Page 55 of Elven Prince

“Shit, Knox,” Tig whispered. “Didn’t know we had another sharpshooter.”

She waited a moment longer to confirm no other enemy combatants moving toward the doorway from the front. “Yeah, me neither.”

Once it became clear that the two attackers she’d just dropped wouldn’t move again, Rebecca slowly rose from her crouch, assault rifle once again at the ready, and crept out from behind the barricade.

The floor littered with rubble and shredded bits of door, furniture, windows, lights, and walls made for tricky navigating, but she picked her way through it until she reached the front doorway. The door was nonexistent, its frame broken off and hanging slanted at different corners.

She cleared the porch, found no one in the front lawn or on the street, and puffed out a quick sigh. “Clear.”

Then she returned to the astounding destruction piled up on and around the barricade in the front room.

More broken rubble toppled off what remained of that barricade as Tig and Lerrick rose to their feet, dusting off their clothes and shaking sawdust and chunks of drywall out of their hair.

“That was over way faster than I expected,” Lerrick declared, kicking out his leg before a disturbingly large sliver of wood emerged from his pant leg and clattered onto the floor. “Wasn’t that much more than three of ’em, was it?”

“Couldn’t have been,” Rebecca said. “These don’t seem like the kinda guys who get scared off and order a retreat when they already outnumber their target.”

Tig sniffed and stepped over one of the gnomes’ tables split cleanly in half. “Almost impressive. I wouldloveto know where the rest of them ran off to.”

“Back here,” Maxwell growled from the rear of the house.

Rebecca caught her operatives’ gazes and nodded for them to head back. As they walked off, she stopped to retrieve both Maxwell’s abandoned firearm and his shoes, which were surprisingly light and flexible compared to the heavy stiffness she expected from almost everything related to her Head of Security.

She took care to dump the crumbling debris out of both shoes before taking them with her toward the back of the house.

When she reached the living room off the kitchen—complete with a decent view of the woods out back through what remained of the sliding glass door—she found this room almost as trashed as the front.

The sliding glass door had shattered, glass pieces scattered across the floor as far as the hall. A flat-screen TV hung askew on its mount, the screen ripped apart. Shelves of books and various magitek devices now only boasted one intact shelf, items strewn everywhere, and slashing claw marks marred every wall at random intervals.

Bruce stood at the front of the living room, gawking at the destruction rendered to his house turned workshop. The gnome hardly seemed to notice two other operatives in the room with him, both of whom stood perfectly still, their weapons trained on the huddled forms on the floor over which they hovered.

“What happened in here?” Rebecca asked.

“These assholes tried to get cute,” Maxwell growled as he emerged from the dark hallway. His bare feet padded silently across the wreckage-strewn hardwood as he zipped up his pants along the way, like it was something everyone did after a firefight.

Not everyone. Just shifters.

“They broke through the back,” he said, gesturing toward the destroyed door. “I presume to flank us from behind for a surprise victory.”

“Nippedthatin the bud, didn’t you?” Rebecca muttered.

He stopped beside her with a grunt. It took him a moment to notice she’d retrieved his weapon and footwear, which he took from her with a darkening scowl before acting like he’d never set them down.

That made it even more difficult for her to hold back a flickering smirk.

“What the fuck is going on?” Bruce screeched, throwing his arms in the air. “I don’t know any of you people!”

“Welltheyseem to knowyou.” Lerrick nodded toward the bodies on the floor, both of which were just beginning to stir again with muffled groans.

“I never signed up for target practice at my fucking house!” the gnome screeched. “What is this? Who are they? Why are they here? What in the name of my disappearing sanity is all this about?”

His outburst ended with a ringing silence no one seemed particularly eager to break.

So Rebecca took the lead on this one as well and stepped toward the two surviving attackers Maxwell had so conveniently turned into her team’s prisoners.

“Those are all great questions,” she said, stopping once her shadow fell over those prisoners. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to find out.”

Maxwell’s fist connected with the troll’s jaw faster than the naked eye could follow.

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