15. Chapter 15
15
A t first, Rebecca thought her threat might have gotten through to the half-changeling, at least.
His eyes widened as he studied every inch of her face. Then he tilted his head, as if just now realizing how much trouble he and his team had gotten themselves into tonight.
His expression softened, and he leaned as far forward toward her as possible with his wrists bound in the dampening cuffs behind his back. “You really have no fucking clue what’s going on here, do you?”
Blue Hells. It wasn’t fear or maybe even relief written all over his face, but his words cleared up that confusion.
The only thing in the half-changeling’s large hazel eyes was pity.
Pure, untainted, genuine pity.
For her .
She wanted to swipe his head right off his shoulders with a single blow and send it hurtling across the room, but it wouldn’t get them closer to the information they needed.
So Rebecca stood, swallowing her anger, and walked away across the living room. Anything short of that would land them right back where they’d started.
As soon as the troll realized she was walking away, he burst into more cackling shrieks of laughter, bucking against his bonds on the floor and occasionally kicking his associate in the process.
The half-changeling didn’t seem to feel any of it.
Rebecca stopped beside Maxwell, who’d already abandoned his pacing to wait for her. Then they watched their prisoners together, the troll cackling and writhing on the floor while the half-changeling rocked back and forth where he sat, his eyes closed, muttering non-stop under his breath.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Rebecca murmured, leaning toward Maxwell to be sure he heard her over the troll’s lunatic laughter.
The shifter glanced at his field watch. “It’s only been twenty minutes. Let me triple that, and I’ll have two little songbirds pecking right out of my hand.”
She shot him a pert look and raised an eyebrow. “Well now I know what to get you for Christmas.”
His frown deepened so abruptly, she would have laughed if there weren’t two magicals tied up on the opposite side of the room who had tried to kill them half an hour ago.
“Did we find anything useful on any of the other bodies?” she asked.
“Nothing. No phones. No keys. No wallets. Zero identification.”
“Not surprising if they thought they were walking into a battle tonight.”
“They thought they’d be coming down on a gnome alone in his house,” Maxwell grumbled. “We were a last-minute surprise.”
Shit. That was true.
Though it did seem odd that anyone would send in a team of five would-be assassins to get rid of a single target. Especially when that target happened to be far smaller than the average gnome in or out of Chicago.
Something was obviously missing here, but so far, they’d found nothing to point them in the right direction. Nothing to clue them in. And clues were exactly what they needed.
She went over the firefight in her mind, mapping out the series of events, searching her memory for even the smallest detail she might have missed in real time.
The troll’s ceaseless cackling made it increasingly difficult to hear her own thoughts, so Rebecca turned to head toward the dark bedroom hallway, wracking her mind for any potential puzzle piece that might fit with what little they already knew.
The attacks today had come down swiftly and without warning, first on Archie, then on Kash’s distribution warehouse and its crew.
Rebecca and her team had anticipated more immediate attacks on other Shade contacts, and they’d been right. At least about this one.
But what did these two dumbasses tied up in Bruce’s living room have to do with the attack on Archie or the warehouse? They weren’t the same. This was the only site with any proof of a confrontation, which was currently strewn all around them. The M.O. was completely different.
But they’d still expected Bruce to be hit next, and they’d been right…
Only when she’d contemplated herself in circles several times did she emerge from the bedroom hallway toward the living room.
The trolls’ mad cackling had stopped.
“Oh good,” she said. “Someone’s finally starting to take this seriously.”
Two successive thumps rose from the direction of the couch, then an unexpectedly eerie silence filled the living room.
“Uh…boss?” The apprehension in Tig’s voice made her stop.
Then Rebecca noticed the bigger immediate issue.
The troll’s cackling laughter had stopped not because he was tired of it but because he’d been stopped.
Both prisoners now lie motionless on the floor, their eyes wide open and glassed over with the fresh absence of life.
Holy shit, were they dead ?
Rebecca darted across the living room, stopped in front of the prisoners, and gave them each a quick once-over before she reached down for the troll’s neck to feel for a pulse.
Nothing.
“What the hell did you guys do ?” she shouted.
“Hey, it wasn’t us.” Lerrick lifted both hands, one of them still clenched around his magitek firearm. “I swear.”
Rebecca checked the half-changeling’s pulse as well, only to find it equally non-existent.
She leapt to her feet and spun around, instantly finding Maxwell’s gaze before she even realized that was what she was looking for.
All the anger and frustration she’d kept at bay during this clusterfuck of a mission roiled inside her, threatening to break free at the slightest poke. Just one more…
Before the accusation on her lips made it past her next sharp inhale, something shifted in Maxwell’s gaze that made him look almost guilty.
Which directly contradicted his next statement.
“I haven’t moved an inch from where I’m standing now.”
She scoffed. “Oh really?”
The rest of her small team gave her matching stares of sheepish cluelessness.
“You mean I stepped into the hall to gather my thoughts, and our only two leads on this attack just…what? Dropped dead on the spot at the exact same time?”
No one replied. They didn’t have to.
The implication of it hit her.
“Oh shit…” Rebecca looked sharply at Maxwell and gestured toward the bodies. “Is this what we’re looking at right now? The same as whoever hit Kash’s warehouse?”
“It is frustratingly similar,” he grumbled.
“But why would they wait this long to kill them?” Tig asked. “Give us enough time to interrogate them before they just wipe them out like that? How does that even happen?”
“Could’ve just been a lucky break for us,” Rebecca said.
“Or that’s how long it took the real culprit to get within range,” Maxwell growled.
In the next split-second glance she shared with the shifter, Rebecca felt she could almost read his mind.
They needed to act quickly.
“Sweep the perimeter,” she ordered before racing across the living room, stopping only to pick up her weapon along the way. “I want eyes on everything. Check the woods in the back. The street. The asshole who did this could still be out there. Let’s move!”
Her operatives burst into action, immediately abandoning the bodies in the living room to head swiftly out of the house.
“Will somebody tell me what the fuck is going on?” Bruce screamed.
Rebecca stopped at the shattered sliding glass door into the gnome’s back yard and turned to point at him. “You stay put. We’ll let you know when it’s clear.”
“You mean there’s more of them out there?” he shrieked.
“ Don’t move ,” Maxwell snarled at him over the clomp of Tig and Lerrick’s footsteps crunching over broken glass and shattered furniture as they headed for the busted front door.
Rebecca and Maxwell slipped out the back to search the area, weapons loaded and at the ready, the high-pitched whine of their magitek mechanisms powering up in their hands as they swept across the ground in the darkness.
They didn’t have to discuss who went where. Rebecca broke off toward the woods behind the house while Maxwell veered to the right to clear the side yard, his footsteps completely silent.
Despite the ache flaring through her again as she and the shifter walked away from each other, Rebecca’s immediate new purpose drove her forward.
They’d entered completely new territory here with this unknown assailant. The prisoners now lying dead on Bruce’s living room floor had only been patsies for the real culprit behind this master plan. They’d been sent to mark one more name off their hit list, but they weren’t the ones behind the other attacks.
Rebecca couldn’t imagine the troll and half-changeling had done this to themselves. Whoever was really in charge must have decided they were merely collateral damage after the failed attempt on Bruce’s life.
Her mind raced as ferociously as her heartbeat as she padded swiftly through the woods behind the house, searching for movement, for evidence of their unknown attacker hiding out back here.
She found nothing.
By the time she fully accepted that whoever had killed the prisoners inside still couldn’t be identified, Maxwell also headed back from the side yard as Rebecca emerged from the woods. The shifter’s dubious glower told her his search had been equally unsuccessful.
She shook her head to tell him she’d also found nothing, then her phone buzzed in her back pocket.
She stopped on the lawn to answer the call from Rick.
“I really hope you have good news for me,” she said.
“Sorry, boss. I wish I could. I’ve just heard back… None of them made it in time. Every name on that list, every vendor and trade partner we’ve contracted, got hit tonight. Everyone we’ve worked with for rations, medical supplies, gear and equipment… They’re all gone.”
When Rick finished his report, Rebecca’s ears were already ringing. The silence on the other end of the line became disturbingly disorienting as she tried to process the news.
“Knox? You still there?”
She cleared her throat. “Yeah. Recall the teams to Headquarters. I want a full debriefing from everyone once we get back.”
“Copy that.”
Rebecca ended the call, shoved her phone back into her pocket, and reminded herself to breathe.
This was bad.
Everyone Shade worked with in a business capacity of any kind was gone, just like that. Taken out in a single day. And the only team who’d had any success at all, no matter how small, was hers.
Bruce was still alive. Her team had seen to that.
Beyond that, though, they had nothing else to go on. Not a single lead to help them track down the sadistic bastards trying to cut Shade off from the rest of their world in Chicago.
They were all alone, with no idea who their biggest enemy truly was and no way to fight back.
The pain of hopelessness and guilt crushing in on her chest made it hard to breathe.
Maxwell approached her in the yard, his scowl deepening. “Did I hear that right?”
Of course the shifter’s hearing picked up their conversation over the phone.
His question didn’t need an answer. They both already knew how bad this was.
“We need to regroup,” she said. “Get back to Headquarters and think this through more carefully than we’ve thought through anything else before now. This could end us.”
He sighed through his nose, his silver eyes lighting up the darkness. “I know.”
For tonight, at least, their immediate work could come to an end.
But now Shade had a nearly impossible fight ahead of them, with no idea who was responsible for wiping out hundreds of magical civilians’ lives in a single day and no way to accurately prepare an efficient defense. Because they had zero intel on these fuckers.
Time was not on their side.
Rebecca and Maxwell stepped back through the shattered sliding glass door to find Bruce curled up on the one armchair that had escaped the destruction in his living room.
The gnome stared vacantly at the bodies in front of his couch, his eyes glazed over even when he looked up at Rebecca and Maxwell’s approach. “Let me guess. More bad news.”
Neither of them replied. They didn’t have to.
Tig’s footsteps crunching over debris filled the front of the house before he appeared in the living room, looking as crestfallen and discouraged as Rebecca felt.
“Went all the way down to the other end of the street,” he said. “Nothing.”
Rebecca nodded grimly. “We need to wrap this up and get out of here. Debrief the other teams who went out tonight.”
“Any luck for them?” Tig asked.
Rebecca pressed her lips together, still battling with the crushing weight of such an immense failure.
“None of them achieved their objectives,” Maxwell replied instead. “No one but us.”
“Aw, shit…” Tig clenched his eyes shut and grimaced. “That’s… Aw, hell.”
For a moment, the living room stewed in the heavy silence of misfortune and the implications of what every Shade team but one had failed to avert.
Rebecca gazed around the destroyed living room and kicked herself for not having pinpointed the wrongness sooner. “Where’s Lerrick?”
Tig blinked, scanned the room as well, as if the issue hadn’t occurred to him, then looked over his shoulder toward the front of the house. “He was right behind me. When I headed back here to regroup, he was crossing the street right behind me.”
“Dammit,” Maxwell growled.
“He’s gotta be right here,” Tig said, then spun around to hurry toward the front of the house. “Lerrick! What are you doing? We don’t have time to fuck around!”
Rebecca already knew there would be no response.
Another member of her task force had been isolated and picked off, just like Archie.
And once again, it had happened right under their noses.