41. Chapter 41

41

A s it turned out, the time-sensitive nature of this mission was far more dire than Rebecca had anticipated, and there was very little any of them could do to prepare for what hit them next.

The team moved in near perfect silence across the abandoned amusement park with their Head of Security in the lead. Not three minutes after they’d left the carousel, they received another deadly reminder that they were not alone here tonight.

The pervasive silence within the overgrown property ruptured beneath a long, deafening, nearly bone-shattering roar erupting from somewhere else in the park to the team’s left.

The noise was so powerful and destructive, even from what had to be a farther distance across the park than Rebecca and her team had already traversed, they felt it trembling through the very earth beneath their boots.

The outbuildings surrounding them shook violently beneath the sonic onslaught. Support beams and door and window frames, most of them already hanging lopsided and on the verge of collapse, shuddered and groaned.

A brick outbuilding on the team’s right shifted beneath the auditory attack, eliciting at first a series of muffled cracks and snaps before individual bricks burst apart and toppled to the ground. Then the outbuilding’s entire southern wall crumbled and spilled aged brick and decades of dust and shards of its insides all over the ground.

Behind them, what remained of the carousel collapsed with a deafening metallic scrape of the ride’s rusted mechanisms snapping apart and buckling.

Even once that unidentified bellow came to an end in the distance, its remnants still echoed throughout the park, ricocheting off the neglected structures and lending even more destructive damage to an already obliterated scene.

Maxwell didn’t have to signal for the team to halt while the horrifying noise blistered across the park.

When the worst of the echoes finally faded, Rebecca realized with rare astonishment that even from a distance, the sound had brought the beginning of tears stinging her eyes, as if someone had pinched her face instead and left a palpable sting behind.

It was over as quickly as it had overwhelmed them, but no one dared say a thing in the aftermath.

Rebecca had never heard a sound like that before and didn’t know what to think. What she did know was that whatever had made that noise, it was connected to the enemy they currently pursued.

“If we see or hear anything, huh?” Rowan asked, breaking the silence for everyone, though his regular joking smirk had faded. “Remind me again what the signal is.”

No one answered him. The necessity of signaling anyone after something like that didn’t exist.

“Do we follow that sound,” Whit asked.

“Knox?” Maxwell pivoted to face the team and meet Rebecca’s gaze.

Was he asking for permission or just her opinion?

Not that it would have made a difference at this point.

“Yeah,” she said firmly and offered a curt nod. “I’d say that’s exactly where we need to go.”

The shifter returned her nod before spinning again to face the direction from which that awful bellow had originated.

“Breach formation,” he barked. “We’re moving in.”

Every operative fell into position behind their Head of Security, who had trained each of them in one way or another during previous field missions.

Field missions in which chaos and anarchy and physical threats on their lives had been all but assured under Aldous’s leadership.

They moved in tandem across the park, almost as if they were a single being of one mind and one mind alone.

Plus Rowan.

He was smart enough to have figured out where to place himself within the team’s new tactical formation as they hurried toward the sound, but of course he didn’t care enough to do so.

Instead, he fell in line directly beside Rebecca, his magitek rifle swinging carelessly at his side in one hand, aiming without direction or caution at the dirt and overgrown weeds with every step. “You know, there is one thing I just can’t quite figure out.”

He needed to stop talking.

Rebecca wanted to tell him to shut up and focus on the mission. But speaking to him now, after what they’d just heard and whatever they were about to walk into, felt more like recklessly encouraging him, no matter what she said.

Rowan didn’t seem to care about that, either. “If this really is such a big deal for you guys, getting these kidnapped magicals back or whatever, why don’t you just track them yourself? Seriously, that would save everyone a whole bunch of time, then you and I can get back to what really matters.”

“This does matter,” she hissed, scanning the darkness as they advanced and trying so hard not to lose her cool on him now. “A lot.”

“Yeah, you have to say that though, don’t you? Thon-Da’al and everything.” He leaned toward her and dropped his voice into a whisper. “You can’t convince me you don’t care about how much time we’re wasting so you can play your little games with these people. We have way more important things to get back to, and you know it.”

“The only thing you and I have to do is complete this mission before going back to headquarters and moving on.”

“Come on. If I haven’t made it clear enough since I found you, that’s probably on me. So I’ll just spell it out. I’m not buying the act, Kilda’ari . Not one bit of it. So you can stop pretending.”

That was the most aggravating of all, even more than his attempts to bring his own personal business to the forefront right now while they were on mission, trying to save lives. But that was Rowan.

He genuinely believed everything Rebecca did now as Shade’s commander was a complete act through and through. That she didn’t truly care about Shade or its members and was going through the motions until something better came along.

Clearly, Rowan had convinced himself that he was it.

It might have started that way, Rebecca joining Shade and signing on with a privatized task force that couldn’t have been any further from success and efficiency than it had been when she’d shown up six months ago.

But a lot had changed in those six months. A lot had changed in the last few weeks alone. Until this moment, she hadn’t given herself the opportunity to consider what Shade meant to her now. What it had become and, in turn, what she had become with and because of it.

“We’re here now,” she replied and left it at that.

The team passed another small collection of outbuildings clustered together before an open field stretching toward another cluster of buildings in the distance.

One by one, they cleared each outbuilding and the surrounding area, which turned out to be the remains of a brick-and-mortar snack stand beside two separate buildings of gendered restrooms. Then Maxwell led them on.

“Well that was a missed opportunity.” Rowan sidled up beside Rebecca again, still acting oblivious to the concerned glances the others shot his way. Including an intensely dubious stink-eye from Maxwell before they’d made it halfway across the open field.

The elf ignored all of it. “If you’re concerned about attracting too much attention, I’ll cover for you. Just sneak behind one of these buildings and do your thing when no one’s looking.”

“This isn’t up for discussion,” she whispered harshly.

“Probably because you haven’t had anyone to discuss it with . We could fake another injury, if that’s more your style these days. Go ahead. Sneak around back. I can shoot you in the leg or something and say I saw some shadowy figure fire at you from across the way. Then bam. You’ve got your excuse right there.”

By the Blood, would he never shut up?

She didn’t remember him being this stubbornly obnoxious back in the day.

Then again, long periods of time seemed to have that effect on memory, didn’t they?

“Or if you’ve got something better in mind,” he continued, “go ahead and share it now. At this point, I’m honestly willing to do anything if it means drawing all this boring business to a close as soon as possible. Just get it over with already. It’s not like anyone else here has a clue what you’re actually doing—”

“Stop talking,” Rebecca muttered, clenching her teeth.

“For how long, exactly? Listen, I know Earthside magic has come a long way in the last couple hundred years or whatever, but it’s still so insufferably—”

Rebecca whirled on him so fast, he stopped short and stared at her, his eyes wide.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Blackmoon,” she hissed, fighting to keep a lid on her aggravation so she wouldn’t scream in his face at full volume and alert every enemy combatant to her team’s exact location. “This is how we do things, end of story. If you have a problem with that, you can go back and wait in the car.”

Rowan chuckled before his mouth popped open for a reply.

She surged forward without giving him the chance and took up her position in the team’s formation again, clenching her jaw and staring straight ahead. Pretending to focus on the dark, open, empty landscape stretching between them and the next grouping of outbuildings up ahead.

She also pretended not to notice the wary looks the team shared with each other and occasionally sent her way.

Maxwell looked back from the point of their formation to scowl at Rowan again. When he met Rebecca’s gaze, that scowl remained before he faced forward and resumed their forward march.

Of course this put the entire team on edge. If they didn’t have a cohesive unit here tonight, they risked compromising the entire mission. Clearly, it took very little effort on Rowan’s part to distract them from their objective, which would only lead to more frustration and dissension and eventually the kind of chaos that hadn’t served them under Aldous.

The kind of chaos they certainly couldn’t afford now.

If Rowan had been some random elf stumbling into Shade’s headquarters, who’d completed The Striving and joined the task force like any other newly vetted and sworn-in operative, Rebecca would have pegged him as an imbecile.

Tonight, she would have called him a threat to this team’s success and the safe recovery of their kidnapped members. She would have banned him from any and all additional field missions in the near future until he proved he could be an asset instead of an unparalleled liability.

But he wasn’t just another random magical off the streets. He was something else, someone else, and he already knew how much his reckless, highly obnoxious behavior would affect everything.

He knew what he was doing, which exasperated Rebecca that much more.

Before they’d left headquarters, she’d believed Rowan would still be an asset tonight despite his defects, but now she wondered how much a Blackmoon Elf could change over centuries.

Fortunately, he didn’t keep hounding her, and Rebecca refused to look for him within the team’s formation to confirm that he’d fallen in line. As long as the Blackmoon Elf kept his mouth shut, she was happy.

Then the team reached the opposite end of the open field and the next group of outbuildings dotting the landscape like old, twisted, barren dinosaurs of their former selves against the night sky.

There were no lights here, either, which meant the team’s only visibility came from the moonlight and their individual capacity, at varying degrees, to see in the dark.

Maxwell signaled to remain on high alert as he led them through the center strip of what had once been a haphazardly cobbled street set up between two rows of long, narrow two-story buildings.

Decades of weeds and hardy wild grasses reclaiming the area had broken up the cobblestones, making this central avenue an unsteady, wobbling pathway beneath their feet. The farther they moved down this main strip, the clearer its original design became.

The buildings to either side were lined with manufactured storefronts in the overly stylized theme of an old Western town’s main drag. They passed the remnants of a tack shop, with a warped and dented selection of iron horseshoes out front.

Several had gone missing, their absence noticeable only by the darker horseshoe-shaped strips left behind on the storefront’s warped wood where they’d once hung.

There on the left were the telltale batwing doors of the saloon, plus the faded remnants of a sign that had declared laughably low prices for room and board at the inn, for a total of twenty-five cents.

The air filling this main strip, which acted as a bottleneck ravine through the amusement park, felt particularly stale, shielded from the breezes rolling through the woods surrounding the property and blowing in across the open fields.

As a result, the silence had only thickened, drowning out the already hushed sounds of Rebecca and her team moving across the chipped and slanted cobblestones.

Like all the other buildings, these also lacked their windows and most of their doors. The wooden balconies extending from the second-story windows slanted dangerously, many of their floors having already given way and caved in.

Others had buckled to the point of threatening to break from the building’s facade and crash down onto the equally rundown wooden porches extending into the main strip at ground level.

The likelihood of enemy targets lying in wait for the rescue team within the second-story rooms above seemed infinitesimal, judging by the state of these buildings. But the Shade team couldn’t assume anything at this point. Not after doing so had gotten them blown up once already.

They’d almost reached the center of the abandoned main drag, pausing only to aim their weapons inside the doorless storefronts before confirming the rooms beyond were empty.

None of them could have predicted the return of that awful, head-splitting roar before it crashed again through the entire park, much louder and therefore far closer than the last time.

Maxwell stopped. The team stopped behind him. Nearly everyone swayed or staggered beneath the onslaught of such a physically powerful bellow rising across the park before they regained their balance.

The Western-town buildings trembled violently on either side of them, floorboards creaking and snapping, window frames and loose, haphazardly crooked shutters rattling against wooden frames. From the direction of the saloon behind them came the tinkle of shattering glass before the buildings themselves fell apart.

One especially loud creak and groan came from a second-story room on Rebecca’s left. She had just enough time to consider the fact that if these buildings folded and buckle and collapse inward toward each other and the center of the main strip, she and her team wouldn’t even have the time to flee toward either end of the main street.

They would be crushed by both buildings converging upon the center of the street.

Then the deafening roar ended, its echo continuing for several seconds before the silence crept back in around them. Something in the building on their right shifted significantly.

The ensuing creak from above sounded far more like weighted movement than simple foundational settling. Something solid and heavy thumped onto the wooden floor up on the second story, making the floorboards groan again as it rolled for several seconds.

The sound cut off, as if someone had reached down to stop the rolling object with a hand.

Something else shifted again almost directly above Rebecca before wood splintered and snapped apart. Half the balcony overhead broke free and dropped.

She leapt back, narrowly avoiding the chunk of warped and splintered balcony plummeting toward where she’d just stood. It clattered onto the wildly uneven cobblestones at her feet, splintering even more and sending up a thick cloud of dry, dusty dirt and wood chips.

Then the next warning cry changed everything.