26. Chapter 26
26
R ebecca stood behind the Shell gas station, away from the exterior lights and the streetlamps illuminating the gas pump and the station’s front doors, with darkness all around her. She could have executed this mission on her own with no gear, no backup, and her Bloodshadow spear the only necessary weapon.
But this wasn’t about her anymore. Not tonight.
Shade was finally on to Kordus Harkennr and the intricate workings of one vital component to his larger grotesque operation. Tonight, this was about her teams getting the job done and doing it right .
The overwhelming energy and heat tingling through her for the last thirty-five minutes spluttered and halted for a split second when Maxwell moved beside her. Complete with that painful tug at her core that now appeared every single time the shifter moved, turned, stepped, or even looked away from her, easing again whenever he returned.
She’d been keeping track.
Her breath caught in her throat, but she forced it back out again and tried to ignore the sensations so Maxwell could do his job—likely while feeling the same thing.
Weren’t they just a pair?
He’d only moved toward the corner of the building to peer around it into the darkness stretching down the highway, but it felt like he’d turned away forever. She sighed with relief when he returned to their position and the pain disappeared, as if it had never been.
“Anything?” she whispered.
“No visual yet, but they’ll be here.”
“And you reconfirmed and double-checked every data point Rick brought us?”
His silver eyes glinted beneath the stars when he fully turned his gaze toward her. The soft pulse of brighter silver within them made her want to drown in that light.
“Recon sat on this route for seventy-two hours,” he whispered. “They confirmed every piece of it twice over. So did you. So did I. I trust them, Roth-Da’al.”
Rebecca nodded and had to look away just to catch her breath again.
She trusted their intel, too. Rick’s recon team had all but pulled a miracle out of thin air when tracking down two of Harkennr’s consistent transport routes, which was more than she could have hoped for three days ago when making the order.
But the convoy transporting a vehicle full of kidnapped and trafficked magicals before sending them to a life of unimaginable horrors inside the Old Joliet Prison should have been here almost forty minutes ago, which definitely concerned her.
Harkennr knew how to play the game. If he hadn’t confirmed the superiority of his own forces and resources the last time they’d spoken, he certainly suspected it. Either he was waiting for her to show her hand with a move like this, or he was planning a move of his own against her task force. Neither option was preferable.
Rebecca couldn’t shake the gut-wrenching suspicion that, even with all their careful planning and strategic preparation, not to mention the perfectly timed influx of working capital to better outfit the entire organization, something would go horribly wrong tonight.
Not the way it always went horribly wrong with Aldous in charge. The kind of horribly wrong that scattered her teams into the night, cracked them open like eggs, and left them spilled all over the interstate, left for someone else to find in the morning.
Any loss among her operatives was a hard blow. Now, though, Rebecca had spent enough time in command to vividly imagine how deeply losing any of the magicals she’d come to know would break her, and how quickly.
Everyone’s lives were on the line tonight, each one of them placed willingly into the Roth-Da’al’s hands because they believed in what she was doing and were ready to join her.
The same way the armies of Agn’a Tha’ros would have laid down their lives for the Bloodshadow Heir, no matter their probability of success or the cost. No matter the purpose or the ideology driving it.
She’d never wanted to lead anyone. Not councils, not courts, not armies, not lives. Yet here she was.
But this meant something. This was real.
Knowing that didn’t soothe her thundering pulse or the pre-battle giddiness surging through her. Combined with that warm, heavy, admittedly pleasant and reassuring weight of Maxwell’s presence beside her—that tingling rush re-infusing her cells with every pump of her heart—standing here behind the gas station off the highway for three-quarters of an hour became a new brand of torture.
She might not make it through another forty-five minutes like this. Hell, another fifteen felt like an eternity.
Rebecca refused to keep checking the time after that, taking turns with Maxwell to scout the highway in both directions until one of them confirmed the visual and gave the rest of their team the green light.
She did, however, occasionally peek through the single window at the rear of the building to double-check the store clerk slumped back in the chair in the back office. The others could say what they wanted about how much Shade’s healer creeped them out, but no one could deny Zida’s efficiency with potions. They did what she said they would.
The clerk would be unconscious for another hour, at least, and would wake to find himself nearing the end of his shift, hopefully assuming he’d merely fallen asleep during a break in the back. With the gas station’s meager security systems temporarily shut down and the security cameras set to loop a frame of absolutely nothing until 3:42 a.m, the guy would have no cause for concern.
Rebecca made a mental note to thank Rick and his tech team personally after this. Battling other magicals in a human city was one thing. Understanding human technology enough to break it down and stage an unwitnessed ambush at a gas station took his skill set to a whole new level.
She’d let herself get so caught up in the waiting, she didn’t register the twin lights appearing down the dark stretch of highway until she realized she’d been staring at them so long, they’d already doubled in size.
Those were headlights.
With a sharp hiss, spun back around the corner of the building, nodded at Maxwell, and whispered, “Incoming.”
He didn’t bother to look for himself before circling his thumb and middle finger between his lips and letting out a short, harsh whistle.
How much things had changed in the last three weeks, from Maxwell questioning her every literal step to now trusting her to the point that her visual on their potential target was enough for him to move their team to the next phase. No double-checking her work. No second-guessing her information.
When had that shift happened?
The buzz and crackling static of all the gas station’s external lighting, floodlights on the building, lampposts in the parking lot, and the neon backlights of every station pump flickering in quick succession whisked her back to this moment.
Power surges, faulty wiring, and flickering lights weren’t rare at old gas stations along the highway. With nothing else around, this particular flicker was manufactured from Zane positioned on the roof of the building.
Maxwell had assured her the Umbál had a special touch with electronics. He wasn’t wrong.
One power surge through the station’s entire circuitry was only the first signal to look alive. The second would come when they confirmed that the next vehicle to turn into the gas station was who they’d been waiting for.
Maxwell scanned the back of the building and the smaller parking lot behind them as all the lights flickered back on. “Do you think Harkennr knows his night-shift drivers are occasionally behind schedule?”
Rebecca had almost peeked around the corner again to check the oncoming vehicle’s approach, but she stopped to meet the shifter’s gaze instead. “They’re still alive. So no. I don’t think he knows.”
She realized only afterward that Maxwell had attempted a joke to break up the tension in their last minutes of waiting, but she’d given quite a solemn answer.
The way his silver eyes narrowed beneath a fleeting frown he tried to cover up worried her. The shifter believed he knew as much about Kordus Harkennr as she did, most of which he’d put together from their visit to the prison. Now she’d dropped the ball with a flippant comment that seemed to have stoked his suspicion all over again.
But they both knew this wasn’t the time to dive further into how Rebecca had accessed so many things she claimed to know.
A twisting, shifting patch of light and shadow grew brighter on the asphalt beside the building, darkening again when the crunch of tires on scattered dirt in the station’s parking lot heralded the vehicle’s arrival as it turned into the lot. The next step was up to Zane on the roof.
Either this was their target, or the team would keep waiting for who knew how much longer. Assuming the route Recon had scoped and confirmed hadn’t changed in the last twenty-four hours.
Don’t hold your breath .
The idling engine shut off before one vehicle door opened and voices spilled across the empty station lot.
“…already behind schedule. What’s he gonna care? These ones won’t even be called in for another week or two. It’s not like he’s expecting us tonight .”
“It’s the principle of it. Trust me, we don’t wanna make a habit of it.”
“Whatever, man. Hey, while you’re out, grab me a chocolate bar or something. I’ve really been craving—”
“I’m not your personal shopper, Royce. I’m not even going inside. This is a gas stop, and that’s it.”
“Fine. Then I’ll go get it my own damn self—”
“The fuck you will.” A low, warning snarl filtered through the voices before the tense silence seemed to pause everything.
In that brief moment of complete silence, with the vehicle just on the other side of the building, Rebecca heard something else.
Sniffling and terrified, hushed whimpers, all of it muted but still audible.
Blue Hells. This was their target, all right. There were magicals in the back of that vehicle.
The second she realized the truth, she glanced at Maxwell and saw the same realization dawn in his expression. Simultaneously, the lights around the station buzzed and dimmed to a sporadic flicker before flaring up again.
Signal number two. Time to move in.
“Jesus, I hate these dumps,” the guy in the passenger seat complained. “It can’t be that hard to fix a few lights…”
“Stay in the damn car!”
By the time the driver emerged from the vehicle, Rebecca and Maxwell were already veering around the corner of the building, magitek weapons loaded and at the ready.
They entered the parking lot from the back as the shirtless half-changeling prepared to shut his door before pumping his gas.
The door never budged.
A bolt of brilliant purple energy in a spiraling flare zipped across the highway. It lit up the station parking lot with a crackling hiss before crashing into the inside of the driver’s open door with a blaze of exploding purple light and the deafening shriek of tearing metal.
The driver’s-side door clanged across the asphalt, torn from its hinges, and clattered against the front of the pumping station with a hollow echo.
The half-changeling spun toward the highway, his hand still outstretched to grab and close a vehicle door that no longer existed. “What the—”
“Don’t move!” Maxwell barked as he surged toward the vehicle, his augmented assault rifle propped in both hands and aimed at the driver’s chest. “Hands up.”
“What the hell is this ?” the driver shouted.
“Your hands !”
Only when the half-changeling saw Tig and Ben reach this side of the highway from their position behind the opposite embankment, and Zane hopped off the roof to land squarely on his feet like a two-legged cat, did the driver finally do as he was told.
He lifted both hands in the air, and a dark chuckle escaped him. “I gotta admit I didn’t see this coming.”
“Turn around and get on your knees,” Maxwell snarled.
“Come on. Do we have to go through all that? You already got the drop on me.”
“Now!” Maxwell bellowed.
The half-changeling rolled his eyes but did as he was told.
The shifter pulled a set of magic-dampening handcuffs from his pocket as he approached the driver, keeping steady aim with his rifle in one hand. “How many are in the back?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
Maxwell sent his foot so hard and so quickly into the center of the driver’s back, the guy had no time to catch himself before he toppled forward onto his chest with a loud smack of his face against the asphalt.
“What the hell, asshole? What was that—”
“ How many ?” Maxwell roared.
“Jesus, just a few, okay? Happy now?” A bitter laugh burst out of the half-changeling even while Maxwell pressed a boot down onto his back to hold him there. “Now you just signed your own death warrant for a few useless nobodies who won’t even be missed. You feeling proud of yourself yet? Big guy with a big gun, making a big deal over a few worthless pieces of—”
He grunted beneath the increased weight the shifter bore down on his back.
“Tig,” Maxwell snarled, “check the back.”
Tig pivoted toward the rear of the vehicle, his weapon at the ready. The terrified gasps and now poorly muffled sobs from inside the van grew louder.
Rebecca couldn’t help but watch now. It sure didn’t sound like just a few in the rear of Harkennr’s transport vehicle.
Ben stepped behind Tig and summoned a blazing green fireball in one hand, prepared to offer cover fire if necessary.
“Do you guys have any idea who you’re fucking with?” the driver asked through a strained laugh, even when Maxwell applied more pressure with his boot. “You picked the wrong fucking van to rob off the highway in the middle of the night, I can tell you that much. When my boss finds out what you did, you’re all dead. And everyone you know is dead. You have no clue how much you just fucked yourselves.”
“Only if someone else figures it out,” Rebecca replied sharply as she stepped aside so the driver could see her approach from his compromised position on the ground. “Because you won’t be the one to tell him, I can promise you that.”
That wasn’t part of the plan. This mission prioritized as few casualties as possible, even of Harkennr’s forces. But he didn’t have to know that.
It was enough to shut him up.
Before Tig’s hand closed around the handle of the van’s rear double doors, the vehicle rocked sideways, the front passenger-side door flew open, and a gap-toothed gnome barreled out of the front seat with a warbling battle cry.
The window of his open door shattered beneath his first desperate attack launched toward Zane, glass and red sparks flying everywhere.
“You’ll never take me alive!” he screamed, stumbling sideways and throwing more battle magic at no particular target.
Without so much as blinking in surprise, Zane took aim and fired a spiraling shot of scarlet energy after the fleeing gnome. The magitek round hit the guy in the back and exploded in whipping coils of light, coalescing into physical form as they elongated and wrapped around his body from head to toe.
In seconds, the gnome was encircled by the glowing scarlet ropes tightening and constricting around him like a giant snake. His legs were squeezed together, tripping him up, and he crashed to the asphalt, writhing and choking while the magical net in which he’d been caught pumped him with magical voltage. Then he finally gave up and lay still.
A muffled scream rose from the van, hushed immediately and joined by other terrified whispers.
“Go ahead, man. I got it.” Zane nodded toward Tig, keeping his weapon trained on the gnome now lying still and tied up with coils of magical rope beginning to fade.
Tig didn’t need to be told again. He gently pulled the handle, and the rear doors creaked open as the van wobbled back and forth again. The whimpers and stifled sobs intensified, but only because the doors no longer blocked the sound.
Tig dropped his hand from the open door and gaped at the sight.
“Christ,” Ben muttered behind him as he lowered his weapon, no other impending threats around them.
Rebecca rounded the vehicle to get her own good look at what had shocked her operatives.
When she stopped beside Tig and peered into the dark rear of the van, she couldn’t think of anything to say, either.
Almost two dozen pairs of eyes stared back at her, glowing in an array of colors. The light from the pumping station illuminated far more inside the back of the van than she’d ever wanted to see. Nearly two dozen abducted magicals crammed into a single vehicle, their clothes stained and torn, hair matted, faces smudged with grime. Several of those cheeks were streaked from where their own tears had washed away the filth, over and over again.
They all huddled together, clutching at each other and failing to choke back a sob or another trembling whimper. The younger ones hid their faces.
The cost of Kordus Harkennr’s brilliant advancements in magical technology.
“Somebody give me a confirmation,” Maxwell called out.
“Yeah, they’re—” Ben cleared his throat. “They’re back here, all right.”
“You should check that asshole’s story again, Hannigan,” Rebecca added, unable to look away from the awful sight in front of her. “I think he’s redefining just a few .”
Maxwell must have borne down again with even more pressure before the driver under his boot yelped and put up a struggle.
Rebecca was too focused on the terrified faces still gaping at her to be sure. She leaned forward toward the rear of the van and tried to smile. “Everything’s okay now. We’re here to help.”
Then she stepped aside to nod at Tig and Ben. “Get them out of there.”
She didn’t stop to make sure they did their jobs but rounded the van again to join Maxwell with his foot still squarely planted in the center of the half-changeling’s back.
Whether he could already feel her roiling outrage or had seen it on her face, Maxwell didn’t intervene when Rebecca lowered herself into a squat beside the driver’s head to have her own little chat with him first.
The half-changeling panted beneath Maxwell’s boot, but that didn’t stop him from trying to laugh in her face when she reached his field of vision.
“You lied to us the first time,” she said. “We asked how many people you crammed into the back of your van, and that didn’t turn out well for any of us. I’m going to give you one more chance to give us a real answer. How does that sound?”
The half-changeling’s sputtering, gasping laugh with a shifter’s heavy foot bearing increasingly more weight down on his back made the guy sound insane.
“Where were you taking them tonight?” Rebecca asked.
The driver laughed again and tried to tilt his head despite it being smashed into the asphalt.
“Where did they come from?”
It was a poor line of questioning without any other interrogation methods to fall back on, as the teams had all agreed at the start of this operation, but she figured there was always a chance one of Harkennr’s people might start squealing with just the right amount of pressure that didn’t permanently shut them up.
The half-changeling huffed out more quick, choking laughter before he broke into a wide, toothy grin that made his split lip crack open farther to bleed freely down the side of his chin. “You’re dead, bitch. You know that? You’re fucking dead !”
“Is that so?” she asked.
“You have no idea what you just started tonight.” Foamy spit dribbled through his teeth with every word, his breath increasingly more labored by the second. “Whatever you’re trying to do, you better kiss it all goodbye. You’re all fucking dead.”
“Maybe.” Rebecca tilted her head and leaned in closer so she could look into both his eyes at once. “But I’m not the one lying bloody on the ground.”
This asshole wouldn’t give them anything. She could see it in his face even as he leered at her with foamy, blood-specked drool glinting on his lips as he cackled all over again.
She recognized that look in his eyes, the sanity-defying laughter and the blood-flecked foam dribbling from the corner of his mouth. She’d seen that before too. One of Harkennr’s favorites.
Rebecca pushed herself to her feet and met Maxwell’s gaze. “He won’t talk.”
“Maybe not now, but once I get him back to the compound and start up the Needle—”
“I believe you,” she said, “but it’s too late for that now.”
The shifter frowned at her, and Rebecca stepped back before nodding toward the half-changeling beneath his boot. It only took Maxwell two seconds to put the pieces together before he removed his boot, stepped to the side, and hunkered down to inspect the first of Harkennr’s captured forces tonight.
The van’s driver lay still, his golden-brown eyes wide open and a cruel sneer contorting his features. But the sneer was stiff and unmoving, and his eyes stared blankly ahead at nothing, their spark of intelligence and life already snuffed out.
“It wasn’t you, by the way,” Rebecca murmured.
Maxwell looked sharply up at her before rising to his feet. “I know. He already had some kind of poison capsule in his mouth, didn’t he?”
She nodded. “Probably, yeah.”
Made from an otherwise harmless purple flower on Xahar’áhsh, which, when mixed with a few other choice ingredients and prepared correctly, worked just as quickly and effectively as an Earthside arsenic capsule. Only this stuff eliminated even the possibility of bringing a necromancer into the picture to question the subject after death.
A “brilliant little Thank You,” Harkennr had called it.
“Well I won’t have to listen to that fucking laugh anymore,” Maxwell grumbled before turning toward the front of the van, where the gnome from the van’s passenger seat also lay on the asphalt, his arms clinging against his sides and his legs pressed together despite Zane’s magical lasso had since disappeared.
“The half-changeling isn’t the only one with information,” Maxwell murmured.
“Oh damn…” Zane prodded the motionless passenger with the toe of his boot. Then he ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Uh, boss?”
“What’s going on?” Rebecca stepped toward him, then her gaze fell on the body at his feet.
“Ah, shit.” Zane grimaced. “Yeah, this one’s a no-go too.”
“What did you do?” Maxwell snarled.
“Come on, Hannigan.” Zane gestured toward the body. “I did exactly what I was supposed to do.”
Then he glanced at his augmented rifle, which had clearly come from the new weapons cache of what Shade had taken off yet another one of their enemies. “I think this thing went a little harder than I expected.”
“You mean you killed the target you were supposed to subdue to bring back with us?” Maxwell asked.
“Not on purpose. Hey, it’s the first time I’ve used this thing on a live target, all right? I had no idea.”
With a low growl, Maxwell turned away from their entire team and didn’t seem to realize he had no other immediate target for his anger.
“Hey, what matters are those magicals we’re pulling out of the van right now.” Rebecca nodded toward Tig and Ben helping each kidnapped civilian out of their confined quarters one at a time by hand. “Priority number one.”
“I am aware of this mission’s objectives, Roth-Da’al,” Maxwell snapped, then immediately added, “Respectfully.”
This was a shitty situation, and they’d all known it would be. She couldn’t blame anyone on this team for responding accordingly, especially at the sight of an entire van of Harkennr’s next would-be victims right there in front of them.
She ignored the bite in her Head of Security’s comment and instead added, “Who knows? Bravo Team might’ve had better luck.”
Maxwell shot her a pert sidelong look and raised an eyebrow. “Highly doubtful.”
Yes, that was exactly what she was afraid had happened.