17. Chapter 17
17
“ T his isn’t a request!” Rebecca barked, fighting back the urge to haul the gnome out herself, regardless of the fact that it would technically count as a civilian abduction. “You’re coming with us, and we’re leaving now .”
“What the hell for?” Bruce shrieked, throwing his hands up in exasperation.
By the Blood, how many times did she have to go over this with him before it finally sank in?
“To keep you safe,” she said. “Again, if we hadn’t gotten here in time, you’d be as dead right now as the other bodies littered all over your property. We can’t effectively protect you from another assault if you stay here, but we can keep you safe and alive under protective custody at Shade Headquarters.”
“No! Absolutely not. That’s ludicrous. This whole thing is completely insane!”
“I won’t argue with you there,” she said. “But that doesn’t change what needs to happen next. We need to go.”
“And just leave my home and everything I’ve built here? All my things? My business?”
“Doesn’t look like there’s much of a home left…”
“I won’t do it!” The gnome defiantly stomped his foot and folded his arms, making it even more frustrating when he lifted his chin as if that settled it. “You can’t make me do anything against my will. I don’t even know you people.”
“Our working relationship was reliable enough for you to sell us your tech.”
“Lady, none of this has anything to do with tech! Look what you did to my home !”
Rebecca really didn’t want this to get ugly, but the gnome wasn’t giving her much of a choice.
Before she let her frustration overpower her and did something stupid she’d regret, she turned around with an exasperated sigh, meaning to ask the rest of her team for advice.
Maxwell was already storming toward her, a vicious snarl curling his lips.
Then he blew right past her and charged toward Bruce, stopping last-minute to loom over the gnome like a shadow of death.
The shifter swiped at Bruce’s shirt collar with one hand and lifted the guy off the ground by the handful of gnome’s shirt clenched in his fist.
“What the—”
“Do you want to live?” Maxwell roared in the gnome’s face. “Or would you prefer to stay here in the broken remains of your old life and die anyway? Those are your only options.”
Bruce stammered and struggled in Maxwell’s hold, clawing at the shifter’s fist around his shirt in a failed effort to free himself.
The struggle didn’t last long before the gnome gave up with a massive sigh and dropped his hands to both sides. As he dangled in Maxwell’s grip, the truth of his situation finally seemed to sink in. “No. I don’t want to die.”
The shifter cocked an ear toward him. “What was that?”
“I want to live!”
“Good answer.” Maxwell lowered the gnome to the ground, then stepped back with another growl to give him space. “If you wish to leave on your feet, I suggest you start moving now.”
“Fine, fine.” Bruce lifted both hands in concession and let out a massive sigh. “Just please, please let me pack up a few things first. I’ve got too many prototypes and sensitive material tucked away in here. The culmination of my best work! Let me get them together first and take them with me.”
Maxwell bared his teeth. “Will those keep you alive better than we will?”
“Probably not…” Bruce squeaked. “But they won’t do you and your people any good if I just leave them here, will they? And if we’re all facing the same asshole who wants to take us all down for the count, I promise you don’t want my work falling into their hands instead of yours.”
Maxwell looked like he was about to sweep the gnome off his feet again and chuck him through the non-existent front door just to get this over with. But he reined in his impulses and turned to Rebecca instead.
The gnome had a point. He was, after all, their only surviving business contact, and his work might eventually help them once Shade made more headway against their most dangerous foe to date.
She nodded.
Maxwell hissed in irritation before barking at the gnome, “Two minutes! After that, I will carry you off the premises myself if need be.”
“Fair enough.” Bruce scrambling off across his home to collect his most important belongings.
Rebecca summoned a new reserve of patience as best she could, though it probably wouldn’t last long. Most likely, she could hold her frustration in check longer than two minutes, but something told her Maxwell’s fuse was much shorter tonight.
And with good reason.
His team had been through a hell of a surprise mission that had blown up in their faces. At least they’d be going home with something to show for it. A single rescued contact. Just one among dozens.
But even once they returned to Headquarters and set Bruce up in the compound’s most secure area, the night still wasn’t over.
There was so much more to do, and every new item added to Rebecca’s checklist tonight was top priority.
Maxwell glanced at his watch, then thundered across the house. “Ten seconds!”
“Yeah, yeah, okay! I get it. Just hold your panties on!”
The heavy, sliding shuffle in a struggling rhythm preceded the gnome’s appearance at the front of the house, where his rescuers turned chaperones waited for him. Somehow, the gnome possessed enough strength to push an enormous storage tote across the floor in front of him, which looked and sounded at least four times his own body weight.
He stopped when he reached the destroyed front room of his bungalow, where the remains of the team’s last-minute barricade remained. Then he looked up at Rebecca and Maxwell with a sigh and dusted off his hands. “All right then. You guys are leaving now, right?”
“And we’re taking you with us,” Rebecca replied.
“Yeah, about that…” The gnome thrust both hands onto his hips and defiantly lifted his chin again. “I’ve changed my mind, actually. I don’t think I’ll go with you. Thanks for all the help or whatever. If that’s what you wanna call it. But I’ve gone over my options, and I’d prefer to take my chances with something a little different. Have fun without me.”
“Not an option.” Maxwell stalked toward the gnome, then bent to grab the edges of the storage tote.
“Hey, you listen to me, shifter!” Bruce wagged a finger in Maxwell’s face. “You don’t own me, and you sure as hell can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.”
Growling again with his hands clamped around the edges of the tote, Maxwell looked up where he’d bent over and met the gnome’s gaze. “Wanna bet?”
Bruce’s face drained of color, his mouth popped open, but the words he wanted seemed to have gotten stuck in his throat.
Maxwell straightened, hauling the tote with him, and turned around to head out the destroyed front door. “Move out.”
“Hey, hey!” The gnome waddled after him before he seemed to remember Rebecca was still there. So he stopped to attempt reasoning with her instead,. “That’s private property. He can’t do that!”
“He just did,” she replied flatly. “And he really wasn’t joking about carrying you out to our vehicle if he has to. I’d start walking if I were you.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake…”
“You’ll be safe with us at Headquarters until we better understand the danger and can confirm its over,” she added. “Think of it as taking asylum, if you want.”
Bruce scoffed and shot her a scathing glare. “ Insane asylum, you mean.”
“Whatever helps you get through the worst of it.” Rebecca gestured toward the front porch and the team’s vehicle waiting at the curb now.
The gnome gaped at her a moment longer, then tugged on the bottom hem of his t-shirt and stomped past her out the door with a muttered, “Fuck my life. I’ll never do business again after this…”
Rebecca finally let herself roll her eyes now that that gnome’s back was turned. Then she left the bungalow after him, scanning the dark street and the few neighboring houses, the closest of which were almost at the end of the block.
Nothing stirred in the darkness. The lights in all the other houses had shut off for the night and remained off, which felt like a miracle after the intensity of the firefight just inside Bruce’s front door. But at least nothing else disturbed her and her team before they got everyone into the vehicle and on their way back to Shade Headquarters.
T hough they were finally back on the road again, no one’s mood had improved.
Tig sat in the back, vigilantly watching over Lerrick for signs of either improvement or worsening condition, and said nothing.
Wedged into the vehicle’s only other seat in the rear, Bruce didn’t hold his silence for very long. For the majority of the drive, he mumbled angrily to himself about task forces of unseen magicals who had no damn clue what they were doing.
“I don’t know why I’m even involved in any of this. I just make the augmented technology. I can’t actually use it against enemies. Not like I’ve ever had any enemies to use it against in the first place…”
When they pulled into that compound’s parking garage, Zida was already down there waiting for them with an enchanted stretcher floating beside her in a halo of glimmering yellow light.
Rebecca and the rest of her team helped get Lerrick onto the stretcher and officially under their healer’s experienced care. Then the storage tote of Bruce’s things came out of the trunk to be hefted into Rick’s arms.
Bruce begrudgingly peeled himself off the vehicle’s rear seat to scowl at everything around him, like he had every right to disapprove after the Shade team had saved his life tonight.
Rebecca got ahold of Whit to have him deliver a message to the rest of the task force.
“If anyone’s still out in the field, tell them to get back here now. Whatever clues they can possibly find that might help us move forward, great. Bring those too. But be careful. Everyone stays quiet and off the grid.”
“Understood.” The warlock nodded, his concerned frown darkening. “I’m on it, boss. And if anyone asks for more details, what do I tell them?”
“Tell them I think we’ve just gotten ourselves into a bit of a bind, and I want everyone to be on the same page before we start making moves to get ourselves out of it. That’s as good of an explanation as it gets right now.”
Whit hurried off to make the necessary calls and get the message out to every team still out there.
In the aftermath of the bustling response to her team’s return, Rebecca gave herself a moment longer in the garage to take a breath and still her racing thoughts.
She had a feeling there wouldn’t be a whole lot of spare time to do so after this.
It hadn’t registered that Maxwell had remained in the garage with her until the tingling flare of energy between them shifted and intensified. Then he was at her side, watching the last operatives who’d come to help disappear in the stairwell up to the ground floor.
“We will get to the bottom of this,” he grumbled beside her.
“If there even is a bottom. All those civilians, Hannigan. Just for doing business with us and nothing else.”
“You can’t carry that around with you.” The gentleness in the shifter’s voice was almost enough to break the last of her composure wide open.
“If I don’t carry it, who will?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he replied plainly. “We had no idea what was happening. No one could have known. Even you.”
The urge to lean into him grew overwhelmingly powerful, as if being physically closer would magically fix everything that had gone so horribly wrong today. As if it could erase the pain and the guilt and the heavy burden of what still had to be done.
Rebecca couldn’t let herself give in to that physical longing for the shifter beside her.
If she did, she worried everything else around her would cease to matter, including the safety and survival of her task force. She couldn’t let that happen.
“I can’t shake the feeling that I should’ve known,” she murmured. “That I should’ve done better. Anticipated this asshole’s next moves. Whoever he is.”
“No one could have done that.”
“And Shade still has to pay for it anyway. Is that what you’re saying?”
Maxwell’s gaze settled on the side of her face like a block of ice, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to look at him just yet.
“There’s always another possibility,” he murmured.
A hot shiver raced down Rebecca’s neck, as if he’d whispered it in her ear despite the six inches between them as they stood in the garage, side by side.
“The possibility that this may not be about Shade at all,” he added.
The despair she’d been fighting back burgeoned into a fiery burst of anger and suspicion at his words. She stepped away from him, scowling. “And what might it be about, Hannigan?”
Was this his way of not-so-subtly suggesting she really was at fault here? After everything else he’d just said?
The shifter’s frown darkened as he watched her, gauging her reaction, battling with his own private thoughts and feelings.
Though she’d instantly gone on the defensive, she didn’t feel any suspicion from her Head of Security. No anger aimed at her. This wasn’t a personal attack on his part, but somehow, it still felt like one.
“It might be someone out there, an old contact or disgruntled adversary, thinking Aldous is still alive and in charge of things,” he explained. “Or it could be nothing more than a coincidence that some other unknown organization in Chicago thinks they’re getting retribution against a different enemy who isn’t us.
“This could be a blood feud between other parties that has nothing to do with us and we just happened to get caught up in the middle of it.”
“They would have to be epically ignorant to make that kind of oversight,” she muttered.
Maxwell grunted. “They wouldn’t be the first.”
It was hard to believe there were others out there as clueless and manipulative and reckless with their power as Aldous had been. But it wasn’t impossible.
Maxwell was right. This could have been anything, even a power struggle in Chicago that had nothing to do with Shade. But it had swept them up into its chaos all the same.
She shot him a sidelong glance. “And you’re telling me you genuinely believe in coincidences?”
“I can’t say that, no,” he grumbled.
It shouldn’t have surprised her that Maxwell now returned to his natural default, shooting her suspicious sidelong glances while he stood there—silent, dark, brooding, and unwilling to share more with her.
It didn’t surprise her. Not really. But it still hurt in a way she couldn’t fully describe.
For one brief and fleeting moment, Rebecca had thought she could actually trust the shifter to be her ally in this. That she could let herself get close, open up, share with him how she really felt without fear of judgment, or of his deepening suspicion, or of the barrage of interrogating questions he otherwise would have thrown at her.
One moment, weeks ago, when she might actually have found something meaningful with another person. Right before everything blew up in her face.
The kiss. The elven rune on Maxwell’s chest. All these attacks on Shade’s operatives and any business contacts even remotely affiliated with her task force in any way.
Now, she couldn’t even trust him to tell her the full truth while they worked in tandem to solve the threatening question of who was doing this to them and why.
They would work together for Shade’s common good, because it was necessary. Maxwell could suggest all manner of additional possibilities as to why this was happening to them now, though none of those suggestions offered any viable solutions.
But deep down, Rebecca knew he still suspected her of far more than he was willing to admit out loud.
He thought these attacks might not have anything to do with Shade specifically, yet her Head of Security didn’t believe in coincidences. One of those statements had to be a lie.
If this wasn’t about Shade and Maxwell didn’t buy his own reasoning that this could all be a fluke, it meant only one thing.
It meant that at his core, in some hidden part of him, Maxwell Hannigan did believe Rebecca was at fault for this awful situation. Maybe not directly, but in some other way.
He wouldn’t say it to her face. Of course not. But he would watch her now as intently as he had before and after she’d taken command. He would weigh his findings against his own personal beliefs and agenda, and if that continued long enough, they’d find themselves at each other’s throats again.
Maybe even with far more detrimental consequences than last time.
No matter how hard she tried to improve things for this task force, the fact was, Rebecca Bloodshadow had inevitably made everything worse.
She and Maxwell had gone right back to the beginning, as if nothing between them had ever happened.
This time, though, Maxwell had placed himself front and center in all her affairs, as her bodyguard and right-hand man, her second in command, who hardly left her side.
He’d declared it to her himself several times over. The shifter owed her a life debt, which he fully intended to repay.
Whether that became anything more than their strict working relationship together—romantic or otherwise—Rebecca believed he would keep that vow.
Even if he thought she was solely to blame for the larger unknown threat Shade faced.
Rebecca might have taken that in stride if it weren’t for one major difference.
It wasn’t much, but she knew more about the shifter now than she had when he’d sworn that vow to her and given her his life.
That tattoo on his chest changed everything. The elven rune connecting a lone shifter to ideologies and elven politics and ancient alliances to which no shifter had any right to be connected.
If the time ever came, Rebecca didn’t know whether she could accept Maxwell’s decision to fulfill that life debt, knowing what she knew now.
Would she let him fulfill his end of it when she was constantly wondering whether he’d already betrayed her and Shade? If there was the smallest chance Maxwell Hannigan himself might actually be behind all this?
The answer wouldn’t reveal itself now. Not like this. Not when she needed it to, while her Head of Security stood beside her, watching her dubiously. While the flaring tingle of that energetic pull between them intensified and heightened and tempted her body to submit to what her rational mind knew she could never embrace.
Not like this.
All Rebecca knew now was that if they didn’t get ahead of the coming danger soon, even by a single step, they were all fucked.