Page 173 of Elven Crown

It filled the air with a hair-raising crackle like uncontained electrical voltage that made Rebecca’s nose burn furiously and all the hairs along her arms and the back of her neck stand on edge.

A low burst of static and an electrical hum were just the start while the lights blinking all over the magitek bomb sputtered to life in a flurry of different colors. The warm-up lasted long enough for Diego to let out a resigned sigh and mutter dolefully, “Shit.”

Then the power-surging device strapped to his back built into a furiously powerful pulse of increasing energy so quickly, no one else had time to realize what was happening before that devastating roar coming right from the device ripped through the air.

A crackling whine underlying the familiar sound rose too, only audible at close range, but barely.

Without walls and doors to block the noise and the auditorium turned into an empty echo chamber, the sound was so much worse up close.

It rippled through the air, surging like a physical storm and hitting Rebecca and her team just as hard.

The next second, her head felt like it was going to burst open at any second, the power vibrating through her at a much more physical level than when it had just been noise from a distance.

The theater hall shook, spilling dust and chunks of rotting plaster down from the ceiling while the wooden stage trembled, adding more cracks to its already battered floor and base.

The slanted auditorium floor buckled, sending the Shade operatives staggering to catch their balance while, they clamped their hands over their ears to almost no effect.

As Rebecca blinked through another swell of tears stinging her eyes, she only caught brief glimpses of the others between longer moments of her vision failing her.

Shell hunched into her shoulders, plugging her ears with her fingers.

Rowan lowered into a full crouch on the floor, his hands over his ears and his teeth gritted.

Whit and Jay wearing the same jaw-clenched expressions, the warlock scrunching up his entire face, while Jay’s eyes bulged from his head as he gazed blankly around the room.

For as difficult as it was for Rebecca to focus her vision on much of anything, she figured Jay might have had reason at that moment to wonder if he’d gone blind.

Then she saw Maxwell.

The shifter had doubled over completely, as if he’d just taken a gunshot to the belly. His wide eyes strobed faster by the second with violent silver light while his mouth had torn open, exposinga glimmer of teeth and canines that looked far sharper than normal as he let out a furious cry of pain she couldn’t hear.

Rebecca couldn’t hear anything in that first second or two that felt like an agonized lifetime. Nothing but the whining shriek of the surging magitek bomb beneath the blistering roar, up close and personal.

Nothing, of course, until the screams started again.

Only now, the whole team knew exactly where they’d been coming from.

Tied to his makeshift torture chair on the stage, Diego got the full brunt of the assault, far more than the rest of them. The blinking lights from the bomb at his back seemed to light him up from the inside, as if the power surge were blasting right through him, feeding off him, illuminating his skin, muscle, flesh, and bone from the inside out.

He screamed and screamed, bucking wildly against his bonds and the stacked cinder blocks beneath him, his head whipping from side to side at eerily impossible angles while his face contorted in agony, crimson eyes strobing with extra brilliance Rebecca had never seen in a Cruorcian before.

Because none of it was from him.

And there was nothing any of them could do about it.

As quickly as it had powered up against them, the augmented power cell—or dormant bomb, or whatever it was—stopped its violent surging. All its blinking lights shut off at once the second the horribly violent roar plunged them into silence again.

That silence seemed complete and total at first, until, through the ringing in her ears, Rebecca heard the soft hiss coming from the device and caught the scent of burning metal on the air.

The second the roaring stopped, so did Diego’s screams.

When Rebecca caught her breath again and her awareness returned enough to notice anything beyond the agony of having stood so close to the device during another episode, she almostthought the Diego had given up beneath this last attack. That it had killed him.

He slumped limply forward as far as the ropes and iron chains binding him would allow, his head fallen forward, his chin sagging against his chest, crimson Cruorcian eyes closed. It even looked like he’d stopped breathing until the last hiss from the bomb subsided.

Then Diego’s low, steady, even breath was barely audible beneath the gasping and panting from the rest of the team.

It took a moment for everyone to regain their wits. When Rebecca found Maxwell again, he’d dropped to both knees on the slanted floor, having caught himself with both hands splayed across the chipped cement in front of him, breathing heavily.

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