by Martha Carr
With a self-conscious smile, he studied the metal sphere again and shook his head. “Well, unless you’re going with a private radio frequency or jacking into a server somewhere else, I don’t know how else that’s possible. I don’t see anything in here that would support plugging in directly.” He scratched his cheek and tossed the metal sphere back at Cheyenne, who batted it aside like a fly.
The metal ball thumped onto the couch cushion beside her. “Don’t insult me.”
Matthew chuckled. “Seriously, Cheyenne, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And insulting you is the last thing I wanna do.”
“Because you’re trying to keep up the nice-guy act? Not buying it.”
“Would you buy it if I said I’m honestly a little scared of what you’d do to me if I got on your bad side?”
“You’re already on my bad side, Matthew.”
“Okay.” Ember set her mug down on the coffee table and raised a hand to head off Cheyenne’s impending outburst. “Can we backtrack a little and start at the beginning?”
“What does Combined Reality, Inc. do?” Cheyenne sat up and folded her arms.
“Cheyenne.”
“I’m giving him the chance to lay it all out there, Em.” The halfling gestured toward their sincerely confused-looking neighbor. He’s got a good poker face, I’ll give him that. “Now’s your chance to start talking about what this other private company does, man.”
Ember rolled her eyes. “You’re being an asshole.”
“No, it’s okay.” Matthew uncrossed his legs and settled both feet on the area rug beneath them. “I’m flattered that you’re so interested. Like I said, Combined Reality, Inc. doesn’t operate in the public sector.”
“Neither do I.”
He pulled back with a laugh. “What?”
Ember drew her hands down her cheeks and glanced at the ceiling. “Oh, my God.”
“We’re not talking in a public capacity, Matthew.” Cheyenne glanced around his apartment and shrugged. “We’re sitting in your living room. Are you the expert on your own businesses, or do I have to go hunt somebody else down?”
“Whoa. Hold on.” Their neighbor spread his arms and blinked. “I have no problem talking about it, but I thought you guys had some kind of cybersecurity issue you wanted to talk about. Right?”
“So it’s not cybersecurity, then. Okay.” Cheyenne nodded and gestured toward the metal sphere beside her. “Does Combined Reality, Inc. write all the programming for stuff like this? Or are you just housing data storage? I didn’t go too deep, but I’m having a hard time imagining that it’s one without the other.”
Matthew took a deep breath and smiled at the halfling. “You don’t have a problem you want my advice on, do you?”
“Oh, yeah. We have a problem. It’s you.” Cheyenne stood up from the couch with a crinkle of paper as she gathered the printed sheets from beneath her legs.
“Whoa, whoa. Wait a minute.” Ember lurched forward in her chair, thinking her friend was about to go straight for the jugular.
Instead, Cheyenne stormed around the coffee table and slapped the stack of papers down on Matthew’s knee. “You can skirt around answering my questions all you want, but now you know what I know. Or at least some of it.”
Matthew frowned at her without looking at the printed sheets. “What is this?”
“I asked first.”
He gazed down at the papers and shuffled through them one at a time, his eyes scanning quickly before he moved on to the next page. Then he flipped through the rest and blinked. “Wow. This is insanely thorough.”
“I’m still waiting for a thorough explanation.” Cheyenne stepped away from him and folded her arms. “Go ahead. Go through as much of it as you want. I know you know what you’re looking at.”
“Of course I do.” Matthew chuckled and stroked his chin. “I don’t say this to a lot of people, Cheyenne. Again, the last thing I wanna do is insult you, so I hope you can take this as a compliment when I say I’m seriously impressed that you found any of this.”
“Great. Now tell me what the hell you’re doing with those programs.”
He laughed in disbelief, shaking his head as he flipped through the rest of the stack. “I built one of the country’s leading cybersecurity firms from the ground up. I wrote all our processes myself, so I know how strong my own data security is. Seriously, how did you get this?”
“That’s none of your business.” Cheyenne pointed at the papers. “But obviously, you’re all up in mine.”
“I wasn’t aware this had anything to do with you.”
“Cut the shit, man!” She clenched her fists and breathed slowly through her nose, fighting the urge to burst into full drow fury and light a fire under the guy’s ass in a different way. Sparking ball of black energy right under his nose would get him talking. Just keep breathing. “I found what you’re hiding, okay? Game’s up. You’re coding programs and syncing capabilities into those machines, and you need to start talking before I—”
“Cheyenne!” Ember’s barked command sounded so much like Bianca Summerlin, it pulled the halfling right out of her rage.
She spun to face her friend. “What?”
“Can we talk in private for a second? Maybe out in the hall?”
“No, no. Stay here.” Matthew waved the papers in his hand, staring at them as he stood from the loveseat. “I’m happy to give you guys some space. I should probably go draft a few emails anyway.” He looked at Cheyenne with a confused smile.
“Go write your emails.” She folded her arms and glared after him as he headed around the corner into the rest of his apartment, chuckling to himself. This isn’t going the way I wanted.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
“Okay, listen.” Ember wheeled toward her, lowering her voice. “If you think I’m not all about figuring out how to stop the bastards who sent those spy-beetle things after me, you’re nuts.”
“He’s just laughing it off.”
“And you need to cool it.” Ember leaned forward and tried to peer around the corner. The sound of fingers typing on light-resistance laptop keys came from the other side of the weird wall dividing the living room from the rest of Matthew’s apartment. “He’s way more interested in figuring out how you got past his defenses.”
“His defenses?”
The fae rolled her eyes. “Or whatever stupid hacker lingo you guys use. I seriously don’t think Matthew has a clue about what’s going on, at least not about who his clients are.” Ember nodded at the metal sphere on the couch.
“Or maybe he’s just a good liar.”
“Yeah, okay. Maybe. But instead of jumping from talking around this whole thing in infuriatingly vague terms to threatening him with physical violence, it might be a good idea to cross some middle ground first.”
Cheyenne met her friend’s gaze and pursed her lips. “Now who’s being infuriatingly vague?”
Ember groaned in frustration. “Seriously, for how smart you are, you can be ridiculously thickheaded sometimes.”
“Sure. You try rolling around in my head for a day.”
“I’ll take a hard pass on that, Cheyenne.” Ember lowered her voice even more and cocked her head. “We haven’t brought up anything about where that war machine is from. Nothing about magicals, the portals, the other side, any of it.”
The halfling narrowed her eyes and looked toward the kitchen, half-expecting to find Matthew spying on them from around the corner. “You think he knows about all that?”
“Hey, I’m taking your opinion into account here. If he knows everything about his companies and what they’re up to, he’d know about that part too, right?”
Cheyenne rubbed her mouth. “Probably. He’s all over trying to fix the hole in his security he’s not gonna be able to find. If he’s that involved in what Combined Reality, Inc. does, he’d at least know about the tech he’s writing programs for.”
“Finally.” Ember glanced at the ceiling.
“He
y, I would’ve come to this conclusion on my own…eventually.”
“Yeah, only after you realized hitting him with deadly magic wasn’t gonna get you anywhere.” The fae shook her brown hair out of her eyes and gripped the armrests of her chair. “We’ll bring that up too. Mention something about magicals or technology not from Earth, right? Then we can gauge his reaction.”
“Before doing what, Em?”
“Before we show him we’re part of that whole world.”
“Are you insane?” Cheyenne hunched her shoulders when she realized how loud she’d said it. “We can’t just show up at our neighbor’s apartment going, ‘Hey, look at us. We’re magicals from another world most people will never know exists. Feel like telling us all your secrets now?’”
“If he’s been doing business with magicals, what’s the big deal?”
“The big deal.” Cheyenne wrinkled her nose. “Shit, Em. You’re making me feel pretty stupid right now because I can’t come up with an answer for that.”
“You’re not stupid, you’re pissed.” Ember shrugged. “Sometimes that makes you stupid, but it’s temporary.”
A surprised laugh burst out of the halfling, and she ran a hand through her hair as she took a deep breath. “Okay, we’ll do this your way.”
“But for real this time, huh? You didn’t stick to that plan.”
Cheyenne headed back to the couch and dropped onto the leather cushion again. “Your way was taking way too long. I’m not a fan of small talk and drooling over homemade lattes.”
“No shit.” Ember followed and parked her wheelchair beside the end of the couch. “So, when he doesn’t start freaking out about magic and different worlds, we’ll show him what’s up with us.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“I’ll say something about this bracelet, okay?”
Cheyenne shot her a quick frown. “Why?”
“Why? So you know I’m about to take it off.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ll know what you’re doing the minute you do it.”
“You don’t plan anything ahead of time, do you?”
The halfling grinned and folded her arms. “Not to your level of detail.”
Rolling her eyes, Ember sat back in her chair and slowly shook her head. “You should try it sometime. Maybe then you wouldn’t have to use so much of that healing salve.”
“And ruin all the fun? Come on.” When they looked at each other, both girls snorted. “But hey, that’s why I have you, right? To handle all the detailed planning for me.”
“Don’t push it.”
Cheyenne glanced at the ceiling and shrugged. “I mean, you do have a private chauffeur.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation now.” Ember clenched her eyes shut. “Okay. If you can keep the lid on the drow through the rest of this conversation, sure. I’ll plan stuff for you.”
“Deal.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Thirty seconds later, Matthew reappeared from around the corner, the stack of papers still clutched in his hand as he scratched the back of his head. He stopped in the living room and looked at his guests like he’d forgotten they were there. “Sorry. Do you guys need another minute?”
“Nope.” Ember smiled. “We’re good, thanks. Perfect timing, actually.”
“Mmhmm.” He sat in the loveseat again. “So, now that you’ve blasted through what I thought was an impenetrable virtual wall, you wanna tell me what you’re looking for?”
There it is. Open invitation. “Yeah. How’d you start making deals with O’gúleesh magicals?”
Matthew finally looked up from the printed details of his company’s work and blinked. “The what?”
“Come on. Maybe you haven’t seen anything that looks like that before.” Cheyenne pointed at the metal sphere. “But you don’t let other people handle things for you if you can do it yourself, right?”
“Right.” He bit his lip and frowned.
Ember took a deep breath. “So you know that whatever parts Combined Reality, Inc.’s working with aren’t from here.”
“If you’re talking about foreign materials, then yeah.” Matthew’s frown deepened. “You know foreign trade is part of the technology industry.”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes. “We’re talking way foreign. Like, not-Earth foreign.”
Their neighbor blinked rapidly and shifted in the loveseat. “I don’t know where you’re trying to go with this.”
“Yeah, you do.” The halfling narrowed her eyes. “You know, it always creeped me out that you never had a problem looking me in the eye until now, but it’s a pretty dead giveaway that you’re hiding something.”
“Also a dead giveaway that he wasn’t hiding anything before,” Ember added, turning to give her friend another pointed stare.
Cheyenne ignored her and focused on Matthew. “You know about magicals, Matthew. Don’t you? The O’gúleesh refugees coming across the portal from that other world. The weird tech they’re bringing with them. And you’re the one who helped them figure out how to get that tech to work over here when it’s not supposed to.”
He laughed and tilted his head, opening his mouth but unable to find anything to say.
Turning to look at Ember, Cheyenne shrugged. “I’d say that looks like an admission of guilt, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s an admission of something.”
“Okay, just take a step back for a second and listen to what you’re saying.” Matthew leaned forward in the loveseat and propped his forearms on his thighs, clapping his hands together. “You’re trying to convince me that there are people from some other world who can use magic. That magic’s even real. I know you’re smart enough to get into my files, but all this makes you sound like crazy.”
“Or crazy smart.” Cheyenne grinned. “I never said anything about magic.”
“What?”
“O’gúleesh magicals, man. That’s as far as I went. You pulled out the ‘magic is real’ thing all on your own, so can we finally agree to be on the same page for two minutes? That’s about as much patience as I have left.”
Ember cleared her throat and fiddled with the silver band on her wrist. “What do you guys think of my bracelet?”
Cheyenne snorted. “For real?”
“What?” Matthew scrunched up his face and shook his head. “Are you guys on something right now?”
He stopped when Ember slipped the illusion charm off her wrist and wiggled it in front of her. Her human appearance faded, revealing her fae-pink skin, violet-streaked hair, and luminous purple eyes as the air around her glowed with that faint pink aura. The small pointed tips of her ears poked out from beneath her straight hair, and she raised her eyebrows at Cheyenne.
The halfling spread her arms and slipped into drow form. “So either we’re all crazy, you’re on something, or we can quit fucking around and start talking to each other like adults. Up to you.”
Matthew’s jaw dropped as he took in the revealed magicals sitting in his living room. “You?” Then he threw his head back and bellowed with laughter.
Cheyenne and Ember exchanged glances, and the fae set the thin silver band in her lap. “Not the reaction I was expecting.”
“Yeah, kinda hard to gauge.” The halfling folded her arms and stared at their neighbor as he fought for breath in the loveseat.
“I can’t believe it!” Matthew pointed at them and barked another laugh. “You. Both of you!” His laughter dwindled into nonstop chuckling, and he dipped his head to wipe the tears from the corners of his eyes, sniffing as he tried to get control of himself again.
“You know, there’s a fourth option I didn’t think I had to mention,” Cheyenne muttered, her golden eyes narrowing. “Wanna guess what that is?”
“Cheyenne.” Ember frowned at her and shook her head. “Last resort.”
The halfling’s nostrils flared. Good first resort too. But she’s right.
“Wow. I’m sorry.” Matthew cleared his throat a
nd blinked back the last of his tears. “That was just the last thing I expected. And I’m not laughing at you, to be clear.”
“Do enlighten us,” Cheyenne said flatly, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s ironic.” He took a quick drink of his latte. “That’s all it is.”
“That’s not even close to a good enough answer.”
“Okay, okay.” Lifting a hand to gesture for them to wait, Matthew ran his other hand through his hair with another chuckle. “Honestly, this whole week, I thought I was neighbors with a couple of VCU grad students doing their thing. I mean, you guys aren’t normal grad students.”
“Clearly.” Ember’s face wore a surprising copy of Cheyenne’s scowl now.
“No, I’m trying to explain how weird this is.” Matthew blinked quickly and shrugged. “I didn’t think to look past what you guys show the rest of the world. And this whole time, two magicals are living next door to me. Hell, I’ve spent plenty of time in the elevator with Cheyenne.”
“What?” Ember’s eyes widened.
Cheyenne grimaced and shook her head. “Just…standing in the elevator.”
“And I had no idea that either of you is this.” He grinned at them and took another long drink of his latte.
The halfling stared at him and fought to bring her annoyance levels down to bearable. Either he’s about to attack us, or we just broke our neighbor.
“Em.”
“Yeah?”
“How do you feel bout continuing this conversation my way now?”
Ember folded her arms and wasn’t at all amused when Matthew fell into another fit of awed laughter. “Well, I won’t stop you.”
Chapter Seventy
Cheyenne summoned a burst of crackling purple sparks in her palm and stared at their war-machine-dabbling neighbor.
“Whoa, whoa.” Matthew leaned back in the loveseat, lifting both hands and eyeing her warning magic. “What are you doing?”