5. Chapter 5
5
R ebecca just wanted to get out. To get some fresh air. To put some distance between herself and Shade Headquarters—and, more specifically, between her and Maxwell.
She needed to get her head on straight again and remember what it was like to not be assaulted by a nearly sentient third-party energy drawing her and the shifter together at every waking moment.
She focused so intently on how much better she’d feel after leaving the compound, the booming roar that greeted her when she reached the bottom of the stairwell—cracking across the garage like a sonic explosion—made her falter and almost lose her balance on the last step.
What now?
She recovered her balance and her wits gracefully enough and scanned the mostly empty underground parking garage. Ready for anything.
It was only Titus.
He stood in the center, staring at her and unleashing more of his thunderous laughter as if it were the most natural sound in the world. For him, she supposed, it probably was.
“Not like you to be late to your own party,” he boomed through another chuckle as she headed toward him.
“Oh, is that what we’re calling this? My party.”
“Aren’t they all now, Roth-Da’al?” Titus spread his arms and stuck out one foot before attempting what would have looked like a graceful bow from anyone else. From him, it looked like he was about to bend over and re-tie a shoelace.
“Very funny,” she said flatly, then waved him forward with her toward one of the six vehicles currently in Shade’s possession.
Their mismatched fleet had doubled in size since the last time she’d needed a car, thanks to a streak of successful acquisitions from recent missions.
Rebecca headed for the sorriest looking tin can of the bunch—a decades-old Honda Civic that had seen better days but was still big enough to haul Titus around.
More importantly, it didn’t scream, “Look at me!” in public like the butter-yellow VW that had once been Shade’s only form of viable transportation on wheels.
“I figured we’d take the Honda today,” she said.
“Way ahead of you, boss.” With a jingling flourish, Titus produced a set of keys in his enormous hand and dangled them in front of her.
She looked up at him with a snort. “No one ever called you unprepared.”
“Not for a while.”
“You wanna drive?”
“Fuck no. I wouldn’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
Rebecca stopped to scrutinize him with a raised eyebrow. When Titus beamed down at her and said nothing, she snatched the keys out of his hand and let out a wry chuckle. “Fine by me. And hey. This place is in the middle of downtown. So you might wanna grab one of those—”
“Uh-huh.”
A bright flash of silver light caught the corner of her eye, and when she looked at him again, she almost didn’t believe what she saw.
The man standing beside her was entirely unrecognizable—bleach-blond hair nearly falling into a pair of bright, sparkling blue eyes, and a gleaming grin revealing teeth so unnaturally white and sparkly, it bordered on creepy.
He’d maintained Titus’s intimidating musculature, though it now looked far more natural and relative to his size.
If she hadn’t known it was Titus standing there beside her, she would have said a human had stumbled his way into Shade Headquarters.
That was the point.
“Damn.” She gave him another approving once over. “I’ve been waiting to see one of those in action. Impressive.”
“You think?” Titus spread his arms and looked himself over. “I dunno. Seems a little small to me…”
“Everything seems a little small to you.”
When the blond man threw his head back for another round of uproarious laughter, it was all Titus. No doubt about it.
A low, playful whistle echoed toward them from the other end of the garage, where Archie had just opened the cab door to one of Shade’s recently acquired eighteen-wheelers now reserved for supply runs.
“Looking good, Titus!” he shouted, wagging a thumbs-up in the air toward them. “Hardly recognize you.”
“Should’ve gotten one of your own,” the big guy called back. His booming voice needing no amplifying, but shouting across the garage made it sound ten times bigger anyway. “Save us all the pain of looking at your shit-ugly mug.”
Archie laughed as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “Come say that to my face, you handsome bastard.”
Another explosion of laughter was Titus’s only reply as he and Rebecca reached the Honda.
She couldn’t stop sneaking extra looks at him, somehow still expecting to find the enormous vuulbor beside her like a giant walking hunk of stone. “Wow. That new tech guy really knows what he’s doing.”
“You like it?” Titus stretched out his left arm to show off the thick band of shiny gold now adorning his wrist. “Custom job, too. Apparently, changing a guy’s size falls under ‘advanced illusionary spellwork’ or some shit. But I guess it does the job.”
“Definitely a different vibe. Which is the point, I know. Pretty amazing he cut you down to size by like a foot.”
“Eight inches,” he corrected, fixing her with a suddenly deadpan stare. “Thank you very much.”
Rebecca lifted both hands in concession and managed to keep a straight face, “My bad. It doesn’t actually change your size, though, right?”
He patted his belly with both hands, which now looked nothing like Titus’s normal wall of solid muscle. “Nope. All me on the inside. Just the outside that got a makeover.”
“So you’ll still have to duck through the doorways and everything.”
“Yep.” The manicured eyebrows of his new illusion drew together as he studied her face. “When you think you’re looking me in the eye, still feels like you’re staring at my throat.”
Rebecca barked out a laugh and unlocked the driver’s-side door before hitting the automatic unlock for the passenger side. “I’ll try to remember to address half a foot above your head, then.”
“But hey. Other than that, can’t say I’ve got much to complain about.”
“The gnome does decent work.” Rebecca opened her door and slid behind the wheel, bracing herself when the vehicle rocked sideways beneath Titus’s enormous weight as he settled into the passenger seat.
“Just like the witch sisters said he would.”
Rebecca paused with the keys in the ignition and frowned at him. “Maddie and Lacey?”
He shot her a sidelong glance with a knowing smirk that made this human-illusion version of Titus look smug and full of himself. Normally, she found the look on the real Titus endearing. When he didn’t look like a reincarnated Viking in Chicago.
“We got any other witch sisters I should know about?” he asked.
“No. But I thought they were from Boise.”
“I heard it the same.” Titus grunted as he fought with the seatbelt, struggling to pull it out enough that it reached ridiculously far around his human illusion. “Guess they’ve been in Chicago long enough to make a few friends along the way.”
Rebecca shrugged. “Benefits of taking on new members.”
They stared at each other, then burst out laughing before she started the engine and got them on their way.
When they passed the eighteen-wheeler, Archie rolled down his window to wave, then offered another wolf whistle at the blond-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot-four-looking human Titus in the passenger seat.
The big guy laughed and flipped him the bird.
S tepping through the front doors of Chicago’s Nexus building filled Rebecca with the same sense of eerie abandonment and impending doom as the two other times she’d been here.
They found the immaculately clean lobby, polished marble floors, expensively tasteful décor in hues of gold and off-white as unchanged as she’d hoped they would. Once again, the pristine concierge desk remained empty, with no sign of anyone having ever manned that desk at all.
After all, employees were completely unnecessary in a magical storage vault where customers helped themselves to their own units and the built-in magical security ensured a shortage of break-ins or identity fraud.
Unless, of course, one murdered their predecessor in self-defense and inherited his vault key along with everything else he left behind.
As Rebecca eyed the lobby, a low whistle from behind echoed off the high ceilings and polished white marble comprising nearly everything.
“Don’t know what I was expecting,” Titus murmured. “But this ain’t it.”
She turned to face him, automatically craning her neck in preparation to meet his gaze, and found herself staring at thin air six inches higher than the sparkling blue eyes of the giant blond illusion standing in front of her.
“Hey, check you out,” he said. “You’re looking me in the eye.”
Despite his confirmation, Rebecca didn’t know where she was looking. “All right. Take that shit off.”
“Aw, come on, boss.” His booming chuckle echoed everywhere. “I thought you liked the new look.”
“Not anymore. It’s creeping me out, and I still don’t know where the hell your eyes are.”
“We’re out in public, though…” He gestured behind him toward the double glass doors of the building’s entrance. “Don’t want me drawing attention, right?”
“This is a magical storage unit, Titus. Not out in public .”
“What if somebody sees?”
“You know what?” she quipped as she headed toward the circle of gold painted on the center of the lobby floor, “if any human’s dumb enough to walk in here on their own, they deserve every bit of the shock they’ll get seeing you , either way. Trust me.”
More laughter followed her across the lobby. A flash of bright silver light bounced off the marble surfaces in every direction, then an intimidatingly massive shadow fell over Rebecca before the vuulbor stopped beside her within the circle.
When she looked up at him, he was grinning.
“Oh, that’s so much better,” she muttered, despite her neck already hurting from looking straight up at his face. “New rule. You only get to wear that when it’s absolutely necessary. Not for fun.”
“Roger that, boss. So how do we get this party started?”
Rebecca whipped out the vault key and returned his flashing grin with one of her own. “Roth-Da’al, party of two?”
The golden pedestal rose from the panel sliding open in the gold-painted floor, just like before, illuminating with the same bright-blue glow emanating from the key in her hand. The number five appeared on each, and Rebecca set the key on the slanted top of the glowing pedestal.
All the lights cut out, plunging them into perfect and complete darkness.
It would have come with complete silence if it wasn’t for Titus’s bone-shattering laughter cutting through the pitch-black. “Holy shit. This is fantastic!”
“Glad someone’s having a good time.” In the dark, he couldn’t see her smiling.
“You know me, boss. It’s the little things.”
The lights cut back on, and they stood in nearly the exact same room.
This one, though, had a gleaming silver number five hanging on the far wall. Instead of a concierge desk and glass doors to the outside, the perimeter of this circular room was lined with nondescript wooden doors, all of them exactly the same at first glance.
“Come on, then.” After a quick glance around level five’s massive lobby, Rebecca stepped off the golden circle and headed for the door in front of her. “And quit screwing around.”
His laughter continued. When she reached the doors, Rebecca was happy to keep her hidden smile to herself.
Every door here looked exactly the same, which made it impossible to tell which one her level-five key opened. Until she approached it and both the door and key glowed with matching electric-blue.
She didn’t trust her own directional orientation within this room yet. There was always a chance the golden circle brought them up to a level five facing a different direction every time.
Rebecca didn’t want to find out what happened when someone tried to open the wrong vault with the wrong key.
That kind of mistake might just be the thing that sent everything else tumbling over the edge.