Page 168 of Elven Crown

The concussive force of such a violently powerful roar blistering through the air made Rebecca feel like she’d been shoved inside a powerful loudspeaker and forced to endure the sonic assault bombarding her from every direction.

The bellow rumbled in her chest and up through her head, making her eyes instantly water. She staggered beneath the assault, clamping both hands down over her ears when she regained her balance and looked up.

Maxwell’s shifter hearing, far more sensitive than everyone else’s, got the worst of it. He covered his ears as well, snarling furiously, and stumbled sideways against the wall before sagging against it. It seemed all he could do was stay on his feet.

While her vision blurred and bounced around beneath the chaotic roar, Rebecca found Rowan next.

He’d crouched low to the floor, hands over his ears as he gritted his teeth and glared at the next set of double doors leading into the auditorium and eventually the theater hall’s stage on the other side.

He was so intently focused on those doors, Rebecca was certain he wouldn’t have noticed her if she’d come up behind him to yell down into his face.

The look that came over him next, however, was all too familiar. A look she knew well enough to predict what he intended to do next.

While the ferocious bellow continued from the other side of those doors, Rowan stood from his crouch, grabbing his weapon off the floor.

Rebecca couldn’t hear it, but she watched his mouth form the words as he leveled his weapon at the doors. “Fuck this.”

“Blackmoon! Fall back!” she shouted, but the trembling roar drowned out her words.

Even if he’d been able to hear her, he wouldn’t have listened.

That didn’t stop her from calling after him.

“Stop!”

He took off at a dead run toward the double doors.

“Rowan!” she screamed, just as the deafening bellow like that of some furious mechanical beast snuffed out again.

The end of her scream echoed in the immediate silence, but it didn’t matter.

Rowan’s first round of augmented weapons fire blasted open the doors just in time for him to slip through before they swung shut again on shuddering hinges.

The rest of the team still hadn’t quite recovered by the time he disappeared on the other side, but Maxwell acted as swiftly as he could, given the less-than-ideal circumstances.

“Godammit!” he roared as he shoved himself off the wall, stumbling forward and shaking his head. The ringing in his ears had to be worse than Rebecca’s. “Everybody move!”

As their team leader surged toward the trembling doors, the others got a hold of themselves and followed.

When Rebecca slammed her shoulder against one of the doors swinging shut in front of her just to open it again, she could have sworn she heard and felt the dangerously rusted hinges creak and snap apart beneath the blow, but she didn’t stop to check.

She kept formation with her team surging into the auditorium before they fanned out to prepare for another firefight.

But then everyone stopped, because what greeted them on the other side of those doors was nothing close to what they’d expected.

The auditorium was entirely empty.

Not merely of enemy combatants or an audience to fill the theater hall’s seats. The seats themselves were gone, stripped from their settings bolted to the floor and long since disposed of. The carpet lining the left, right, and center aisles had all been stripped away as well, leaving the team to stand against an enormous open room with nothing but an empty, chair-less downward slope of cracked cement and horribly chipped black paint stretching between them and the far end of the auditorium.

Rebecca had half-expected to see the stage removed as well, but that seemed to be the only part of the theater hall’s main room that hadn’t been touched and torn apart.

The darkness in here was almost complete, save for a small, slowly blinking yellow light on the far side.

Disoriented by discovering absolutely nothing in here, every operative stopped, waiting for their vision to adjust to the dank, barren darkness so they might see farther than the center of the chair-less auditorium.

Now that the awful, bellowing roar had stopped again—for how long was anyone’s guess—the only sound now came from seven different Shade operatives panting to catch their breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop right down upon them at any moment.

Rebecca’s vision adjusted quickly, which only reconfirmed her team was entirely alone.

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