Page 166 of Elven Crown

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. Thenhe 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.

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