Page 175 of Elven Crown

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 forthem.

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.

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