45. Chapter 45

45

“ W hat? Started the countdown? No!” Diego chuckled. “I don’t think so…”

“Stick with what you know,” Maxwell reminded him. “Conjecture won’t get us out of here. All of us.”

“Right. Yeah, I get it. Um…okay. So it’s not on a timer or anything. That’s not these pricks’ style. It’s rigged with a proximity sensor kinda thingie… I think. I don’t know, it’s one of the wards here. This thing they tied us up against is mostly harmless. Until someone on the outside gets too close, and that’s the trigger, right? Again, I’d take a few steps back if I were you. Just in case. Hey, good thing I got you to stop in time.”

Whit sucked in another sharp breath and staggered backward by several feet until he stood on the slope of the descending floor stretching across the theater hall.

Maxwell, by comparison, took three incredibly calm, even steps backward and finally lowered his weapon. “Anything else?”

Diego let out a bitter, tittering laugh. “I mean, take your pick. This whole place is rigged with the same kinda ward traps. Move too fast, step one inch in the wrong direction, and you get blown to bits.”

“Then how the hell are we supposed to get you out of here?” Jay asked.

“Trust me, man,” Diego said, “I’ve been trying to work that one out since I woke up in here like this.”

He’d also been trying, Rebecca realized, to goad his captors into climbing onto the stage to make him shut up, hoping they’d be annoyed by his antics and on edge just enough to make one fatal misstep and blow this whole theater hall to Xahar’áhsh and back.

She was especially grateful that he’d recognized his rescue team before that happened, and she had to give the Cruorcian points for serious guts.

He’d rather pull the enemy into their own trap and blow up with them than continue to suffer whatever tortures they’d been throwing at him.

Judging by the screams her team had heard from halfway across the park and the state of the theater hall—magitek bomb and all—she couldn’t blame him.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Diego continued, sounding a lot more lucid now as his memory and awareness seemed to return in full. “Disarm the casting circles first. And no joke, you guys. It’s some seriously complex magical shit, so just be careful, yeah? If anyone sets this thing off and kills us all, there won’t be a damn thing to stop me from coming back to haunt your ass forever.”

“If anyone could do that,” Jay muttered, “it’d be you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Never mind.”

This was one more serious problem the team hadn’t anticipated—magical booby traps set all around their very alluring prize sitting center stage. The magicals they’d come here to rescue.

“Okay,” Rebecca called out. “I’m gonna take a closer look at these wards around the stage. I want everyone else to fan out, sweep the place, find out if we’re actually alone here. We’ll go from there.”

With nods of assent from all around, the team broke off to follow her orders.

Rebecca headed toward the side of the stage and the set of stairs ascending from the end of the far-left aisle. She expected to see the first glimmer of a casting circle begin to illuminate and grow brighter as she approached the base of that short staircase.

She didn’t expect Maxwell to appear there by her side in an instant.

Maybe she should have specified that ‘break and scan the premises’ orders also applied to him.

When the tingling warmth of his presence rushed across her skin and raised goosebumps beneath her jeans and light jacket became far too distracting twenty seconds in, she turned toward him with a sigh. “I need to take a look at this on my own. It won’t do us any good if this thing goes off at the last second and Shade loses both its commander and Head of Security in the same go.”

His frown deepened as he studied the glowing casting circle on the floor, which grew brighter when he leaned slightly forward and faded again when he straightened. “That’s not the most important thing right now.”

What was that supposed to mean?

Was he referring to her personal safety and his self-proclaimed mission to protect her at all costs, or was this about saving those three captured operatives strapped to a magical bomb on the stage?

As if he’d read her thoughts, Maxwell’s silver gaze flickered away from the casting-circle trap to settle on her face, and his frown darkened.

It didn’t matter what he’d meant. Not now. She just had to get him away from these traps.

“Seriously, Hannigan,” she said. “Go with the rest of the team. Secure a perimeter here. If we’re not alone, we need to know about it. If we are, we need to keep it that way.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Listen, if something goes wrong, you’re the obvious best choice for handling the aftermath. I might be able to reverse this”—she gestured toward the half-shimmering casting circle—“but I’ve got to do it alone.”

They stared each other down until it almost looked like he was about to give in.

Then he opened his mouth. “Can you give me a good reason why doing this alone increases the chances of you successfully diffusing these bombs?”

Dammit, why wouldn’t he just listen to her?

Yes, she had one fantastic reason. Her Bloodshadow magic. But it wasn’t a good reason she could give him.

She sighed and held his gaze. “Besides the other reasons I just gave you? No. I can’t. I just need you to leave.”

Maxwell folded his arms and leaned toward her, tilting his head as he brought his face so incredibly close that the electrifying tingle between them almost became a burning flush across her cheeks. She hoped to hell he couldn’t see it.

“Fat chance, Thon-Da’al,” he murmured. “I’m staying.”

By the Blood, his stubbornness made him insufferable.

At the same time, it was weirdly, uncomfortably endearing how much he thought he was protecting her by getting in her way.

With a frustrated grunt, Rebecca returned her attention to the casting circle and now could only pretend to investigate it, because she already knew what needed to be done.

She’d wanted to try turning her Bloodshadow magic against the traps themselves, targeting the life force of the magical energy binding Diego, Titus, and Burke to that magitek explosive on the stage. That way, maybe she could drain dry the residual magic of the casting circles and all the other traps around the theater hall until there was nothing left to activate.

She was almost entirely certain that would have done the trick. It was absolutely worth attempting, but if Maxwell refused to give her even a few minutes of privacy beside the stage, or anywhere else within the building, it was no longer an option.

If he saw her, he’d ask how she’d done it. He wouldn’t stop asking until Rebecca gave him an answer, and she didn’t think she could come up with anything convincing enough to explain what he would have watched her do without telling him the truth.

Also not an option.

So instead, she spent another sixty seconds bending toward the casting circle and reaching for it from different angles with her fingers and her magic, hoping a shifter’s lack of inherent control over any other magic but his own would prevent him from realizing she wasn’t actually doing shit.

Then she withdrew her hand, stood, and shook her head. “Fuck.”

“Care to elaborate?” he asked, looming behind her with his arms still folded.

“There’s a locking switch on this thing,” she said. “Whoever cast these was smart enough to mold them directly to their own magical signature. The caster’s the only one who can touch this without setting it off. I can’t get rid of it.”

That part was all true, at least, and she was glad for not having to directly lie to him about it.

Maxwell searched her face, as if he were waiting for her to share some other crucial bit of necessary information. When she didn’t, he gruffly stroked his chin once and nodded. “Then we’ll find another way. Let’s regroup and come up with a better plan now that we know more about what we’re dealing with.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

When she nodded, Maxwell turned to head back across the auditorium toward center stage, and she almost thought she would have enough time to try one more little maneuver with his back turned.

It wasn’t turned for very long.

The second she eyed the casting circle again, deciding how she could activate her more powerful abilities to weaken the ward’s proximity sensors, if not deactivate them entirely, the shifter stopped to look at her over his shoulder.

“You coming?” he asked.

Blue Hells! She just couldn’t catch a break.

“Yeah,” she said and gave up trying to sneak in a few tricks while he wasn’t looking.

All things considered, she should have known any other attempts would be useless. Maxwell was always looking.

Though she kept it locked away beneath her own mask of certainty and confidence, she was starting to worry now. If Maxwell refused to let her work on her own and she couldn’t come up with a viable excuse to make him, she didn’t know how the hell their team was going to finish this.

They weren’t equipped to handle this level of complicated warding keeping their captive operatives bound to that augmented bomb and permanently beyond their reach. That was a major issue.

As she and Maxwell returned to the center of the sloped auditorium floor, Shell, Whit, Jay, Corey, Murray, and even Rowan returned from their quick but thorough search of the building.

Whit shook his head. “There’s no sign of anyone else here. As far as we can tell, the place is empty.”

“Then we might have enough time to work this out before company arrives,” Maxwell said.

“Oh yeah. Sure,” Diego called from the stage with a snort. “You guys go ahead and take your time. However much you need. This is actually the closest thing I’ve had to a vacation in a while.”

Shell shot the Cruorcian a tight smirk, but no one said a thing.

They couldn’t take their time here, and everyone knew it.

They couldn’t have predicted just how little time they would actually have, because there was no warning at all before the magitek bomb strapped at the center of their captured and bound operatives on the stage flared up with another power surge.

It filled the air with a hair-raising crackle like uncontained electrical voltage that made Rebecca’s nose burn furiously and all the hairs along her arms and the back of her neck stand on edge.

A low burst of static and an electrical hum were just the start while the lights blinking all over the magitek bomb sputtered to life in a flurry of different colors. The warm-up lasted long enough for Diego to let out a resigned sigh and mutter dolefully, “Shit.”

Then the power-surging device strapped to his back built into a furiously powerful pulse of increasing energy so quickly, no one else had time to realize what was happening before that devastating roar coming right from the device ripped through the air.

A crackling whine underlying the familiar sound rose too, only audible at close range, but barely.

Without walls and doors to block the noise and the auditorium turned into an empty echo chamber, the sound was so much worse up close.

It rippled through the air, surging like a physical storm and hitting Rebecca and her team just as hard.

The next second, her head felt like it was going to burst open at any second, the power vibrating through her at a much more physical level than when it had just been noise from a distance.

The theater hall shook, spilling dust and chunks of rotting plaster down from the ceiling while the wooden stage trembled, adding more cracks to its already battered floor and base.

The slanted auditorium floor buckled, sending the Shade operatives staggering to catch their balance while, they clamped their hands over their ears to almost no effect.

As Rebecca blinked through another swell of tears stinging her eyes, she only caught brief glimpses of the others between longer moments of her vision failing her.

Shell hunched into her shoulders, plugging her ears with her fingers.

Rowan lowered into a full crouch on the floor, his hands over his ears and his teeth gritted.

Whit and Jay wearing the same jaw-clenched expressions, the warlock scrunching up his entire face, while Jay’s eyes bulged from his head as he gazed blankly around the room.

For as difficult as it was for Rebecca to focus her vision on much of anything, she figured Jay might have had reason at that moment to wonder if he’d gone blind.

Then she saw Maxwell.

The shifter had doubled over completely, as if he’d just taken a gunshot to the belly. His wide eyes strobed faster by the second with violent silver light while his mouth had torn open, exposing a glimmer of teeth and canines that looked far sharper than normal as he let out a furious cry of pain she couldn’t hear.

Rebecca couldn’t hear anything in that first second or two that felt like an agonized lifetime. Nothing but the whining shriek of the surging magitek bomb beneath the blistering roar, up close and personal.

Nothing, of course, until the screams started again.

Only now, the whole team knew exactly where they’d been coming from.

Tied to his makeshift torture chair on the stage, Diego got the full brunt of the assault, far more than the rest of them. The blinking lights from the bomb at his back seemed to light him up from the inside, as if the power surge were blasting right through him, feeding off him, illuminating his skin, muscle, flesh, and bone from the inside out.

He screamed and screamed, bucking wildly against his bonds and the stacked cinder blocks beneath him, his head whipping from side to side at eerily impossible angles while his face contorted in agony, crimson eyes strobing with extra brilliance Rebecca had never seen in a Cruorcian before.

Because none of it was from him.

And there was nothing any of them could do about it.

As quickly as it had powered up against them, the augmented power cell—or dormant bomb, or whatever it was—stopped its violent surging. All its blinking lights shut off at once the second the horribly violent roar plunged them into silence again.

That silence seemed complete and total at first, until, through the ringing in her ears, Rebecca heard the soft hiss coming from the device and caught the scent of burning metal on the air.

The second the roaring stopped, so did Diego’s screams.

When Rebecca caught her breath again and her awareness returned enough to notice anything beyond the agony of having stood so close to the device during another episode, she almost thought the Diego had given up beneath this last attack. That it had killed him.

He slumped limply forward as far as the ropes and iron chains binding him would allow, his head fallen forward, his chin sagging against his chest, crimson Cruorcian eyes closed. It even looked like he’d stopped breathing until the last hiss from the bomb subsided.

Then Diego’s low, steady, even breath was barely audible beneath the gasping and panting from the rest of the team.

It took a moment for everyone to regain their wits. When Rebecca found Maxwell again, he’d dropped to both knees on the slanted floor, having caught himself with both hands splayed across the chipped cement in front of him, breathing heavily.

She thought she saw his arms trembling as they held him off the ground, but then he let out a furious snarl and pushed himself to his feet.

“What kinda sick fucks would even make something like that?” Whit asked as he clenched his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“The sick fucks we’re gonna put down before this is over,” Maxwell snarled.

“Diego?” Rebecca asked through the pounding aftermath squeezing her head. “Diego! Hey!”

“Oh man…” Shell took two hesitant steps toward the front of the stage. “He’s okay, right? He’s not—”

“Stand back!” Maxwell barked, reaching toward her with a hand. He didn’t seem physically capable of much else.

The troll woman stumbled to a halt, looked back and forth between the shifter and their operatives on the stage, then stepped back again and wiped the quickly building sheen of sweat from her forehead. “But he’s okay, though, right?”

“He’s breathing,” Rebecca replied. “So are Titus and Burke, from what I can tell.”

“Yeah, but for how much longer?” Rowan asked. “After that, I’m surprised he was even still conscious when we got here.”

He nodded toward the stage, frowning against the residual effects of the last power surge. “I would’ve put my money on the big guy, personally.”

The searing gasp from the stage made everyone freeze before they realized it was Diego coming back to himself.

He lifted his head, though not all the way. A string of drool slid from his open mouth before he spit as far to the side as possible for how tightly he’d been bound.

“Yeah, and you would’ve lost,” he croaked. “But hey, I’ll take that bet for next time if you’re still down.”

A surprised laugh escaped Rowan before he ran a hand over the top of his head, swiping back the strands of russet-colored hair that had broken free from the loose ponytail falling down the center of his back.

“Holy shit,” Whit said, gaping at the Cruorcian. “You okay, man?”

“Sure.” Diego sniffed, then spat again. “Fucking peachy. Sign me up for the day spa once a month from now on, why don’tcha?”

The other operatives let out strained chuckles, but even Diego’s wry humor wasn’t enough to cut through the tension swirling around the room. Nor did it lessen the severity of their current situation, or the consequences of what would happen if they couldn’t get out of here soon.

Consequences Rebecca didn’t have the energy or presence of mind to consider at the moment.

She didn’t have to consider them to know this would only get worse for them the longer it took to diffuse the explosive wards around the stage and get the hell out of here.

With the acrid sting of burning metal and the crackling weight of magic in the air like heady ozone, Rebecca studied the empty theater hall, wracking her mind for any viable plan that might work.

If they’d been attacked by their unidentified enemy right now, they couldn’t have been less prepared to put up a good fight, no matter what form of combat.

Then it hit her.

Maxwell had already called it when he’d said their team was almost certainly walking into a trap tonight.

Whoever had built this torture chamber of a kidnapping and magical-hostage situation had very specific targets in mind, and they’d put this whole thing together.

Not every rescue team would have traveled on foot across an abandoned amusement park, site unseen, to recover their abducted comrades. Not to mention walking right into the center of the action with no enemy in sight the way Rebecca’s team had walked right into this theater hall, with so much confidence in their ability to handle whatever the enemy might throw at them.

This had all been set up specifically for magicals like those belonging to Shade, who’d built not only a privatized task force but a community. A family, even. A home of so many misplaced individuals ready and willing to walk into the fire if it meant saving one—or three—of their own.

Individuals who would have responded to the growing urgency and necessity of such a rescue mission with not only their heads but their hearts as well. Who would have pushed themselves onward through anything at the sound of their imprisoned friends screaming beneath intermittent torture.

The psychotic mastermind behind this whole thing had known that added detail would only make the team move that much faster. That it would make them that much more determined to reach the finish line and get this done, maybe even to let desperation take over until they did something brazen and stupid in their rescue attempt.

That was the kind of twisted asshole who'd known the kind of loyalty and perseverance with which Shade’s entire task force operated.

As if the enemy had been able to read their minds far before Rebecca and her team even made it to the park.

As if the enemy had known from the beginning who they were, where they’d all come from, and what they would do in response to an emergency kidnapping and hostage situation.

Which left only one viable explanation for all of it.

Someone had sold them out.

Someone had opened the Pandora’s Box of Shade secrets and offered it on a silver fucking platter to ensure this rescue team walked willingly and without suspicion into literally the most perfect trap.

Because it had been crafted specifically for them .

Rebecca didn’t know how the betrayal had happened or by whom, but the fact that they were standing in the product of it was plain as day.

Such a sick genius would not have left the discovery of their missing operatives and the inability to free them without blowing everyone up as the grand finale.

No, the exploding carousel had been a palate cleanser. That violent mechanical roar and tortured screams merely the appetizer. And now, standing here with their heads up their asses and their hands tied behind their backs by their inability to disarm the wards was just the first entree of a five-course meal.

It wasn’t over yet.

“Hannigan?” she called, trying to keep any panic from her voice while maintaining the urgency.

It caught his attention. He turned toward her with another curious frown.

“It’s not over,” she told him. “We aren’t—”

Safe. Of course they weren’t safe.

But the end of her warning was drowned out by the magitek bomb’s next power surge flaring up again.

It was just as debilitating as the last, bringing half the team to their knees while the other half struggled not to collapse beneath the awful crash and the building magical pressure filling every cell of their bodies.

Diego’s screaming started up again too, joined by a much deeper, more gravelly, but no less tortured scream from Titus, who must have regained consciousness before the device shot him through with enough destructive magical energy to have made him pass out.

The sound ripping into Rebecca's ears and crackling against her eardrums was unbearable.

If she'd finished her warning before the next power surge, and with at least a few seconds for the team to have prepared for even a sliver of the next assault—and a sliver was better than what they had—she wouldn’t have felt so damned useless. This mission wouldn’t have felt so fucking doomed.

As each operative fought their own personal battle with the inescapable agony the surging power bomb shot through them, Rebecca’s gut clenched around a knot of terrible, overbearing realization.

That she had failed them, miserably and irredeemably.

That this was all her fault, and it would only get worse, and that would be on her too.

That everything she'd done to keep her secrets—all her hard work and now her inability to throw caution to the wind and just use her Bloodshadow magic without weighing it all against the consequences—had led these magicals straight into a trap none of them could escape.

And there still wasn’t a thing she couldn’t do about it, because none of them could hear her.

She’d already waited too long.

With her head splitting beneath the bomb’s constant bellow and whine, plus Diego and Titus’s screams, while the rest of the team could manage nothing more than holding their heads and gritting their teeth and trying not to let this sound drive them mad, Rebecca looked up into the wings at the closest overhanging balconies on her left.

It was simply where her gaze had gone as she fought off the dread in her belly and the excruciating pain blasting through her skull. But when she lifted her gaze that way, she found something else up there as well.

An enormous shadow looming toward the edge of the balcony, vaguely humanoid and seemingly unaffected by the sonic chaos threatening to cave the theater hall in on top of them.

A second later, a flicker of dark yellowish-brown light came from beside that shadow. At first just a few flashes but steadily growing stronger and brighter, its yellow-brown color increasingly nauseating by the second.

Rebecca’s instincts warned her of the coming danger from above even before that terrible light pulsed faster and increasingly more violent with every second.

Streaks of brown-yellow burst away from the balcony to strobe all over the theater hall’s ceiling, twisting left and right, strumming and pulsing and shuddering as a low hum added its timbre and augmented chaos to the deafening crash of the bomb’s current power surge.

Holy shit, they weren’t alone in here. The un-diffusible ward bombs had distracted the team just enough that no one else had noticed.

Now, that flashing yellow-brown light spilling from the balcony’s shadows overhead was some other weapon powering up for a major attack from above.

Rebecca’s team was to incapacitated to even prepare themselves.

The only way to successfully handle what came next without sacrificing something she couldn’t afford to lose was if Rebecca Bloodshadow also had the ability to be in multiple places at once.

Unfortunately, she didn’t.

She had mere seconds to pick and choose whose safety and sanity was more important than anyone else’s before she made her next move.

Because she’d already failed them all.