Page 169 of Elven Crown

What the hell was this supposed to be?

Then something stirred at the bottom of the slope by the stage. A low, strained groan carried toward them across the darkness.

“Oh,look. Someone finally grew the balls to come talk to us in person, huh?”

It was without a doubt Diego’s voice, though strained and hoarse from all the screaming.

Rebecca and Maxwell exchanged a knowing look but said nothing before heading down the theater hall’s barren slope toward the stage with the team following behind.

Calling out to Diego now was just as dangerous as barreling into this building without any idea what they were getting themselves into, but now there was a very real, very tangible reason to remain silent.

Diego was obviously talking to someone else, which meant whoever he was taunting right now might not yet have noticed the team’s arrival after all the noise.

Diego’s forced scoff split the silence again. “I bet you’re all too chickenshit to even come up here and look us in the eye. Come on! Getrealclose. Why don’t you take a look at exactly what you’re dealing with?”

The closer Rebecca inched toward the stage, though, the clearer it became that no enemy targets waited for them anywhere.

That slowly blinking yellow light paused before several others in a multitude of washed-out colors took up a similarly blinking rhythm. In seconds, the stage had become a twinkling source of a few dozen different-colored lights. Winking in and out together, they now illuminated the rest of the stage.

Diego wasn’t alone.

Two other slumped, unmoving forms sat on the stage with him.

Rebecca recognized the slightly misshapen outline of Titus’s huge bald head and the slant of his nose as his head drooped forward over his chest. She could only assume the third figure was Burke without immediately hopping up onto the stage for a closer look.

All three of their captured operatives were present and accounted for, and from a distance, they seemed relatively unharmed, though Titus and Burke’s stillness were slightly alarming.

“Huh? Come on!” Diego spat. “Get closer. I dare you! You shithead cowards are all the same, you know that? You don’t even have the guts to fuckinglook at me!”

Maxwell signaled for Whit to join him toward the stage before they both quickened their pace. The others waited and scanned the dark theater, prepared to offer cover fire if necessary.

It certainly felt like it would soon become necessary.

Diego hissed, struggling against unseen bonds, then threw his head back and shrieked with a madman’s cackling laughter. “That’sright! Climb on up here if you dare, you fucking cowards!”

“That’s the plan,” Whit grumbled as he and Maxwell reached the bottom of the sloping floor, now with only the empty front aisle between them and the stage.

“Wait, what?” Diego struggled harder, joined by the heavy clink of something scraping and bumping the stage’s wooden floor as he rocked sideways and strained to get a better look at his rescue party.

The lights beneath him and all around him pulsed together with a brighter glow, and his crimson eyes widened. “Shit. It’syou.”

When Rebecca saw the Cruorcian’s face drain of all color, she knew she’d been right.

Something was still very wrong about all of this.

“No, no, no!” Diego hollered, struggling wildly now. “Wait! Don’t come any closer—Stop! Don’t fucking move!”

“Whoa, whoa. Hold up.” Maxwell stopped two feet from the base of the stage and extended an arm to keep Whit from approaching any farther. “What do you mean, ‘Don’t come any closer,’ Diego?”

Murray cleared his throat, then summoned an orb of ghostly yellow light that did nothing to help the already eerie ambiance of the barren, stripped theater hall. When he tossed it into the air, his orb cast a pallid, sickly glow over everyone.

But it was what they needed.

Now they could see, including why Diego had switched so suddenly from captive bravado to genuine terror.

It was definitely him, Titus, and Burke together on the stage, sitting in a roughly circular three-men gathering, their backs turned inward toward each other.

The backs of their chairs made last-minute out of stacks of warped and decaying plywood, random supply pallets, and piled bricks and cinder blocks from other rubble around the park jutted up against some monstrous bit of machinery, as big as Titus, mounted in their circle’s center.

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