14. Chapter 14
14
T he front door burst apart with a blaze of electric-green light, sending shards of splintered wood flying everywhere.
Rebecca and her team ducked behind their constructed barricade as massive splinters and wood chips peppered their makeshift cover, followed by the deafening crash of shattered glass bursting from every front window busted in at the same time.
Bruce screeched and curled into a ball at the back of the barricade.
Rebecca’s small but no less effective team was fully prepared to strike back. They didn’t even need a signal for this one.
The growing high-pitched whine of their magitek weapons powering up rose in tandem as the first enemy boot stepped through the blistered doorway, crunching down on broken glass and chunks of exploded door.
When they opened fire, rounds from all four weapons lit up the air with multicolored lights streaking toward the doorway. Every shot found its mark in the first intruder, pummeling the target simultaneously in a crackling blaze of magical rounds before any of them got a good look at his face.
The intruder crumpled to the floor in a smoking heap without a sound.
Then a blast of purple flame barreled into the house right on his heels. It bashed into the front of the barricade with a cracking boom, rattling the stack of mismatched chairs, tables, and bookshelves and launching Rebecca and her team backward from their positions.
Rebecca’s back thumped against what felt like the edge of a table, making her snarl before she regained her bearings. “Take them down!”
It was more of a reaction than a necessary command, and her small team recovered quickly as a vortex of kinetic force flashing with spiderwebbing white lightning bolts crackled through the doorway and straight for them.
Tig and Maxwell threw themselves sideways to avoid the backlash of the next attack buckling part of the barricade in half before they propped themselves up on the rubble to return fire.
Rebecca’s arms already ached from the incessant kickback of her automatic rifle as she sprayed an endless stream of augmented rounds through the doorway. With zero visibility through the smoke and sawdust filling the air, backlit by glowing magitek rounds and the hissing crackle of more purple flame and green bolts of energy streaking into the house, she could only keep shooting and hope to eventually hit her target.
An orange lance pierced the doorway, heading straight for her.
She ducked, heard it thump into the side of a bookshelf behind her with a final jolting quiver, and returned her finger to the trigger to continue the defensive assault.
Amidst the clatter of constant weapons fire and the roaring whirr of magical blasts rushing closer and fading like crashing waves, a scream outside ripped through the air.
The ground shook with another toppling thud on the front porch.
Two down, and no clue as to how many others remained to further press the attack on Bruce’s home.
An incomprehensible bevy of angry shouts beyond joined the noise, though one of the voices faded until the muddled argument ended. But the assault through the battered doorway remained.
Rebecca’s team fired back, dodging pellets of blue magic streaking inside and thumping into the barricade disastrously close to the operatives. But not close enough for a direct hit.
There was no telling how long the firefight continued before the low rumble of another explosion shuttered through Bruce’s bungalow. More shattered glass tinkled onto the wooden floor and peppered the walls somewhere behind the barricade.
“Shit.” Maxwell set down his weapon and rose from his position, still doubled over behind the barricade but now on his feet.
“We’ve got a breach,” he snarled over the deafening chaos. “Cover me.”
“Copy that!” Tig shouted over his own return fire.
Rebecca paused long enough to glance toward the shifter but found him already gone from behind the barricade as more splintered wood and cracked plaster rained down all around them. The clomping footsteps on the porch between volleys of blistering magical attacks proved their enemy was still hitting them hard from the front.
Maxwell had, however, left his shoes behind with his weapon.
She couldn’t help a tiny smirk, even through the gunfire and the pain squeezing around her chest while he moved farther and farther away from her.
This was almost over.
She gave him thirty seconds of constant defensive fire from all three of them behind the barricade while Bruce cowered in the rear, yelping every time an enemy blast hit another piece of his furniture.
Then Rebecca signaled for a ceasefire.
Tig and Lerrick responded instantly.
The ear-splitting roar of exchanged magic, the whine of augmented weaponry, the staccato of automatic rounds firing into the darkness—all of it stopped.
The only sound now came from somewhere at the rear of the house. A quick series of scrabbling clicks across the wood, a short-lived scuffle, a grunt and collapsing thump, then silence.
Rebecca slowed her breathing and watched the doorway. Two seconds later, a pair of slow, cautious footsteps whispered across the wooden porch slats, eliciting creaking groans at the shifting movement.
Tig and Lerrick held their weapons at the ready, waiting for their commander’s next move.
She expected the enemy targets out front to be relatively suspicious, but they were also surprisingly impatient.
The first guy stepped slowly through the shattered doorway, peered around, then stepped farther inside to investigate.
The second his associate stepped into view, Rebecca fired a burst of lethal rounds into his face, then swung her rifle by two centimeters to cleanly pick off the first guy before he had any idea what had happened.
Their bodies hit the floor almost simultaneously.
“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 would love to 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.”
“Nipped that in 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!”
“Well they seem to know you .” 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.”
M axwell’s fist connected with the troll’s jaw faster than the naked eye could follow.
Blood sprayed from the captured enemy’s mouth on contact as his head rocked to the side.
Rebecca could have sworn she heard something break in his face, even if it was just a tooth popping loose.
More blood spattered across the hardwood floor when Maxwell shook it off his hand. Then the shifter hunkered into a squat in front of the strangers his wolf had incapacitated in a matter of seconds, growling out a slow sigh. “Let’s try this one more time.”
As soon as the troll drew his next breath and rolled his head upright again, a mad cackle burst from his lips. “Nice try. We can’t give you shit.”
Rebecca shifted her weight onto the opposite leg, her arms folded. “ Can’t tell us and won’t tell us are two very different things.”
“I agree.” Maxwell cracked his knuckles for the fourth or fifth time since the start of this interrogation.
The troll in front of him offered a blood-smeared grin in response, though his associate—a half-changeling they’d had to bind with Bruce’s newest prototype of magic-dampening handcuffs to keep him from shape-shifting his way into an escape—cringed at the sound.
When the half-changeling tried to wriggle away from his seat on the floor against the couch, Maxwell grabbed him by the shirt collar and hauled him back into place.
“This doesn’t end until we hear something satisfying enough to make it end,” he growled. “Who sent you?”
The troll’s leering grin never wavered. He said nothing.
Watching from the far side of the living room, Bruce cringed every time blood pooling at the corner of the troll’s mouth grew heavy enough to drip from his face to add another stain in the hardwood floor.
“Why did you come here tonight?” Rebecca asked. “To this house? Why this gnome?”
Bruce groaned as he swept his gaze across the living room, then buried his face in his hands.
“All right. Sure,” the troll said through a sneer. “Let’s trade, darlin’. Show me yours, and I’ll choke the fucking breath out of that pretty little neck—”
Maxwell’s fist connected with the other side of the troll’s face, this time with enough force to send the guy careening sideways. With his hands tied behind his back, he toppled helplessly to the floor, his face and shoulders smacking the wood almost at the same time.
Rebecca sent the shifter a sidelong glance. “If you keep that up, we won’t get anything out of him.”
He glowered at her but said nothing.
Because he knew she was right.
If he killed these guys playing overzealous hardball, their chances of getting any more information tonight disappeared.
“Doesn’t matter,” the half-changeling mumbled, his chin dropping toward his chest.
That seemed to give his mouthy buddy a burst of renewed energy. The troll cackled where he lay, his feet jerking sporadically in rhythm to his deranged glee that didn’t show any signs of stopping.
“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?” Rebecca asked.
The half-changeling sighed and shook his bowed head.
“You think whoever sent you will only make things worse for you if you talk?” she asked.
Maxwell rose from his squat with another growl. “Like we haven’t heard that before.”
“More times than we can count, honestly,” Rebecca added. “And you know what? I’ll just say it. I’m really tired of getting the same useless non-answer from everyone who fails to kill me and my people. Most of you don’t even know each other, but it sure feels like every asshole in this city got together and planned every response ahead of time.”
Maxwell rolled his eyes and stalked away from her, though at this point, it was all to give the prisoners a good show. But if Maxwell did need a little break, she could take it from here, no problem.
She turned her attention onto the enemy and leaned toward them. “But the people you work for aren’t here, are they?”
The troll didn’t respond, but the half-changeling lifted his head to study her with wide eyes. Not in fear but in baffled confusion.
She must have struck some kind of chord with that one.
“Listen,” she said, “if your bosses sent you guys to get this job done the way they want, that’s not such a great look. Seems to me they’d rather hide behind the front lines while the soldiers do all the dirty work for them.”
Pacing on the far wall, Maxwell snorted. “Dirty soldiers…”
She ignored him. “It makes me wonder why they won’t just head out themselves to get the job done right. No one else is capable of it, obviously.”
Lerrick snickered until Tig elbowed him in the ribs.
“You’re worried about what your bosses will do to you if you talk.” Rebecca directly in front of the prisoners and dropped into a squat, just like Maxwell had. But she didn’t reach out toward either of them. In fact, she had no intention of touching them at all. “But really, what you should be more concerned about is what we can do to them .”