6. Chapter 6

6

T hat was the whole reason Rebecca Bloodshadow was here, with the likes of Shade.

Keeping her secrets.

At least, that had been her reasoning in the beginning, back when she’d thought the organization still held up to its former reputation. But then she’d officially joined Shade’s ranks and learned the highly disappointing truth.

Diego’s sarcastic sneer melted into genuine confusion as he stared at the side of Rebecca’s face. “What’s that? What’re you doing?”

“What’s what?” she asked blandly, turning her gaze on him one more time.

He wrinkled his nose, crimson eyes growing wide until he seemed to realize how clueless it made him look and scowled at her again. “That look on your face. It’s like a smile, but it’s definitely not a smile, and I don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to mean.”

“Looks like you’ll just have to keep guessing on that one,” she said.

Without waiting for responses from the other survivors of tonight’s disastrously ineffective operation, Rebecca headed across the dark garage toward the underground entrance leading into the rest of the old factory Shade called home.

Everyone else finished collecting themselves from the van before following her. No one had a whole hell of a lot to say after that, and why would they?

They’d just had their asses handed to them on what was supposed to have been a quick in-and-out retrieval with maybe a few magical shots fired, zero casualties, and a severe lack of the blatant idiocy with which Aldous had led them.

Rebecca should’ve known it wouldn’t actually work out.

She’d wanted to believe Shade’s current deficiencies with the changeling in charge would improve. She’d wanted to be optimistic. Maybe she’d even wanted to grab some of Nyx’s unfounded hope for herself .

And look where it had landed them all.

For six months, nothing had changed. If Rebecca hadn’t been there on this operation tonight, who knew? The team might not have even made it out at all. Only Rebecca had considered seizing a literal open-door opportunity to draw the firefight to a close, even if it meant destroying the weapon Aldous wanted to get his hands on.

She couldn’t have cared less about the weapon. She just didn’t want to be involved in anything directly related to the deaths of magicals who just didn’t deserve it.

All part of why she’d moved across the country, searching for something like Shade in the first place. Secreted away from the pointless battles and the sacrificing of lives like living game pieces on a chess board.

Honestly, Rebecca actually preferred the game of chess to its Xaharí counterpart from the old world known to her kind as eeifte’í —or, directly translated, “little slaughter”.

But no, so much about Shade as an organization had turned out to be nauseatingly similar to what she’d left behind—what she would continue to leave behind indefinitely, if she had her way.

That would never happen if someone didn’t do something about Aldous’s baffling incompetence and the fact that such a royally ignorant asshat was still in charge of the entire organization.

Which was exactly why she’d wanted to keep a low profile, keep her head down, do what she was ordered, not make any waves, and maybe take down a few bad guys in the process.

After what she’d done tonight against Edwardo and his griybreki gang, though?

Yeah, she might’ve just blown the door on her anonymity wide open, and that was only going to make shit worse from here on out. Especially for her.

After a shower to wash out the dust and debris of so many explosions and a light meal—which amounted to whatever the hell Bor felt like whipping up in the kitchens that didn’t instantly make her feel like she’d had a five-pound bag of cement in her stomach—Rebecca found herself doing something she didn’t normally do after missions.

Or before them. Or any time in between, really.

She sat in the common room with those from her team and the handful of other Shade members who either hadn’t been a part of the epic fuckup tonight or had managed to avoid multiple weeks of necessary recovery time after disastrous missions of their own.

Normally, Rebecca preferred to stay in her private room, away from prying eyes .

And, most importantly, away from any possibility of someone else assuming she was available for conversation, or advice, or opinions, simply because she existed.

None of that felt like a possibility tonight, though.

No, tonight, an entirely different mood hung in the air within Shade’s headquarters.

She felt it growing the second Maxwell had parked the van in the garage and gotten out before anyone else to be the first back inside.

Everything else after that had only reinforced what Rebecca already knew.

She’d seen it coming for weeks now.

Certain changes were finally slithering their way through the hallways of Shade’s headquarters like poison slipping through a network of veins. Potentially dangerous changes, sure, if shit got too tense.

The promise of it had existed in everything around her, growing stronger and more palpable by the day.

The most surprising difference for her personally was that Rebecca actually felt like being among the others tonight, studying their interactions, analyzing bits of overheard conversation, and making bets with herself as to which one of these misunderstood do-gooders would be the one to step up and make the biggest change for all of them.

Or at least light the fire under Shade’s ass to get things moving, because someone had to.

She sat on one of the old leather couches that had at one time been a deep, chocolaty-brown but had since grown worn and dried-out, stretched and cracked and sunken to more of a sickly, non-existent gray. The only pockets of color the couch did contain were from several old stains of who only knew what spilled across the fabric over the years.

Rebecca stretched both long legs across the couch’s cushions, crossing one ankle over the other as she casually propped herself up with an elbow and forearm on the cracked and splitting armrest. Then she watched and waited.

Something was definitely about to happen, and she didn’t want to miss a second of it.

She counted twenty-three other Shade members in the common room tonight. That accounted for a little over two-thirds of the organization’s total ranks living and working out of this repurposed steel factory, doing whatever they had to do to get by.

She didn’t know all their names, and she didn’t plan to, either. She only really interacted with the magicals who made up the tactical team from their belly-up bust tonight .

For whatever reason, she’d executed more operations with that specific six-man team—plus Aldous—more than any other combination of Shade’s operatives, and even they didn’t know her beyond what she could offer the unit in pursuit of their various objectives.

That was already more than enough.

The more people thought they really knew her, the more dangerous it was for them to know her at all.

And the more dangerous it was for Rebecca to risk being seen and recognized and discovered.

Names, however, weren’t necessary for recognizing the murmurs of malcontent and dissension moving through the ranks, especially when every conversation she overheard tonight touched on internal frustrations and insubordinate loathing in some form or fashion.

That included discussions of Shade’s most recent failure in the field, which Rebecca had expected everyone in the compound to have already heard about by the time she’d entered the common room tonight.

“Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. You’re telling me he tried to blow up a bomb?”

“I mean, that’s basically what happened…”

“So you guys went in for absolutely nothing…”

“Couldn’t even pick up the fucking weapon. They’d already turned it on…”

“Hell of a close call, man.”

“Too close. If I could walk out of here today, I would. I’m fucking done with this…”

“I would love to find the motherfucker who raised that asshole. Can’t actually be genetic, can it? That kinda stupidity, I mean. It’s gotta be a side effect of something else, right?”

“If something doesn’t change real soon, we’re not gonna make it. None of us…”

“He’s gonna get us all killed for, like, literally nothing. That ain’t what I signed up for…”

“Seriously, I’m fine.” Leonard entered the common room, powerwalking at a furious pace as if that could get him far enough away from Nyx following closely on his heels.

She proved him wrong by disappearing from the hall into the common room with a pop and reappearing two feet in front of him in a flash of violet light.

Leonard yelped and staggered backward, but Nyx seemed far more concerned with imparting her own words of wisdom.

“You have to talk to somebody about it,” she said. “Why not just let Zida take a look? What’s the worst that can happen? ”

“The worst that could happen…” Leonard echoed with a snort. “Are you serious? I can’t believe you’re actually asking me that right now.”

Frowning, Nyx tilted her head and studied his face. “You can’t believe I care about you getting hurt out there?”

“ This is the worst that could happen!” he shouted, sweeping his bloody arm in the shredded sleeve of his leather trench coat toward the common room.

Now everyone else lounging around here in the middle of the night had abandoned their own conversations to eavesdrop on Leonard and Nyx’s.

Rebecca would have done the same if she hadn’t already been watching them from the start.

“Everything that happened tonight,” the mage continued, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “ That’s the worst, okay? It already happened, and yeah, it could’ve gone a totally different way. I mean, any worse than this, and we’d all be dead!”

Instead of fixing him with her wide violet eyes, Nyx gaze now darted around the common room, taking in the sight of almost a two-dozen other magicals all listening quite intently to their conversation turned argument.

“Leonard?” she squeaked. “Maybe we should talk about this somewhere more—”

“No, I’m done talking! I’m done trying to do anything . I kept thinking there was something I could’ve done to make shit better. After that last op went so fucking sideways with the bishta’al swarm, I swore I’d speak up the next time. That I’d say something. And I did!” He pointed at the katari. “ You heard me. I know you heard me. We got to that fucking parking lot, and I asked him, ‘What about a Plan B?’ Right? Didn’t I?”

“You definitely asked him,” Nyx murmured, shooting her wary gaze around the room again as she stepped toward him. “I heard you. We all heard you. You’re not losing your mind, Leonard, I promise. Maybe you’re just…I don’t know. Are you hungry? Maybe Bor still has something in the—”

“I asked because what if something went wrong, you know?” Leonard continued, oblivious to both her discomfort and her attempts to pull them away from the center of the room. “And he almost ripped my fucking head off for even bringing it up! Like I was the fucking idiot. And now look at us! I’m all torn up. I don’t know what the hell kinda shape Diego’s in. Titus is out like a fucking light. Our biggest guy. And you?”

He tossed a hand toward Nyx this time, looking her up and down. “Hell, I have no idea how you’re doing, ‘cause I haven’t even asked! Jesus, I’ve just been standing here, bitching at you the whole time. What kinda asshole does that?”

“The kind who sounds like he still wants the boss to rip his head off, the way he keeps whining about shit. ”

The low, grumbling voice came from the far side of the common room, opposite the hallway leading to Shade’s industrial-sized kitchen and closest to the side of the building housing both Zida’s makeshift infirmary and the ground-floor levels of Shade’s armory full of basic weaponry, kits, and various paraphernalia.

The irony of that placement certainly wasn’t lost on Rebecca.

Nyx, Leonard, and half the other Shade members in the common room turned to fix the new speaker with vacant gazes and gaping mouths.

“Hector,” Leonard breathed. “When did you—”

“Just got in.”

The nurúzhe sitting in a simple wooden chair pulled from an antique dining set wore baggy jeans over enormous sneakers and an even baggier hoodie that hid his full form. The hood pulled up over his head enshrouded his entire face in darkness. The guy even wore a pair of full-length black leather gloves at all times to complete his full-body cover-up ensemble.

The only features distinguishing him from an overstuffed scarecrow were his raspy, gravelly voice and the cold stare of all-black eyes glowing within the darkness of his hood—either no pupil or all pupil. Hard to tell.

How his eyes had become that way was anyone’s guess, though Rebecca figured it probably had something to do with all the death magic.

“And imagine my surprise when I came home,” he continued, “after all this time, only to hear this shit bouncing around the walls. Sounds like y’all seriously fucked up this time.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Leonard snapped back.

“I know what I’ve heard so far,” Hector rasped, the rest of his form perfectly still as he slowly folded his arms in the chair. “Sounds like the whole damn lot of you couldn’t figure out how to get your hands on one fucking target—”

“I thought I heard bullshit spewing from over here.” Diego rounded the corner from the hallway, presumably having come straight from Zida’s infirmary. He stopped right beside Hector sitting perfectly motionless and damn near invisible in his chair and glared at the guy. “Not really the right time to make those kinds of accusations, don’t you think?”

Hector looked the Cruorcian up and down—or at least that was the given impression as his head moved slightly and the weirdly inexplicable glow of his all-black eyes shifted positions. Then he lifted both gloved hands and wiggled his fingers encased in black leather. “Not really an accusation , though, is it?”

Diego looked down at his own fingers, most of which had been wrapped in fresh bandages to protect whatever healing sludge Zida had drenched them in, then quickly folded his arms. “You can say whatever you want, dipshit. You weren’t there. Probably couldn’t’ve handled half the shit we managed tonight, but I guess we’ll never know. You keep disappearing whenever the fuck you feel like it, and I can’t remember the last time you pulled your own weight around here.”

A little chuckle escaped the thick black shadow filling the inside of Hector’s hood. “Right. I do know I wouldn’t have fucked it up so badly that I put the damn head of this rusty old machine in a fucking coma …”

Murmurs of surprise, doubt, and suspicion echoed around the common room after that one simple statement meant to incite a whole hell of a lot more.

Even Diego looked horrified by the fact that anyone would claim a Shade team had taken their leader out for the count, especially when the full details of their last mission debrief hadn’t officially been released to the rest of the task force.

Probably because Aldous hadn’t regained consciousness yet, but that part didn’t matter.

The fact that Hector openly discussed it now was bad enough.

Then the side conversations burst out among the other members standing or sitting together in pockets of three and fours.

“Wait, is that really where he is?”

“What the fuck happened out there, huh?”

“We’re screwed. Totally screwed. If word gets out about this…”

From her casual seat on the old couch, Rebecca watched and listened and didn’t say a word. It took a surprising amount of willpower not to open her mouth to deliver a few well-earned observations of her own.

Even harder than that was maintaining her deadpan expression when every part of her boiled over with the urge to throw her head back and cackle maniacally at the ridiculousness of this whole thing.

Almost everyone in Shade—including Hector, she was willing to bet—hadn’t seen a quarter of the shit she’d experienced in both worlds.

This right here? This was just a bunch of rebels running around, trying to take magical law into their own hands without a clue as to how bad shit could really get.

Without a clue as to how good they really had it in comparison—Aldous’s incompetence notwithstanding.

Somehow, she managed to hold off even the barest hint of a smirk and contented herself with letting this little drama play itself out.

Hector the nurúzhe, Shade’s most frequently absent member, the one guy the rest of this organization knew less about than they knew of Rebecca—and only because she didn’t hide her face—was just stirring up the shit in a pot that had already started to boil over without him.

Interesting .

Whatever he was trying to get at, Rebecca decided she’d keep an eye on it. Curiosity was just another one of those inherent traits so many others in her past had tried to rip out of her by the root.

Used the right way, though, that curiosity wasn’t always a death sentence.

She’d learned that the hard way too.

She wasn’t the only one with their curiosity forcefully stoked right now, but none of the other magicals had the presence of mind to realize this wasn’t the time to completely lose control of themselves.

“Come on, Diego,” someone grumbled. “You gotta tell us what went down out there.”

“This talking rag doll sounds like he already knows what happened. The rest of us deserve an explanation too.”

“If Aldous is out of the game, it changes everything, man. We gotta figure out what comes next.”

“Who said he’s out of the game?”

“That’s what a fucking coma means, dipshit.”

“That’s why we haven’t heard shit about Edwardo and the weapon, right? Because Aldous is done for, and now we’re all—”

“Standard operating procedure.” The low, authoritative growl coming from the left-hand side of the common room—and the entrance to a particularly narrow hallway leading toward the building’s east end—cut everyone off instantly.

All eyes turned that way.

Maxwell stood at the mouth of that hallway, his arms folded, glaring out at the gathered magicals.

Rebecca wasn’t particularly amused to see the shifter hovering there like that, nor did she appreciate his habit of appearing out of nowhere just when things are starting to get good.

This time, though, she was willing to ignore it. More than anything else, a standoff between Maxwell and Hector seemed fairly imminent, and she honestly wanted to see what popped up between them without interference.

Hector chuckled. “Look who crawled out of his kennel to come join us. And how is our fearless leader?”

Maxwell stared at the nurúzhe for an uncomfortably long time before responding. “Ready to get back to the drawing board, actually.”

“How diligent of him,” Hector crooned. “And you know this how, exactly?”

“He told me. Simple as that.”

“Hmm.” Hector’s tone wasn’t nearly as casual-sounding as his one-word response. “I wouldn’t know personally, but I’ve heard it’s a bit hard to deliver orders from an infirmary bed. Especially when unconscious.”

Someone else gasped before more whispers and sharply held breaths filled the room.

Rebecca drowned out the crosstalk noise as best she could to focus on the real issue at hand.

Part of her expected both of these guys with enormously oversized egos to whip it out and start measuring right here in front of everyone.

Hector’s expression remained ever unseen and therefore unreadable.

Maxwell, on the other hand, lifted a hand to his face in a lazy attempt to hide the yawn splitting his jaws open wide.

No way in hell that wasn’t fake.

Then he shrugged. “You’re probably right. But Aldous is in his office, so I guess we’ll never know.”

Confused murmurs filled the air again. It was one thing to make outrageous accusations like Hector had, but it was another thing entirely to heavily imply the nurúzhe was full of shit.

Points for Maxwell, then.

“Is that so?” Hector murmured, his voice rattling softly now like a pile of dead leaves blown across dry dirt.

“I don’t know about you,” Maxwell replied with a shrug, “but personally, I’ve got no reason to make shit up.”

With a slow sigh, Hector lightly slapped his gloved hands down on his thighs and pushed himself to his feet in one swift, fluid motion like water swirling down a drain. “Well then, I guess he’ll be wanting to see me.”

This time, Rebecca just couldn’t help herself.

She barked out a laugh before calling out from her spot on the couch, “Right. Because whatever the hell you do is so important, he wants nothing to do with it.”

Both Maxwell and Hector—as far as she could tell from the disturbing swing of the nurúzhe’s glowing black eyes—turned their gazes onto her as if noticing for the first time that she existed.

“Hmm.” That was all Hector offered in response before he slowly made his way across the common room toward Maxwell and the narrow hallway leading toward the boss’s office.

“Not so fast,” Maxwell growled. For the first time, he added a very clear warning to his words, all of it directed entirely at Hector. “He didn’t say shit about you .”

The creepy-ass nurúzhe stopped in his tracks, which was a fantastic sight.

Rebecca hadn’t been sure the guy had enough of a soul to be surprised by anything.

“Then what the fuck did he say?” Hector hissed .

Maxwell stared at the black oval within the nurúzhe’s hood, then his silver eyes shifted across the room toward Rebecca. “Apparently, he wants the elf.”

For the second time in under two minutes, Rebecca found herself the target of almost two-dozen gazes fixed on her from every location around the room. It took her another moment to realize why everyone stared at her again, and it wasn’t because of her witty quips this time.

She was the elf.

The only elf in Shade.

She shifted on the couch to get a better look at Maxwell standing there in the hallway with his arms folded, his silver eyes fixed on her, expressing zero emotion whatsoever.

Her smirk faded, and she sighed through her nose.

Fuck.