Page 156 of Elven Crown

The elf ignored all of it. “If you’re concerned about attracting too much attention, I’ll cover for you. Just sneak behind one of these buildings and do your thing when no one’s looking.”

“This isn’t up for discussion,” she whispered harshly.

“Probably because you haven’t had anyone to discuss itwith. We could fake another injury, if that’s more your style these days. Go ahead. Sneak around back. I can shoot you in the leg or something and say I saw some shadowy figure fire at you from across the way. Then bam. You’ve got your excuse right there.”

By the Blood, would he never shut up?

She didn’t remember him being this stubbornly obnoxious back in the day.

Then again, long periods of time seemed to have that effect on memory, didn’t they?

“Or if you’ve got something better in mind,” he continued, “go ahead and share it now. At this point, I’m honestly willing to do anything if it means drawing all this boring business to a closeas soon as possible. Just get it over with already. It’s not like anyone else here has a clue what you’re actually doing—”

“Stop talking,” Rebecca muttered, clenching her teeth.

“For how long, exactly? Listen, I know Earthside magic has come a long way in the last couple hundred years or whatever, but it’s still so insufferably—”

Rebecca whirled on him so fast, he stopped short and stared at her, his eyes wide.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Blackmoon,” she hissed, fighting to keep a lid on her aggravation so she wouldn’t scream in his face at full volume and alert every enemy combatant to her team’s exact location. “This is how we do things, end of story. If you have a problem with that, you can go back and wait in the car.”

Rowan chuckled before his mouth popped open for a reply.

She surged forward without giving him the chance and took up her position in the team’s formation again, clenching her jaw and staring straight ahead. Pretending to focus on the dark, open, empty landscape stretching between them and the next grouping of outbuildings up ahead.

She also pretended not to notice the wary looks the team shared with each other and occasionally sent her way.

Maxwell looked back from the point of their formation to scowl at Rowan again. When he met Rebecca’s gaze, that scowl remained before he faced forward and resumed their forward march.

Of course this put the entire team on edge. If they didn’t have a cohesive unit here tonight, they risked compromising the entire mission. Clearly, it took very little effort on Rowan’s part to distract them from their objective, which would only lead to more frustration and dissension and eventually the kind of chaos that hadn’t served them under Aldous.

The kind of chaos they certainly couldn’t afford now.

If Rowan had been some random elf stumbling into Shade’s headquarters, who’d completed The Striving and joined the task force like any other newly vetted and sworn-in operative, Rebecca would have pegged him as an imbecile.

Tonight, she would have called him a threat to this team’s success and the safe recovery of their kidnapped members. She would have banned him from any and all additional field missions in the near future until he proved he could be an asset instead of an unparalleled liability.

But he wasn’t just another random magical off the streets. He was something else,someoneelse, and he already knew how much his reckless, highly obnoxious behavior would affect everything.

He knew what he was doing, which exasperated Rebecca that much more.

Before they’d left headquarters, she’d believed Rowan would still be an asset tonight despite his defects, but now she wondered how much a Blackmoon Elf could change over centuries.

Fortunately, he didn’t keep hounding her, and Rebecca refused to look for him within the team’s formation to confirm that he’d fallen in line. As long as the Blackmoon Elf kept his mouth shut, she was happy.

Then the team reached the opposite end of the open field and the next group of outbuildings dotting the landscape like old, twisted, barren dinosaurs of their former selves against the night sky.

There were no lights here, either, which meant the team’s only visibility came from the moonlight and their individual capacity, at varying degrees, to see in the dark.

Maxwell signaled to remain on high alert as he led them through the center strip of what had once been a haphazardlycobbled street set up between two rows of long, narrow two-story buildings.

Decades of weeds and hardy wild grasses reclaiming the area had broken up the cobblestones, making this central avenue an unsteady, wobbling pathway beneath their feet. The farther they moved down this main strip, the clearer its original design became.

The buildings to either side were lined with manufactured storefronts in the overly stylized theme of an old Western town’s main drag. They passed the remnants of a tack shop, with a warped and dented selection of iron horseshoes out front.

Several had gone missing, their absence noticeable only by the darker horseshoe-shaped strips left behind on the storefront’s warped wood where they’d once hung.

There on the left were the telltale batwing doors of the saloon, plus the faded remnants of a sign that had declared laughably low prices for room and board at the inn, for a total of twenty-five cents.

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