by Amy Star
Cheyenne cleared her throat, and the mood settled slightly. Even if Cheyenne was sort of gleeful about it, it seemed like the sort of topic she wasn’t supposed to act like she was gleeful to talk about.
“She started crying,” Cheyenne stated, one shoulder lifting in a shrug. “So, I guess she is still a human under all the fakery. Or…sort of a human. I don’t know if were-animals are considered humans or if they’re their own thing.”
“Very sad,” Daphne deadpanned, rolling her eyes. “Almost makes me forget that she could have avoided the entire situation if she hadn’t been a complete fucking creepazoid.”
Cheyenne held her hands up in a placating gesture. “Hey, I didn’t say I felt bad for her, just that there are apparently human-ish emotions somewhere in there.”
“Far, far under there,” Daphne agreed.
“But it wasn’t exactly exciting,” Cheyenne carried on. “Harry was polite about it, and she didn’t break down into hysterics or anything like that. I sort of wanted to scream at her over the phone, but if I had done that, then it would have negated the purpose of not letting Harry know I was listening in.”
“For shame,” Daphne scolded mildly. “I mean, I would have done exactly that in your shoes, but that would be different,” she added, nodding her head sagely. “So, for shame.”
Bringing a hand to her chest, Cheyenne sighed, “However can I make up for my wrongdoings, I wonder? Will I need to throw myself across a pit of fire?”
“Nothing like that,” Daphne assured her, patting her on the shoulder. “In fact, if no one knows, then you can just keep pretending you’re a paragon of morality!”
“Now there’s an idea,” Cheyenne snorted. “I like it.”
By then, the sound of footsteps in the hallway was audible, coming up the stairs and crossing the floor.
They both fell silent in an instant when there was a knock at the door, and Harry opened it just enough to lean his head in a second later. “Cheyenne,” he greeted, and if he had any idea of what they had been talking about, he showed no sign. “Just letting you know that Lorraine won’t be returning.”
Cheyenne nodded quickly in acknowledgment, mouth clamped closed, and Harry retreated again, closing the door once again.
Cheyenne and Daphne were silent just long enough to wait for Harry’s footsteps to go silent, and then they collapsed against each other in a heap of wheezing laughter, hands over their mouths as they tried their hardest not to be heard. It wouldn’t be appropriate, and Harry at least was not having nearly as good of a time with the situation as they were.
Daphne shoved her head against Cheyenne’s shoulder and then straightened up again, still tittering quietly behind her hands. “You’re a horrible human being,” she stated, her words still wobbling with mirth.
“So are you!” Cheyenne protested, ramming their shoulders together with enough force that Daphne nearly toppled sideways onto the bed. “You’re no better than I am. You monster.”
“We’re both horrible people,” Daphne offered instead, conceding a point that she had never been trying to make to begin with.
“And don’t you forget it,” Cheyenne replied, nodding once.
It was…not quite a good evening, but it had certainly started looking up.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It didn’t take long before things began to get weird. Or weirder, rather, considering Cheyenne considered her life to be pretty damn weird by that point. But it had seemed like a harmless sort of weird for the longest time, aggravation aside.
And then, the weirdness started to get less harmless.
It started out small. She would feel the urge to look out the nearest window, just to make sure there was no one there. Or she would go outside to find something, only to find it missing or moved, or to find footprints in the grass and the gardens. After one such peek out the window, she stepped outside just to be sure—just to put her mind at ease—and found the gate hanging open, as if someone had departed in a great hurry. Cheyenne swore that no one had left the house to use the gate that day, though.
She mentioned it to Harry, concerned that someone was trying to case the house to rob it, but he didn’t seem worried. His security system was top of the line, after all, and it seemed pretty likely that it was just some local kids. Rich teenagers got bored and liked to try dumb things.
It seemed like sound enough logic, so Cheyenne tried her best to believe him, and for a while it worked well enough.
Harry’s logic stopped being comforting before long, though, and everything began to go downhill very quickly.
*
The feeling was slow when it started creeping up on her. At first, she just thought it was lingering paranoia after everything that had happened with Lorraine, considering how long she had spent tense and hyper-focused. It would make sense if it was just a little difficult for her to let that feeling go, so at first, she simply assumed that she was jumping at shadows. As it was, the hormones were already making her a little crazy, and she spent most of her time feeling some degree of frazzled. In fact, on multiple occasions, she had looked down at her stomach and cooed, “You’re all going to be out soon. Yes, you are. I’m so fucking glad.”
On the whole, she hadn’t put any stock in the feeling that someone was watching her. She wasn’t anyone particularly special or unique. She didn’t even have much of a job at that point, other than filling in to do a few errands for Harry on occasion. There was no reason for anyone to watch her.
Even so, the feeling kept nagging at her, and after a point it was just more comfortable if she had Daphne or Harry with her when she went into the city. Neither of them seemed to object, considering she was eight months pregnant with triplets and looked like she was fit to burst, and neither of them liked leaving her unattended if they didn’t have to.
It was on one such excursion into the city, picking up a few replacement bottles of the various vitamins and supplements that Cheyenne was supposed to scarf down on a daily basis, that she realized that maybe she should have paid a little more attention to that feeling.
Daphne grabbed her elbow as they left the shop before they could start back towards the car, with a sharp, “Hey.”
Cheyenne blinked at her, halting mid-step before putting her foot back on the sidewalk. “Yeah…?” she asked slowly, bemused. “What’s up?”
Daphne lifted a hand, pointing across the street as surreptitiously as she could manage. Admittedly, it still wasn’t particularly subtle, but it did the job, and as Cheyenne’s gaze followed the direction of her pointing finger, she watched a familiar blonde hastily turn away and begin walking steadily down the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
Cheyenne’s chest went cold as she watched Lorraine’s back retreat, and it took her a moment to realize Daphne was saying something. She started paying some semblance of attention again around halfway through the sentence.
“…mean, sure, it could be coincidence, but it seems pretty fucking weird to me, don’t you think?” Daphne shook her head slightly. “Come on, let’s just get out of here.” She looped her arm around Cheyenne’s and started walking once again, leading her steadily towards the car.
Cheyenne was quiet as she sat in the passenger’s seat, and they were halfway back to Harry’s house before Daphne finally broke the silence, sliding a brief, furtive glance in Cheyenne’s direction as she asked, “You okay?”
“A little weirded out,” Cheyenne replied, drumming the fingers of one hand on the car door. “I sort of figured everything with Lorraine was over and done with when Harry fired her.”
Pulling a hand off of the steering wheel, Daphne reached over and squeezed her arm. “It might be nothing,” she pointed out. “A ‘wrong place, wrong time’ sort of thing.”
“She looked like she was trying to get out of there in a hurry,” Cheyenne pointed out skeptically, still looking out the car window as she said it.
Daphne snorted, and her hand fell away from Cheyenne’s shoulder to instead re
turn to the steering wheel. “Well, yeah, of course,” she replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Whether she meant to be there at the same time as us or not, she’s still going to recognize you, and she still got fired and you were a pretty intrinsic part of that. Of course, she doesn’t want to be in the same place as you if she doesn’t have to be.”
Daphne’s logic seemed sound enough, at least for the time being. If it happened again, then Cheyenne wasn’t going to consider it just an uncomfortable happenstance, but for the time being, it seemed harmless enough to go without mentioning it.
After all, she already had proof that Harry wasn’t going to believe her on these matters until he was directly confronted with it, and she wasn’t in the mood to put herself through that again if she didn’t need to. She was pretty sure she didn’t have the fortitude for it.
Besides, if it turned out to be an actual problem, she could call the police later just as easily as she could call them then.
The rest of the drive was quiet, save for the sounds of traffic. Even with her tentative hope that it had just been an accident, Cheyenne couldn’t help but feel discomfited, and Daphne kept sliding her worried glances for the duration of the drive, until she was pulling into Harry’s driveway once again.
Neither of them mentioned anything to Harry that evening. Not even Daphne, who tended to air on the side of the overly cautious. Cheyenne wasn’t fully confident that Daphne actually believed it had just been happenstance that led to them crossing paths with Lorraine, but she also knew that Daphne’s opinion of Harry wasn’t exactly the highest, and she supposed it was entirely possible that she had also decided not to bother mentioning it to him if she didn’t think he was going to do anything.
It was yet another thing Cheyenne supposed they were going to have a very long conversation about after the babies were born and she was a bit better at stringing her thoughts together. If she tried it just then, she was pretty sure she was either going to make no sense or she would just insult him on accident.
*
As exhausted as she frequently was, Cheyenne felt moments of near manic energy from time to time, as if she was going to burst apart at the seams and fall into a billion pieces if she didn’t get out and do something.
It tended not to be anything huge. Walking long distances wasn’t really an activity that agreed with her for the time being, and she couldn’t really comfortably fit behind the wheel of a car anymore, so that wasn’t an option. And besides, those bursts of energy tended not to be anything particularly long-lived.
But she had her allowance from Harry, considering she was on maternity leave but she had refused to just sit around the house like the air would poison her if she left, and Harry hadn’t put up much of a fuss about giving her money each week. After all, it’s not as if he was really going to notice its absence.
He put up more of a fuss about Cheyenne going out on her own. Come to think of it, Daphne wasn’t crazy about the idea either. Cheyenne wasn’t entirely sure why. Well, alright, she knew why: the babies. But that still didn’t seem like a great excuse for either of them to get worked up, as far as she was concerned. If anything went wrong while she was out, she always had her phone with her, and even if she didn’t, it would be pretty damn hard for someone to miss an absurdly pregnant woman having trouble, so someone would be able to dial 911 for her even if she couldn’t do it herself. And then she would be off to the hospital, just as she would be if something went wrong while she was at the house by herself, as she so frequently was, since she was the only one residing there who didn’t work nearly every day.
But if they wanted to be a pair of nervous nellies, she wasn’t going to argue with them. There were better things she could do with her time and her energy whenever she actually had any of it to spare.
Considering that determination, though, of course it was all but inevitable for something to make her change her mind.
She was walking in the strip district in the early afternoon, making herself useful because an energy high had struck and the house seemed almost oppressively empty and silent. If nothing else she could hit up a few of the organic grocers along the strip and get something to make for dinner. It had been a while since she had gone all out when it came to cooking, but food shopping at least seemed like something well within the timeline of her typical bursts of energy. It also meant she would have something reasonably non-taxing to do once she was back at the house.
There were two grocers and a fishmonger that she planned on visiting, and it was as she stepped out of the first grocery store that she felt a touch off. As if something was trying to bore into the side of her head. She paused and glanced around on the sidewalk outside the store, and a teenage girl with a dog paused and asked her, “Hey, you okay, lady?”
Cheyenne offered the girl a smile and waved her along. “Just fine,” she replied. “Feeling a bit off is just a fact of life by now,” she added, one hand on her belly, a shopping bag in the other hand.
The girl gave her a wary smile before she continued on her way, glancing over her shoulder one last time before she picked up her pace again.
Cheyenne looked around once more, but everything seemed normal. She scowled down at the sidewalk for a moment before she shook her head in exasperation and kept walking. She was going to have a good afternoon, goddammit. No one and nothing was going to ruin it for her, least of all her own paranoia. With that thought bolstering her, she continued on to the second grocery store with a spring in her step that only felt a little bit too forced.
She made it to the store without any issues, and when she stepped inside, everything was perfectly fine. She would admit, she lingered a bit longer than she needed to as she picked up the ingredients she needed. She chatted with the cashier for a bit longer than was strictly necessary before she stepped back out the door and onto the sidewalk once more.
Once again, there was just something off, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. Her eyes narrowed as she peered around, but she didn’t take long to search, since it took only a moment before people started to look at her like she was crazy, and it wasn’t long before a couple were asking her if she needed any help with anything.
Cheyenne pasted a smile into place as she assured them, “Thanks, but no. I’m fine. It’s just been a long day.”
Both of them seemed a bit reluctant to keep moving, so Cheyenne made the decision for them, with one last smile before she carried on down the sidewalk. She just had to get to the seafood store and from there she could call a taxi to come get her. It wouldn’t be an issue.
She was fairly sure she wasn’t going crazy, but as she took one last look around before she picked up a more purposeful pace, she couldn’t help but feel like maybe she was. She pushed that thought to the back of her mind for the time being, though she didn’t bother trying to tell herself that she was going to have a good day. That possibility had sort of vanished.
It seemed like a silly thing to get emotional over, but she still had to squeeze her eyes shut for a few seconds as she walked. By some miracle, she didn’t bump into anyone.
When she got to the seafood store, the smell was almost overpowering, not helped at all by how tight and cramped the shop was, trapping the smell in every beam, brick, and fiber of the building. And yet even that was preferable to the strange, subtle dread of being outside. So once again, she took her time browsing the fresh selections, and the woman manning the counter was a cheerful, pleasant sort, so conversation was easy enough to make. Cheyenne honestly did get swept up in it without even needing to force it.
But soon enough, she had what she was looking for, and she stepped back outside. She had been in the shop for longer than she expected.
Perhaps that was why, once she stepped out onto the sidewalk, she actually managed to catch sight of her problem.
There was Lorraine, standing across the street. It took her only a split second to realize she had been spotted, and she ducked into a passing crowd and all
but disappeared. Cheyenne stared blankly at where she had been standing until someone bumped her with their shoulder, and she snapped back into the moment. Adjusting her hold on her purchases, she turned and stepped right back into the shop.
“Something wrong with the fish, dear?” the woman behind the counter asked.
“No, no, nothing like that.” Cheyenne offered a shaky smile, followed by the first story she could think of that would be believed and taken seriously. “I need to call a taxi, but…well, I know you don’t have a lot of space in here, but can I wait in here for it to show up? My ex-boyfriend is waiting for me outside.”
For a moment, the woman looked outraged on Cheyenne’s behalf, but she calmed quickly and offered a firm, “Of course, dear. I insist, in fact. And if he tries to come inside, you point him out to me, and I’ll tell him what’s what.”
Cheyenne couldn’t help but laugh at that, as she imagined the small woman in front of her menacing some imaginary man with a cleaver.