Page 90 of Elven Prince

“If you identify any bodies,” Maxwell added, “enemy or civilian, do not engage. Wait for a visual. Hold your positions there if you have to.”

“Copy, Alpha.”

Those were the best instructions he could have given. The meeting between Big Boss and Suit wasn’t supposed to take place until midnight, meaning the Shade teams still had a little under an hour to reach their positions and hold until the right moment.

Theyshouldhave been the first ones here. Clearly, they weren’t.

Two vehicles parked out here, on a road no one used, close to a bridge with no other purpose but signaling occasional trains and serving as a neutral spot for gang meetups.

This wasn’t part of the plan.

Maxwell signaled for the team to keep moving in but slowly, cautiously, searching now for those who’d driven that car and even a possible attack. Then he and Rebecca led the formation down the road.

The darkness still provided them with enough cover to sneak up on someone in a vehicle without alerting them, which was exactly what they did. Maxwell tried to peer through the rear windshield first, but the glass was too darkly tinted, and he shook his head.

Rebecca moved with him but on the opposite side of the town car, matching the shifter’s every step while the rest of Alpha watched the trees, prepared to offer cover, if necessary.

When she reached the rear driver-side door, she found the dark window rolled almost halfway down. Rebecca bent slowly toward the open window for a quick look inside, but the only movement came from the window directly across from her—the old man with a gray mustache leaning forward to do the same.

Maxwell. That was still Maxwell. She had to remember that.

They looked at each other through the car, then scanned the back seat and the front.

The town car was empty.

She and Maxwell straightened again at the same time, staring at each other even while he murmured into the comms. “Vehicle at Alpha’s position confirmed empty. Keep an eye out.”

“Same here,” Whit replied.

Another burst of static came through the comms before Diego’s subdued voice joined the party. “Um…all teams? Does anyone else have a visual of the road under the bridge?”

As Rebecca and Maxwell stepped together toward the front of the vehicle, she almost asked what they were supposed to be looking for on the road. But then she didn’t need to.

The evidence lay sprawled out directly in front of them.

The span of dirt road stretching the distance between this vehicle and the bridge, plus farther beyond, was littered with bodies.

Hundreds of bodies. A literal trail of corpses littered across a neglected dirt road within the wilderness that had almost overgrown what the Polly “L” Bridge was supposed to have been within the city of Chicago.

As Rebecca followed the trail with her eyes, the carpet of corpses became thicker and closer together, as if these last few stragglers lying in front of the vehicle hadn’t been fast enough to keep up with the bulk of the exodus toward the bridge.

What the hell happened here?

Without a word, Alpha Team kept moving, following both the dirt road and the bodies, investigating both the dead and how much further danger they’d be walking into if they kept up their advance.

At first, the bodies littered closest to the empty town car were all orcs. Recognizing Big Boss came easily; the guy was twice the size of the biggest orc sprawled across the dirt around him, his grotesquely large tusks thrust into the earth where he’d fallen.

Rebecca vividly remembered those rings on his fat fingers from the video.

So much for her assumption that neither of the gangs was going to show up to their meeting place far earlier than the agreed-upon time.

But Big Boss and all his thugs were dead now. So someoneelsehad shown up extra-early too.

Where werethey?

She glanced up at Maxwell with a dizzying rush of déjà vu peppered with skepticism when the wrinkled, mustachioed face of his illusion darkened into the exact same scowl she normally found there.

He’d just asked himself the same question.

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