23. Chapter 23

23

S he couldn’t very well warn them, these magicals she cared for, against Shade’s newest member. Not if she wanted them to keep believing Rowan had been a stranger to everyone when he’d walked through Shade’s front doors.

But her team tonight sure enjoyed his company, laughing and joking as they worked together to clean up the evidence of their short but intense skirmish with the Edwardo’s griybreki.

At least Rowan was pitching in with this part of the mission.

The next time Rebecca spotted Maxwell, he stood on the other side of the fourth transport truck at the edge of the docks, where he’d amassed a pile of griybreki corpses at the water’s edge. At first, she assumed his perpetual scowl were just another way he exhibited intense concentration on his current task. She’d seen it before.

But every time the docks echoed with a new round of laughter while the rest of the team worked together, Rowan among them, the shifter stiffened. Sometimes, he even gritted his teeth against the sound, occasionally snarling in response, but always looking more pissed off than he had seconds before.

The rest of the team might have already accepted Rowan Blackmoon among their ranks. Hell, the entire task force had shown up for The Striving to cheer him on. But their Head of Security clearly remained unconvinced.

Rebecca headed toward Maxwell and his pile of bodies before she’d even considered what she wanted to say to him, if anything. By the time she realized she didn’t have a plan for starting a conversation, she’d already joined the shifter. Turning back without a word wasn’t exactly the best way to get him to open up.

He gave no indication of noticing her, even when he turned around to grab another griybreki off the ground and drag it back with him toward the pile, though he growled when another burst of laughter rang out from the others. This time, the sound was joined by someone pounding a fist on the side of a shipping container as part of the joke.

Maxwell’s jaw muscles clenched over and over, visibly working in the dim light of the Port of Chicago’s exterior lamps. Rebecca waited for him to give her some sort of sign, whether acknowledging his desire to be left alone or her willingness to engage when he offered her nothing.

But when he didn’t do or say anything, her curiosity overwhelmed her remaining patience.

“Can I help you over here?” she asked.

The heavy whisper of a body dragging across the asphalt was the only response she got. Then Maxwell released the dead griybreki’s gangly green arm, and the body thumped down at the edge of the pile alongside all the others. “You can do whatever you want.”

That didn’t technically answer her question, but he hadn’t told her to leave him alone, either. Maybe if she committed to helping him in this task, he might eventually open up. Possibly.

They worked together in silence for several minutes, gathering up the remaining dead griybreki and leaving none behind for humans to find in the morning. Once they had all the bodies in one place, Maxwell switched his focus to tossing each corpse over the edge of the dock and into the water, one by one.

Despite their webbed hands and feet and their amphibious appearance, tossing griybreki into any body of water produced the same physical effects as tossing a human body into a vat of hydrochloric acid.

The heavy splashes of griybreki bodies hitting the water joined the rest of the team’s laughter in the night air. When Rebecca and Maxwell were over halfway through the pile, she figured it couldn’t hurt to try again.

She flung another body over the side of the dock, watched it bubble and hiss for a second before sinking too far beneath the surface to keep watching, then dusted off her hands, as if handling these corpses had left her with something to dust off them.

“I’d say that was a hell of a success,” she said and folded her arms.

“Hardly.” Maxwell lifted the next body by one limp wrist and heaved it over the side, as if the creature weighed nothing at all.

The ensuing splash was larger than Rebecca had expected, and she took several steps away from the edge to avoid the spraying backsplash. “Then maybe you can tell me what I missed. Because this turned out exactly the way we wanted it to.”

“Big-picture success,” he said with a shrug as he turned back toward the body pile. “Sure, we got what we wanted, but I fail to see how the definition of success includes screwing around and treating the mission like one big joke.”

When another round of laughter broke out among the rest of the team, Maxwell froze, growled deeply, and bared his teeth at the light reflecting off the rippling water. “Or a damn stage. That’s the exact opposite of what we need.”

Wow, he really did despise Rowan after the elf’s performance tonight.

It didn’t help that he’d suspected Shade’s new elf from the beginning. While witnessing the shifter’s distaste for Rowan herself, Rebecca couldn’t escape the feeling that there was something else at play here. Something else affecting Maxwell’s current sentiments.

Something she felt compelled to dig up, with no rational explanation for the urge.

“Everyone copes differently,” she said. “I wasn’t the best either when I first joined. But he’ll learn. We all do, eventually.”

“I wouldn’t hedge your bets just yet if I were you,” Maxwell growled.

“He took down the griybreki manning that laser. Which would’ve put us in a pretty tight spot otherwise.” Rebecca cast a quick glance toward Rowan and the others, all of whom looked focused on and invested in cleaning up their latest battlefield. “At least he’s gotten more involved.”

“Sure.” Maxwell kept working, still without looking at her, as if the conversation had never happened.

Was that all she was going to get out of him?

It wasn’t enough.

Rebecca’s inexplicable desire to get to the root of her Head of Security’s personal issues battled with a growing disbelief in the realization that it sounded like she was trying to defend Rowan right now. “Look, I get that he’s a pain in the ass. I’ve seen it too. And he clearly doesn’t know when to drop something and just let it be. But he did—”

“With all due respect, Thon-Da’al,” Maxwell interrupted, his voice low and thick with the tension of maintaining his composure, “I would prefer to discuss this later in a formal debriefing.”

Then he paused beside the dwindling pile of corpses and added, “When I can guarantee I’m more…in control of myself.”

She watched him intently, waiting for him to look at her until it became crystal-clear that was exactly what he refused to do.

Maxwell’s jaw clenched and unclenched mercilessly as he stared at the water, hands balled into fists. It didn’t look like he meant to pull himself out of that tension anytime soon.

In fact, Rebecca decided he looked like he was fighting himself—or his own natural reactions—to discussing Rowan at all. Then she noticed the water blinking with the reflection of his glowing silver eyes she couldn’t see and realized what he was trying to tell her.

Maxwell didn’t think he could control himself if they kept up this discussion. That only confirmed her suspicions of how much he resented Rowan having joined their ranks.

And he thought he needed to be in control of himself.

Just one more side to her shifter Head of Security she hadn’t seen yet. Or maybe she just hadn’t considered the possibility that Maxwell Hannigan also battled with keeping himself in check. His abilities. His power. His anger.

Her desire to reassure him, to remind him of how well things had turned out tonight, especially after all Shade’s failures with Aldous, was both odd and impossible to ignore.

So Rebecca stepped toward him again, meaning only to encourage him.

Somehow, it felt absolutely necessary.

“Hey, the important thing is we did well tonight.”

Maxwell stiffened even more at her approach, which she noticed a split second before the unbelievable strength of that tingling warmth and the incredible pull it had on her—urging her closer, challenging her, begging her—flared up between them with full force.

If Rebecca had been alone, she would have tried her best to ignore the sensation, just like every other time she’d felt it so far. But she wasn’t alone.

Which was why she saw, with perfect clarity, the physical reaction of Maxwell’s body too—the tightening of his muscles and clenching of his jaw; the soft, hesitant inhale; the hesitant confusion warring with the urge to pull away.

She recognized it instantly.

What she saw in him looked like what she felt every time they were in the same room together. Every time they got even remotely close like this.

What was this? And why, of all the magicals in Chicago—all the magicals on Earth or Xahar’áhsh—did Rebecca apparently share this odd sensation with Maxwell Hannigan?

The feeling had grown so overwhelmingly strong now, breathing felt like a chore. Like a physical choice Rebecca had to keep making over and over again, or her body would fail to continue doing what it had never needed her permission or her conscious awareness to do.

There was no doubt in her mind that Maxwell could feel this too. Whatever this was. Before she could properly assess the appropriateness of the time and place for bringing it up in conversation, though, she was already asking him.

“You feel that, right?”

His breath hitched, then he let it out slowly but didn’t reply.

When he finally looked at her for the first time since she’d joined him at the edge of the docks, it was the look of someone only now being seen for the first time. Like a being born invisible, who’d spent their whole life believing they would never be found until the moment someone finally looked them in the eye and not through them.

But Maxwell wasn’t invisible. She was pretty sure he never had been.

That look, though, made her want to reach out to him again. This time, the urge was too strong to ignore. If he felt it too, then maybe there was something else they were supposed to know about each other. About themselves.

His silver eyes glowed brighter in the darkness, and his lips parted to provide an answer.

On the other side of Rebecca, someone else let out a heavy sigh, shattering the moment.

“You mean that cool night breeze?” Rowan asked and sighed again. “Oh yeah. I feel it.”

Maxwell’s mouth snapped shut, then he stooped to pick up another griybreki corpse and threw it in the river.

Rebecca turned to scowl at Rowan, who returned her stare with wide, faux-innocent eyes and a flickering smirk. “Did you need something?”

“Just wondering if there’s anything else that needs to be done around here,” he replied cheerily, then spread his arms and winked. “Put me to work, boss.”

Rebecca fought the urge to tell him exactly how he could be of use by shoving him off the docks. But that type of punishment hardly fit the crime of acting clueless, even when Rowan Blackmoon was anything but.

Maxwell beat her to it.

The shifter hefted another griybreki corpse off the dwindling pile of only a remaining few, hauled it with him toward Rowan, and tossed the body at Rowan’s chest with a noncommittal grunt.

Rowan caught the cargo reflexively and gaped at the shifter.

“There you go,” Maxwell said, then immediately turned to resume his own cleanup duties.

Rowan scoffed. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

“I don’t know how you do things wherever you come from,” Maxwell said, “but here, we clean up after ourselves.”

He tossed the last body over the edge with a loud splash when it hit the water. Then he spun around again and stormed back toward the rest of the team without another word.

He didn’t look at Rebecca again, either, which she wouldn’t have minded if she hadn’t just been so close to figuring out what that sensation was. Maybe even naming that thing she felt in the shifter’s presence that he also so clearly felt in hers.

Or, at least, she’d been one step closer to that knowledge. But the moment was over.

Rowan stared after the shifter a moment longer, then looked at the lifeless body in his arms and grimaced. “Did I do something?”

Rolling her eyes, Rebecca gestured toward the water as she turned away from him. “Go for it.”

T he general mood among the team had returned to normal once they’d disposed of tonight’s evidence and decisions were made as to who would drive which vehicles back to headquarters and who would ride with whom.

To Rebecca, Maxwell seemed to have gotten over his anger, or exasperation at Rowan, or whatever emotion he hadn’t been capable of sharing with her. She would have believed it too if Maxwell hadn’t made it a point at every turn to keep as much distance as possible between himself and the Blackmoon Elf.

More than that, though, he hadn’t looked at Rebecca once since his near attempt to answer her questions at the edge of the docks, and that was its own red flag.

Not that she could place what was wrong or why he refused to look at her. Merely that he didn’t.

After six months of living and working within Shade, of missions and enduring Aldous’s madness, Rebecca realized she couldn’t remember a time when she was in the same room with the shifter and he wasn’t already watching her when she found him. At any point in time.

Tonight, though, was the first time since they’d had their run-in with Harkennr’s security at the Old Joliet Prison that he no longer seemed capable of looking at her even for a second.

Something was different.

If he wouldn’t look at her or talk to her, how the hell was she supposed to know what that something different was ?

How the hell was she supposed to know how to fix it?

Why did she feel like there was anything to be fixed in the first place?

Those unanswered questions played over and over in her mind as the team piled back into their own vehicle, plus one of Eduardo’s transport trucks to haul their intercepted weapons cargo back with them to headquarters. The not knowing, not being able to figure it out, wore on Rebecca’s nerves.

She understood Maxwell’s issue with Rowan. She understood it all too well. Nor did she blame the shifter for any of it. Often, she’d felt the very same about Rowan Blackmoon, and that part made sense.

What didn’t make sense was Maxwell’s sudden change in attitude toward her . His inability to discuss their first fully successful mission without, as he’d put it, “being in control of himself.” And now he wouldn’t even look at her.

The more she watched him interacting with the rest of the team, though—which consisted mostly of driving the van back to the compound and occasionally grunting in what might have been amusement at something someone else said—she was seeing him in a different light too.

All this time, Rebecca had assumed Maxwell had a problem with her specifically. That because she didn’t come with a vetted and confirmed paper trail of her entire life and existence on Earth before she joined Shade, he suspected her of being someone or something far different—and maybe even far worse—than what she pretended to be.

In a lot of ways, he would have been right. But after seeing him almost come undone because of Rowan’s attitude problem, she wondered now if Maxwell’s issues extended to all elves in general.

Not that he was likely to have had much interaction with very many elves of any clan. Not in this world.

She still couldn’t help wondering if something had happened, with some other elf at some other time, to put him this much on the defensive. It was always possible that he operated on some preconceived misconception of who and what elves were and how they were supposed to present to the rest of the magical world. That was anyone’s guess.

It didn’t make the shifter’s attitude toward both her and Rowan less concerning, however.

In fact, it could become a major problem for both of them.

If Maxwell’s determination to investigate everything about Rebecca, and likely everything about Rowan Blackmoon as well, led him to any discoveries that included them both, he would find one massive rabbit hole of history and complications and disaster.

A much deeper hole than he could ever possibly have expected.

A hell of a lot more than one shifter, even Maxwell Hannigan, could handle on his own.

That was something she couldn’t plan for, because she had no idea of either how capable Maxwell was of digging up others’ dirty laundry or how he would react if he ever discovered hers.

When every task was complete, and the team prepared to load up to head back for the night, Rebecca watched their interactions while somehow not noticing Leonard approach until he stood right beside her and opened his mouth.

“Boy,” he said. “That new elf, huh?”

She turned to see him watching Rowan and raised an eyebrow. “What about him?”

“He’s…something else.”

“Yeah. I’ll talk to him.”

“And hey, is it just me, or does Hannigan seem to just really hate the new guy’s guts?”

Rebecca sighed. “Honestly, I still can’t tell.”

“That’s kinda weird, right? Not like you need it or anything, but just my two cents. You might wanna keep an eye on him. Just in case.” Leonard scratched the back of his head and sucked in a sharp breath through gritted teeth, as if this conversation physically pained him. “Either he hates the new guy’s guts, or those two have some kinda weird history none of us know about. But if they don’t work it out soon, that’s gonna be more of a problem than any of us need right now, you know?”

“Trust me, I’m already aware.”

“I mean, we just got rid of Aldous and all the shit that came along with that dumpster fire,” he continued. “We need things to go smoothly for a while. And I can’t tell if that’s gonna happen.”

“It already is.” Rebecca almost laughed at the confused look the mage gave her, then shrugged. “Comparatively.”

“Oh. Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m right there with you. This is already way better. I’m just not sure Hannigan’s totally on board. It could turn out to be a big issue if everyone just leaves it alone.”

She almost laughed again but held her composure.

Leonard wasn’t particularly known for his ability to be subtle, but he did have a point. This weird competition—or pissing contest, or whatever it was—between Rowan and Maxwell could easily get out of hand if left unchecked.

It almost had in the back of the transport trailer, before Nyx snatched away the elf’s dagger and Rebecca fired a warning shot of battle magic into the gray wolf’s hide.

But Leonard wasn’t bringing it up just for fun, either. He was putting it in the ear of his commander, who had the means to do something about the issue before it ever became a real issue.

So she folded her arms and nodded. “I hear you. And I’ll talk to him too.”

No need to say who. The whole mission had, in one way or another, revolved around Maxwell versus Rowan. Rebecca didn’t want to stay out of it long enough to see how things would pan out on their own.

One way or another, she would have to have that uncomfortable conversation with Maxwell, and then she’d have to do the same with Rowan.

Just not here on the Port of Chicago docks in front of the entire team. Or on the ride back to the compound. Or anywhere that provided an audience for conversations like that.

This was something she had to approach with caution and a higher level of competent diplomacy than she’d previously thought necessary as a member of Shade.

She needed a private conversation with each of them, alone, the prospect of which didn’t particularly thrill her at the moment.

Until she made it happen, though, Rebecca could only hope she didn’t find those two at each other’s throats again before she had the chance to lay down the law and make them play nice together. Or at least try to let them get a hold of themselves like grown-ass adults.

The tension between Rowan and Maxwell was palpable even when they’d split up in different vehicles, despite Rowan’s constant joking attitude and flippant disregard for certain rules established far before he’d ever made the journey through the Gateway and into Earth.

Hoping they didn’t tear each other apart was all Rebecca could do for now, though she remained acutely aware of the fact that everything and everyone always had been and always would be beyond her control.

That didn’t mean she would give up on either of them, though.

Not before they gave her a good reason to, and fortunately, that hadn’t happened yet.

So it definitely surprised her when Maxwell beat her to the passenger-side door of Shade’s van and opened it for her while half the team climbed into the back on their own.

She was about to thank him, but then a piercing whistle sounded from the other side of the docks.

Rebecca and Maxwell both turned toward the eighteen-wheeler they’d taken as their own to transport their new intercepted cargo.

While Titus climbed up into the front seat to get the truck started, Rowan headed for the cab’s front passenger-side door and made a giant show of waving animatedly across the docks at Maxwell—that same infuriating grin shining through the darkness.

Then he blew Maxwell a kiss.

Just to screw with them.

The shifter snarled as the tension returned to his body, drawing all his muscles taut. He grumbled something unintelligible and didn’t wait for Rebecca to climb into the front passenger seat.

Instead, he ignored both elves and stormed around the front of the van, slamming the rear door on Leonard, Diego, and Nyx in the back along the way.

When he jerked open the driver’s-side door and slumped behind the wheel, cranking the van’s engine like he might decide any minute to destroy it, the shifter’s tension had once again spread to everyone else around him.

Rebecca glanced into the rearview mirror for a quick look at Leonard, Diego, and Nyx settling down in the back. No one said a thing. They hardly even looked at each other, even when Maxwell shifted into drive and slammed his foot on the gas to take off from the docks with a jolting start.

Not being able to talk Maxwell down off whatever ledge of fury he’d reached felt like a major setback Rebecca still didn’t quite know how to handle.

She couldn’t make him feel differently about Rowan Blackmoon among their ranks, nor could she make Rowan take this task force seriously for however long he intended to stay with them.

She did know, however, that they’d avoided a physical fight so far because she’d been there with them every step of the way. As far as she knew, Rowan and Maxwell hadn’t been alone since the Blackmoon Elf’s arrival, and Rebecca had diffused the tense aggression bubbling between them practically every time they were in the same room.

She couldn’t do that forever, though. One of these days, Rowan and Maxwell would have to handle their issues on their own. When she imagined that happening, all she saw in her mind’s eye was a vision of Maxwell Hannigan and Rowan Blackmoon ripping each other to shreds every chance they got.

They’d almost achieved that tonight.

How much longer would they keep this up?

How much longer would Rowan keep screwing around with serious Shade business like it was all a game?

How long would Maxwell keep making himself a willing target for Rowan’s behavior?

She would have loved to know the answers, because what she did know hardly filled her with confidence.

The biggest problem was that she still didn’t know how to help either of them.

If Maxwell and Rowan couldn’t stop themselves from destroying each other, and it definitely looked like they were on the right track, Rebecca would have to step in in a whole new way. She didn’t want that either.

If she failed in that, if she failed to protect two of Shade’s most valuable members despite their differences, what kind of leader did that make her ?

No better than the kind of leader she’d refused to be before she gave up everything that had once made Rebecca Bloodshadow who she was.

As she thought about it on the tensely silent drive back to headquarters, she recognized another major difference between her old life within the Bloodshadow Court and her new life as Rebecca Knox.

She cared a hell of a lot more about damn near everything.

Which meant she also had a hell of a lot more to lose.