Page 13 of Elven Lies

Ouch.

He didn’t want to talk about any of this, did he?

So much for trying to ease some of the roiling tension inside her Head of Security that was now spilling over into the admittedly awful prospect of what they were about to do. But he was right. He hadn’t given her any reason to think that once he agreed to something and set his mind to it, he wouldn’t follow through.

She wasn’t here with Rowan, for instance. That was for sure.

Time to quit talking and face the music, then.

Turning back toward the prison, Rebecca nodded grimly. “Fair enough. Then let’s get this over with.”

As they approached the prison’s guard towers and the mechanized front gates serving as the base’s first line of defense, the wary tension Maxwell exuded only intensified. Rebecca felt every iota of it.

Her attempt to clear the air hadn’t done a thing, but the way he felt so far had no bearing on their ability to do what had to be done. As long as it stayed that way—and Rebecca hoped it did—they stood a decent chance of making it out of this in one piece. Hopefully, they’d be able to say the same about Nyx when this was over.

With daylight on their side this time, their visibility was far better now than their first visit to Harkennr’s base. The ability to see every soldier, vehicle, and armed artillery system stationed around the prison yard made the whole thing that much more intimidating.

Now that Rebecca saw it all in broad daylight, it seemed more of a miracle that she and Maxwell had successfully escaped the first time.

On the other hand, broad daylight also made it easier for the guards manning those towers and every soldier stationed in the yard to see the prison’s two newest visitors approaching far before they came within conversational speaking range. No alarms went off this time, though a few alerting shouts rose through the air until Rebecca and Maxwell stopped in front of the closed mechanized gates on wheels.

A troll manning the guard tower on the left poked his head out through the window to study them from above.

“Identify yourselves,” he barked, though there was no alarm or suspicion in his voice. In fact, the guy sounded bored as hell.

Rebecca reached into her jacket pocket and withdrew the first figurine of dark stone before holding it up toward the gate-tower window.

“We have an invitation,” she replied, feeling rather ridiculous for using old-world protocol outside an allegedly haunted prison on Earth. But ritual and tradition held, and Kordus Harkennr had brought them along with him to Chicago.

The troll squinted at the figurine, hawked and spat out the window, then disappeared inside again before an echoing buzz blared from within the gate’s mechanism as the system turned on. The gears turned, and the wheels rolled aside, opening the gates for two guests on foot—either brave enough or stupid enough or both—to walk willingly into the Old Joliet Prison and all the horrors and hidden dangers within.

Once those sliding gates opened fully, Rebecca and Maxwell took their free pass to walk right on through. It felt like every eye of every guard and soldier on duty focused intently on them, with plenty of suspicion and aggression in their stares. But no one acted on the impulse.

A few soldiers shifted their positions or readjusted their grips on magitek weapons, whether they stood guard on foot or up in the backs of vehicles behind mounted assault weapons.

So far, this was the epitome of a truce, though whether any of Harkennr’s forces recognized the elf and the shifter who’d infiltrated their defenses more than a week ago was anyone’s guess.

The second Rebecca stepped past the open gates and entered the prison yard, this time from the front, those terrible screams, wordless cries of agony, and sporadic flashes of magical light from inside the prison kicked up in her awareness.

Harkennr must have erected some type of dampening ward to keep the worst proof of his presence here hidden from anyone beyond the gates.

But now that she and Maxwell had returned, that proof was once again right here in front of them. The volume and intensity of those tortured wails weren’t nearly as terrible as the last time, but they still existed.

Shooting Maxwell another sidelong glance, Rebecca instantly recognized the harsh set of his jaw and the overly stony expression he’d adopted to mask everything beneath the surface.

From everyone but her.

She felt his righteous fury and his guilt almost as if they were her own, and she would have been lying if she said she didn’t agree with his reaction. Most likely, she felt the same, though it was hard to tell the difference between her own emotional response and what she felt so viscerally pulsing off her Head of Security in dark, trembling waves.

She wanted to ask him one more time if he was all right, if he thought he could handle this now that they were here in the middle of it, but she didn’t want to insult him.

She didn’t want to give anything away to Harkennr or his forces, to make them think their two newest visitors might not be operating at their best with the added discomfort of knowing more abducted magicals in this building currently suffered a fate no one should ever be forced to endure.

Maxwell could handle this. He’d known what this mission would entail before insisting on coming with her. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have joined her.

Rebecca had to believe that, or their chances of success today were already dangerously slimmer.

Once they’d made it halfway across the prison yard, still without any sound or movement from Harkennr’s forces stationed out front, she centered her gaze on the building’s closed front doors. It would have cost her and Maxwell more than they could afford to open those doors the last time, but now, with a hollow thunk and a squeal of rusty hinges, theprison’s old double doors swung open toward them with a stuttering creak.

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