Page 22 of Elven Throne

“Not like that.” He reached her, unzipped his light jacket, and whisked it off his massive shoulders before draping it around hers. The warm weight of it was a welcome protection, the normal-sized jacket for Titus falling just below her knees as it draped over her frame.

Rebecca looked down at herself in the overlarge garment and snorted. “Not exactly my style.”

Titus stepped back and folded his arms with a deepening frown. “That’s all you get. The bearskin’s mine.”

Huffing out a laugh, she zipped up the jacket around the frayed remnants of her own clothing and looked up at him, rolling up the sleeve cuffs so she actually had use of her hands. “Thanks.”

“Ditto,” he said with a nod. The concern in the big guy’s eyes beneath that remaining frown said everything else he couldn’t voice.

“All right.” Rebecca nodded toward Zida and Bor standing in the crater with her. “Help them out of here.”

Titus turned his focus onto Shade’s elders still clinging to each other. At the vuulbor’s approach, Bor gently released the healer and grunted. The big guy helped Zida out first, despite the fact that he could have carried them both out of the crater at the same time. Just not with both their dignity still intact.

Then Rebecca climbed the crumbling, debris-cluttered slope on her own, surprised to find several hands extending down toward her at the top, which she took gratefully for a final boost up and out.

When Leonard and Murray finally released her with wide eyes, nodding at her muttered thanks, they both stepped back to give their Roth-Da’al some space.

No one else around the crater moved much beyond stunned shuffling as they took in the overwhelming destruction left in the battle’s wake.

Staggered groups of operatives emerged from the tree line in all directions, weapons at the ready as they cautiously reached the parking lot only to find the battle permanently finished.

Rebecca gave them time to process what they were seeing and surveyed the extensive damage for herself.

The crater was much larger than she’d first thought, now that she stood above it. The compound had taken significant damage, multiple areas sagging where they stood, as if the rest of the building would collapse into dust at any second.

Somehow, it still held. Probably not for long.

After turning in a slow circle for an initial assessment, she turned back toward her task force. All the wide-eyed, shell-shocked faces staring at the battlefield, silently waiting for whatever came next while those who’d gone after the jump points around the perimeter finally joined the larger huddle at the edge of the crater.

“The griybreki?” she asked.

At first, it seemed no one had heard her until Diego cleared his throat and gestured toward the crater.

“That damn light snuffed ‘em all out,” he said, his voice hoarse but otherwise steady. “No bodies. No remains, even. No proof of anything.”

Then he habitually reached up to grab the brim of his baseball cap, paused when he realized it was gone, and let out a growling groan of frustration before running his hand through his dust- and soot-speckled hair. His crimson Cruorcian’s eyes flashed in the darkness, with nothing to hide their glow.

Just as Rebecca had intended, the final explosion of Zida’s magic had taken out the entirety of the griybreki swarms and not her task force with them.

“Any word about the jump points?” she asked.

“Explosion fried the comms,” Theo replied with a weary shrug. “Haven’t heard anything from anyone out there yet. But there’s Braxus.”

He nodded toward the troll approaching the crater with the rest of Charlie Team first while the other three returned from their various points around the parking lot, slightly behind.

So Rebecca asked the same question of Braxus when he finally reached them.

The troll swallowed, tried to shake out more of the stripped leaves and snapped twigs caught in his hair and clinging to his clothes, then gave up with a heavy sigh. “We got three of ‘em closed up tight before the whole world lit up and threw us farther into the woods.”

“Any injuries?”

“Nothing we can’t handle, boss.”

So far, it had turned out better than she’d expected.

The rest of their post-battle reports were delivered in a staggered line of combat-weary operatives recalling what they’d accomplished before the final explosion had ended everything for everyone.

Five other jump points had been successfully destroyed before the explosion, though the teams had confirmed a total of twelve placed around the compound in a radius of two and half kilometers.

---