Page 154 of Elven Crown

“Of course we do,” Maxwell replied before sniffing the air again, his nostrils flaring above a determined grimace. “Our guys were definitely here, and I’m betting they still are. I can smell them.”

“So we keep moving,” Rebecca said. As soon as the command left her lips, the shifter’s gaze settled on her face.

Maxwell didn’t look at her like she was hiding something, or like he disapproved of her decision, or even like he couldn’t figure out how to feel around her, which had become increasingly more frequent lately.

He looked relieved.

“Does that special nose of yours know where to go next?” Rowan asked, sniggering at the shifter. “Because if not, we’ll be here all night.”

Maxwell ignored him and swung his weapon up into both hands to hold it at the ready. Then he nodded across the open space toward the opposite side of the now destroyed carousel. “Move out.”

The team fell into formation behind him and followed their Head of Security deeper into the abandoned park. No one was backing out now, their close call with the explosive wards notwithstanding.

With his tracking device now returned to a pocket of his cargo pants, Whit took his position directly behind Maxwell.. Even if they hadn’t had a shifter’s sense of smell to point them in what was hopefully the right direction, Rebecca would have moved this way too—despite the underlying sensation of wrongness she felt here, which only intensified the farther they moved.

The team advanced a lot more cautiously now, watching the ground in front of them for additional casting circles and clearing the front rooms and around the backs of each new structure and worn-down ride they passed.

“Next time you hear music or see something else turn on in this place,” she warned them, “just don’t approach.”

“And if you see or hear anything else,” Maxwell added over his shoulder, “if you get a feeling you don’t recognize, signal an alert.”

It was sound advice, though Rebecca wondered how much good it would do them now, seeing as they relied solely on their own instincts, intuition, and the tracking skills of a single shifter. Though, if she had to guess, Rebecca would have said her Head of Security excelled in that department too.

He’d trackedherseveral times now, after she’d taken special pains to avoid being followed or discovered.

The overly bold idiots who’d thought it was a good idea to ambush and capture Shade operatives and hold them hostage hadn’t done nearly as much to cover their tracks. That much was clear.

This team would find Diego, Titus, and Burke. Rebecca just hoped they got to their missing operatives before the kidnappers did them any permanent damage.

Judging by the explosive strength of a seemingly simple defensive ward conjured from a triggered casting circle in the dirt, she had a feeling time was not on this team’s side.

41

As it turned out, the time-sensitive nature of this mission was far more dire than Rebecca had anticipated, and there was very little any of them could do to prepare for what hit them next.

The team moved in near perfect silence across the abandoned amusement park with their Head of Security in the lead. Not three minutes after they’d left the carousel, they received another deadly reminder that they were not alone here tonight.

The pervasive silence within the overgrown property ruptured beneath a long, deafening, nearly bone-shattering roar erupting from somewhere else in the park to the team’s left.

The noise was so powerful and destructive, even from what had to be a farther distance across the park than Rebecca and her team had already traversed, they felt it trembling through the very earth beneath their boots.

The outbuildings surrounding them shook violently beneath the sonic onslaught. Support beams and door and windowframes, most of them already hanging lopsided and on the verge of collapse, shuddered and groaned.

A brick outbuilding on the team’s right shifted beneath the auditory attack, eliciting at first a series of muffled cracks and snaps before individual bricks burst apart and toppled to the ground. Then the outbuilding’s entire southern wall crumbled and spilled aged brick and decades of dust and shards of its insides all over the ground.

Behind them, what remained of the carousel collapsed with a deafening metallic scrape of the ride’s rusted mechanisms snapping apart and buckling.

Even once that unidentified bellow came to an end in the distance, its remnants still echoed throughout the park, ricocheting off the neglected structures and lending even more destructive damage to an already obliterated scene.

Maxwell didn’t have to signal for the team to halt while the horrifying noise blistered across the park.

When the worst of the echoes finally faded, Rebecca realized with rare astonishment that even from a distance, the sound had brought the beginning of tears stinging her eyes, as if someone had pinched her face instead and left a palpable sting behind.

It was over as quickly as it had overwhelmed them, but no one dared say a thing in the aftermath.

Rebecca had never heard a sound like that before and didn’t know what to think. What she did know was that whatever had made that noise, it was connected to the enemy they currently pursued.

“If we see or hear anything, huh?” Rowan asked, breaking the silence for everyone, though his regular joking smirk had faded. “Remind me again what the signal is.”

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