2. Chapter 2
2
“ I knew it!” Leonard shouted, thrusting a finger at Rebecca as he leaped from his chair. The office filled with the noisy screech of the chair leg scooting back across the floor.
Maxwell’s low, warning growl dominated all other sound. “Take a seat.”
Leonard gawked at Rebecca. “Know, if you know who took her, you have to know where she is. We have to get her back!”
“Which is why the Roth-Da’al called this meeting first thing,” Maxwell said.
“We’re wasting time.” Leonard stood fully from his chair, glancing back and forth between Rebecca and Maxwell with wide eyes before he slammed both hands onto the table. A flare of uncontrolled yellow sparks burst beneath his palms. “So why is everyone just sitting here?”
“There’s a lot more to say and a lot more to discuss,” Rebecca said, forcing herself not to stare at the mage’s hands or the evidence of him having lost control of both his composure and his magic. “That’s why we’re all sitting down here this morning. It’s a process.”
“What took you so long to figure it out?” Whit asked.
“Oh Blue Hells.” Zida rolled her eyes. “And we need to have a meeting about it?”
“Sounds to me like something we definitely should’ve moved on as soon as you confirmed who it was,” Whit added.
“Meeting or no meeting,” Leonard said, his voice rising in pitch again with his excitement, “Nyx needs us. And if you already know where she’s being held, then why the hell haven’t you sent a team to bring her back? She was unconscious, for crying out loud!”
“In your seat, mage!” Maxwell barked, his voice low and threatening without ever having raised its volume.
Leonard gawked at the shifter, as if he hadn’t known Maxwell had been sitting right there the whole time. Then he dropped back into his chair and clamped his mouth shut.
Rebecca had known she would face these questions. She just had to get to the part where she could answer them in an orderly fashion that made sense based on what she was about to propose.
“Listen,” she said, “I know racing in after Nyx right off the bat is a knee-jerk reaction. Maybe even the best first plan of action when one of our own disappears—”
“Disappears?” Bor asked with a snort. “I thought she was taken.”
“Any questions for the Roth-Da’al can wait until she’s finished,” Maxwell growled.
For a moment, all eyes centered on the shifter and his glowing silver eyes—which revealed his frustration with their brighter and faster pulses of light, even when his voice and demeanor didn’t.
This whole thing definitely would have taken even longer if Rebecca hadn’t pulled her Head of Security into it with her, that was for sure.
“Trust me,” she continued. “That was exactly what I wanted to do last night too, when we found out Nyx was taken. And you’re right, Leonard. She was taken. But I’ve also had the night to think it over, and I believe we need to go about this one a different way than normal.”
“Are you kidding me?” Leonard shouted, this time throwing himself forward against the edge of the table as he gaped at her. “Oh, so the ambush that took down our convoy last night gets a whole team sent out right away to bring them in, but Nyx has to wait overnight for anyone to do a damn thing about it?”
“I get it,” Rebecca replied calmly. “And I understand your concerns, but with this—”
“We’re wasting time!”
“Does Nyx have her phone on her?” Maxwell asked, speaking as levelly and blandly as if he were asking for the time.
Leonard blinked at him, then scoffed. “No.”
“Do we have any other viable method for tracking her location?”
“Well…no. But—”
“Then listen to your Roth-Da’al, Saldrich. There’s a reason she wanted you at this meeting along with everyone else, and at this rate, it’ll be after dark again before you hold your tongue long enough to hear why.”
Leonard’s fists clenched tightly on the table as he stared the shifter down, but then he relented and sank back into his chair, thoroughly chastised and fortunately convinced. For now.
That wasn’t at all how Rebecca wanted him to feel, but at least he’d quieted down.
“That better be an exaggeration, Hannigan,” Bor grumbled. “You’ll catch me dead in my room before you ever see me skip three meals in a row just for a chat. Not to mention the riots when you leave magicals like these to fend for themselves for every damn scrap o’ chow.”
Zida barked out a laugh and rolled her eyes.
Maxwell glowered at them both but didn’t have to say anything else about it. As two of Shade’s oldest members—both of them old-worlders straight from Xahar’áhsh and with an unimaginable magnitude of experience between them—the cook and the healer kept their silence and returned their full attention to Rebecca.
“Now,” she continued, “on top of Hannigan’s valid points, mainly the fact that we have no way to specifically track Nyx, I can tell you all with a hundred percent certainty that riding in after her the way we rode in to recover Diego, Titus, and Burke last night simply won’t work. Not with this scumbag.
“Our chances of successfully bringing Nyx back home, safe and sound, are way better if we all go into this with a different frame of mind. More specifically, if we respond with something surprising. Something her kidnapper won’t expect. With this one, we have to be smart about it.”
Especially when Rebecca knew from personal experience just how sadistically crafty Kordus Harkennr was and just how terrible he really could be when pushed to his limits.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell anyone in this room why she was so certain what those things were—that, once upon a time and long ago, she had actually worked with Harkennr, though in a very different capacity than her current position with Shade entailed.
That would only raise more questions she couldn’t afford to answer without unraveling the tangled web of lies strung through at least half a dozen of her old lives and their various aliases.
Besides, this meeting wasn’t about her. What everyone else here did or didn’t know about Harkennr had no bearing on the fact that he’d taken Nyx right out from under them, or that reacting in the usual way wouldn’t get them the usual results. Not with a sick and twisted mind like Harkennr’s.
“All right,” Whit said, his jaw set in determination. “I trust your instincts, Knox. I’m sure everyone else here would say the same thing. So then what does being smart about this actually look like?”
“First, it looks like taking stock of what we know and can confirm. His name is Kordus Harkennr, and he’s set up shop here in Chicago in the Old Joliet Prison. Beyond those two facts, we don’t have much else, including where he’s keeping her or what he’s doing to her.”
“ Doing to her?” Leonard asked, his face paling considerably.
“If anything,” Rebecca added quickly. “I can guarantee that if we go blasting in blind without our heads screwed on before we confirm any other information, it’ll only give Harkennr that much more of an advantage than he already has. He’ll take it as a personal attack, and why wouldn’t he? He took one of ours, and we’d be going after more than just one of his. He might even see it as an act of war, even on a small scale.”
“And snatching Nyx out of a fucking recovery bed isn’t ?” Leonard interjected.
Maxwell opened his mouth to respond with something no-doubt threatening, again, but he stopped when Rebecca signaled him with two raised fingers and answered the mage herself.
“Of course it is,” she said. “But unfortunately, the asshole who took her has the upper hand here, and we have zero intel. That part’s pretty indisputable.”
Only then did Leonard look like he was starting to put the pieces together himself as well, and Rebecca couldn’t blame him for that, either. His feelings for Nyx and his fear for her safety had overpowered his common sense. It was an easy thing to let happen, especially when caught blindsided like this.
Which was part of why she’d called this impromptu meeting in the first place.
Bor grunted and shifted in his chair. “That’s all well and good. Sounds like you know what you’re talking about. I’ve got no issue with that, but I would like to know how you know even this much of the bare minimum, like you said. That this Kordus Harkennr character’s the one responsible.”
“Yeah, you know what?” Leonard added. “I’d love to know that too. Because the only evidence we found of anything was no Nyx and that creepy-looking doll thing sitting there on the bed where she should’ve been.”
“ This creepy-looking doll thing?” Maxwell asked as he gestured toward the corner of Rebecca’s desk and the small humanoid figurine carved of white stone she’d set there before the meeting.
The mage’s wild eyes settled on the figurine, then he stared at it before nodding blankly. “Yeah, that… That’s the one.”
“I don’t get it,” Whit cut in. “I mean, unless that thing has the guy’s name written on it, there’s no other way for any of us to know who took her and left that hunk of rock in her place.”
Rebecca pulled open the center drawer of her enormous desk and grabbed the first humanoid figurine she’d received from Harkennr. The stone’s cold, smooth weight in her hand felt like an ominous portent of all the danger that still awaited them—regardless of a Shade operative having just been kidnapped by a potential enemy.
Only she was certain there was no potential about Kordus Harkennr. No amount of seemingly harmless invitations would ever change that.
With that first stone figurine clenched in her fist, she shoved the center drawer shut again, only for it to jam on her with an inch and a half of space left. After jiggling the drawer a few times and realizing it wouldn’t budge, she let out a frustrated grunt and forced herself to ignore the furniture for now.
Instead, Rebecca returned her attention to the magicals sitting around the table and lifted the first figurine for everyone to see. “How do I know it was Kordus Harkennr? Because he’s already sent me one of these before.”
The first figurine clinked down onto the surface of her desk when she set it gently beside the second—dark and light stone, contrasting side by side.
The others stared at her proof, then Leonard snorted. “Oh, great. Who else got kidnapped?”
“She received a package shortly after the huur-akíl ,” Maxwell explained.
“There were only two things in it,” Rebecca added. “A congratulatory note—”
“If you can even call it that,” Maxwell grumbled.
“And that figurine.” She nodded toward the two crude stone shapes standing guard on her desk.
Leonard’s face scrunched up in pure bafflement. “Are you serious?”
Both Whit and Rick looked just as clueless as to the meaning and purpose of those figurines, though they concealed it better than the mage.
Bor and Zida, however, exchanged a knowing look, just as Rebecca had expected. She also expected them both to keep their mouths shut about it, which was probably for the best.
Of course those two would have recognized the offering of those figurines for what they were, as well as all the inherent implications. Shade’s resident cook and healer were two of only a handful of true old-worlders among Shade’s ranks, just like Harkennr.
Just like Rebecca.
“All of it came from Kordus Harkennr,” Rebecca said. “He signed his name on the letter in his little care package. After that, he assumed—correctly—that he wouldn’t need to leave his name again when he left a second message on Nyx’s empty bed.”
Then she studied each of their faces, gauging the striking lack of reaction on every expression.
So not even the two other old-worlders sitting at this table so much as recognized the name, huh?
That still benefitted Rebecca in a small way, because now their questions about the guy were far less likely to include those too dangerous for her to answer with complete honesty.
On the other hand, it meant she had her work cut out for her in convincing her task force just how dangerous Harkennr was, no matter how many signs pointed to the exact opposite.
And she was certain they would.
“We have far less confirmed intel on Harkennr than I would like,” Maxwell continued, “but here’s the sum total of what we do know.
“Currently, he runs his operation out of the Old Joliet Prison, which isn’t as abandoned and empty as everyone thinks it is. The compound is well guarded and heavily armed. We might even go so far as to call it a defensive fortress. Its forces are large in number, and from what I’ve seen, they know what they’re doing. Harkennr runs a tight ship.
“The rest is pure conjecture on my part. This is one sadistic son of a bitch. That prison is filled with illegally captured and trafficked magicals Harkennr uses as experiment subjects inside the compound. We’ve also confirmed he consistently brings in new shipments of abducted victims to add to his…collection.”
“ Victims ?” Leonard screeched, nearly jumping out of his chair again. “Experiments? Y-you mean Nyx isn’t the only one?”
Rebecca forced back a grimace, trying to maintain her composure in the face of these abhorrent facts she and Maxwell now got to share with the others. “We have reason to believe—”
“This motherfucker took Nyx to experiment on her!” Leonard shrieked. “To torture her! And we’re just sitting around talking about it?”
The office exploded with a violent thump when Maxwell pounded a fist down onto the table. “One more outburst, Saldrich, and you’ll sit out the rest of this briefing.”
This time, instead of easing back into his chair and looking fully chagrinned, Leonard turned his head to glare daggers at the shifter.
Maxwell’s equally threatening stare in response didn’t budge.
The mage’s jaw muscles worked furiously as he fought to contain himself, sitting rigidly and fuming in his seat.
“Like Hannigan said,” Rebecca continued, wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible, “this is the only confirmed information we currently have. The most important decision that needs to be made now is what needs to happen next. How do we respond to this? Because reacting is out of the question on this one.”
Leonard gaped at her. “Are you insane?”
“Only sometimes,” Rebecca replied with a weak smile, then shook her head. “But not now. I don’t want to roll in blindly, guns blazing, with no idea whether Nyx is actually there at Harkennr’s compound or even where to look for her if she is. Harkennr’s smart. Dangerously so. Not like the other gangs and wannabe crime bosses we’ve gone up against before. He’ll expect a mindless retaliation, and he’ll be more than ready for it.
“Honestly, he’s far more prepared for something like that than we ever could be, the way things stand right now. But in his letter, he did also offer an open invitation to stop by, walk right in, and talk to him…”
A low growl rose from Maxwell as he swept his silver gaze across the table. “At the Roth-Da’al’s earliest convenience.”
“He sounds like a stuck-up prick,” Zida muttered.
Rick gaped at the healer.
Bor grunted.
With a nod, Rebecca delivered what she was now convinced would be the final blow to this meeting. “I think accepting his offer is the is the way to go as our next best step.”
When the only responses she got at first were vacant stares and silence, Rebecca set her jaw and steeled herself for the other shoe to drop. Seconds later, it did. Violently and all at once.
“ I get it…” Whit nodded and shook a finger at her. “You mean like a Trojan-horse kinda thing. Get through all his defenses first, then attack from the inside once you’re already there, right?”
“Oh, all by herself, with no one there for backup?” Zida quipped with a snort. “I didn’t think anyone at this table was born yesterday. Way to prove me wrong…”
“That’s a reckless approach,” Bor grumbled. “This isn’t even about attacking the guy. He took one of ours.”
“Exactly!” Leonard thrust a finger toward the old giveldi. “We have to take him down all at once, as soon as we can. For good. We have to get Nyx out of there.”
“No one’s talking about leaving her there,” Rick said, his black- and red-mottled face contorted by a frown. “But sight unseen? We need way more recon.”
“That takes too much time.”
“Oh, so you think this is supposed to be a fast operation? I tell you what, the entire team’ll be dead before anyone finds out anything new. You heard what Hannigan said about the place.”
“The motherfucker’s experimenting on them!”
“Which makes it even more dangerous to go in all hot-headed like that. Do you wanna end up being an experiment?”
“We have everything we need to take them out. What about all those new weapons?”
“Weapons don’t mean shit when the enemy outsmarts you before you even have a chance to fire the damn things.”
The office rang with angry shouts and unveiled condescension as the argument heated right along with everyone’s tempers. Rebecca only tried once to silence them with a lifted hand to offer a few more ideas, but no one noticed.
So she shut her mouth again and waited, thinking her so-called assembled council could get the anger and aggression out of their systems quickly before returning to the actual conversation at hand. She was wrong.
When the argument devolved into insults and half-cocked threats flying across the table, everyone offering their own opinion and each of them differing greatly, Rebecca looked to Maxwell.
The shifter watched the unfolding descent with a darkening scowl before he turned his head and his silver eyes locked onto Rebecca’s face. He looked just as disappointed in these results as she felt.
They wouldn’t get anywhere if things continued this way. And they simply didn’t have the time to parse out everyone’s fear and anger from the smart choices before Shade made its next move.
Nyx didn’t have the time.
“Okay, listen!” Rebecca shouted above the other voices all shouting at each other. “This isn’t the place for—”
“Are you hearing yourself? Blue Hells, they should’ve kidnapped you and spared us all the trouble of listening to that garbage you call a professional opinion.”
“Bite me, old-timer!”
“And by the way, when was the last time you went out on a mission? Or better yet, the last time you even left this fucking building?”
“The last time some young, still-green idiot showed his elders the proper respect! And believe you me, son, it’s been decades .”
“That’s enough!” Rebecca shouted, to no effect. The bickering merely continued, growing in a swelling wave of fear and anger and the kind of division that had for so long kept the entire task force and all its members from realizing their true potential.
Only, now that Aldous wasn’t here to bear the brunt of it, when the mission came down to the wire, these magicals had no one left to turn on but each other.
Which was the exact opposite of why Rebecca had called these six very specific individuals here in the first place.
Her own frustration got the better of her, and she inadvertently took a page out of her Head of Security’s book by pounding a fist down on her desk and almost rising from her chair with the force of her next shout. “ I said that’s enough !”