13. Chapter 13
13
T he second Zane touched the dome’s shimmering wall of multicolored light with the toe of his boot, the force field erupted.
A burst of rippling power surged up from the contact point, filling the air with a violent twang like straining metal cables. Sparks flew in a brilliant burst of shimmering light that shot from the dome wall and straight into Zane’s chest.
The charge knocked him off his feet and launched him back through the air. He flew straight between the two elven soldiers he’d passed, missing their shoulders by a fraction of an inch, and crashed into the dirt. Only after sliding several feet farther on his back, sending up plumes of loose earth, did he finally stop.
Then Zane lay there on his back, the breath knocked out of him, eyes open wide and staring at the nearly invisible blanket of stars filling the sky above the top of the dome. He blinked furiously and grunted.
The moment of stunned silence didn’t last.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“She said it was a fucking ceasefire!”
“What the hell was that ?”
“If you don’t take down this wall right now and let us out, I swear on my own mother , I will mow you down myself!”
It was impossible to tell which operative drew their weapon first to aim it squarely at the elven soldiers before the air filled with a rising whine as magitek firearms powered up to full capacity and Shade operatives readied themselves to fire.
The calamity of furious shouts and threats, all with an understandable fear behind them, made Rebecca’s head spin.
Nothing should have echoed this loudly when they were outside, but Rowan’s force-field dome seemed to enclose both the physical and all sound.
The Hakalini’ir soldiers held their line with admirable calm and level-headedness, ignoring the verbal threats and insults launched at their faces. Not a single one of them drew their battle weapons amidst the chaos.
They did, however, respond to any Shade operative who stepped closer to their line or the dome wall with the practiced ease and efficiency of someone who’d done this before.
When the first operative took a surging step forward, stabbing the barrel of his weapon toward the soldier in front of him and roaring violent threats beneath all the other noise, the soldier moved in the blink of an eye.
A flash of silver armor winking beneath the shimmering glow of the dome before the soldier sent a small dagger pelting into the earth at the operative’s feet with a dull thump. The intricately crafted silver handle glinted as the weapon stood perfectly upright, only an inch of the blade buried in the dirt.
“Are you fucking kidding me? If you’re gonna start pulling knives, asshole, at least make sure you can aim!”
Other operatives pressed the soldiers’ physical and reactionary boundaries, trying to push forward against the barricade line, testing the limits of their captivity in the only way their anger afforded.
A staggered volley of elven daggers flew from the barricade line to serve as a warning for those who stepped too close, each soldier hardly seeming to move at all from their alert and motionless positions.
When the daggers had no effect, the soldiers launched small bolts of battle magic, intended only as warnings to keep Shade’s riled operatives in check and away from the wall of the magical dome.
Rebecca had given up trying to shout her operatives down. The first time she tried it, she couldn’t even hear her own voice.
Jumping in the middle for another attempt to stop this lunacy was more likely to get someone hurt, including herself. They’d turned themselves into an angry mob.
Amidst the volleys of glinting daggers and magical warning shots, one of her operatives slapped the side of his firearm to bring it to full capacity, swung the barrel up by no more than a foot over the soldiers’ heads, and fired a burst of three deafening rounds at the force field.
Each shot of blazing white light cracked into the opalescent wall, one after the other, sending ripples of light away from the contact with another twanging groan and flash from the dome itself. But even magitek weaponry proved useless against the barrier.
Seeing this only stoked the operatives’ fear of their obvious prison and resentment for those who’d put them there.
The raging bellow of insults and threats merely rose in urgency and volume, exchanged with more bursts of warning battle magic from the elven soldiers to keep their captives in line.
Beyond that, the Hakalini’ir did nothing. Clearly, they were prepared to continue this useless skirmish without harming their targets for as long as it took the Shade operatives to either wear themselves out or fully admit their own defeat.
Rebecca’s gut sank when the realization hit her.
The barricade line of elves wasn’t here to keep her teams from escaping the dome. The force field on its own would have handled that anyway.
The soldiers were here to protect those trapped within its borders. To keep Rebecca’s operatives from throwing themselves at the force field in their haste to escape, which would only result in more harm to her teams.
The Hakalini’ir held the line to protect Shade’s operatives from themselves…
And her teams were all too worked up by the idea of unwilling captivity to notice the truth.
Allowing Zane to test the force field with his body had been an intentional play, meant to show the operatives just how useless their combined resistance really was. The elven soldiers had clearly been ordered to keep their unwilling guests from further testing the strength of those walls and seriously injuring or potentially killing themselves in the process.
Rowan had thought of everything when he’d schemed for this night.
This wasn’t a last-minute rescue by the Blackmoon Scion suddenly showing up at the last second to call off his Hakalini’ir ’s attack. Every piece of this night had been meticulously planned and carried out to perfection, because he’d anticipated exactly how everyone would react.
As if he’d been summoned by appearing in her thoughts, when Rebecca spun away from the chaos along the barricade line, she found him instantly.
Rowan jogged across the open ground surrounding the old bridge, not from the tree line where Rebecca and Maxwell had emerged but from somewhere closer to the base of the bridge, as if he’d purposefully stayed away to let the scene play out.
Of course he had.
His wide eyes shimmered with the reflected glow of the force field dome and all the flashing lights of his soldiers’ continued warning shots. As he approached her, he looked genuinely baffled by the unfolding chaos, as if he’d never expected the situation to devolve in a manner quite like this.
Rebecca ignored what he looked like and focused instead on what she knew.
Rowan wasn’t surprised by any of this. He was the one who’d set it all in motion, and every single event had unfolded exactly as he’d planned.
When he finally reached her and slowed out of his jog, Rebecca was already trembling beneath the effort of holding back her fists clenched at her sides.
She wanted to throw him against the dome wall acting as a charged electric fence, but she managed to unleash only words instead, cutting him off as he opened his mouth to no doubt, say something else meant to deflect from the real issue. To lure her further into his complex deceit.
“What the fuck is this?” she snarled, lurching toward him.
He pulled to a stop a few feet away and blinked at the operatives still screaming at his soldiers. Then he met her gaze with a concerned frown. “This is exactly what I was trying to tell you before you decided you didn’t care to hear it and raced off with your little guard dog at your heels.”
He gestured toward the useless conflict in front of them. “And to be perfectly honest, it’s also exactly what I was trying to avoid. Force field and everything.”
“We made our deal,” she hissed. “The negotiations are over. I cast the fucking spell with you, I spoke to the Council, and we agreed on our next steps. Problem solved.”
“Well, yeah. We did do all that.”
“So take it the fuck down!” she spat, stabbing a finger toward the force field.
Rowan’s next sigh might have sounded like regret to anyone else, but she knew better. “Like I tried to explain to you before… It’s not that simple.”
“You got what you wanted from me. There’s no conceivable reason for you to hold my teams here any longer. Let them out!”
“You’re absolutely right.” He regarded her coolly for another agonizingly long moment, which gave Rebecca enough time to note the shift in all the chaotic noise crashing around them. Plus one singularly recognizable snarl from Maxwell, wherever he was.
She felt his presence, as always, knew he was unharmed, and followed his progress along the barricade line through the physical sensations of their connection, but she didn’t look for him.
She would not give Rowan any reason whatsoever to think he had shattered her resolve or distracted her with enough surprises and chaos that she would give up on her anger toward him for all of it.
“I am right,” she hissed. “So take down the fucking wall.”
“Not that kinda wall, unfortunately.”
She widened her eyes at him, because she still couldn’t justify beating a straight answer out of him. But she could stare at him until he said something useful.
“It’s one of those special ones,” he finally explained, shrugging casually as if he’d had no part in their current circumstances and had chosen to accept them without question. “You know, conjured to contain everyone and everything inside its walls until all the issues between the opposing parties are hammered out between them into a mutual agreement.”
A choking cough burst out of her. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Nope.” He shrugged again, looking weaker and slightly less confident. “Or until the forty-eight-hour timer runs out. Whichever comes first.”
“Or what ?” she shrieked.
The force of her outburst momentarily settled all the noise by the dome wall, though that had already begun to die down.
“Move!” Maxwell barked somewhere along the line.
His voice pulled her attention away for a moment. She found him standing among the operatives who’d just about lost their minds with their own new discoveries of their current imprisonment.
The shifter set a hand firmly on an operative’s back and guided the troll none too gently away from the Hakalini’ir line, as he seemed to have done with several others already.
In the brief lull after Rebecca’s shout, her Head of Security turned, looked her way across the open space, and instantly met her gaze.
She felt his aggravation toward having to manhandle his own teams into acting like the trained operatives he knew they were. As well as his wordless reassurance that he was taking care of it and what felt like a prompting nudge for Rebecca to continue doing what she was doing to handle her end of this shitty scenario.
A tingling flare of energy erupted across her flushing cheeks, rippling down her arms and deeper toward the center of her belly, brought on now by that one simple look exchanged between them.
That certainly wasn’t helping.
But at least Maxwell had found a little more success in settling the outbreak of rage, dissension, and denial among their teams.
Not that it would do as much good as she’d thought it would thirty seconds ago. Before Rowan had delivered his final bomb of an explanation as to the more detailed terms of Shade’s captivity beneath the dome.
But she did feel less out of control.
Swallowing down the hottest-burning parts of her fury toward the Blackmoon Elf, Rebecca took a deep breath and turned back toward Rowan.
“Just so I know I’ve got this straight,” she seethed, careful to keep her voice low, “if we want out of here any time in the next forty-eight hours, everybody inside this dome has to make nice with everybody else first?”
“If we’re defining ‘make nice’ as generally tolerating each other to a degree that enables consensus and collaboration toward common goals, yeah. At least, I’m pretty sure this spell doesn’t require holding hands around a prayer circle or anything.”
Rebecca closed her eyes. “And if that doesn’t pan out, for some reason, we’re stuck here for a full forty-eight hours before that wall comes down.”
Sticking his hands on his hips, Rowan tipped his head back to study the stars barely visible beneath the shimmering dome. “Hard to tell in this light, but I’d say we’re down to forty-seven now. Maybe forty-six.”
“This is fucking unbelievable.”
Here they were, amidst the chaos of their respective combat units clashing painfully together in manufactured misunderstanding, and he still refused to divulge the full and complete terms of any agreement he made. Not just with Rebecca but with anyone.
She wasn’t the only victim of his scheming, but that didn’t make it any less infuriating.
Gritting her teeth, she stepped away from him to keep from physically lashing out and scanned the dissipating tension among her operatives, thanks once more to another intervention by Maxwell.
In hindsight, she’d refused to account for anything Rowan might have done or planned before leading her teams to this location beneath the bridge mere hours ago, because she’d wanted to believe her issues with Rowan and Shade’s issues were mutually exclusive.
That had been a disastrous mistake, and now she was paying for it. They all were.
She would not make the same mistake a second time.
“You should have told me all of this before we walked off into the woods for that joke of a conversation,” she snarled.
“Probably. But then you wouldn’t have agreed to anything inside that trailer.”
“No shit.” With an angry snort, she gestured toward the mass of her operatives moving dejectedly away from the barricade line.
None of them looked reassured, vindicated, or even resolved toward working this thing out, but at least they’d stopped threatening the soldiers and their own physical safety.
“But I could’ve prepared them enough to avoid this bullshit,” she added.
Rowan chuckled, the sound of it grating on her last nerve.
Of course he thought this was amusing, if not downright hilarious. After everything, he still displayed that amusement openly, speaking to her as if she shared his warped sense of humor.
As if she’d been in on the whole thing with him since the beginning.
“But let’s be real about this for a second,” he said. “These Earthside magicals you’re so in love with? They probably would’ve done the exact same thing anyway, even if you’d told them what the barrier meant. Don’t get me wrong. Have they improved since the first day I walked into that shitshow you call a task force? Absolutely. Far more than I ever expected, based on my initial assessment.
“But they’re children , Kilda’ari . Pretending they’re not and treating them like they can actually handle their shit when the really hard truths come knocking… That’s just delusional fantasy. Not worth entertaining. Better to keep them in the dark like children too.”
The unbelievable filth spewing from his mouth like his own breath, delivered with such astounding superiority and condescension, as if it were impossible for Rebecca to have felt any differently, as if she despised them and looked down on them just as much…
It lit a raging storm of disbelief and righteous indignation inside her. Its fires burned hotter and faster and with more devastating intensity than anything she’d felt in such a long, long time.
How dare he!
The Blackmoon Scion was within his rights to think whatever he wanted to think. To hold his own opinions. To revel in them like the smug asshole they made of him as much as he wanted.
But he actually thought he could say these things out loud, to her , without any repercussion? Without anyone correcting him or disagreeing? Without a single ounce of resistance? Without anyone taking a stand to call him on his bullshit?
He thought Rebecca would simply go along with it, or write off his words as easily as writing off his carelessness and idiotic games. As if anything that allowed her to still view him as a friend and an ally still even existed anymore.
By the Blood, the Bloodshadow Court really had brainwashed him, hadn’t they?
She’d suspected it before, but this sealed deal.
Rowan Blackmoon no longer stood with her against the old-world powers that, from the moment of her birth, had sought solely to contain and control the Bloodshadow magic inside her. To oppress and use Rebecca as nothing more than a vessel for that power.
He’d become one of them.
The overwhelming grief erupting at the realization added to her rage like gasoline poured over a campfire.
She had never before feared losing herself to her own fiery rage. Not like this.
But she feared it now.
Oblivious to all of it, Rowan let out a whimsical sigh and slowly shook his head, casually flipping a stray lock of russet-colored hair over his shoulder. “But when you don’t have much to work with in the first place, what else do you do?
“If it were my call, I’d keep them all here while you and I go find that prophecy. Let them stew in it a little. Give them some time to think about growing the hell up while we’re gone. They won’t be happy about it, obviously, but it’s just about the only realistic way to keep them from getting themselves killed without their precious Roth-Da’al to protect them. Clean up all their messes…”
The last bit of Rebecca’s self-control shattered.
She stormed toward Rowan, violent crackles of dark, mercurial silver erupting around her clenched fists, bright-silver sparks showering to the dirt in her wake.
“Like any of them even knows the real meaning of that word. Roth-Da’al… ” he continued, completely blind to her reaction. “It’s a good thing they get to stay in this world. These amateurs wouldn’t last two minutes in the—”
A burst of blinding silver light exploded in Rebecca’s vision, rippling from a focal point at the Blackmoon Elf’s jaw in a strobing eruption of dark gray and lightning-bright silver. She saw nothing else.
She hardly felt the impact of her knuckles crunching against his jawbone. Hardly realized she’d done anything at all until her magic dimmed enough to see again.
When she found him, he’d finished pushing himself off the ground, a handful of dead grass blades clinging to the end of his dark ponytail as he straightened. His eyes, dazed and hazy, flickered in an attempt to refocus after such an unexpected blow.
Unexpected for Rebecca too.
With her chest heaving and the roar of her pulse rushing in her ears over every other sound, she glanced at the scuffled lines in the dirt between them, then at Rowan, the earth beneath her own feet several yards from where he now stood, then back to the Blackmoon Elf’s face, trying to figure out exactly what had happened.
She only noticed the blood pouring from the corner of his mouth and dripping down the side of his face and into the dirt when he lifted a hand to prod at the quickly swelling flesh along his lower jaw.
When he pulled his fingers away and saw them glistening with his own blood, he blinked in bafflement, looking just as shocked and confused as Rebecca felt.
Then his wide hazel eyes swung up toward her again. “Was it something I said?”
By the Blood, she hadn’t planned to hit him like that, with her Bloodshadow power ignited by her rage and adding nearly impossible force to the blow. She hadn’t intended to hit him at all.
But right now, ancestors help her, it was all she wanted.
To surrender to all the darker complexities of the singular magic that made her who and what she was.
She wanted to turn it all against the Blackmoon Sion—the elf who had once been her only reason to keep going and had since been transformed into just another zealot of the Bloodshadow Court, everything it stood for, and everything Rebecca rejected.
If she kept going, if she ended the him right here and now, it would solve everything.
No more prophecy if the other alleged half of it didn’t exist.
No more vow to uphold without him.
No more duty. No more running. No more imprisonment for her operatives or looming threat of the Bloodshadow Council sending far deadlier resources after her to succeed where Rowan had failed.
None of the challenges, obstacles, and impending disaster waiting for her, no matter what she chose, would even exist if Rowan Blackmoon didn’t.
And in this moment, no one here who might witness such a thing had so much as a sliver of the kind of power necessary to stop her.
Even still, even while entertaining the idea and how many seemingly endless difficulties it would solve, Rebecca just couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Once she realized that, she also realized she had once again drawn the full attention of every Shade operative locked away with her inside this dome, plus the attention of every Hakalini’ir soldier.
They all watched her, holding a collective breath, waiting to see which decision Shade’s Roth-Da’al would make and how it would determine what happened next for all of them.
And Maxwell.
More clearly than all the rest of it, she felt him watching her from across their magical cage, his gaze nearly burning a hole through the side of her face and doing nothing to appease the firestorm of her hatred for everything Rowan now represented. Admittedly, it was also just plain hatred for Rowan.
Her connection with the shifter didn’t make it easier to stand down either.
Maxwell wanted her to slit Rowan Blackmoon’s throat clean through and leave him for dead in the dirt, right here now in front of everyone. Rebecca felt his desire for such a thing. She felt it so distinctly, there was no room for misinterpretation.
Part of her agreed with Maxwell’s sentiment, and the idea was certainly tempting.
Or, maybe equally as possible, Rebecca was now losing the ability to tell the difference between her own desires—no matter how dark—and Maxwell’s as they mixed together, flowing back and forth between their connection.
If that were the case now, though…
At this point, did it even matter anymore?