by Martha Carr
“Oh.” He gave her a sheepish smile and shrugged. “Sure, yeah. Magicals. Okay, so how do you want me to send this over?”
He and Ember looked at Cheyenne. The halfling stepped back. “I don’t know. Go get a piece of paper and a pen or something.”
“Or I could just send it to Ember.”
“Please don’t.” The fae girl shook her head. “I don’t want anything about this on my phone. And Cheyenne, don’t even think about trying to convince us you don’t have a whole bunch of stuff on your phone that keeps things hidden from anyone who looked.”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes. “Come on. I wouldn’t try to convince anyone of that.”
“So, what’s your number?” Matthew asked. “I’ll text it to you.”
She stared blankly at him until Ember smacked the halfling’s arm. “Okay, fine. Hand it over.”
Matthew gave her his cell phone, and she quickly typed in her number before chucking the thing back at him.
“Don’t get any ideas about texting me or sending me a bunch of crap I didn’t ask for, okay? This isn’t a free pass.”
Matthew scoffed as he transferred whatever information he had in a text. “Trust me. I’m not even a little interested in doing any of that.”
“Good.” She folded her arms and watched him until he finished and dropped his phone on the loveseat next to him.
“There. You have a name and an address and a few extra tidbits. That’s all I can give you without tearing down everything I’m trying to do.”
“Don’t worry, Matthew. We won’t topple your little empire just yet.” Cheyenne snatched the metal orb from the couch and turned to leave, then paused and made herself look him in the eyes again. “Thanks for finally helping.”
“Thanks for not tying me to a chair.”
She nodded and headed for his front door as Ember took a deep breath and wheeled her chair around to follow.
“Ember, can I talk to you alone for a second?”
Ember stopped and met Cheyenne’s gaze. The halfling opened the front door and gestured toward the hall. “I’m just going home.”
She stepped into the hall and made a beeline for their apartment without bothering to close his door behind her.
Ember blinked and spun her chair again to look at Matthew. “What’s up?”
“I’m just trying to help people. I mean, yeah, this is my business and my livelihood, and I have to do things a certain way to keep things running the way they’re supposed to.” He leaned toward her. “But I would never willingly enter into business with someone if I knew they’d use my work and my services to hurt people. You have to believe that.”
Ember gave him a small, patient smile. “I want to believe it. Maybe you had no idea what was happening, but you have a lot stacked against you right now. I just hope you didn’t give Cheyenne bad information she won’t be able to use. For your sake, I mean.”
“No, that would make me stupid, wouldn’t it?”
“Yep.” When he didn’t say anything else, she turned her chair toward the door again.
“I hope this doesn’t change things,” he blurted after her. “You know, between us. Whatever that is. Because I do enjoy spending time with you the way we have been.”
Ember looked over her shoulder and raised her eyebrows. “Honestly, that’s the last thing on my mind right now. You’ve been nothing but helpful and decent to me, but all this? It kind of changes things, yeah. Just don’t screw anything up, and maybe we’ll keep hanging out. I don’t know.”
“Okay. Yeah.” Matthew nodded, ducking his head and sliding his hands into his pockets. “Thanks for being honest with me.”
“It goes both ways.” Without waiting for him to reply, she wheeled across the hall and through the open door of her apartment on the other side. The last thing Matthew saw before Ember shut the door behind her was Cheyenne’s glowing golden eyes locked onto his face.
“Asshole,” she muttered, still glaring at the closed front door.
“Don’t.” Ember wheeled toward the kitchen. “We did what we went over there to do, and you got a name, all without having to blast things to pieces. Mostly.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know if this is the name we want. It could be useless.”
“I know that.” Ember flicked her hand toward the cabinet above the sink, which opened with a flash of violet light before one of their drinking glasses floated down from the cupboard and into her hand. She took it with her to the fridge to fill it from the water dispenser in the door. “We still can’t assume that he’s always lying to us.”
“Em, we had to show him this to get him to tell the truth.” The halfling gestured at her body, which was still in full drow form. “He’s known about the other side and magicals being over here for at least five years, which is way longer than I expected, and we had to shove that in his face before he said anything.”
“Well, just talking didn’t work very well with you at first either, did it?” Ember took a slow drink of water, then gulped down half the glass.
“That’s totally different.” Cheyenne leaned against the back of the couch and folded her arms. “I wasn’t supplying O’gúl loyalists with a program I wrote to help them power war machines. I wasn’t involved in anything but trying to hide from everybody.”
“All I’m saying is that you didn’t tear down your walls until someone shoved proof into your face. It makes sense that that’s what he needed too.”
“I’m not a fan of comparing me with him.”
Ember chugged the rest of her water and set the glass under the dispenser to refill it. “I know, but don’t you think finding things we have in common with people we don’t like is a solution? We both know you better than that.”
Cheyenne stared at her friend, who now drank a lot more slowly. She’s not looking at me on purpose. I can take the hint.
The halfling walked around the couch and the coffee table and slumped into the dry leather recliner. Then she pulled out her phone and opened the text with the file Matthew had sent her. It looks legit. Time to find out.
“You’re not planning on hanging out with him again after this, are you?”
Ember’s glass clinked on the granite countertop of the kitchen island before she wheeled back into the living room. “I have no idea. I could say it’s none of your business, but that wouldn’t be true, knowing what we know about him now.”
“Right. And you don’t know?”
“No. Now let’s move on to the more important question, which is why you haven’t called Corian yet to go after that guy.”
“What do you think I’m doing right now?” Cheyenne wiggled her phone in front of her, then made the call to her nightstalker ex-mentor.
He picked up on the second ring with a gruff urgency. “Everything okay?”
“Whoa. Yeah. We’re fine over here. You?”
“Spent all afternoon getting L’zar’s fell-damn audience back home and making sure they’re safe.” Corian lowered his voice, his lips brushing the speaker on his phone. “I might kill him for doing that.”
“Well, don’t bring me into it. As long as everyone made it out of there today, I’d say we pulled it off. And I have some information for you.”
“Like what?”
Cheyenne looked at Ember, who lifted her hands and slowly lowered them, mouthing “Gently.” “I found the guy who wrote the program powering the war machines.”
“Who is it?”
“The owner of a company called—”
“Hey!” Corian pulled the phone away from his mouth to shout. “If you guys seriously have to do that right now, you know how this works. Take it outside.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
Cheyenne grinned. “Goblins?”
“No, it’s the other pain-in-my-ass magicals who can’t keep it together long enough to spare the rest of us from their constant nagging.” The nightstalker sighed. “You were saying?”
“The company’s called Combined Reality, Inc. Owned priv
ately by ThomasSafe. Ember and I met with the owner, and he gave us the name of one of his clients who apparently has this software and the operating systems running the O’gúl tech.”
“Wait a minute. You went to see the owner of this company without telling me first?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Cheyenne, I don’t have to explain to you how delicate we have to be with all of this. If you’re running around blasting in front doors and asking questions that are likely to expose all of us then—”
“Jesus, stop talking and let me finish.” Cheyenne stood from the recliner and put the call on speaker, not wanting his voice that close against her ear. When he didn’t say anything else, she took it as the go-ahead. “We haven’t been running all over town, okay? This guy just happens to live in our apartment building.”
There was a loud click, and the line went dead.
Ember stared at the phone. “Did he just hang up on you?”
Cheyenne clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Yep. Without listening to anything I had to say.”
“Is everything okay over here?” Ember yelped and jumped in her chair when an oval of shimmering light burst into existence three feet in front of her.
Corian stormed out of his portal, sidestepped quickly to avoid the fae girl’s wheelchair, and headed for the front door. “Tell me where he is.”
“Hold on.” Cheyenne tossed her phone onto the recliner and took off after him. “Corian, wait.”
“I am. I’m waiting for you to tell me where this sonofabitch is so I can wring every drop of information out of him before I wring his neck. What’s his name?”
“No!” Ember wheeled quickly toward them, the violet light beneath her wheels lifting the whole chair enough to give her an extra boost of speed toward the front door. “You don’t get to pop into the middle of our apartment like that to go storming after someone.”
Corian spun around and raised an eyebrow, pointing at her with a hand tufted with light-brown fur. “I strongly suggest you don’t let your new role as Cheyenne’s Nós Aní go to your head. It’s been eight hours.”
“This has nothing to do with that.” Ember gestured at Cheyenne. “You didn’t bother to listen to her. And unless you’re showing up like this to stop an attack, you seriously need to give us some warning.”
The nightstalker turned his silver gaze on Cheyenne. “Sounds like you’re starting to rub off on her, kid.”
The halfling shrugged. “It works both ways. Not a bad thing.”
“No.” Corian nodded. “Tell me then.”
“I’m not telling you where he lives. Not right now.”
“I meant the information he gave you.”
“Right.” Cheyenne glanced at her phone in the recliner. “He gave me a name, two addresses registered under that name, a history of their in-person meetings, and a catalog of the services and various programs this Syno guy has been purchasing from him for a long time.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. A couple of years.”
Corian’s nostrils flared. “Why don’t I have this information right now?”
“You know what? You’d have it by now if you weren’t jumping to conclusions and you took a minute to listen to me. I was about to text it to you but figured I’d call to explain first.”
The nightstalker’s lips twitched into a barely perceptible smile, one pointy tufted ear flicking against his light hair. “This sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, I get it. I used to be the one jumping to conclusions before I got all the information. Now we understand each other.” Cheyenne went back to the chair and snatched up her phone to forward the text to him. “And now you have all the information.”
“Does that include this company owner’s apartment number?”
“That’s not important,” Ember said. “If we have to go back and talk to him, we will. But you should take your team and go look for this Syno first. If this information is good, you’ll probably find one of their control centers.”
Raising an eyebrow at Cheyenne, Corian clasped his hands behind his back. “If the information’s good?”
She shrugged. “We’re trying to take his word for it, okay?”
“I sincerely hope you made it perfectly clear what will happen if we find out he’s jerking us around.”
“Hmm, I don’t know. Ember? Do you think we made that clear?”
The fae girl pretended to consider the idea. “Yeah, I’d say he’s well aware.”
“Good. I’ll hold you to that. Both of you.” Corian swung his finger from Cheyenne to Ember and dipped his chin. “We’d better not end up on another wild goose chase.”
“We get it.” Cheyenne gestured at the open space on the other side of the coffee table where he’d portaled himself into their apartment. “Go check it out. Unless you want us to come too?”
“No, you two should stay in tonight. Let the rest of the ceremony settle in. It has the potential for side effects.”
Ember rolled her eyes. “Are you serious?”
Corian peered over the back of the couch at the scattered pages of Maleshi’s spellbook. “Who’s been working on spells?”
Cheyenne snorted. “Please. Like you don’t know the answer to that.”
Looking back over his shoulder, the nightstalker gave Ember a small, appraising smile. “How’s it going?”
She folded her arms. “Better than Cheyenne, at least.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“Okay, very funny.” Cheyenne sank back into the recliner and crossed one leg over the other. “She’s a natural. Created a tiny rainstorm over our chair.” She gestured at the wet pool in the cushion of the other recliner. “And set up an alarm around the apartment.”
“Really?” Corian dipped his head toward Ember. “I’m impressed.”
“Thanks. It only works with other people in the hall, so maybe I should start working on something that’ll go off right before nightstalker portals pop out of thin air.”
“Maybe add a little warning shock too,” Cheyenne added.
Corian ignored them both and stared intently at their front door. “I’m curious as to why you’d want an alarm to sound for someone out in the hall. Aren’t there only two apartments up here?”
“Yep.”
Ember looked quickly at Cheyenne. “We used it for the pizza guy.”
When Corian gave the halfling a questioning glance, she gestured at the mostly empty pizza box on the coffee table. “It worked.”
“I see.” He gazed at the door one more time, then stepped away from the couch. “Then I’ll get back to my phone, if everything looks good.”
“It looks good. Just go check it out.”
“I’ll send Byrd and Lumil to take care of it. Maybe I’ll join them. That way, there won’t be any confusion over what we find.”
“Great.” Cheyenne gave him a tight smile and nodded. “Good luck.”
“Mmhmm. Enjoy the rest of your night.” The nightstalker’s fingers moved quickly until a new portal shimmered open in front of him. He shot Ember one last sidelong glance, then stepped through the oval of dark light and disappeared before the portal closed.
Ember asked, “What was that?”
“I think we gave our neighbor away by talking about the alarm.” Cheyenne rubbed the side of her face. “Sorry, Em. I guess it’s easy to let something like that slip when I’m focused on keeping him from tearing this whole building apart.”
“He’s not going to. He’d better not.”
“And the info on Syno had better be legit.”
The apartment was silent until Ember chuckled softly.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“No, seriously. What?”
“You just stopped a nightstalker from pulling a Cheyenne Summerlin.”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes. “I’m not that bad. I mean, it didn’t take much to get him to calm down.”
“Right.” E
mber chuckled and covered her mouth with a hand. “That’s the funny part. When you get riled up, you’re much worse than that.”
“No, I’m not. For real?”
Ember burst out laughing, nodding as she leaned over.
Cheyenne thumped her head back against the recliner’s cushion and grinned at their apartment’s vaulted ceilings. “I’m getting better, though. Only left one hole in Matthew’s furniture.”
“That is a plus. I guess we’ll see how long it lasts.”
“Your support is always appreciated, Em.” Cheyenne picked up her phone and glanced at the time. “Okay, it’s after ten. Wanna watch another episode of that stupid show you’re so into?”
“Ha. Which one?”
“I don’t care.”
Ember wheeled around the couch to take up her TV-watching spot at the far end of the coffee table. “But you are into watching TV. Maybe I am rubbing off on you too.”
“Sure. Don’t get too excited about it.” Cheyenne pushed out the recliner’s leg rest and stuck her hands behind her head. “I just want to stop thinking about all this, because tomorrow’s Friday, and I’m not excited about stepping into a classroom in front of a bunch of undergrads to pretend like nothing more important is happening.”
“Education is important, Cheyenne.” Ember shot her a sidelong glance, then returned to scrolling through the selection on their giant TV.
“I never said it wasn’t. Stopping these loyalists running the show behind all the war machines is just more important, and pretty much the only thing we can do until L’zar figures his shit out so we can make the crossing again and finally end this craziness.”
“Well, who knows? Maybe teaching a class of undergrads will be a good distraction.”
“Probably not.” They both laughed, then Cheyenne picked her head up off the laid-back recliner. “Hey, you think you could make me kind of a reverse illusion charm?”
“Hmm.” Ember squinted at the TV and kept scrolling. “For the halfling who can slip in and out of looking like two different people?”
“Yeah. Just in case something else happens while I’m teaching and I need to go full drow without freaking out my entire classroom.”
“Oh, you mean like what that necklace did for you?”