16. Chapter 16
16
D ammit, this was not supposed to happen!
Her team had successfully thwarted the attempt on Bruce’s life, if nothing else. Tonight, they’d gotten here in time to intercept the attack. They’d saved their new magitek contractor when everyone else Shade worked with had already been hit.
And then they’d let their guard down just enough to tempt another sneak attack on one of their own.
If they were too late in getting to Lerrick, just like all the civilians Shade had failed to protect tonight…
Rebecca groaned and stormed across the living room toward the front. “Fuck me… Could this get any worse?”
“Aw, shit.” Tig almost ran into Rebecca when he returned to the living room, his eyes wide and panicked. “He’s not even in the house.”
“Well he didn’t just disappear into thin air,” she snapped. “We gotta find him.”
“Wait a minute,” Bruce stammered as he started to push himself out of the armchair. “What’s happening now? What are you people—”
Maxwell snapped his fingers before pointing at the gnome with a threatening growl. “Stay!”
The gnome shrank back into the armchair and did as he was told.
“Find him!” Rebecca shouted as she stormed past Tig to head through the destroyed front door this time. “Now!”
With her pulse racing again as she stalked back out into the night, searching frantically for their missing operative, the despair that had almost overwhelmed her after Rick’s update now grew into a boiling rage she could hardly contain.
Who was doing this to them? And why couldn’t they pin the motherfucker down before things only got worse.
She scoured the streets in front of the gnome’s house, searching the neighbors’ yards. While Maxwell and Tig helped her scour every square inch of the surrounding area, Rebecca wondered if her ascension to the Roth-Da’al of Shade had become more of a death sentence for the task force than a saving grace.
Nothing like this had happened before in Shade’s history. No matter how terrible Aldous had been in command, he hadn’t gotten their contacts murdered en masse or individual operatives attacked without rhyme or reason. With no shred of evidence as to who was gunning for them.
For the first time, she doubted her ability to lead Shade the way it deserved, now that all her efforts had led to this and she was no better.
Making her no better for Shade than Aldous, when she couldn’t even protect her own people.
The frantic search for Lerrick didn’t last long before Rebecca, Maxwell, Tig reconverged in front of Bruce’s bungalow, all of them looking equally downtrodden and horrified.
“No sign of him anywhere,” Maxwell grumbled.
Rebecca turned her gaze onto Tig, feeling the snarl reveal itself on her face but unable to stop it. “Did he say anything to you when you two went out front? Did he give you any indication that he was leaving? Or that he’d found something new?”
“No, Knox. I swear. He was right behind me on my way back in. I didn’t talk to him out here because I figured we’d go over everything inside with you .”
“And he never said anything about leaving or needing to get out? Did he look like he was hiding something? Like he was trying to get away?”
“What?”
“Was he acting suspicious, Tig?” she shouted. “You were with him all night! And you didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary?”
“Of course not. Why would I? What are you trying to say?”
“You think Lerrick was the mole?” Maxwell asked. “You think he’s the one who’s been feeding our intel to the enemy?”
“I don’t know what the fuck to think!” Rebecca snapped. “Nothing about tonight has made any sense. Hundreds of Chicago magicals are dead because of us, and now, after the only averted death, with our only two possible leads dead on the floor inside that house, one more of ours just up and disappeared! If you ask me, this would’ve been the perfect opportunity to make a run for it.”
“No!” Tig shouted back, vehemently shaking his head. “No, that’s not right. We all know him. Lerrick wouldn’t do that.”
“I agree,” Maxwell added, fixing his silver gaze on Rebecca, his pained expression only making her feel worse for this conversation. “If we were talking about someone else, a different operative or former operative, that would be a different story. But Lerrick is Shade, through and through. He’s a good man. This wasn’t him.”
Readjusting her already bone-crushing grip on her assault rifle, Rebecca inhaled deeply, focused on clearing her head.
She didn’t truly believe Lerrick could have done something like this. She’d let her frustration and her guilt get the better of her when they had literally nothing else to go on.
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t think it was him. But we can’t stay here all night hoping he turns up again on his own. We need to get back to Headquarters now and focus on what comes next.”
“You mean we’re just gonna leave him here?” Tig asked.
“If he’s even still here,” Rebecca replied. “But we don’t know that, either. I don’t like it any more than you do, but our current problem is too big to put on hold for him. He’ll turn up, eventually.”
“And what if he doesn’t?”
She knew the right answer—the coarse, seemingly heartless answer. That they would have to cut their losses with Lerrick, like they had to do with all their murdered contacts dotted all over the city.
Because if they didn’t figure out who was behind these attacks as soon as possible, there would be more.
And Shade would remain helpless to stop it or to protect anyone else involved in this shitshow.
But saying it out loud Tig as he gazed at her in horrified disbelief was just too hard. She couldn’t do it.
“He has a phone,” Maxwell said.
Rebecca and Tig spun toward the shifter as he drew his own cell phone from his pocket.
“I should have thought of it sooner,” he said. “I’ve got his number right here. If he answers…”
“Yes.” Rebecca pointed at him. “It’s worth a shot. You call. I’m going back inside for Bruce. It’s too dangerous to leave him here, and at the very least, we can offer him more protection at Headquarters. Especially if someone decides they want to come after him again to finish the job.”
Maxwell nodded curtly as he pressed his phone against his ear.
Rebecca took off for the house.
Taking Bruce with them tonight and putting him under protective custody in the compound was one thing they could do right, even if nothing else worked out.
Even if they never found Lerrick.
She’d only taken three hurried steps toward the house before a new sound caught her attention and made her stop.
A tinny, muffled ringtone rising from somewhere behind her.
She spun around to see Maxwell and Tig gaping back at her with equal surprise.
Then Maxwell took off, racing toward the vehicle they’d parked half a block away from the gnome’s bungalow workshop.
Rebecca and Tig hurried after him while the muffled ringtone continued.
Maxwell reached the vehicle a second before the ringing stopped and snarled furiously, his eyes strobing with dangerous flashes of violent silver.
“What is it?” Tig panted as he and Rebecca slowed in front of the vehicle. “What did you find?”
Metal groaned and squealed under the abuse as the shifter nearly ripped the vehicle’s rear passenger-side door off its frame. When he hauled it open, his ferocious growls deepened before he bent forward into the rear of the vehicle.
Then Rebecca got her first look at what he’d found.
It was Lerrick, sprawled haphazardly across the back seat, like someone had tossed him back there in a hurry.
The half-orc was covered in blood, his face split in multiple places, the swelling already making it hard to recognize him. Several bleeding lesions covered both forearms, and his blood-splattered magitek firearm lay beside him, tossed onto the back seat and balancing precariously on the edge of toppling to the floor.
“Oh fuck…” Tig groaned, shuffling from foot to foot as he peered past Maxwell, trying to get a better view. “No, no… Shit. Is he…”
Maxwell removed his fingers from the side of Lerrick’s neck and pulled away from the open door before straightening. “He has a pulse. And he’s breathing. Barely.”
The relief of having found him alive battled with the new urgency of the situation, but Rebecca still had to make the call. “Let’s get him home. He needs a healer.”
“Holy fucking shit,” Tig muttered. “How the hell did this happen?”
“That’s something we’ll figure out, later,” Rebecca said. “Whoever did this wanted us to get the message, and we got it. So now it’s time to get the hell out of here.”
“And what’s the message this time?” the troll asked hesitantly.
She glanced at Lerrick one more time, bloody and beaten unconscious and left in the back seat for them to find, and forced herself to look away.
Her gaze was instantly drawn to Maxwell’s face, and it seemed the shifter knew what she was going to say before it ever came out.
“Get out as fast as you can,” she muttered, “or I’m coming for you. That’s the message.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Tig groaned again.
“Message received,” Maxwell grumbled. “Loud and clear.”
“Are you serious?” Tig looked back and forth between his superiors, then gestured toward the inside of the vehicle. “How the fuck are we supposed to take that kind of threatening message seriously?”
“Oh, we can take it seriously,” Rebecca said. “We’d be stupid, not to. But that doesn’t mean we have to do what it says.”