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T he next second, Rebecca was ripped painfully from the ecstasy of watching, her mind knocked around by the daunting force of Maxwell’s overwhelming irritation surging against her and through her out of nowhere.

She pressed herself back against the passenger seat beside him to ride out that first wave. The shifter didn’t even seem to notice.

Even if she’d wanted to, even with no other distractions, there was no way to pull apart the threads of churning rage and haste, frustration, and his desperate need to race out and fight. It all spilled from the shifter and crashed into Rebecca through their connection, rendering rational thought impossible.

No way to stop it, either.

The simultaneous comments from her teams through the comms didn’t let up, either.

“Hey, you think the weapons manufacturer felt like dabbling in augmented portal technology too? Figured they’d give the fucker a second shot?”

“Dude, that is now officially the most depressing thought I’ve had all week.”

“Seriously, what idiot would sell portal tech to Eduardo ?”

“Probably figured he’d just teleport himself to the bottom of the ocean or into an active volcano or something. No harm done and another moron off the playing field…”

Rebecca’s eyelids fluttered as her head sagged back against the seat cushion, her face bursting with the instant heat of fury that didn’t entirely belong to her. She sucked in a sharp, hissing breath, steeled herself against the storm of Maxwell’s emotions, and opened her eyes again.

Still unable to look away from the blinding column of swirling white light in the parking lot—the central convergence of every scrabbling stream of griybreki swarms bearing down on Shade Headquarters.

Maxwell had every right to feel the way he did. Eduardo was attacking their home, and sitting here in their vehicles, shouting guesses into the void about how specifically the bastard had managed it, wouldn’t change a thing.

But if the shifter didn’t rein in his volatile emotions pretty fucking quick, they’d eventually overwhelm Rebecca to the point of making her useless in this battle—just the next fight in an endless string of harrowing combat her task force wouldn’t survive without her.

She’d seen enough even from here to know that much.

As soon as the heat in her cheeks receded enough to no longer make her dizzy, she turned toward Maxwell still white-knuckling the steering wheel and going nowhere.

He needed to pull himself together. If he hadn’t managed it already, maybe he just needed a little push…

“…looks like he knows exactly what he’s doing now.”

“That’s the part that fucking scares me.”

Then a thin, shrill voice rose through the comms above all the others, carrying more absolute certainty than it had ever carried before.

“It’s not magitek,” Nyx said. “That’s a blink.”

The turbulent crash of nearly seventy-five operatives talking over each other snuffed out instantly, replaced by a sudden, eerie silence of confusion and the awful weight of what Nyx’s statement implied.

All the unanswered questions and impossible unknowns that came with them.

No one had to ask for clarification.

Delivered as it was, straight from Nyx, the meaning was woefully clear.

She’d meant one of her abilities. An inherent and uniquely katari ability.

Her race’s well-known capability of teleporting across enormous distances without the need for powerful reagents, or complicated spellcasting, or any of the requisite nasty side effects suffered by anyone else who successfully harnessed such a useful trick, no matter their race.

Except for a katari. For them, it was as natural as breathing.

The new silence permeating the comms carried the unspoken question no one dared ask aloud, though they all wondered the exact same thing.

How the fuck did Eduardo get his hands on the ability to use and control katari magic like this with such precision? Or at all?

Maxwell’s next growl shattered the eerie stillness surrounding Nyx’s latest revelation. “Whatever he’s trying to do, that nexus there won’t last much longer before it explodes. That’s our priority target. All teams close in on—”

“That’s not Eduardo,” Rebecca interrupted.

The comms went deathly silent again, every operative baffled by the fact that anyone would contradict their Head of Security at a time like this—even their Roth-Da’al.

She still couldn’t stop staring at that column of white light at the center of the chaos.

Her next thought wouldn’t have occurred to her if Maxwell hadn’t put ‘Eduardo’ and ‘nexus’ in the same sentence, but she knew without a doubt Eduardo had nothing to do with that brewing storm of deadly power.

She couldn’t logically explain why, but she sure as shit felt it.

Even the sound of Maxwell gruffly clearing his throat beside her couldn’t make her look away.

“Then who is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know…” she murmured, then remembered with a painful flare of acuity that this wasn’t just the two of them, alone, in a private conversation. “But it’s not fucking Eduardo. I know that much. Priority targets are the fucking frogmen swarming HQ.”

Under any other circumstances, facing any other threat anywhere else, the Shade teams would have moved instantly at those words, taking action on their Roth-Da’al’s command without an official order, because they all knew by now how this worked with Rebecca in the lead.

But this was so mind-numbingly different.

No surprise, however, when Maxwell recovered first, far more quickly than anyone else, before clearing his throat a second time and stepping back in.

“We break up the siege. Full infiltration. Then we get the rest of our people out of there. Bravo Team, east flank. Charlie takes west. Delta’s on the north sweep. I don’t care how you get there, but you fucking get there, and you take out everything that moves.”

“Aim for the jump points where they’re all coming from.” Nyx’s voice rose shrilly through the comms again, impossible to mistake or ignore. “Shut those down, and they won’t open again.”

“You heard her,” Maxwell snarled. “Move!”

Vehicle doors opened and shut. Weapons clicked against gear while every operative gathered their things and prepared for one more battle, again, with hardly any rest between.

Even when Tig, Shell, Theo, and Murray wasted no time getting out of the Honda, Rebecca remained in the passenger seat, waiting until the shifter beside her was ready to move on his own orders.

Shade’s four combat teams broke away from the vehicles, moving in tight formation into the woods and toward their target locations, leaving little sign of their presence and almost no sound. They weren’t Hakalini’ir , after all.

Fifteen seconds. That was all Maxwell gave himself before he finally looked at Rebecca for the first time since bringing the Honda to a screeching halt half a mile from the compound.

She already felt the tumultuous battle of his warring emotions through their connection before she met his silver-glowing gaze. Then the strength of what he felt only intensified.

But at least now he’d pulled the worst of it back under his control, which meant she didn’t have to worry about fighting off an attack from the shifter’s flaring rage and thousands of griybreki intent on bringing Shade to its knees. For now.

Maxwell let out a low growl and finally released his grip on the steering wheel, flexing his fingers wide as he held her gaze. “I’ve never seen this before.”

“Me neither. But we’ve definitely seen worse.”

It wasn’t very reassuring for either of them, but it was true. Accepting that truth, no matter how difficult or how large the threat they now faced, was still far preferable than lying to themselves about the situation.

When he inhaled deeply through his nose, she thought Maxwell meant to say something else, but then he tore his gaze away from her and opened his door. “Time to move.”

She couldn’t argue with that. But the second she stepped out of the Honda’s passenger seat, the thick power radiating through the air, even this far out from the compound, nearly knocked her over before she could even close the door.

Beyond the gurgling shrieks and yammering of the griybreki swarms—now ten times louder outside the vehicle—beyond the hissing explosions of battle magic joined by endless sputtering echoes of augmented weapons fire, the air crackled with a staggering intensity of powerful magical energy in the distance.

Rebecca sucked in a hissing breath through her teeth, overwhelmed by the veracity of such power like she hadn’t felt in so very long. Certainly not on Earth. For the briefest moment, she sagged against the side of the vehicle and tried to cover it up by pushing the passenger-side door shut beneath her weight.

The dizzying effect of everything she felt swirling through the air only lasted a fraction of a second before she recovered herself, but it was clearly long enough for Maxwell to have noticed.

“What is it?” he asked, his voice barely audible over the muffled explosions in the distance and the constant background clatter of magical warfare.

She tried to look at him, to let him see in her eyes that whatever it was, she could handle it. But her gaze had already fallen again onto the churning column of burning white light rising from the compound parking lot like the beam from an unseen alien spaceship touching down to Earth.

Aliens would have been a preposterous explanation, but she still couldn’t look away.

The physical sensation of Maxwell watching her was unavoidable too. His calculating silver gaze elicited another flash of tingling heat in her cheeks as she took two small, staggering steps forward, her eyes glued to that blinding light.

She felt him watching her. Wondering at her reaction. His concern that she knew something he did not and might not reveal any of it to him before they headed in to join their operatives in breaking up Eduardo’s siege.

What was she supposed to tell him, if she could even bring herself to speak right now?

That whatever that blazing column of burning-white light was, it called to her, drawing her to it like a moth to the fucking flame? That something inside that deadly vortex of concentrated magic felt more familiar than anything she’d encountered in this world over multiple centuries?

That she had no idea exactly what it was—the most concentrated, fearful, awful power she’d felt on Earth that didn’t come from her?

She could see nothing but the blazing light from this distance. All she knew was what she felt, nothing else.

How did she explain that to anyone, even to Maxwell? Even through their connection?

The next second, all thoughts of the shifter, of their operatives moving in around the compound’s perimeter, of Eduardo and his griybreki horde throwing everything they had at Shade’s home—all of it disappeared.

Rebecca floated forward down the dirt road, leaving everything else behind, aware only of the power she felt from that burning-white light and her certainty that whatever existed at its center was terrible and incredible and that she had to get there…

“Rebecca.”

If her name on Maxwell’s lips hadn’t already stopped her in her tracks, the warm weight of his hand settling on the back of her arm certainly would have. As soon as she remembered she wasn’t alone, sensation and awareness all crashed back into her.

Including everything she felt radiating off the shifter in waves, pulsing into her as if they were her emotions and reactions instead. His curiosity and confusion mixed together in a heavy blur. His concern for her, tampered as it was by a different sort of confusion and a little fear.

He had to be feeling her attraction to that glowing thing at the center of so much blinding white light. He had no idea what it was. Neither did she. But now that he felt what flowed through Rebecca, a good deal of his confusion and hesitation must have stemmed from his own residual attraction to that same light.

Whether he realized it came straight from Rebecca or he harbored his own shifter’s curiosity of it as well.

She didn’t shrug away from beneath his hand, and he didn’t remove it yet. The question he once might have voiced but no longer needed to hung in the air between them, flavored by the even stronger sentiment their strange connection revealed.

He didn’t want her to walk headfirst into that magical storm all on her own, especially when neither of them knew what it was.

“If I could name it,” she murmured, “I would. It’s not Eduardo. That’s all I can tell you.”

“It won’t hold—”

“It’ll hold long enough.”

With great effort, Rebecca tore her gaze away from the roiling mass of storming white magical energy and looked up at him again. The tingling surge of their connection—still always strengthened somehow by gazing into the shifter’s glowing silver eyes—now felt like a welcome relief compared to the intensity of staring at that burning storm and the way it captivated her.

“And I’ll be there to hold back the worst of it when that thing finally goes off,” she added. “Because you were right. It will.”

“And after?” The frown darkening his features remained much longer than it usually did. Either he’d given up trying to hide his emotions from her behind that stony mask of apathy, or he no longer could.

She couldn’t tell which she preferred, only that the shifter’s concern for her overwhelmed everything else.

Why did he look so… sad ?

“After?” she repeated.

“You better fucking be there afterward too,” he growled, finally lifting his hand from her arm and leaving a painful cold in its place.

Rebecca couldn’t help but smirk up at him. “Your threats are starting to lose their bite, wolfie.”

“Don’t worry.” Maxwell rolled his eyes and looked away to face the battle ahead. “I’ll have plenty more for you when this is over.”

Well, at the very least, his comedic timing had improved. A little.

She didn’t have to say it in that moment, but Rebecca knew instantly what this was.

For the first time since Shade had made her their new Roth-Da’al, she and Maxwell were about to walk into significant danger and a whole lot of unknowns, and her Head of Security hadn’t demanded he remain at her side for her protection.

He wouldn’t. She could feel that too.

Without any words or concrete thoughts shared—the only thing their connection hadn’t yet tapped into—she also knew why Maxwell didn’t insist on staying at her side this time.

Because his wolf could do a lot more damage against the enemy than trying to protect her from something neither of them had ever seen before and still didn’t understand.

This time, they trusted each other to get the job done, without physically staying together, without fighting side by side.

All due to Shade’s literal survival at stake now in a way they’d never faced before.

Even with all of that unspoken, she had one more thing to say, and she suspected Maxwell was waiting to hear it.

“If Eduardo went through all this trouble, there’s no way he’s sitting this one out. He came here to watch us burn, because he thinks we will. When you find him, I want his last thought to be how fucking wrong he was.”

Maxwell’s eyes pulsed with a hungry silver glow as he dipped his head toward her and growled, “It’s done.”

That was it. No orders needed. No arguing. No trying to hammer out the details of a last-minute strategy when there had hardly been time for this conversation.

He already knew exactly what she wanted; they shared the same goal.

Without another word, Maxwell shifted right there in front of her, in the middle of the road in the early morning darkness. Shadows scattered like terrified rodents beneath the silver blaze of light blooming around him.

Rebecca’s veins boiled with searing heat and a shuddering burn rippling down her spine, her flesh igniting with the echoes of what the shifter always felt when he called his own inherent ability out to play.

But she only felt a sliver of it, she knew. It was enough to make her glad of their magical differences.

When the burst of silver light faded, all that remained were her Head of Security’s empty shoes, his clothes crumpled in a pile in the dirt, and a final glimpse of Maxwell’s enormous, shaggy gray wolf bounding into the woods before he disappeared through the trees.

Setting her sights on the battle, she forced herself to move. To keep walking on her own. To enter the fray as herself and hope it would be enough to stop this.

If she didn’t force herself forward, to just put one foot in front of the other and not look back, the physical pain of Maxwell’s wolf loping away from her and after his prey would have made her stop.

The startled yelp and ensuing snarl bursting from the thick woods, with a brief and heavy crash through the underbrush, reached her at the same time.

Somehow, knowing he felt that pain of their separation too—whether wolf or man—gave her the strength to keep moving and trudge through the rest of it until they were so far apart again, the pain finally receded.

It still hurt like a bitch.

But they had a job to do, and for this one, they each had to do their part alone.

Maxwell would find Eduardo.

Rebecca would reach the center of that agonizingly powerful column of white-hot energy burning away in the parking lot. She’d make sure that when it erupted—and not knowing what it was wouldn’t change the inevitability that it would erupt—she would be there keep it from taking everything Shade had left.

Namely, all their lives.

As she reached the edge of the parking lot, and the searing ache of the distance between her and the shifter settled into a deep, low, far more manageable throb at the base of her skull, she just hoped she and Maxwell had enough time to finish what they started while they were apart.

And that their separation now wouldn’t end up being their downfall.