Page 74 of Elven Crown

Maxwell’s hind paws clicked and scratched against the trailer floor, and Rebecca acted on instinct.

She launched an orb of crackling red magic at the wolf’s bristly hide. The burst collided with his flank and knocked him off balance.

With a yelp of surprise, he didn’t stick around to go after his prey again. Instead, he turned with a snarl, leapt past Rebecca, and landed with a clicking skid across the asphalt before darting out of view and disappearing altogether.

She hadn’t thought that one through all the way to the end.

Maxwell would hold this against her for a long time, she was certain. But he’d left the trailer now, which meant she stared down at Rowan lying on his back, his eyes wide as he processed what had just happened.

In an instant, his shock disappeared beneath another gleaming grin he flashed up at her. “Thanks.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” she snapped. “Get up.”

Shrugging off her anger, Rowan pushed himself off his back, then rose to his feet and sighed. “Why is everyone around here so touchy?”

When he briefly caught her gaze again, she recognized the short-lived glimpse of hurt in his eyes—something she hadn’t seen in centuries but remembered all too well. There was nothing she could say to him to alleviate that hurt. Not here in front of everyone.

He’d been in the wrong. So had Maxwell.

Rebecca turned toward the mouth of the trailer, looking for the shifter while Rowan centered his attention on Nyx still sitting atop the stack of weapons crates behind him.

“That’s a nifty little trick,” he said.

The katari snorted and flipped his dagger in her hand. “It has its uses, yeah.”

After hopping off the back of the truck, Rebecca found the scattered pile of clothes Maxwell had left behind during his shift and headed off to collect them. She also needed a moment to think about how she wanted to handle the fighting between these two.Ifshe even wanted to handle it at all.

It seemed nothing she did would get Maxwell and Rowan to play nice, even putting them on the same team for a mission that had been a success tonight. What else did she have to fall back on when neither of them would do what she said and quit going at each other’s throats for longer than five minutes when she needed them to?

As she finished collecting the last of Maxwell’s abandoned clothing, she realized she also felt guilty for having stepped in the way she did. For blasting the giant wolf just to get him off of Rowan.

In reality, she’d done it for both their sakes. Nyx had disarmed Rowan in the blink of an eye, and Rebecca had seized the moment to even the odds. She couldn’t have very well left it alone when one of them was weaponless and the other had been minutes away from chomping down on his opponent’s throat.

She hadn’t seriously hurt him. She knew that much. It wasn’t the first time she’d hit Maxwell with a blast or two of her crimson battle magic.Thatlittle squabble in the past had brought them to a whole new understanding of how important it was to at leasttryto trust each other, especially if they wanted Shade to succeed after all its recent changes.

It was something they had to work on together.

So why did she still feel so guilty about using a little magic to keep him from ripping Rowan’s head off?

As much as she didn’t want to watch her old friend get ripped apart after his hubris and poorly timed interventions, she didn’t wantMaxwellto get hurt, either.

It made no sense, but she couldn’t help feeling like her battle magic had still wounded the shifter more than Rowan’s blade ever could—not physically, but in other ways. Even if she’d done it to keep them both safe from each other.

She was still battling through that thought process when she returned to the fourth truck parked haphazardly at the very edge of the docks, nearly off the pier. She wouldn’t have known where to look for Maxwell to return his shift-abandoned clothes if she hadn’t heard the wolf’s claws clicking across the asphalt on the other side of the semi.

Then she stopped, listening for the right moment, feeling like she might scare him away again even though she’d been around his wolf before on plenty of previous missions. Not to mention most recently, the night he’d crashed her private investigation of the Old Joliet Prison.

As far as Maxwell knew, he didn’t have any reason to fear her, and she didn’t intend on correcting him about that anytime soon.

The sound of him sniffing across the ground reached her, then the other side of the transport trailer illuminated with another blinding flash of silver light that cast Maxwell’s shadow long across the ground.

Rebecca hadn’t specifically been snooping, but she couldn’t help noticing the change in that shadow as it morphed seamlessly from four-legged with snout and tail to two-legged and standing upright. Then the silver light of his shift winked out again.

She should probably still say something and alert him to her presence, but before she decided on the right way to do that, Maxwell’s next snarl broke through her thoughts. It was followed by a startling clang against the side of the trailer that made the whole thing wobble back and forth.

Great. Now he was punching transport trailers.

He’d better get it out of his system now, because Rebecca decided she didn’t want to keep waiting. What had happened back there between him and Rowan still needed to be discussed, if only for her to remind the shifter of Rowan’s official acceptance into Shade and that they couldn’t afford to lose one of their own.

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