39. Chapter 39

39

R ebecca’s stomach sank at the sight of Maxwell growing rigid as he held the door open only wide enough for him to see through into the hallway beyond.

He blocked her view of their newest visitor on purpose. She knew it.

Definitely not a good thing if even her Head of Security got caught off guard by someone inside the compound. Again.

She sat up straight in her office chair, eyes wide. “Who is it?”

Maxwell grumbled something unintelligible, then finally jerked the door open all the way to allow entrance. He didn’t look happy about it.

In stepped one of his security guys—an enormously muscular blackhorn who could’ve been a bodybuilder in another life. “Package for you, boss.”

“Who’s it from?” Maxwell grumbled behind him.

The blackhorn paused, looked back and forth between the shifter and Rebecca, then grimaced with a sheepish shrug.

“The other boss,” he said, nodding toward Rebecca.

She fought back a grin. Maxwell certainly hadn’t expected that change so quickly, had he?

The shifter didn’t bat an eye at the apparent misunderstanding. “The question applies regardless.”

The blackhorn nodded, then studied the plain brown package in his arms.

He didn’t look suspicious or even concerned, but Maxwell’s darkening scowl aimed at the blackhorn’s back intensified Rebecca’s growing wariness as the blackhorn approached her desk.

“Doesn’t say where it’s from,” he replied. “But it’s addressed to ‘The New Roth-Da’al of Shade’.”

Rebecca found herself sharing a surprised glance with Maxwell from across the office. Clearly, he’d had the same thought .

How the hell did anyone else beyond the walls of this compound get wind of Shade’s very recent change in leadership?

“When did this come in?” the shifter asked.

“Just now. Normal mail carrier. It’s the only delivery we got today.”

Today…

Depending on how far away—or how close—the anonymous sender was, they’d found out about Aldous’s sudden demise any time between the night Rebecca had obliterated his spark and mail pickup this morning.

“Did the courier have any information about where it came from?” Rebecca asked.

The blackhorn shrugged again, though all the questions had now formed a confused frown across the lumpy, hairless ridges of his pronounced forehead. “I didn’t ask. Not usually something that comes up in conversation when I’m just accepting packages.”

Maxwell nodded and reached for the box. “I’ll take that.”

“Sir.” The blackhorn handed it over without hesitation, then turned his back toward Rebecca, looking particularly lost. “Anything else I can—”

“I’ll take it from here,” Maxwell interrupted as he turned the plain box over in his hands, looking for the easiest way to start opening it. “You’re dismissed.”

His security guy practically scurried back through the door, taking the liberty of pulling it shut behind him.

“What’s his name again?” Rebecca asked, pointing at the door.

Maxwell fixed her with a deadpan stare. “Rick.”

“That’s right. Rick. Got it.” Not until today had she thought her failure to prioritize learning the names of Shade’s top security team would come back to bite her in the ass. Clearly, she had to start paying better attention.

Rebecca watched her Head of Security inspect the outside of the package, already feeling the knot of dread tightening in her gut. There were just too many unknowns here, which made this the perfect time to start inspecting each of them with a little extra help. “Do we know anyone else who could’ve heard about Aldous?”

Maxwell seemed hesitant to say anything as he headed toward the desk, then cleared his throat. “There are eyes and ears everywhere. Always have been, always will be. Most of them are impossible to track, anyway.”

“Uh-huh. Any idea who these eyes and ears might belong to? Because if there’s still someone in here feeding sensitive information to the outside before we’re ready to share it ourselves…”

“I don’t have an answer for that. I can say I’ve suspected for a while now that someone in power beyond Shade’s reach was keeping very personal tabs on Aldous. ”

That didn’t sound good.

Shifting her weight in the desk chair, Rebecca propped an elbow on the armrest and tapped a finger against her chin as Maxwell gingerly set the package down on the desk. “How personal are we talking?”

“Like monitoring-his-vital-signs personal,” Maxwell replied, then looked up to meet her gaze. “I never found the proof I needed to confirm it, but there was enough to make me believe it.”

She nodded and returned her attention to the plain, unmarked brown box with nothing but ‘To the New Roth-Da’al of Shade’ scrawled across the top in black Sharpie. But it didn’t have a physical mailing address, and the return address and required paid postage were also nonexistent.

Not all that odd for a package sent to a magical organization from another magical organization or individual. Shade wasn’t that hard to find if one knew where to look.

But the inner workings of the task force’s tumultuous last week and its subsequent change in leadership hadn’t been announced in any public way. Which made the writing on this package more than a little concerning.

“Well it makes sense,” she said. “If Aldous was being that closely monitored the way you think he was, whoever was keeping tabs on him would’ve known something big had happened the second Aldous’s heart stopped beating.

“The question after that, then, would be… How did they get their own private access to his vital signs in the first place? Because I’d really love to avoid a similar arrangement, if possible.”

Maxwell narrowed his eyes at her and snorted. “Can’t help you there.”

Rebecca forced back a laugh. “So that’s why you’ve been going overboard in the personal-bodyguard department, huh? You let Aldous slip through the cracks one too many times?”

He bristled at that and looked away from her. “No one ever let Aldous do anything. My job was to protect him. Barring that, I had—”

“Your orders,” she said. “Yeah, we’ve established that. I get it. Someone could’ve gotten their hooks into him any time you weren’t around.”

Maxwell’s jaw muscles worked furiously as he glared at the package between them.

Was that a hint of embarrassment in the uncomfortable twitch across his face? Disappointment, maybe, in his own shortcomings?

It was certainly something she could use to her advantage under the right circumstances.

Trying not to smile at this potential future leverage, Rebecca took a chance on it. “But tell me. Just how many times did you let Aldous give you the slip so he could go running off on his own somewhere?”

His jaw stopped clenching but now he just ground his teeth together in one endless flex before slowly meeting her gaze again.

A thrill of charged tension—of both warning and inviting challenge—prickled across Rebecca’s shoulders with that look in his eyes. Was she finally finding the shifter’s buttons?

“Again,” he growled, “no one let Aldous do anything.”

“Oh, totally. He was a shit leader. We know that too. But if he got himself mixed up with someone else who could keep tabs on his vital signs , I mean… Come on. That’s pretty impressive, don’t you think?”

He snorted but didn’t provide her with an answer.

“Now I’m starting to see why you take your job so seriously with me around,” she added with a smirk.

“You’re not Aldous,” he said.

“No truer words, Max.” Rebecca stood to reach across the desk for the package. “Now let’s see what kind of congratulatory gift our mystery sender packed away in this— Hey .”

With a frustrated huff, Rebecca smacked both hands down on the desk, the package now once more out of reach because Maxwell had just snatched it away to start opening it for her instead.

“I’m sorry ,” she added, scowling at him. “We’re seeing the same thing, right? That this thing’s addressed to the new Roth-Da’al and not the Head of Security?”

He produced a blade seemingly from nowhere and used it to open her first official package as commander anyway.

“It’s for your own good,” Maxwell muttered, deftly slicing away at tape and glued cardboard alike.

For her own good.

First it was poison tests on all her food, then keeping other Shade members from getting remotely close enough for any form of conversation, and now he had to open her mail for her too?

Would he start doing her laundry and inspecting her toilet paper every time she had to go?

“That’s getting real old, real fast,” she grumbled.

His blade disappeared somewhere on his person again before he ripped open the box the rest of the way with a loud snap. “You’ll get used to it.”

Or she could just let the homunculus poison take over completely and kill her so she wouldn’t have to deal with this anymore.

With one more quick tug, Maxwell has the package open and let the cardboard flaps fall away from each other before he peered inside .

“Excellent.” Rebecca cocked her head. “We didn’t explode, and nothing popped out of there to kill me. So now can I have my—”

“Not until I’ve cleared it.”

Of course the first thing he did was to give the package’s contents a good sniff. Rebecca really should have expected it at this point, just like she should have expected it when he reached into the box as well to pull out its contents so he could also inspect them more closely one at a time.

The concept of privacy and personal ownership apparently no longer existed for her new position. That wasn’t going to last much longer, even if it was the one and only change she made to the task force from the inside as its leader.

Scowling at the shifter’s unwavering dedication, Rebecca slumped back down in the chair and relented to letting him do his thing. Fighting him on it wouldn’t get her anywhere. With this shifter, she had to pick her battles.

When he seemed convinced no residual threat lingered within the box or its contents, the first item Maxwell handed her was a small stone trinket he’d unwrapped from within a strip of parchment paper bound in a piece of light brown twine. “This…doll mean anything to you?”

She snatched it out of his hand and turned the cold stone figurine over in her hands before sparing the shifter a quick glance. “Nope.”

He was too preoccupied with sniffing out and personally handling the rest of the package to give her response much thought. Which meant he was distracted enough not to notice the lie.

Rebecca knew exactly what this was, and now she was glad she’d decided to sit down before getting her hands on the thing.

The carving was crude, sure. A little amateur, even. Humans who found stuff like this lying around called them “primitive artifacts from ancient human peoples and cultures lost to time”.

She couldn’t blame them for it. They were working with what they had, and their collective knowledge of Xahar’áhsh, its magic, and the creatures who stemmed from it was remarkably lacking. For good reason.

This figurine wasn’t some random piece of art from an ancient human civilization. It wasn’t even from an ancient Xaharí tribe.

No, judging by its weight, the figurine had been cut, carved, and polished right here on Earth, on this side of the Gateway, quickly and with little attention paid to detail.

Because it wasn’t the details that mattered.

The figurine was just a symbol. An inside joke understood only by Xaharí old-worlders who’d lived in Xahar’áhsh and crossed over through the Gateway at one point in time. A mark from the old days of acceptance and acknowledgement paired with a well-earned advisement for any leader in power .

A message that the game was being played. That nothing lasted forever in the form it had been created to take. Not even stone.

“Maybe it wasn’t meant to be recognized,” Rebecca muttered with a shrug and placed the figurine on the far corner of the desk. “Maybe they’re assuming whoever took over after Aldous has the same knowledge he did. Or lack thereof. Was he Earthborn?”

The question made Maxwell look sharply up at her, his deep frown of concentration flickering for a moment before he returned his attention to the package. “I never asked.”

No, of course not. No one in this world really cared about a magical’s ties to the old world or the old laws, whether they were original Xaharí or a transplant or several generations removed from the birthplace of magic. It didn’t matter in this world. Not the way it mattered back home.

Shifters like Maxwell didn’t come from Xahar’áhsh, anyway. So of course he wouldn’t have thought to discuss detailed origins like that with Aldous.

The changeling could have been an old-worlder, but he certainly hadn’t acted like it. If he’d been Earthborn, though, that made this little figurine sitting on the edge of Rebecca’s new desk a lot more meaningful.

It turned the figurine into a personal message.

A promise.

Then it would mean whoever had sent this fun little gift basket knew enough about Rebecca to know she wasn’t from Earth.

Which begged the question: How they this mystery sender possibly know anything about Rebecca?

Well, that was something she’d have to uncover on her own. Once she figured out how to take a damn breath without Maxwell knowing about it.

Even without knowing who it was from or whether they had insider knowledge of Shade’s new leader, the figurine told her one thing for certain.

The sender was an old-worlder. No doubt about it. They’d chosen to greet Rebecca as the new commander with all the pomp and formality required by old-world laws. Most likely, they didn’t give a shit about Rebecca personally or who’d been before stepping into this new role.

The sender was following the rules and warning her not to let the new position go to her head. Reminding her that she wasn’t the only player in the game.

How cute.

“Huh.” Maxwell shoved his hand and almost his entire arm into the box, rooting around with a whisper of shuffling contents until he pulled out his hand again with only a folded piece of paper to show for it.

“That everything?” Rebecca asked .

“Could’ve used a smaller box.” He unfolded the single piece of paper, scanned it for two seconds, then folded it again and handed it to her. “The only things in there were this and that little statue. The rest is just packing peanuts.”

“Not the biodegradable kind, I’m guessing?” Her smirk faded when she looked up to see only his perpetual scowl. “Oh, come on. You really need to lighten up, you know that?”

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

“Yeah, I bet you will,” Rebecca muttered, then focused fully on the neatly folded note that had been so thoroughly buried by packing peanuts with a single stone figurine.

Her secret admirer from beyond Shade’s physical walls could have just sent the letter. But for an old-worlder, what fun would that have been?

The letter’s handwriting was neat and tidy. No frills, no wordy language, and the letter itself got right to the point.

‘Greetings, Roth-Da’al.

It would seem your organization has fallen into more capable hands than those of your predecessor. Already, I have every faith you will exceed his capabilities and all our expectations.

As an offering of welcome and congratulations with open arms, consider this my invitation to you as a valuable new figure upon the greater field of play. Please do accept my open invitation to the Old Joliet Prison when it is most convenient for you and your no doubt harrowingly busy schedule.

I believe a meeting of great minds in person, as well a discussion of how we can work together for the greater benefit of magicals in the Windy City, will prove fruitful for all parties involved. I humbly await your upcoming visit.

Forever Bound,

Kordus Harkennr’

Rebecca had known from the first few words of this “Welcome to the Club” note that the author was full of shit. This was nothing more than one giant game to her secret admirer, made that much more apparent by the mystery surrounding the package. The stone figurine only supported her theory.

She’d been amused by the whole thing until she got to the very last line to read both the salutation and the author’s name signed just below it.

As soon as she did, her blood ran cold in her veins, and she fought against the debilitatingly strong urge to squeeze that letter in her fist and make it burst into flames just so she wouldn’t have to look at that name anymore.

The name she absolutely recognized, in a place she never would have imagined to see it.

A name she had hoped never to see or hear again in her life.

The name belonging to someone who had been searching for her far longer than she cared to admit.

Kordus Harkennr.

How the hell had he found her?