14

A n instant, cloying rush of odors slammed into Rebecca, igniting her senses.

Cooking stew rich with meat, butter, garlic, a hodgepodge of spices, and an overwhelming overtone of freshly diced onions.

The assault on her nose made her eyes instantly water.

Then she saw the figure standing on the other side of the open door.

An older man, late fifties or early sixties. His wavy hair, fully gray, swooping in loose curls across his forehead and beside his ears. The graying scruff on his face wasn’t quite a beard, as if he’d shaved only a few days ago and had been too busy since to maintain it.

Dressed in leather work boots, jeans, and a button-down shirt, he looked exactly like what she would have expected from someone living out here on the land.

Except for the dark, slightly backlit silver eyes settling directly on Maxwell the instant he’d opened the door.

Rebecca’s first thought was that she now stared at a Maxwell Hannigan from thirty years in the future. Or at least the aging equivalent of thirty years for shifters, and she had no idea how that worked.

Despite the striking resemblance between them, however, the two men did not look at each other like family members reuniting, or even as old friends having fallen out of touch for years.

They certainly didn’t act like it.

The second that door opened, Maxwell instantly dipped his head and lowered his gaze—an alarming response from him and something Rebecca had never seen him do with anyone.

She opened her mouth to offer a greeting, maybe to help him out with the startlingly thick tension swirling around the overwhelming odors of cooking from within the farmhouse.

But the old man didn’t give her a chance.

“Thought the cookin’ might’ve gotten to me,” he said, his voice low, gravelly, and not entirely unkind. “Makin’ me imagine somethin’ that couldn’t possibly be true. Not today or any day. But it really is you .”

The next wave of horrified determination and overwhelming defeat blasting from Maxwell almost made Rebecca reach for the exterior wall to steady herself.

It faded again at a ridiculous speed, and when she looked at Maxwell, she instantly noticed the complete lack of physical tension in his body. As if he’d gone completely limp while standing there, with his head lowered and silver eyes trained on the door’s threshold just in front of the older man’s boots.

This wasn’t just respect and deference, humbling himself to ask for help.

This was total submission. Complete and overwhelming, both inside and out.

He’d been instantly cowed by a single door opening and one older man staring at him from the other side.

What the fuck was this?

The older man tightened his grip on the open door and stared at Maxwell a moment longer before he spoke again. “You got some nerve showin’ your face here, boy. Not to mention settin’ foot anywhere near this property. All it takes is one fucking call…”

“The decision is yours.” Maxwell’s voice remained steady and expertly controlled in its deferential softness, and he still didn’t look up from the floor. “And I will accept it, either way.”

“What did you do?”

Maxwell said nothing, the twitch of his slightly clenched jaw barely visible now, his gaze still averted.

This was so weird. Such an oddly formal interaction given the incredibly informal setting.

Rebecca didn’t know what to think beyond the certainty that this whole thing was immensely uncomfortable for her and for Maxwell.

The man behind the door didn’t seem affected by any of it, one way or the other.

His steady gaze remained on Maxwell before he let out a heavy, relenting sigh and shifted his weight, loosening up a little. “What do you want?”

“Asylum.” Maxwell offered a small, slow, unthreatening wave of his hand, gesturing toward the entirety of the Shade task force gathered in the front lawn behind him, the sight impossible to miss. “Refuge and shelter for those in need.”

The older man didn’t once glance at the group on his front lawn, just as he hadn’t once acknowledged Rebecca with a single look. His gaze remained solely, unnervingly settled on Maxwell. “Who will stand?”

“I will.”

“And what am I supposed to do with you?”

Maxwell swallowed thickly, but nothing else changed in his stance or demeanor. “Your house, your rules.”

The other man offered a sighing grunt in either disapproval or disbelief. “So I accept appeal and turn my back to the shadow. What then? You got a plan for that ?”

Rebecca could hardly take much more of this—this unexplained ritual and ceremony of whatever the fuck these two were doing right now. Which looked like nothing more than one guy showing up on another guy’s front porch. Casual on the outside.

On the inside, though, deep down? It was anything but.

That was perfectly clear.

She would have come to the same conclusion even without the barrage of concern, nervous pleading, and so much overwhelming shame blasting into her.

Unfortunately, her connection with the shifter offered no further insight whatsoever.

After another moment of hardening silence, Maxwell finally spoke again. “Refuge and shelter for those in need. They are in need.”

The gray-haired man gently tilted his head. “What other roads?”

Maxwell swallowed and muttered, “None.”

“So the first is also the last. Narrow minds lead to narrower options. Funny how that works.”

Rebecca almost gasped at the renewed flare of anger and frustration now peppering everything else she felt from him.

If this odd bit of ceremonial interrogation lasted much longer, Maxwell would lose his shit.

Even still, he fought desperately to maintain his composure. “If there were any others, I would not be here—”

“You’re damn right, you wouldn’t,” the other man snarled. “Shouldn’t be here anyway.”

In an even more surprising display of submission, Maxwell dipped his head even farther, almost turning his stance into a bow. “The shadow moves without face or fangs or fur. Your house—”

“My house, my rules. I know. You got anything else to say to me?”

More silence. More waiting.

More effortless precision in ignoring literally everyone else but Maxwell—the elf standing beside him on the front porch and nearly a hundred other magicals huddled on the front lawn.

None of this conversation made any sense beyond an incredibly formal method of Maxwell asking for protection for all of them.

The quivering tension only rose and thickened on the porch. No one moved or said a word. No indication that the pulses of complex, indecipherably enmeshed emotions all stuffed beneath the worn and weathered mask Maxwell maintained were warranted at all.

It still felt like one wrong move, one mistakenly misunderstood word, would be the end of everything.

Not knowing how or why was enough to make Rebecca lose her own temper, but she held it in check.

For now.

The moment of frozen, suspended time finally burst when the gray-haired man asked, “How long?”

“Two weeks,” Maxwell replied. “No longer.”

Then the man let out a sigh and opened the door a little wider. “Two weeks, huh?”

“Yes.” Maxwell didn’t so much nod as almost bend in half when he dipped his head again, still staring at the metal grate along the threshold of the farmhouse. “No longer.”

Pursing his lips, the man finally pulled his gaze away from the shifter all but rolling over and exposing his belly in submission, then finally scanned the front of his property and all the weary, desperate, misplaced magicals standing on his lawn. Refugees from the heart of Chicago.

He didn’t look surprised to see them there, but he did take in the sight as if only now realizing they were there.

“You get one ,” he grumbled. “And the shadow can rest. For one. Go on and bring ’em round back.”

He nodded toward the side of the house, then—without looking at Maxwell again or even offering Rebecca so much as a single glance—withdrew and swung the door shut in their faces.

It didn’t carry the slam of finality or even of the homeowner’s anger, but it still felt like fate had been sealed with the closing of that door.

Shade’s fate. Or maybe just Maxwell’s.

Heaving a massive sigh of relief and simultaneous defeat, Maxwell hung his head, his chin nearly touching his chest, and ran a hand through his hair. All the tension seeped out of him in one giant rush, the absence of which seemed to cause the slight tremble in his hand when he lowered it from his hair and back down to his side.

The same tremble coursed through his body from head to toe, barely visible.

But Rebecca was right here, standing so close, she saw every microscopic twitch of loosening muscle, all that contained pressure and bottled emotion finally released.

It lasted only a brief moment before the shifter pulled himself back together and fully straightened his spine.

Finally released from his confusing submission, he lifted his gaze to stare directly ahead at the closed door in front of him.

The ensuing awkward silence made Rebecca want to scream. Instead, she waited for someone to say something. Maxwell or Bor, or maybe even one of their operatives out on the lawn.

When that didn’t happen, her curiosity and impatience and growing concern for Maxwell’s current state urged her to break the silence herself. For all of them.

“I have no idea what just happened,” she muttered.

His boots whispered across the porch’s wooden planks lightly dusted with bits of dirt and prematurely fallen leaves as he turned slightly toward her. Finally, he was once more capable of looking her in the eye. “More than I had hoped for.”

It wasn’t an explanation, but at least it was a good sign.

She hoped.

“Well that’s good,” she said. “No more death sentence, then, right?”

“Not yet. A lot can happen in a week.”

And there went the optimism she’d tried to grab, blowing right off the front porch and dissipating in the bright sunshine stretching across cornfields and pastures all around them.

What remained, however, was probably more important.

Shade had found a place to stay. The older man, who’d looked so strikingly like Maxwell, had invited them to the back of the house. For all intents and purposes, it sounded like good news.

Rebecca would have believed good news had finally reached them if it weren’t for the hesitation, wary submission, and still so much shame churning inside the shifter beside her.

Looking morose and defeated and like all hope was still lost, Maxwell nodded toward the porch steps, then settled a hand on the small of Rebecca’s back to guide her off the porch.

As if staying here any longer to talk this out together might cause the earth to crack open beneath their feet before an endless chasm swallowed them up for eternity.

Even with the thrilling jolt of electrifying intensity racing up her spine at the warmth of his hand burrowing through Titus’s borrowed jacket to light up her body, she let him lead her off the porch anyway.

Nor did she protest when he urged her with a more solid nudge to pick up the pace once they reached the first step.

She still had no idea what was happening or exactly what the agreement he’d just made with the homeowner truly entailed, but she couldn’t ignore the urgency in Maxwell’s movements. Nor did she miss the overwhelming need behind his dully glowing silver eyes when he stopped at the base of the stairs, removed his hand from her lower back, and swept his gaze across the task force waiting for the verdict.

Would they be accepted here, or would they be forced to dejectedly move on and look for shelter and rest elsewhere?

Maxwell’s grimly set jaw and subdued nod didn’t exactly make the answer clear to anyone.

“We can stay here,” he said, raising his voice to be heard across the front lawn. “It isn’t much, but we have been granted a week of sanctuary in this place. Meaning we have a week to figure out where to turn next. We are guests here, nothing more. Remember that.”

He swept his gaze across them one more time, searching faces to be sure his declaration was fully understood and accepted. Then he cleared his throat. “What we need right now is rest, food, and a place to sleep. Now we have it. Everybody around back.”

With only a few pockets of whispered conversation among them, the group moved together, converging at the side of the house to walk around it at a slow, exhausted pace.

Rebecca, however, remained at the shifter’s side, waiting for a more private moment in which she hoped to get a little more clarification.

Zida and Bor stayed as well, watching Maxwell as the shifter oversaw the mass exodus of their operatives from the front lawn to the back of the farmhouse. Like a shepherd overseeing his flock.

Only when the last of them had disappeared did Bor step toward Maxwell, his scarred face pinching in concern as he asked gently, “How’d it go?”

“Better than I’d anticipated,” Maxwell replied, all the certainty of responsibility and duty and leadership gone from his voice.

He sounded like a complete stranger.

Bor offered a curt nod. “Guests, huh? All of us?”

Maxwell fixed him with a deeply knowing look. “You convinced me to take the chance, giveldi. I walked away from it with a week and my life. It will not get better than that.”

“And we’re all grateful for it.” With a grunt and one more brusque nod that could have meant anything, Bor returned his attention to leading Zida in a shuffling gait around the side of the house after the others, his staff thumping softly into the grass with every other step.

Maxwell started after them, but Rebecca stopped him with a hand on his arm. Not a forceful grip like last time, but a gentle gesture. She had a feeling that was what he needed.

He froze at her touch, a tingling ripple of energy flowing through them both at the contact.

Then he finally turned to face her, and Rebecca knew she’d been right. The overwhelming sorrow in his silver eyes, their glow duller now than she’d ever seen them, almost broke her open right along with him.

“Hey,” she said softly, hating the fact that she didn’t know how to fix this for him; she didn’t even know what this was. “What just happened?”

“Later,” he muttered with a subdued rumble in his chest. “You have my word. But hesitation has no place here. And the hospitality comes with a price.”