38. Chapter 38
38
M axwell Hannigan was about to be the death of her.
Literally.
All without ever even knowing his constant surveillance of Rebecca’s normal everyday activities only helped the homunculus poison already well on its way to killing her.
At first, she’d thought his constant hovering over her shoulder was just his way of getting his point across—that he was always watching; that even as commander, she wouldn’t get away with anything without him knowing about it; that he would do whatever it took to protect this task force, even if it meant a grueling day of shadowing her every move just for the message to sink in.
Why else would the shifter attach himself to her like this in every way but the physical?
Under normal circumstances, it would have been highly obnoxious.
With the clock ticking on Rebecca’s life, though—and no way to know how much longer she would survive with one steadily dying arm and almost no energy of her own left—Maxwell’s determination felt like a death sentence.
And she couldn’t even plead her case, because no one could know she needed her own Bloodshadow magic to heal herself.
No one could know she had Bloodshadow magic.
Waiting for her outside her room was bad enough. When Maxwell shoved her aside at the common room’s refreshment table and snatched her freshly doctored cup of coffee from her hands to give it a tentative sniff, her frustration only deepened.
Then he did it again with her tray of food offered through Bor’s kitchen-service window with a brusque grunt and a scratchy, “Roth-Da’al,” from the old cook, and Rebecca wanted to shove the tray of hot breakfast in Maxwell’s face .
“Dammit, Hannigan,” she snarled. “Are you gonna be this far up my ass forever?”
“Only if you insist on taking your meals down here with everyone else.”
“Why? Because the last guy used to do it in private where no one could poison him and get away with it?”
There was still no hint of emotion, no amusement or irritation, when Maxwell answered her. “Among other things.”
“You realize that if anyone here’s likely to poison me, it’s you , right? Doesn’t make you the most trustworthy poison-tester.”
He said nothing.
Her stubbornness refused to let her switch up her normal routine just to escape him, which only made the morning worse when she took a seat at one of the common room’s tables to eat her breakfast.
No one had watched her much before she’d been made Shade’s new commander. That probably wouldn’t have changed even with the new title.
But with the Head of Security standing over her table, mean-mugging every other member of the task force who so much as dared to look Rebecca’s way?
That turned the whole thing into a spectacle.
Which meant she ate her breakfast—as much as the nausea would allow—with her face flushing hot and her hands clammy under all the attention and a rising swell of anger boiling in her gut.
And the whole time, she was certain Maxwell was eating this shit up like candy.
He’d found a way to get on her nerves without actually doing anything wrong. Worse than that, he had no idea his decision to tail her like this pushed her closer and closer to the edge of panic and desperation every second.
Panic and desperation were the surest ways to fucking up.
She had to get away.
He left her little to no viable means of doing so.
When she left the common room, anyone she tried to talk to got turned away by Maxwell’s possessive presence. Anyone who might have tried to talk to her got instantly turned away by the aggression in the shifter’s stare, or a warning growl, or an interruption every few seconds to correct their misuse of properly addressing their Roth-Da’al until the other person just gave up.
Most of them took one look at Maxwell hovering behind Rebecca and took off in the opposite direction instead.
It was more than just hovering, though. She could feel him there, complete with the almost undeniable urge to spin around and attack him any way she could, just to get him off her back .
Worst of all was that some other, even more messed-up part of her imagined the shifter watching her for different reasons, sizing her up, getting the kind of up-close and personal inspection that was only possible when two people were stupidly intimate with each other.
Insanely, infuriatingly, deliciously close like this…
By the Blood, when did physical injuries start screwing with her ability to focus on what was actually important, not to mention possible?
And with Maxwell still standing right behind her at every moment, it was impossible to get her mind off him.
Even retreating to her office on the second story didn’t ward away her shifter shadow.
By the time she slumped into the office chair behind the enormous desk, the numbness in her left arm had spread three-quarters of the way toward her shoulder. The handprint around her wrist now made her flesh look more like a gray marble statue than living organic material.
The waves of energy, focus, and vitality from Zida’s vials lasted shorter and shorter periods while the effects drastically lessened.
She had to find a way out of here as soon as possible before the likelihood of Shade needing to elect a new commander again morphed from a high probability to little more than a certainty. She couldn’t keep this up forever.
When she glanced up at the open office door where Maxwell had taken up his post just inside with his hands clasped behind his back again, she thought she saw the shifter wrinkle his nose and sniff at the air, but he didn’t say anything.
Figures. If he’d smelled poison gas seeping into the room, he probably wouldn’t have said a thing to warn her. Why bother when his silence would wipe her out just as quickly?
Snorting at the thought, Rebecca focused on the desk in front of her. There had to be something here to help spark a few new ideas. Maybe an old mission report, or some overlooked intel everyone had missed.
Crafting a false emergency out of something that already existed would be the easiest way to get Maxwell off her case. If she could make it convincing enough…
At the sound of the heavy wooden drawers rumbling open and shut, Maxwell looked sharply up at her to watch, his silver eyes flashing.
Despite specifically refusing to look at him, Rebecca still felt his gaze as if he’d thrown something across the room at her instead.
With her failing strength and inability to tune out such a strong, confusing sensation, another flush crept up her neck and into her cheeks, threatening to burst right through the top of her head while she perused the desk drawers’ contents.
Great. Just what she needed—to start blushing in her office before she started sweating. That would only convince Maxwell there really was something wrong with her, far more than she’d let on.
He really needed to stop staring at her like that.
Refusing to let him see how much his gaze affected her, she found herself unable to focus entirely on searching through the desk. But when she opened the center drawer to peer inside, the gentle clinking of glass against glass made her pay attention.
A dozen clear glass vials sitting in a plastic caddy inside the desk’s center drawer, all of them tightly stoppered and all of them completely empty.
Then she found the note beside the caddy and pulled it out to read the short message left behind.
‘These are yours. Do whatever you want with them, I guess. It’s your nervous system. I’m leaving it up to you because I’ve got other shit to do with my time. Just be careful.’
Rebecca almost laughed at the note, then instantly wiped her expression clean and shoved the paper back into the desk drawer when Maxwell cleared his throat.
“Something on your mind?” she asked, running her fingers along the row of a dozen additional vials of Zida’s emergency go-potion.
Maxwell stared straight ahead, “Just my own opinions. Which have no place here, I know that.”
Oh, he had opinions , did he? Imagine that.
“I won’t argue with you there,” she muttered before selecting a new vial from the drawer and attempting to open it with the weak fingers of her right hand and the completely numb fingers of her left. Already she wasn’t off to a good start.
“But for the sake of entertainment,” she added, “why don’t you go ahead and share your opinions with me anyway.”
Maxwell watched her before his scowl deepened further. “It’s really not necessary.”
“Not for you .” Her face felt tight and dangerously hot, even when she tried to smile at him, which was supposed to be a distraction from her efforts to open a new vial. Because yes, it felt like she definitely needed another one. “Your Roth-Da’al, on the other hand, is particularly interested, so… ”
When the stopper refused to come out between her fingers, she sighed and lifted the vial to her mouth to pull the thing out with her teeth again.
“I have my concerns,” Maxwell grumbled.
She looked up at him and raised an eyebrow, replying around the stopper between her teeth, “Oh?”
“About your current drug use.”
The sharp pop of the stopper finally pulling free filled the office, followed by a tiny piece of rubber rolling across the surface of her desk when Rebecca’s mouth went slack under the Zida’s magic gas instantly doing its thing.
There was no more brilliant flash of bright white light, no more surge of energy like she’d just plugged herself into the greatest lifeforce generator in existence, but her physical symptoms definitely improved. Her hands didn’t shake anymore, either. Even the numb one.
Once the immediate effects sank in, Rebecca opened her eyes again and looked directly at Maxwell this time with a crooked smile. “I wouldn’t call it drug use when it’s prescribed and approved by our resident healer.”
“So Zida approved that much of it all at once?”
Granted, a dozen vials was quite a lot, but Zida had already admitted she didn’t know what to do to heal Rebecca’s worsening wounds or alleviate the effects of the homunculus poison. And she’d put the vials here, for crying out loud.
Rebecca took a deep breath. “Yes, as a matter of fact. And I’ll have you know, this stuff is… Wait.”
She dropped the used vial into the open center drawer with a tinkle of glass and paused. “Have you been going through my desk?”
Maxwell didn’t skip a beat. “I smelled it the second we stepped into the room.”
“Um…in the drawer, or me?”
“Both.” Still, his inflection never changed.
Apparently, Rebecca now smelled like magical drug abuse and illness. Wasn’t that just one hell of a compliment.
“Well let’s just agree that what you do or don’t smell on me is none of your business.” She leaned back in the desk chair, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply through her nose, silently thanking Zida for thinking preemptively. Even if the old woman had only done it in an attempt to alleviate the annoyance of Rebecca constantly asking for more.
“I can’t help but notice,” Maxwell said, breaking the silence yet again. “Whatever it is, it’s not anything I recognize. What’s going on with you?”
Rebecca snorted. “ That , Max, is quite the loaded question right now.”
“What are the vials for?” he amended .
She cracked open one eye to see that yes, he was still staring at her from across the office, and yes, she fully believed he would keep doing that until she answered him.
“That’s also none of your business,” she said. “But it’s real sweet to know you care.”
He pressed his lips together and sighed before looking her over again, though he didn’t give any indication of being either frustrated by her silence or insulted that she wasn’t ready to spill her guts to him about every little problem.
Especially when he’d made his own not-so-veiled threats against her privacy and peace of mind.
Smart wolf.
She could easily laugh off his concern and pretend like this wasn’t a big deal, sure. Maxwell had no idea what was wrong with her.
Hell, Rebecca didn’t even know what was wrong with her, but she did know that until she caught a break from his constant vigilance, Zida’s vials were as much of a lifeline as she was going to get.
Which simply reminded her of the need to find something that could break that constant vigilance so Rebecca could make it out of this building in one peace and purge from her body what nothing in anyone else’s possession could.
“All right, Max,” she said, leaning back again and crossing one leg over the other. “This looks like our chance to set the record straight. Is there anything commander-worthy in here that needs my attention? Like high-priority stuff. Let’s get to work.”
Maxwell raised his eyebrows at her, looking a little surprised that she’d asked about work instead of sitting around like someone who hadn’t wanted this job in the first place. His surprise, however, wasn’t enough to keep him from responding to her request.
He took off across the office toward the large bookcase against the wall to Rebecca’s right, taking his sweet time searching through the various notebooks and binders and stacks of paper there before hauling out the thickest three-ring binder she’d ever seen. It had to have been six inches, if not more.
When he returned to the desk, he dropped the binder onto it with a muffled thump, spewing a thin layer of dust in all directions.
Rebecca made a mental note to find out who was responsible for cleaning up here. There was a good chance “protocol” had dictated for years that the commander saw to the daily upkeep and care of his or her own office. In which case, she’d get to work changing that.
Just as soon as she got her failing body under control .
She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward in the chair, squinting at the enormous binder. “What’s this?”
“Top priority intel.” Maxwell stepped away and clasped his hands behind his back again.
“Seriously?”
He lifted one shoulder in a blasé shrug and cocked his head.
Holy shit.
She’d known Shade had various operations in the works. They always did. She’d known the task force’s reputation exceeded them and had for some time. That reputation had even been positive once upon a time, before Aldous, but it had never occurred to her that the organization had this much potential work just waiting around to be snatched up.
“Aldous actually worked on all this?” she asked, flipping the binder’s cover open and pretending to read over the first few pages.
Maxwell snorted. “He hardly ever opened the dossier.”
“Okay… But I asked for top priority stuff.”
“Yep.” The shifter nodded at the overloaded binder, then pressed his lips together as if forcing himself not to freely speak his mind. “And you’re looking at it.”
Damn.
So not only had Aldus been a complete chickenshit too full of himself to value anyone else’s life or fulfilling the mission for which Shade had been formed in the first place, but he hadn’t even looked at the top-priority cases or contracted jobs specifically sent to Shade headquarters by contacts or potential clients.
Fucking changeling.
Frowning as she perused the binder’s contents—which had been diligently organized in chronological order, the most recent incoming requests at the top—Rebecca finally had to stop trying to make sense of words she couldn’t even focus on long enough to read.
So she sat back in her chair and looked up at Maxwell again.
Maybe he was slightly more useful to her than just being a constant pain in her ass. Or he could be, provided she figured out how to ask the right questions.
“So which city are we looking at with the most top-priority contracts to get started on?” she asked.
For a long moment, it seemed all he could do was stare blankly at her, though his jaw muscles worked furiously beneath his unflinching stare. That was the only part of him that moved in the ensuing silence until he drew in a deep breath through his nose and said, “Take your pick.”
Well that didn’t help her narrow down anything. What a fucking mess Aldous had made. For a guy who’d so highly valued his own reputation and opinion of himself, the legacy he’d left behind was a total joke.
She’d rather not think of him at all at this point. He was gone.
Then the memory of his last moments in this world sparked a new train of thought, which might have been the first time the changeling had actually provided something useful.
Only in death.
“Did you put all this together yourself?” she asked, gesturing toward the binder.
Maxwell nodded, and that was it.
There was no point commenting on his thoroughness again, so Rebecca decided to go straight for the kill.
Hopefully, this would be enough of an attention-grabber to get her Head of Security caught up in the details. Maybe it would even keep him so busy that he forgot all about hovering over her shoulder like a hungry mosquito.
“Is there anything in here on Hector?” she asked.
Something changed in the shifter’s expression then—maybe even something like interest or pleased surprise to hear he was finally serving under a commander who gave a shit about what happened both within and beyond these walls.
As soon as that excitement had appeared with a flash across his silver eyes, though, it vanished again beneath the mask of Maxwell’s stoic apathy. But at least he had an answer for her.
“Not in there.” He scowled at the enormous binder, then crossed the office again toward two large metal filing cabinets sitting against the opposite wall, each with impressively large and complex locks updated to state-of-the-art security standards.
Not that anyone who particularly skilled at breaking into locked things couldn’t get into these filing cabinets whenever they wanted, but as far as she knew, shifters couldn’t cast their own wards. Only an idiot would try to break into the commander’s office at Shade headquarters anyway. Because they’d also have to deal with the organization’s Head of Security.
After a lot of clanging and banging around before he locked up tight again, Maxwell returned with a much smaller file folder, which slapped down onto the desk in front of Rebecca as if the shifter couldn’t wait to get rid of it.
“You’ve got a little bit of everything in here, don’t you?” she muttered, reaching for the file.
Maxwell grunted. “Not as much as I’d like. ”
The file on Hector Faad was disappointingly thin, citing only the guy’s qualifications right up to passing his initiation into Shade and a list of his official missions though Rebecca never would have expected Aldous to file any kind of paperwork around any secret personal operations he’d sent Hector out to handle for him.
At the end was a brief summary of where Hector had come from before joining Shade, namely several years spent working with a small PI firm of three magicals based out of New England.
None of the information was particularly striking, nor did it provide much of anything about the guy Rebecca hadn’t already pieced together herself.
“Do you know anything about his other previous affiliations before Shade?” she asked. “Other than the PI firm in Boston.”
Maxwell folded his arms, his scowl returning like she’d just deeply insulted him with such a question. “Everything I know is in there. No more, no less. Hector was almost as hard to pin down as you are.”
With a flickering smile, Rebecca closed the file before looking up at him. “Interesting. Is that your way of saying you have a file on me too?”
An oddly dancing light shimmered in his silver eyes as he studied her face. Then it seemed Maxwell worked diligently to force his gaze away from hers before responding, “Not officially.”
Rebecca snorted. “Wonderful.”
She was about to ask how they might go about gathering more intel on the nurúzhe Maxwell had ended by punching a hole through the guy’s middle, but she didn’t get the chance.
A sharp knock wrapped on the office door.
Without hesitation, Maxwell pivoted and got back to work as the new commander’s personal Head of Security, personal bodyguard, and now, apparently, personal doorman.
Short of escaping out from under Maxwell’s constant gaze and the frustratingly distracting, tingling warmth washing over her practically every time the shifter moved, Rebecca would have loved to leverage her new status to dig into Hector’s past.
But she soon discovered the head of an organization like Shade had even less time to focus on one task with any level of efficiency, and that her time wasn’t really even her own anymore.
At the rate things were going, it might never be again.
That became especially clear when Maxwell opened the office door and immediately stiffened in high alert when he came face to face with what greeted him on the other side.