Page 122 of Elven Crown

“Knox! Hey, stay with me. Can you hear me? Hey!”

Her head wobbled, mashing her cheek even harer against the floor before she felt the hands tightly gripping her shoulders. She meant to say she was fine, to just give her a second, but the words wouldn’t come out.

Then she realized with a detached sort of awareness that she was panting and practically on the verge of hyperventilating.

“Hey, stay with me!” Maxwell shouted again.

A slap filled her ears, joined by a pressure on her cheek as her head wobbled again, though she didn’t quite feel it.

Had the shifter just slapped her to keep her awake?

Her eyelids fluttered, and she looked up to see several magicals hovering over her, their faces all darkened with concern and horrified awe, but none of them holding still long enough for her to recognize.

Something was definitely wrong. Something hurt…some pain in her belly that hadn’t been there a moment before but was now screaming for attention.

Trying to catch her breath and unsure whether she succeeded in slowing it down, she tried to pick herself off the floor, failed, and dipped her head instead. It rocked against the floor where she lay on her side so she could look down at her stomach now pulsing with a dull ache blooming into a sharpened pain that didn’t make any sense.

When her gaze finally focused on her belly and the horrific sight there, it still didn’t quite make sense.

Because where she expected to see her black t-shirt resting over her abdomen, she now saw a growing pool of crimson around a ripped hole in the fabric…

And a huge shard of splintered wood emerging from the center of that hole, its sharp end buried in her flesh where it had impaled her and protruding now by only a few blood-splattered inches.

Her eyes widened when she saw the cause of everything that felt so wrong. With a grunt, Rebecca stared at the broken spear in her belly, then reached toward it with trembling hands and a groan. “Ohshit…”

34

While the rest of the room swirled around her in a haze of smoke and chaos and shouting voices, Rebecca felt only stabbing pain and dizziness and an alarmingly intense heat coursing through her body.

She’d just been skewered by a piece of wooden target.

Shouldn’t she becoldright about now? Or did that come later?

Riding beneath those strangely relevant thoughts was the underlying realization of how much harder it would be to get out of this one without anyone looking twice at how she did it.

“No, don’t,” Maxwell said, gently batting her hands away from the enormous splinter piercing her abdomen. “Don’t touch it.”

In an oddly detached way, Rebecca found his concern more amusing than it should have been, but wasn’t this just her luck?

A warbling mixture of voices swarmed all around her until another familiar tone caught her attention.

“Would you look at that?” Rowan stepped into her line of sight with a crooked smile. “That thing’s powerful as hell. You weren’t kidding.”

He glanced down at his shirt covered in sawdust and bits of plaster after the explosion and carelessly brushed away the mess to let it flutter to the floor.

If Rebecca’s body had currently responded to her commands, she would have told him to go sit in the corner until she got this sorted out. As it was, though, she could only handle gaping up at him with wide eyes, trying to slow her breathing so she didn’t hyperventilate and pass out. That wouldn’t help anyone.

The casual surprise with which Rowan had approached her remained unsurprising. He already knew just how easily she could heal herself after an upset like this.

But no one else did.

So when Maxwell turned away from Rebecca to glare up at the Blackmoon Elf hovering over them both, she couldn’t blame him for his reaction.

Rowan looked down at the shifter and wiggled his eyebrows. “That’s some pretty insane power, huh? Hey, do we have anything else with, like, a slightly gentler kickback?”

With a roar, Maxwell leapt to his feet, pivoted toward Rowan, and sent a fist cracking into the Blackmoon Elf’s face.

With a grunt of surprise, Rowan stumbled backward and tested his newly split lip with a quick brush of his fingers.

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