8. Chapter 8
8
T he second Rebecca pulled the Honda into the parking garage, her stomach dropped, and every ounce of her awareness drew inward onto one devastating certainty.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
The instant niggling in the back of her mind told her it the danger had something to do with Shade’s fairly new semi parked inside, impossible to miss.
“Huh.” Scrutinizing the eighteen-wheeler with a deepening frown as she slowed her own vehicle to a stop in its regular parking spot. “Wasn’t Archie on his way out when we left?”
Crammed into the passenger seat beside her, Titus scratched his nose. “Uh-huh.”
“Looks like he hasn’t even taken off yet.”
He shrugged. “Takes us way longer to get to that vault and back than Archie to get out to make a trip to the warehouse. I even timed it. Once.”
Rebecca killed the engine and turned to look at him. “ You’ve been on kitchen runs?”
He smirked back at her. “Everybody’s got their part to play, Roth-Da’al.”
“Fair enough. I’m popping the trunk. Can you grab those crates and take them up to my office?”
“Scary-looking and strong.” Titus wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Now I know why you picked me for this special assignment .”
With a snort, Rebecca popped the trunk and got out of the car, shooting occasional glances at the truck she didn’t know would become such a source of concern.
Titus made quick work of hauling both enormous treasure-filled storage totes out of the trunk, hoisting them onto one shoulder again before he and Rebecca made their way across the garage toward the stairwell.
She couldn’t stop looking back at the semi.
“If Archie already finished his run, where’s the unloading crew?”
Titus didn’t skip a beat. “Maybe he went up to grab ’em.”
Once they passed the side of the vehicle and Rebecca shot another curious look over her shoulder at the semi, the already darkening pit in her stomach clenched tighter in apprehension.
Viewing this side of the truck instinctively felt like some kind of clue.
To what, she had no idea.
The driver’s-side door hung wide open, no sign of movement in the cab or of Archie in the garage.
“Hey, Archie!” she called, her voice reverberating across the garage. “You need an extra hand back there?”
No answer. Not even the rummaging thumps and rustles of cargo moving around in the back of the trailer that normally came with returning supply runs.
“Driver? You there?”
The garage remained silent but for Rebecca and Titus’s footsteps across the cement. She stopped to scrutinize the open driver’s-side door and what little she could see inside the cab from here.
Titus noticed her absence a few giant, lumbering steps later and stopped to turn around. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, boss. I bet he had to make an emergency pit stop or something, you know?”
“Is that a frequent issue for him?” Rebecca couldn’t take her eyes off the semi.
“How the hell should I know?” His booming voice dropped in discomfort. “Never really thought about asking.”
“It’d be weird if you did,” she muttered absently.
Titus snorted. “You’re tellin’ me.”
His explanations were all logical and perfectly valid. As far as he was concerned, his Roth-Da’al was making a big deal out of nothing.
But the terrible feeling steadily sinking in Rebecca’s gut since she’d pulled back into the garage wouldn’t let up.
In fact, it only grew worse.
So she broke away from Titus and approached the front of the eighteen-wheeler instead, moving cautiously and hoping her instincts were off. That after everything Shade had faced in the last few months alone, her senses were hypervigilant and overreactive.
That this was nothing.
It didn’t feel like nothing.
“What you doin’ now ?” Titus called after her from the base of the stairwell.
“If Archie needs a few extra hands, it can’t hurt to help him get started.”
It was the only believable excuse she could come up with.
No, Titus’s nonchalant reasoning hadn’t convinced her one bit.
She peered through the open driver’s-side door and into the cab, scrutinizing every aspect in search of any details more suspicious-looking than the others.
Relatively clean cab. A few loose receipts resting in the passenger seat. Coffee mug in the center console’s cup holder. Keys still dangling from the ignition, the engine already cut.
Everything looked perfectly normal, which only tugged at her instincts that much more forcefully.
If everything was fine, why did the sight of a transport trailer parked in the garage with the door hanging wide open fill her with such an overwhelming sense of impending disaster?
It was difficult to admit, but she already had the answer.
In just under the last two months since she’d become Shade’s commander, the task force had really started to come into their own as a cohesive unit and an efficiently operating organization.
They’d stayed on top of their field missions and operations. They’d fallen into a rhythm of maintaining daily ops at Headquarters. They’d honed their schedule of necessary tasks—incoming deliveries, supply shipments, and standard operating procedure—to something resembling a science. Or at least a precise art.
Excluding the night one transport convoy was ambushed, three operatives were kidnapped, and Nyx popped back to Headquarters, bloody and beaten and half-unconscious, Rebecca hadn’t received a single complaint.
Even about emergency pit stops.
She wouldn’t quite call Shade a well-oiled machine—not yet—but they were damn close.
An empty semi in the parking garage with its door open, keys in the ignition, and no sign of its assigned driver just didn’t make sense.
What was she missing?
“Archie!”
Rebecca turned toward the stairwell emitting an echoing slap of urgent footsteps and more yelling from the operative hurrying down to the garage.
“Don’t pull this shit on me now, man! I know you can hear me. Archie!”
A bobbing shadow appeared on the bottom landing, shrinking with every step.
“Dammit, man. I don’t know what’s taking you so long, but I did not sign up to be the old man’s punching bag. You hear me? Listen, if you got a problem with the shipment, you go tell him about it. I’m pretty sure he’s gonna kill me the next time he sees me. And lemme tell ya, that old guy is way stronger than he…”
Jay had already taken several steps across the garage, distracted by his rant. He stopped when he saw both Rebecca and Titus down there with him, watching his entrance in silent amusement.
“Oh.” He looked quickly back and forth between them, then peered across the otherwise empty garage. “Either of you seen Archie?”
Rebecca stepped away from the open cab. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“Dude probably just held it too long on the drive back,” Titus added with a shrug.
Jay shook his head. “Well he hasn’t come upstairs. Trust me, I would know. I’ve been waiting for him in the hall for the last half hour.”
The dwarf’s blue eyes darted around the garage again before settling back on Titus towering over him a few feet away. His expression darkened. “What the hell are you wearing ?”
“What, this old thing?” With his free hand, Titus reached up to stroke the dark-brown bear pelt still draped across his shoulders—which now looked more like a shawl that was almost the right size. “Pretty awesome, right?”
Rebecca had stopped paying attention to them. Her initial gut feeling had kicked all her instincts into overdrive, convincing her now that something was incredibly wrong here. She still didn’t know what, but she intended to find out.
Hopefully before the shit really did hit the fan. Whatever that turned out to be.
She left the semi’s cab and walked the length of the trailer.
“Boss?” Titus called after her.
When she turned around the back of the eighteen-wheeler to face the rear door, she grabbed the giant padlock and jiggled it back and forth.
Still locked up tight.
A bolt of yellow light streaking from her finger and straight into the padlock’s keyhole—a simple, basic lock spell in reverse—popped the metal bar right open with a heavy metallic clink.
Nothing exploded. No other magic responded to her own.
Everything still seemed safe and normal.
Whatever was inside this trailer, though, wouldn’t be as cut and dry.
She felt it in her bones.
The padlock came out of its rings in the door after a quick tug. Rebecca tossed it over her shoulder to send it clattering noisily across the concrete floor. Then she grabbed the bottom of the door with both hands and shoved it up and open.
The rumble of the door sliding open along its tracks momentarily drowned out all other sound before it banged against the front of the trailer and stopped.
Rebecca scanned the inside with a practiced eye, absorbing every detail in seconds.
Archie had definitely completed his supply run and returned to Headquarters.
The trailer was full of stacked boxes meant to replenish Bor’s kitchen stores—Styrofoam cups, table napkins, plastic silverware, more stacked wooden crates of produce, giant sacks of grain, a massive pallet of eggs, plus those filled with nearly every dairy product imaginable, and cooled crates of cut meats from the butcher. Everything the kitchens’ resident cook expected in today’s delivery.
With one additional surprise.
A motionless body sprawled across the trailer floor in front of all of it.
His t-shirt and jeans were torn, ripped, and stained with dirt and blood. More blood streaked across the trailer floor where he lay and along the sides of crates he’d bumped up against on his way there.
There was blood everywhere, in fact, some of it matting his bright-orange mohawk, most of it staining the front of his t-shirt, and a partially dry crust of it across almost his entire face.
A face that had been so badly beaten, his nose was grotesquely crooked, both eyes swollen shut, and a thin trail of blood still trickled from the split across his mangled lip.
Rebecca hoped it was from the split lip and not serious internal bleeding.
If it weren’t for the orange mohawk, it would have taken a lot longer to identify him. He was barely recognizable.
It was Archie.
Rebecca leaned forward into the trailer to look him over as best she could without touching him. The sign she searched for existed, though faint and barely there—the slow, shallow rise and fall of his chest and the barely audible whistle of breath passing in and out of his lungs.
A whistle like that was bad news, but at least he was alive. If they acted quickly enough, he might even stay that way.
“Holy shit,” Titus grumbled behind her.
She spun around to look him in the eye.
The vuulbor’s wide eyes and the grim set of his jaw reflected her own reaction and the vast seriousness of the situation.
“Definitely not an emergency pit stop,” she said.
He puffed out a sigh through loose lips, then grimaced.
“Jay!” Rebecca called toward the stairwell as she backed away from the rear of the trailer. “Get upstairs and tell Zida we need her down here. Now.”
“Oh come on .” Jay groaned and spread his arms before stomping across the garage toward them. “Listen, whatever he did while he was out, that’s his business. I had nothing to do with it, okay? I’m just Bor’s stupid messenger, and I’d really like to stop doing that as soon as possible—”
The dwarf stopped short when he rounded the back of the trailer for a clear view of what lay inside, up close and personal. While he gaped at the ogre sprawled out in front of Shade’s newest incoming shipment, his mouth worked open and closed soundlessly, but no sound came out.
“Jay!” Rebecca barked, trying to snap him out of it without resorting to physical methods. “Hey!”
She snapped her fingers in his face, making him blink furiously before he slowly turned his blank stare onto her.
“Did you hear me? I need you to find Zida and tell her we have a medical emergency in the garage.”
Gaping at her now, he managed a stiff nod.
“Good. Then get to Security and tell them too. Make sure Hannigan knows so we can work out what the hell just happened.”
At first, Jay seemed too shell-shocked to say anything. But then he took two steps backward and lifted both hands in front of him, as if Rebecca held him at gunpoint. “I…uh… I didn’t have anything to do with it, Knox. I fucking swear.”
“I know you didn’t,” she told him and felt like she spoke to a frightened toddler. “Which is why I’m telling you to go get help. We need to know who did this, but until we get Zida and Hannigan down here, that’s not gonna happen.”
It didn’t seem to get through.
“Hey!” Rebecca snapped her fingers in his face again, leaning forward to block his view of the trailer. “Do I need to do this myself, or can I count on you to get it done?”
“Want me to haul him up the stairs, boss?” Titus asked, his rumbling voice now taking on a threatening growl that almost rivaled one of Maxwell’s.
That broke Jay out of his stupor. He shuffled farther backward, his gaze darting between Rebecca, Titus, and the open back of the trailer. “No, no. I…I got it. I’m on it. I can do it. You just… I’ll…”
“Now!” Rebecca snapped.
The guy jumped, spun around, and bolted toward the stairwell to carry out her orders.
As the garage descended into tense silence again, Rebecca and Titus returned their attention to a beaten Archie lying unconscious in front of their supply shipment, his chest barely rising and falling.
He was in bad shape, obviously, but not bad enough that Rebecca felt compelled to use her Bloodshadow magic on him. Not down here in front of Titus. Archie would live and recover eventually. She didn’t want to physically move him until Zida got down here either and risk making it even worse.
Mostly, though, she didn’t want to touch anything else in the garage before the Security team had a chance to look things over. She’d already put her hands on too much of it just trying to figure out what was wrong.
But if she hadn’t opened the trailer, who knew when they would have found Archie?
Titus heaved a massive sigh, slid the crates down off his shoulder, and dropped them to the floor with an echoing thump. “Guess I’m on unloading duty now, huh?”
Rebecca extended a hand to stop him. “Maybe just wait on that too for now. Something tells me we’re looking at a crime scene. Nothing else gets touched until we know for sure.”
He snorted and turned toward her. “What, like right here in the garage? That’s kind of a long shot, Knox. You really think someone just walked in, attacked Archie like that, shoved them in the back, then just slipped out again without anyone noticing?”
“It would be a long shot,” she replied flatly. “And I have no idea whether or not that’s what actually happened. But that’s exactly what we need to find out.”
She wouldn’t stop until she had the answer.
No one liked to believe the headquarters compound, their home , could be so easily infiltrated by someone who wanted to do them harm. It had already happened once before, though, and if Rowan Blackmoon had broken into Shade, someone else could have done the same.
Someone else already had.