of course he didn’t find it funny.
With a sigh of her own, she put aside her protective sarcasms to give him a real answer. “Later. We will, once things settle down and we actually have the time to hammer out specifics. Whenever the hell that happens to be.”
That answer seemed to satisfy him. Acknowledging it with a grunt, Maxwell dipped his head to wordlessly excuse himself and continued on his way toward the three operatives who’d instigated the uproar against the Hakalini’ir soldiers and had come so devastatingly close to turning this ceasefire into a violent and short-lived battle.
A battle they were nowhere near equipped enough to win.
A battle Rebecca had performed a coupling ritual spell with Rowan Blackmoon and relented to speak with the Bloodshadow Council for the first time in centuries in order to avoid.
But she couldn’t tell her operatives that. Not now. Emotions still ran too high, and there were still too many unknowns. Holding a giant tell-all meeting while essentially still imprisoned by a battalion of elite elven soldiers and their commander straight out of Agn’a Tha’ros didn’t even make the list of effective wartime strategy.
Rowan and the Hakalini’ir were the enemy now. She had to keep viewing them as such, if she and her teams were to survive the night.
Maxwell caught her attention again when his gruffly commanding voice cracked across the open field as he finally addressed the three he’d pulled aside.
Even if the place hadn’t fallen eerily silent again already, his voice would have risen above everything else with its sharp, commanding tone and stern approach to reprimanding his subordinates.
“I never want to see that again,” he barked. “I should never have seen it in the first place. One more step out of line from any of you, and you’ll be counting pebbles in this field until you can no longer see straight. Understood?”
Tig, Jay, and Burke gazed back at their Head of Security, eyes wide and jaws firmly set in shame at their public reprimand, but they each muttered their assent and cast their gazes to the ground.
Adding insult to injury, Rebecca was certain, was the fact that they’d been hauled aside from the elves they clearly also considered the enemy and lectured—for as much of a lecture as Maxwell ever delivered—in plain view of that enemy and their fellow operatives.
There was no room for privacy when being held against their will, and that certainly didn’t make this any easier.
But Maxwell had stepped up. The impending crisis remained successfully averted. That was what mattered.
The shifter growled again, then pointed to the dirt at his feet. “Your weapons. Then take a walk. Cool off. I’ll leave it up to you to decide when you’ve had enough. Bring another hot-headed issue to the table, and we will have a serious problem. Go.”
Jaws set grimly in a clear attempt to cool their tempers and avoid lashing out, the instigators did as they were ordered, pulling weapon straps over heads and shoulders and unclipping gear to set it all at the shifter’s feet.
Maxwell watched them with stoic apathy, giving away nothing in his expression.
Rebecca couldn’t remember seeing him don this particular mask of unreadable indifference with anyone but her. Until now.
At least now she knew she wasn’t the only one with the aggravating displeasure of being on the receiving end of that harrowing expression.
Any hot-headed, emotionally fueled fighting beneath the dome had been successfully avoided, yes. But avoiding it had also given the rest of the teams quite the show tonight, not to mention a show for the elven soldiers penning them all in with their statuesque barricade line.
Now seemed as good a time as any for an attempt to smooth things over and offer her operatives as much helpful information as she could spare.
Given the circumstances, there wasn’t much.
“All right, everybody listen up!” she called, commanding their attention again. “Here’s what you need to know right now. Given the situation and our current circumstances, Blackmoon and I have agreed to a ceasefire. No one is to be harmed while we’re here, but the terms of this agreement only apply as long as no one else gets cocky and starts picking fights. Understood?”
The silence she received, with all eyes on her, felt promising until Murray took his own liberties in interpreting her words.
“If you reached an agreement and worked it all out,” he shouted, “we should be able to go home.”
Shit.
Rationally speaking, yes, that was a perfectly viable conclusion to draw. They should have been able to go home.
But as far as Rowan was concerned, logic, reason, and rational decision-making still didn’t seem to be a part of his methods.
“There’s a little more to it than that,” she replied, raising her voice to make sure everyone could still hear. “Right now, our best option is to—”
Before she could even finish, the speech she’d hoped would appease them for the short term completely backfired.
“I’m not sticking around here one second longer than I have to!” Murray bellowed, storming back toward the elven line. “Did you hear that? Ceasefire. My boss and your boss worked things out, so you better—”
“Murray!” Rebecca barked. “Stand down!”
Her command didn’t even have a chance at getting through the explosion of angry shouts from even more operatives this time, which were now fueled by the misunderstanding that this was over.
“Fuck this place!”
“We didn’t even come here for this!”
“Can’t pen us in like a bunch of fucking sheep. You even know what a sheep is?”
It happened so quickly and all at once, Rebecca could have done nothing to stop it, even if she’d noticed Zane storming toward the elven line.
Instead of trying to shout down the Hakalini’ir standing guard along the force field perimeter, he slipped between two soldiers, neither of whom moved a muscle to stop him, and marched for the shimmering wall of magical energy as if it were nothing but a complex light show.
He was wrong.