Pete tumbled off the bottom step, hastily righting himself and flinging out an arm instinctively to keep Gabe from...dying. Or something. He didn't know.
He spotted William and Nate almost immediately, across a field of partial and whole house elf corpses. Most of the ones inside seemed to be dead already, but there were more crawling in through the enormous holes in the doors--which were mostly off their hinges, and seemed to be shuddering under the pressure of all those tiny bodies pressing against them. Pete had a momentary vision of dozens of creepy gray-green fingers digging into his skin, and then he shook it off and kept evaluating.
More and more house elves were making their way through the holes; a good half dozen of them tumbled down the small mound of limbs piled up against the door and split, half heading for Gabe and him and half for William and Nate.
"Fuck," Pete said quietly. No one would hear him, but it felt like an especially profound moment, and he couldn't let it pass silently.
He'd left his machete somewhere, he didn't remember where, and there was nothing even remotely menacing left standing. Merlin knew he wasn't going to accio a weapon through the hallways, so he readied his wand and, when the house elves were within certain spell-casting distance, he flexed his wrist to the ready and cast three very deliberate, very vehement shrinking spells.
"Shit," he said, blinking down at the four-inch tall house elves, now forced to try and hoist themselves up over uneven stone floors. "I can't believe that worked."
He took a few hasty steps forward and crunched two beneath his shoe, then the third, grinning back over his shoulder at Gabe before jerking his attention to William to make sure he was handling his little approaching army.