44. Chapter 44

44

B urke’s scream came first, his agonized wail just as desperate and tortured as the other times they’d heard it. The awful sound was easy to pinpoint now that they were so close, despite the way it echoed off every building around them and clashed against the odd fits and bursts of antique music.

But this time, when Burke’s screams pierced the night before abruptly cutting out again, the other screams followed.

A heart-rending chorus of agonized wails followed, first in one voice behind Rebecca and her team, then a second far off to their left, then a third ahead and to the right, though from far enough away that it couldn’t have possibly come from the same direction as their captured operatives.

The screams that did come from that same direction, however, were even more horrible to hear—Titus’s roaring bellow that ended in a cripplingly breathless choke; every short, sharply rending shriek in Diego’s rough voice.

After every scream Rebecca and her team recognized echoed from up ahead, the screams in other voices—from strangers, from their unidentified enemies—hurtled toward the operatives from every direction.

Bombarding them with the horrific echoes of agony and terror. Distracting them from their intended destination and successfully fraying their nerves.

There was no way to tell if those additional screams and wails came from the enemy as a mocking response, or if they’d been previously recorded and were now played back to throw off the team, or even if they belonged to real people, living victims, also held in this abandoned park, forced to endure unspeakable suffering in real time.

All without knowing a team of Shade operatives was already here. Without knowing anyone else could hear them.

But every magical on Rebecca’s team knew they couldn’t stray off course to investigate whether those other screams were merely a trap. It would only cost the rescue team precious time that Diego, Titus, and Burke didn’t have.

If those were real voices from real victims, the Shade team had to willingly leave them behind as they continued onward. Deviating now might risk their only chance at rescuing their people.

It didn’t take long for the constant onslaught of such gut-churning, heart-wrenching, horrifying sounds to take its toll on the team, which Rebecca already knew was the intended effect.

The operatives in front of her slowed in their forward march behind Maxwell, as if they now slogged through thick mud sucking at their boots and trying to root them to the spot.

Shell flinched and whipped her head toward the direction of each new scream buffeting toward them from unknown locations. Whit kept furiously shaking his head, as if that would clear it of the noises.

The others seemed to have frozen, all normal function disrupted by the chaos in the air.

Maxwell had set his jaw in grim determination, his shoulders more rigid with every step than Rebecca had seen to date. The one time she turned around to look at Rowan, all traces of the Blackmoon Elf’s smirk and constant amusement had evaporated.

For Rebecca, the sound brought back all too viscerally the memory of her botched solo mission at the Old Joliet Prison, where she’d hoped to heal herself first and gather more intel afterward on Harkennr’s forces.

The screams sounded far too similar to ignore their desperate cadence and tortured lack of control or self-awareness, just as horrifying as those that had come from within the walls of the abandoned prison and from the newest shipment of Harkennr’s trafficked experiment subjects pleading to be spared the same fate.

Was this another one of Harkennr’s erected locations, where he conducted his sick studies?

She had no evidence to support that beyond the sound of those screams.

Agony and despair sounded like agony and despair in anyone, once they’d broken to a certain point.

No matter how she tried to rationalize it, though, she couldn’t stop wondering if this was a sick elaborate joke by those who had ambushed Shade’s transport team in retaliation for intercepting their illegal purchase of unsanctioned magitek weaponry.

Or did this abandoned park host something far worse, the surface of which Rebecca’s team had barely scratched?

After the last round of screaming came to a halt., offering the team a blissful but short-lived reprieve from the auditory horrors, Maxwell stopped at the head of their formation. Then he signaled for the team to do the same and seemed to wait for something.

Listening, maybe. Searching more closely through the shadows.

Then again, he could have been sniffing the air just to be sure they were still on the right track.

Then he turned around to face the team. “We’re almost there. Just stand firm, keep your eyes open, and stay on me, no matter what. Let’s go finish this.”

Through their own grimaces, despite no current wails of agony careening around them, the operatives nodded and readied their weapons.

Maxwell opened his mouth to add something else, but then the screams started again, and there was no point in trying to be heard over them.

Instead, with a snarl Rebecca saw but couldn’t hear, the shifter signaled to keep moving toward the only building still directly ahead.

The screams grew louder, not just in front of them but from all directions, as if the enemy were trying to draw them off course at the last second, away from their true target.

The team pressed on until they rounded the front corner of the building Maxwell had indicated, and he brought them to a full stop in front of a pair of closed double doors locked by a heavy silver chain wrapped through dented brass handles and an enormous padlock for added security.

He tested the padlock and the chains, both of which held firm beneath his quick, experimental tugs. Then he pressed his face toward the doors, attempted to see through the narrow crack between them, sniffed at the air, and turned around to face the others.

He didn’t have to say a thing. His expression said it all.

Maxwell still had the scent of their captured operatives, and the team would be following it into this building.

That would have been an enormous relief and a much-needed boost to morale if those Hells-cursed screams hadn’t continued endlessly from every direction.

Rebecca only hoped they hadn’t taken too long to get here.

Gritting his teeth in a silent snarl, Maxwell tried to signal the details of his breach strategy, but it was too difficult to focus on what he might have tried to say.

The piercing screams now felt like a skewer plunging deep into each of Rebecca’s ears, and if it was that bad for her, she could only imagine what the others felt. Apparently, it was too much.

Shell broke free of their staggered formation and stormed toward the double doors, gritting her teeth and raising her weapon. Even Maxwell had no time to intervene before Shell aimed her augmented rifle at the hulking padlock hooked through the silver chains and delivered a single explosive blast of brilliant deep-blue light into it from a yard away.

The doors rattled in their frames, the silver chain sparked and hissed, clanging against itself under the attack, until the padlock glowed a red-hot orange and the whole thing melted apart.

The second the blue lights fizzled out around the door, the screaming from all sides abruptly cut off again, plunging the team into another deafening silence.

Maxwell glared at Shell before slightly lowering his weapon. “We still need to assess the place. I want a confirmed visual on enemy combatants inside, plus a headcount and eyes on our three before we—”

When the next tortured cries cut through the air, every operative twitched at the sound, already expecting the noise to double, triple, quadruple and continue like every other time.

But this was different.

This began as only one voice and remained only one voice, coming from inside the building, beyond these newly unlocked double doors.

And it was perfectly loud enough and clear enough to make out words.

“Is that all you got, you motherfuckers? Who taught you how to do this, huh? Whoever it was, you should ask for your money back! It fucking tickles!”

By the Blood. It was Diego.

Despite the battered hoarseness of his voice and his heavy breathing between furious, baiting shouts, the same thought seemed to hit every member of the team at the same time.

Shell moved first and grabbed a handful of the silver chains before pulling at them with a quick jerk. What little of the partially melted padlock remained in place snapped easily beneath the force, and Shell tugged once more before the chains came loose. She dropped them on the ground in front of her with a heavy jingle.

Maxwell stared at her the whole time, then glanced at Rebecca, as if wanting her opinion, though he’d already made up his mind. “Or we could move in now…”

“Now’s good,” Whit grumbled with a nod.

Maxwell signaled for them to get ready, then he hauled open the double doors and slipped inside, his weapon raised to clear the space in front of him while the team filtered in closely behind.

The walls were too old and thin where they hadn’t already crumbled away, providing little protection against the awful noises from outside, but at least they were finally here.

Now they could get their captured operatives out and back to safety, and this waking nightmare of a mission would be over.

Through the building’s front foyer, across cracked tiles that only looked like marble and had once been polished to a pristine shine, the team swept in.

Frayed red velvet covered random surfaces, like the counter in front of the ticket booth’s window and the stairs leading down off the lobby. The brass banisters and handrails lining the walls were dented, darkened by age and neglect. Piles of dry and decaying leaves scattered across the floor, along with the remnants of shattered glass beneath all the broken windows.

Their footsteps echoed loudly in the silent stillness of the lobby.

Rebecca realized this particular building, though cheaply built and unkept, had been modeled after a 1920s theater hall, complete with thick curtains of dark red velvet now hanging in stained and tattered strips in front of another set of double doors opening into the auditorium beyond.

“Bring it, you fucking amateurs!” Diego’s voice rang from beyond that next set of doors. “Don’t tell me that’s all you’ve got. We’ll be here forever, and all this foreplay’s making me hungry!”

If the team hadn’t already given away their position by surging into the lobby, they would by barging straight into the auditorium while Diego spat obscenities at his captors.

Maxwell signaled for Shell and Whit to head down the left aisle branching up the lobby while Murray and Jay were to do the same on the right. Whether he was still ignoring Rowan to keep him out of the plans or just hadn’t yet gotten around to assigning the elf a task, it didn’t matter.

The trembling growl they’d been hearing across the park, the awful sound that had led them this far, rose again through the theater hall. There could be no doubt anymore that this was where the sound had originated.

It was vastly closer and therefore far louder than all the others.

The concussive force of such a violently powerful roar blistering through the air made Rebecca feel like she’d been shoved inside a powerful loudspeaker and forced to endure the sonic assault bombarding her from every direction.

The bellow rumbled in her chest and up through her head, making her eyes instantly water. She staggered beneath the assault, clamping both hands down over her ears when she regained her balance and looked up.

Maxwell’s shifter hearing, far more sensitive than everyone else’s, got the worst of it. He covered his ears as well, snarling furiously, and stumbled sideways against the wall before sagging against it. It seemed all he could do was stay on his feet.

While her vision blurred and bounced around beneath the chaotic roar, Rebecca found Rowan next.

He’d crouched low to the floor, hands over his ears as he gritted his teeth and glared at the next set of double doors leading into the auditorium and eventually the theater hall’s stage on the other side.

He was so intently focused on those doors, Rebecca was certain he wouldn’t have noticed her if she’d come up behind him to yell down into his face.

The look that came over him next, however, was all too familiar. A look she knew well enough to predict what he intended to do next.

While the ferocious bellow continued from the other side of those doors, Rowan stood from his crouch, grabbing his weapon off the floor.

Rebecca couldn’t hear it, but she watched his mouth form the words as he leveled his weapon at the doors. “Fuck this.”

“Blackmoon! Fall back!” she shouted, but the trembling roar drowned out her words.

Even if he’d been able to hear her, he wouldn’t have listened.

That didn’t stop her from calling after him.

“Stop!”

He took off at a dead run toward the double doors.

“ Rowan !” she screamed, just as the deafening bellow like that of some furious mechanical beast snuffed out again.

The end of her scream echoed in the immediate silence, but it didn’t matter.

Rowan’s first round of augmented weapons fire blasted open the doors just in time for him to slip through before they swung shut again on shuddering hinges.

The rest of the team still hadn’t quite recovered by the time he disappeared on the other side, but Maxwell acted as swiftly as he could, given the less-than-ideal circumstances.

“Godammit!” he roared as he shoved himself off the wall, stumbling forward and shaking his head. The ringing in his ears had to be worse than Rebecca’s. “Everybody move!”

As their team leader surged toward the trembling doors, the others got a hold of themselves and followed.

When Rebecca slammed her shoulder against one of the doors swinging shut in front of her just to open it again, she could have sworn she heard and felt the dangerously rusted hinges creak and snap apart beneath the blow, but she didn’t stop to check.

She kept formation with her team surging into the auditorium before they fanned out to prepare for another firefight.

But then everyone stopped, because what greeted them on the other side of those doors was nothing close to what they’d expected.

The auditorium was entirely empty.

Not merely of enemy combatants or an audience to fill the theater hall’s seats. The seats themselves were gone, stripped from their settings bolted to the floor and long since disposed of. The carpet lining the left, right, and center aisles had all been stripped away as well, leaving the team to stand against an enormous open room with nothing but an empty, chair- less downward slope of cracked cement and horribly chipped black paint stretching between them and the far end of the auditorium.

Rebecca had half-expected to see the stage removed as well, but that seemed to be the only part of the theater hall’s main room that hadn’t been touched and torn apart.

The darkness in here was almost complete, save for a small, slowly blinking yellow light on the far side.

Disoriented by discovering absolutely nothing in here, every operative stopped, waiting for their vision to adjust to the dank, barren darkness so they might see farther than the center of the chair-less auditorium.

Now that the awful, bellowing roar had stopped again—for how long was anyone’s guess—the only sound now came from seven different Shade operatives panting to catch their breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop right down upon them at any moment.

Rebecca’s vision adjusted quickly, which only reconfirmed her team was entirely alone.

What the hell was this supposed to be?

Then something stirred at the bottom of the slope by the stage. A low, strained groan carried toward them across the darkness.

“Oh, look . Someone finally grew the balls to come talk to us in person, huh?”

It was without a doubt Diego’s voice, though strained and hoarse from all the screaming.

Rebecca and Maxwell exchanged a knowing look but said nothing before heading down the theater hall’s barren slope toward the stage with the team following behind.

Calling out to Diego now was just as dangerous as barreling into this building without any idea what they were getting themselves into, but now there was a very real, very tangible reason to remain silent.

Diego was obviously talking to someone else, which meant whoever he was taunting right now might not yet have noticed the team’s arrival after all the noise.

Diego’s forced scoff split the silence again. “I bet you’re all too chickenshit to even come up here and look us in the eye. Come on! Get real close. Why don’t you take a look at exactly what you’re dealing with?”

The closer Rebecca inched toward the stage, though, the clearer it became that no enemy targets waited for them anywhere.

That slowly blinking yellow light paused before several others in a multitude of washed-out colors took up a similarly blinking rhythm. In seconds, the stage had become a twinkling source of a few dozen different-colored lights. Winking in and out together, they now illuminated the rest of the stage.

Diego wasn’t alone.

Two other slumped, unmoving forms sat on the stage with him.

Rebecca recognized the slightly misshapen outline of Titus’s huge bald head and the slant of his nose as his head drooped forward over his chest. She could only assume the third figure was Burke without immediately hopping up onto the stage for a closer look.

All three of their captured operatives were present and accounted for, and from a distance, they seemed relatively unharmed, though Titus and Burke’s stillness were slightly alarming.

“Huh? Come on!” Diego spat. “Get closer. I dare you! You shithead cowards are all the same, you know that? You don’t even have the guts to fucking look at me !”

Maxwell signaled for Whit to join him toward the stage before they both quickened their pace. The others waited and scanned the dark theater, prepared to offer cover fire if necessary.

It certainly felt like it would soon become necessary.

Diego hissed, struggling against unseen bonds, then threw his head back and shrieked with a madman’s cackling laughter. “That’s right ! Climb on up here if you dare, you fucking cowards!”

“That’s the plan,” Whit grumbled as he and Maxwell reached the bottom of the sloping floor, now with only the empty front aisle between them and the stage.

“Wait, what?” Diego struggled harder, joined by the heavy clink of something scraping and bumping the stage’s wooden floor as he rocked sideways and strained to get a better look at his rescue party.

The lights beneath him and all around him pulsed together with a brighter glow, and his crimson eyes widened. “Shit. It’s you .”

When Rebecca saw the Cruorcian’s face drain of all color, she knew she’d been right.

Something was still very wrong about all of this.

“No, no, no!” Diego hollered, struggling wildly now. “Wait! Don’t come any closer—Stop! Don’t fucking move!”

“Whoa, whoa. Hold up.” Maxwell stopped two feet from the base of the stage and extended an arm to keep Whit from approaching any farther. “What do you mean, ‘Don’t come any closer,’ Diego?”

Murray cleared his throat, then summoned an orb of ghostly yellow light that did nothing to help the already eerie ambiance of the barren, stripped theater hall. When he tossed it into the air, his orb cast a pallid, sickly glow over everyone.

But it was what they needed.

Now they could see, including why Diego had switched so suddenly from captive bravado to genuine terror.

It was definitely him, Titus, and Burke together on the stage, sitting in a roughly circular three-men gathering, their backs turned inward toward each other.

The backs of their chairs made last-minute out of stacks of warped and decaying plywood, random supply pallets, and piled bricks and cinder blocks from other rubble around the park jutted up against some monstrous bit of machinery, as big as Titus, mounted in their circle’s center.

The thick ropes and heavy iron chains binding the three operatives to the mechanical behemoth were just the beginning.

Also winking beneath the yellow light of Jay’s floating light orb were at least three different colors, widths, and strengths of binding wards the enemy had cast with particular thoroughness around their captives’ wrists, shoulders, and chest. They were subtle wards, meant to remain hidden until the last second.

And then, when that last second came, it would be too late.

Clearly, the enemy had assumed all three prisoners would have been too incapacitated to warn their rescue party of the existing danger literally behind and beneath them.

Rebecca realized the dozens of slowly blinking lights she’d seen before were a combination of signal lights connected to several incomprehensible levers and dials built into the monstrous gadget surrounded by Shade’s missing members. Others were magical lights cast onto the wall of the stage’s base and the center aisle in front of what used to be the front row seats. All of them winked out at varying speeds and intensity of light.

Like a countdown to one more trap of defensive wards they’d first detonated at the carousel.

Only Rebecca couldn’t read the numbers on this one, and something told her they didn’t have the time for thorough research.

Though Maxwell and Whit stood closest to those ghosts of blinking ward lights forming their own directing line straight toward the prisoners strapped to that thing , the entire team had frozen at the sight of what they were up against.

Maxwell lowered his outstretched arm from in front of Whit, who let out a long, cautious exhale.

“If you know something, Diego,” Maxwell growled, “now would be the time to share.”

“Oh, is that your professional fucking opinion?” the Cruorcian snapped.

Rebecca distinctly heard Rowan’s snicker.

“Sorry,” Diego added with a sigh, then shook his head. “I’m a little out of it right now. Though not as much as these guys, obviously.”

He jerked his head in the general direction of Titus and Burke before nervously licking his lips.

No one said a thing.

“Yeah,” Diego continued. “We’ve, uh… We’ve been through some shit over here.”

“You don’t say,” Maxwell replied flatly.

Diego tried to steady himself with another deep breath. “I can tell you a few things, sure. Enough to keep you from blowing us all sky-high, at least.”

“What?” Shell murmured, then took one more step backward away from the stage when Maxwell signaled for silence.

“It’s a bomb , okay?” Diego continued, blinking furiously as he tried to gather his understandably scattered thoughts. “A bomb. Some kinda energetic explosive, right? Magic and something else, probably. Obviously. It’s all augmented shit.”

“And we just started the countdown, didn’t we?” Whit murmured breathlessly.