Page 92 of Elven Prince

“Negative from Alpha,” he said, holding Rebecca’s gaze. “No sign of any physical engagement among the dead.”

“No fight and no cause of death?” Murray asked. “That doesn’t even… Hold on. Isn’t that…”

The horror of the situation hit Rebecca with full force, doubled in strength by the same realization from Maxwell joining with her own. Her awareness zeroed into a narrow, dark, frigid tunnel of understanding and all-encompassing dread.

They’d seen this before.

This meetup tonight was a trap for theirenemies, and they’d just walked right into it.

A violent snarl burst from the shifter as he whirled around in a half-crouch, the flashing pulse of his silver eyes now starting to break through his illusion. “All teams with Alpha! We fall back!”

A searing burn of fire and power and rending pain overwhelmed Rebecca the next second, freezing her in place with its breathtaking intensity.

Not hers. Maxwell’s.

He was ready to shift at a moment’s notice. That moment was almost here.

Shouts from every Shade team rose through the night as they called to their stragglers and repeated the shifter’s command. Footsteps pummeled the dirt road wherever there was room. When there wasn’t, operatives stumbled over the fallen corpses in their haste to regroup with Alpha Team before it was too late to do anything else.

Pulse pounding and chest heaving, Rebecca tried to ignore the noises of her operatives—nearly fifty of them across four teams—racing back to her and Maxwell as she scanned the woods alongside the road, the dark shadows surrounding them.

So many potential places from which another ambush might emerge, and she couldn’t train her weapon on all of them at once.

The sharp whistle from overhead drowned out the pounding footsteps and shouted warnings. It dropped in pitch, doubled in volume, then a blinding silver light descended onto the middle of the road.

Two more followed in quick succession—screaming blasts of concentrated energy firing down onto the Shade teams.

They struck the road with only milliseconds between them, churning up the dirt, overgrown weeds, and any corpse lying in their path.

Rebecca whirled back toward the bridge, her instincts blazing to life inside her in a way she’d almost forgotten.

That whistle. The blinding light. The sound of attack.

She knew them all.

“Everybody stop where you are!” she roared.

Her operatives responded instantly to the Roth-Da’al’s command, though some of them staggered over more corpses or stray rocks or their own feet in an effort to freeze on the spot.

Rebecca didn’t even have time to search for the source of those magical blasts.

The next second, a black streak arced toward her out of the sky, its sleek form glinting beneath the moon before it thudded into the ground two inches in front of her boots.

A cloud of dust burst away from the impact.

If she’d taken a single step forward or the wielder of that weapon had been any less perfect with their aim, the pitch-black, perfectly smooth shaft of the lethal spear still quivering there in the dirt at her feet would have cut straight throughherinstead.

The area around the bridge fell intensely silent, all Shade operatives turning back to see why their Roth-Da’al had ordered a halt and what that terrible thunking noise had been.

Maxwell snarled somewhere behind her at the sight of the spear mere inches from her face.

She would have told him to wait, but a different voice cut through the night, cracking across the darkness with the kind of power and authority she’d only ever heard in one specific place, and it sure as hell wasn’there.

“By the full authority of the Agn’a Tha’ros Conclave and the Lashir’i Alliance, reveal yourself!”

The command seemed to shake the very earth beneath her boots, making the iron breams of the bridge ahead groan under the echoing tremor.

But Rebecca couldn’t stop staring at that damn spear, so close she could feel its terrible power reaching with cold fingers toward her face.

---