25. Chapter 25
25
R ebecca’s pounding heart and the rush of blood in her ears were all she could hear as she scanned the darkness.
This was it. The culmination of Shade’s single purpose over the last two days. Every single member, field operative and support staff alike, had pooled together their energy and ingenuity to make this a reality, and now they were here.
If they pulled this off, their chances of surviving Chicago’s magical power vacuum would increase astronomically. And then they’d have a real chance at defending themselves, beating back the slavering predators sniffing around their front door, and maybe even wiping the slate clean for everyone after that.
For Shade. For Rebecca.
If they pulled this off…
When they emerged from the thick trees and overgrown bushes along the seldomly used dirt road, the arching silhouette of the defunct Polly “L” Bridge rose against the star-studded sky and the waxing moon, it’s crisscrossing beams almost like more tree branches against the faint light.
Rebecca and the twelve other operatives of Alpha Team glanced up at the ironwork behemoth still half a mile ahead of them, but they weren’t the only ones.
Three other teams closed in on their target location from three other directions, each of them having stalked through the night on foot to avoid as much detection as possible. The city lights winking through the trees became far more visible in the distance beneath the curving arc of the defunct L bridge now used to signal neighboring railroad lines.
Out here, those signal lights on the unused bridge were the only reminder of civilization still close at hand—not too far to access but still far enough to make for a quiet, remote, isolated rendezvous spot for two over-eager magical gangs and one cautiously hopeful task force.
So far, there had been no sign of either gang, nor had Alpha Team spotted any of their counterparts out here in the woods tangled with underbrush. But they would soon.
The Shade teams had come early, and when Big Boss and Suit arrived with their own forces, Rebecca’s teams would be ready for them.
Whether it fostered her confidence or her growing apprehension as they advanced, the tingling warmth of Maxwell’s presence beside her might have been her only familiarity tonight. Maybe even her only comfort.
She also felt the shifter’s overactive suspicion and rising doubts just as strongly.
At Maxwell’s signal, Alpha Team emerged from the tree line to sneak soundlessly toward the bridge, staying off the road and in the shadows.
The next wave of uncertainty crashing against Rebecca’s body almost made her stop before Maxwell finally voiced what she’d felt in him.
“Are you certain this will work?” he whispered, slowly sweeping his gaze back and forth while he pressed forward with silent footsteps, augmented firearm at the ready.
“It’ll work,” she whispered back. “They shouldn’t be here for another hour. By then, we’ll already be in position. And if something does go wrong, they won’t even be able to find us afterward.”
She chanced a quick look in his direction and would have burst out laughing if it hadn’t risked compromising their position.
Maxwell Hannigan looked nothing like himself. Not even a shifter.
Instead, a gray-haired old man stalked beside her, the top ring of his bald head glinting under the starlight. Thick, untrimmed gray mustache, each end curled nearly three inches away from his face on either side. A nonexistent chin. One of the biggest hooked noses Rebecca had ever seen. And two dull, squinty brown eyes, completed by a slight hunch.
A snort escaped her, which elicited more of the barely subdued grumbling and grousing she’d been dealing with for the last several hours.
“I appreciate nothing about this situation,” he growled.
“It’s really good, though,” she whispered.
“Says the curvy redhead straight from a magazine. The gnome didn’t even try to make mine believable. No one has a nose like this.” Glowering through the trees, Maxwell gestured sharply at his own face that wasn’t his face.
“After taking on three last-minute apprentices to draw up the specs and craft us fifty illusion cuffs in under sixty hours, I’d say Bruce did a pretty damn fine job.” Rebecca glanced down at her own body that certainly wasn’t hers and shrugged. “I don’t know. I kinda like the curves.”
“Not my preference,” he growled.
“Oh, he has a preference … And what’s that?” She smothered another laugh, but the next second, the urge disappeared.
Maxwell slowed and looked her over from head to toe, then murmured expressionlessly, “Take off the cuff.”
It might have had a different effect under different circumstances, but coming from the gray old man with an astounding mustachioed beak hunched over beside her, it was just creepy.
Rebecca instantly looked away and cleared her throat. If the darkness didn’t hide the rising flush in her cheeks beneath the brush of Maxwell’s gaze unchanged by his new image, her own illusion cuff certainly would have. “Keep walking, old man.”
A barely audible growl reverberated around them. “I do not require a disguise.”
“You do. We all do. These are enemies we’ve faced before. If any of us is recognized, our objective tonight automatically fails. But this way? Maybe we get the upper hand.”
“ Maybe . I still don’t trust those odds.”
She didn’t have a response for that. The odds were stacked against them. Any number of things could go wrong tonight.
But Shade was used to things going wrong. They’d prepared for this more than they’d prepared for any other mission she could remember, and if things went right ?
The rewards would be greater than any success they’d pulled off so far. Excluding Aldous’s secret Nexus cache.
Worst-case scenario, the fifty operatives closing in on the “L” Bridge would be vastly outnumbered and underprepared, but even then, they’d still get invaluable recon out of the deal—before they’d have to square off against Big Boss and Suit in future battles.
Rebecca fiercely hoped for better than worst-case.
The dark silhouette of the bridge passed in and out of view as Alpha Team navigated through the trees, taking care to stay off the road. The next time she had a clear view of that dirt road stretching under the bridge and beyond, which had seen far more traffic in its inception than it did now, she realized they were almost there.
“All teams,” she murmured through the new advanced comms Shade had contracted from Bruce weeks before all this insanity, “state your positions.”
One by one, the other team leaders’ tinny voices sounded off in her ears.
Everyone was where they should be by now.
“Keep moving,” Maxwell added. “If anyone sees something they shouldn’t, call it in.”
That was as intricate as their plan could possibly get before the teams reached their final positions to stage one of the most brilliant ambushes the task force had ever whipped up. Assuming nothing went horribly wrong at the last second. That was still always a possibility.
The trees thickened, and it eventually became impossible for Alpha Team to keep moving through the underbrush without making more of a racket with snapping branches and rustling foliage. So Maxwell signaled for them to move cautiously toward the dirt road.
When Rebecca stepped out of the trees, her gaze settled on a large, dark shape in the middle of the road, still at least a hundred yards out.
At the same moment, an obnoxious static crackled over the comms before Whit’s voice filled her ear.
“Bravo to Alpha. We…might have a problem.”
“A little more detail than that would be helpful,” Rebecca prompted as Maxwell and the rest of Alpha Team stepped fully onto the road behind her, holding their formation.
“It looks like someone else thought tonight was a good night to be out here,” Whit replied, his voice barely above a whisper through the comms.
She almost asked for more, but when her angle shifted on the road and the moonlight glinted off the top of that dark shape up ahead, she no longer needed an explanation.
It was a car. An older town car, its sleek paint and chrome detailing flashing at her in the darkness now that the trees no longer blocked visibility.
“Vehicle parked in Bravo’s trajectory,” Whit explained. “It looks empty from here, but I’ll have to confirm.”
“Vehicle on Alpha’s end too,” she said, pausing in the road to shoot Maxwell a quick glance. Looking at him felt the same, but the shock of seeing a gray-haired old man in a sweatsuit instead of the shifter disoriented her enough to make her instantly look away again.
Yeah, she didn’t prefer the illusions, either.
“If you identify any bodies,” Maxwell added, “enemy or civilian, do not engage. Wait for a visual. Hold your positions there if you have to.”
“Copy, Alpha.”
Those were the best instructions he could have given. The meeting between Big Boss and Suit wasn’t supposed to take place until midnight, meaning the Shade teams still had a little under an hour to reach their positions and hold until the right moment.
They should have been the first ones here. Clearly, they weren’t.
Two vehicles parked out here, on a road no one used, close to a bridge with no other purpose but signaling occasional trains and serving as a neutral spot for gang meetups.
This wasn’t part of the plan.
Maxwell signaled for the team to keep moving in but slowly, cautiously, searching now for those who’d driven that car and even a possible attack. Then he and Rebecca led the formation down the road.
The darkness still provided them with enough cover to sneak up on someone in a vehicle without alerting them, which was exactly what they did. Maxwell tried to peer through the rear windshield first, but the glass was too darkly tinted, and he shook his head.
Rebecca moved with him but on the opposite side of the town car, matching the shifter’s every step while the rest of Alpha watched the trees, prepared to offer cover, if necessary.
When she reached the rear driver-side door, she found the dark window rolled almost halfway down. Rebecca bent slowly toward the open window for a quick look inside, but the only movement came from the window directly across from her—the old man with a gray mustache leaning forward to do the same.
Maxwell . That was still Maxwell. She had to remember that.
They looked at each other through the car, then scanned the back seat and the front.
The town car was empty.
She and Maxwell straightened again at the same time, staring at each other even while he murmured into the comms. “Vehicle at Alpha’s position confirmed empty. Keep an eye out.”
“Same here,” Whit replied.
Another burst of static came through the comms before Diego’s subdued voice joined the party. “Um…all teams? Does anyone else have a visual of the road under the bridge?”
As Rebecca and Maxwell stepped together toward the front of the vehicle, she almost asked what they were supposed to be looking for on the road. But then she didn’t need to.
The evidence lay sprawled out directly in front of them.
The span of dirt road stretching the distance between this vehicle and the bridge, plus farther beyond, was littered with bodies.
Hundreds of bodies. A literal trail of corpses littered across a neglected dirt road within the wilderness that had almost overgrown what the Polly “L” Bridge was supposed to have been within the city of Chicago.
As Rebecca followed the trail with her eyes, the carpet of corpses became thicker and closer together, as if these last few stragglers lying in front of the vehicle hadn’t been fast enough to keep up with the bulk of the exodus toward the bridge.
What the hell happened here?
Without a word, Alpha Team kept moving, following both the dirt road and the bodies, investigating both the dead and how much further danger they’d be walking into if they kept up their advance.
At first, the bodies littered closest to the empty town car were all orcs. Recognizing Big Boss came easily; the guy was twice the size of the biggest orc sprawled across the dirt around him, his grotesquely large tusks thrust into the earth where he’d fallen.
Rebecca vividly remembered those rings on his fat fingers from the video.
So much for her assumption that neither of the gangs was going to show up to their meeting place far earlier than the agreed-upon time.
But Big Boss and all his thugs were dead now. So someone else had shown up extra-early too.
Where were they ?
She glanced up at Maxwell with a dizzying rush of déjà vu peppered with skepticism when the wrinkled, mustachioed face of his illusion darkened into the exact same scowl she normally found there.
He’d just asked himself the same question.
He signaled for Alpha Team to remain on the alert with possible enemy targets still in the area, then the formation moved on past the town car, following the trail Big Boss’s gang had left behind.
Halfway toward the bridge, though, the corpses didn’t just belong to orcs anymore.
Rebecca noticed a laughably thin troll first. Then two ogres. Then what she might have assumed was an entire coven of witches, if they’d been out here alone.
The farther Alpha Team moved, the more bodies stood out to snatch their attention. Magicals of nearly every race now lie in the road, some even having collapsed on top of each other.
“Check the dead,” Maxwell relayed through the comms. “Report any identifying markers.”
Movement up ahead from the other side of the bridge marked Beta Team moving down the dirt road in much the same way, stooping to search the bodies, finding nothing, then moving on to repeat the process with more of the dead.
Then Charlie and Delta Teams emerged from the wildly overgrown wooded areas alongside the road, also pausing to inspect the freshly deceased magicals where they’d dropped.
Not just orcs, then.
Which also meant not just Big Boss.
“Who did all this?” Murray asked.
Rebecca stooped toward the next body in front of her—a witch with tight blonde ringlets gleaming in the moonlight—and rolled her over onto her back. Dead eyes stared up at nothing, but in her hand, Rebecca found something that made her gut lurch.
A small, barrel-shaped object rested in the witch’s palm, strapped there with a strip of Velcro circling the backs of her fingers.
It was an incredibly miniature version, most likely with far less deadly capabilities, but the coils of intertangled wiring and the blinking blue and green lights—not to mention the low buzzing hum of magical energy radiating from the device—were unmistakable.
“Hannigan,” she muttered, then gestured for Maxwell to join her where she crouched over the dead witch. She lifted the witch’s wrist to give him a better view. “Look familiar?”
The perpetually squinting eyes of his illusion widened, then he straightened in an instant and scanned the rest of the road for movement. “All teams search for custom magitek devices among the dead. We may be looking at the same enemy force that made the bombs at the amusement park.”
“Oh fuck …” Titus groaned through the comms.
“Some of ’em might still be live,” Diego added. “Lights and a little energy’s one thing. But if it starts shaking, you do not wanna be around these things when they go off. Probably not even the little ones.”
Every team leader responded in the affirmative, then all Shade’s operatives got busy searching among the dead, turning over bodies, carefully prying the odd magitek devices out of strangers’ grips.
Rebecca left the witch and the bomb where she’d found them, then straightened and turned toward Maxwell again. “They haven’t been dead long at all.”
“Especially for still having a rendezvous in…” Maxwell checked his utility watch. “Thirty minutes.”
“Both of them. Big Boss and the suit. They both showed up ahead of time and…what? Took each other out at the same time?”
He grunted, still staring at the bomb strapped to the witch’s hand. “That would be particularly convenient…”
“Yeah, for us. But what are the odds that they both—”
“All team,” Tig called over the comms. “Has anyone found any wounds on the bodies? Bullet holes? Blood? Burns? Any signs of a battle?”
His question came from out of left field until Rebecca realized what he was getting at.
She instantly returned her attention to the witch with the bomb in her hand, dropping into a squat to pull the woman’s jacket lapels aside, searching for wounds, charred fabric, blood—anything pointing to an attack.
The rest of Alpha Team followed her lead, searching quickly among the bodies, careful not to step on hidden magitek devices or make too much noise in their investigation. Even when looking closely at the dirt road, the overgrown weeds lining it with the thicker woods beyond, and closer toward the bridge, everything but the corpses in the dirt still looked like it hadn’t even been touched.
“Negative from Charlie.”
“Negative from Delta.”
Rebecca and Maxwell met each other’s gazes again as he stood, dropping a dead Cruorcian back into the road with a thump.
“Negative from Alpha,” he said, holding Rebecca’s gaze. “No sign of any physical engagement among the dead.”
“No fight and no cause of death?” Murray asked. “That doesn’t even… Hold on. Isn’t that…”
The horror of the situation hit Rebecca with full force, doubled in strength by the same realization from Maxwell joining with her own. Her awareness zeroed into a narrow, dark, frigid tunnel of understanding and all-encompassing dread.
They’d seen this before.
This meetup tonight was a trap for their enemies , and they’d just walked right into it.
A violent snarl burst from the shifter as he whirled around in a half-crouch, the flashing pulse of his silver eyes now starting to break through his illusion. “All teams with Alpha! We fall back!”
A searing burn of fire and power and rending pain overwhelmed Rebecca the next second, freezing her in place with its breathtaking intensity.
Not hers. Maxwell’s.
He was ready to shift at a moment’s notice. That moment was almost here.
Shouts from every Shade team rose through the night as they called to their stragglers and repeated the shifter’s command. Footsteps pummeled the dirt road wherever there was room. When there wasn’t, operatives stumbled over the fallen corpses in their haste to regroup with Alpha Team before it was too late to do anything else.
Pulse pounding and chest heaving, Rebecca tried to ignore the noises of her operatives—nearly fifty of them across four teams—racing back to her and Maxwell as she scanned the woods alongside the road, the dark shadows surrounding them.
So many potential places from which another ambush might emerge, and she couldn’t train her weapon on all of them at once.
The sharp whistle from overhead drowned out the pounding footsteps and shouted warnings. It dropped in pitch, doubled in volume, then a blinding silver light descended onto the middle of the road.
Two more followed in quick succession—screaming blasts of concentrated energy firing down onto the Shade teams.
They struck the road with only milliseconds between them, churning up the dirt, overgrown weeds, and any corpse lying in their path.
Rebecca whirled back toward the bridge, her instincts blazing to life inside her in a way she’d almost forgotten.
That whistle. The blinding light. The sound of attack.
She knew them all.
“Everybody stop where you are!” she roared.
Her operatives responded instantly to the Roth-Da’al’s command, though some of them staggered over more corpses or stray rocks or their own feet in an effort to freeze on the spot.
Rebecca didn’t even have time to search for the source of those magical blasts.
The next second, a black streak arced toward her out of the sky, its sleek form glinting beneath the moon before it thudded into the ground two inches in front of her boots.
A cloud of dust burst away from the impact.
If she’d taken a single step forward or the wielder of that weapon had been any less perfect with their aim, the pitch-black, perfectly smooth shaft of the lethal spear still quivering there in the dirt at her feet would have cut straight through her instead.
The area around the bridge fell intensely silent, all Shade operatives turning back to see why their Roth-Da’al had ordered a halt and what that terrible thunking noise had been.
Maxwell snarled somewhere behind her at the sight of the spear mere inches from her face.
She would have told him to wait, but a different voice cut through the night, cracking across the darkness with the kind of power and authority she’d only ever heard in one specific place, and it sure as hell wasn’t here .
“By the full authority of the Agn’a Tha’ros Conclave and the Lashir’i Alliance, reveal yourself!”
The command seemed to shake the very earth beneath her boots, making the iron breams of the bridge ahead groan under the echoing tremor.
But Rebecca couldn’t stop staring at that damn spear, so close she could feel its terrible power reaching with cold fingers toward her face.
She’d seen it before…