Page 145 of Elven Crown

The healer was already glowering at Rebecca. Her puckered scowl deepened when she met her current patient’s gaze.

The patient she had left in the infirmary after expressly ordering Rebecca to stay there for a twenty-four-hour observation period.

Well, Rebecca was busted now for recovering in record time and letting herself out of the infirmary.

When Zida’s dark and beady eyes narrowed and she shook her head, tsking loudly, Rebecca averted her gaze and pretended not to have noticed. It wasn’t like the alarm hadn’t reached the infirmary, anyway. If she had to deal with the healer’s wrath, fine. Later.

Scattered movement rippled across the common room while magicals jostled each other aside to make way. Murmurs of confusion and speculation increased until Maxwell emerged from the crowd on the far side of the room in front of Bor’s service window, which had been closed and locked up for the late-night hours.

Everyone turned to face their Head of Security when they noticed his presence. Rebecca’s stomach dropped when Rick and another member of Maxwell’s smaller security team took their places beside the shifter.

All three of them were covered in blood, either smeared on their clothes or splattered across their faces.

What horrible thing had happened now?

Even without the blood, she would have known it was something awful. She saw it distinctly in the hard set of Maxwell’s jaw, the heaviness behind his silver eyes as he prepared to address the entire task force at once.

Something had just taxed him greatly, and now it visibly took its toll on this shifter whose standard expression and composure made him look like he could stand against anything.

Whatever this was, it was bad.

It briefly occurred to her that she’d read Maxwell’s expressions in seconds, intrinsically knowing what they meant. Apparently,she’d been paying more attention to his moods and the way he expressed them than she’d thought.

“What happened tohim?” Rowan muttered beside her.

“Shut up and pay attention. We’re about to find out.”

“I get it,” Maxwell began, scanning the faces staring back at him. “No one likes getting yanked out of bed like this, but we have a serious problem.”

A tense hush rippled across the common room. A handful of magicals shifted tensely or exchanged wary glances with their neighbors, but the all-pervading silence proved their Head of Security had captured everyone’s full attention with that opening statement.

Rebecca diligently inspected Maxwell for signs of injury or indication that the blood all over him was his own, her belly churning with apprehension. He wouldn’t ignore his own injuries like that, would he?

“A little over an hour ago,” he continued, his deep voice ringing like a warning alarm of its own through the common room, “I sent a small team out with the shipment of surplus weaponry from Eduardo’s recovered cache. Nothing more than routine transport of supplies to one of our secure off-site storage facilities.”

Storage facilities? Was that another aspect of Shade’s assets she hadn’t yet been made aware of since taking over? Or had it been newly acquired?

Rebecca couldn’t help but wonder if any or all of these external facilities had once been privately owned and maintained by Aldous, but that was a question to be answered at a different time.

Then Maxwell’s words boomed across the room again, both his posture and his voice further stiffening with every word. “While en route, the transport team was ambushed in Englewood. They engaged the enemy to defend against theattack, but now we suspect seizing the weapons themselves may not have been the primary objective of that ambush.

“The overflow weapons were seized, as well as three members of that team, who were subdued and abducted from the scene.”

A muted rush of horrified exclamations and outbursts swept across the task force before someone on the other side of the room shouted, “How did you find out about this?”

Maxwell’s jaw muscles worked furiously. “Out of the four-man team, Nyx was the only one to make it back. She was barely coherent, but she shared that preliminary information with us before she lost consciousness.”

More whispers across the room, magicals shuffling uncomfortably at the thought of the katari doing what she’d done.

“Where is she now?” someone else shouted.

“We took her to the infirmary as soon as we realized what happened,” Maxwell replied, his eyes narrowing and his expression darkening despite the effort he clearly put into an attempt to mask it. “She was in pretty bad shape when she showed up, but we got her to the healer in time.”

“Pretty bad shape. No kidding.

If Nyx was the only one who made it back and she’d popped out of thin air in front of Maxwell and his security team, the blood all over them must have come from her.

Not all of it, Rebecca hoped.

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