by Martha Carr
“Maybe five-six.”
“You work out?”
The half-drow spread her arms and cocked her head. “Define ‘work out.’”
McMathers looked her over, his eyes lingering a little longer on her shoulders and biceps. “You’re not a bodybuilder.”
“I’m not out of shape, either.”
“Right. Did you call a taxi or anything? Maybe an Uber?” The man narrowed his eyes again.
“With my best friend bleeding out from a bullet hole and me needing to get to the hospital? I wasn’t thinking about calling anyone.”
“Yeah.” McMathers chewed his lower lip and frowned. “See, that’s what I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around. Ember told us the same thing—that you carried her from Jackson Ward all the way here to VCU Medical Center. That’s over ten blocks. How does a five-foot-six non-bodybuilder carry her five-foot-ten friend with a gunshot wound ten blocks, give or take, to the hospital before that friend loses too much blood for the doctors to operate?”
Cheyenne glanced at Rawley for help, but the woman seemed interested enough in the half-drow’s answer that she didn’t try to change the subject. “Are you asking about my strength or my timing?”
McMathers shrugged. “Both.”
“Adrenaline, I guess. You know, like those stories of moms who’ve lifted cars all the way off the driveway to get to their babies or whatever?”
The man blinked. “But those moms didn’t carry those cars over ten blocks.”
Cheyenne wrinkled her nose at the man. “Neither did I.”
Rawley grinned. “She’s got a point, man.”
McMathers rolled his eyes. “Then what about the timing?”
“I don’t know how long it took me to get Ember to the ER if that’s what you wanna know. I wasn’t paying attention to the time, either. I guess both of us were lucky I got her here in time.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
Rawley shot her partner another of those looks, then shook her head and caught Cheyenne’s gaze. “Did you see anyone else in the park besides the people involved in the argument and the shooting? Maybe somebody stayed behind or showed up for a better look when you did?”
That’s right. Now they’re trying to explain the chunks blown out of the cement skatepark and the chain-link fence that got ripped up like a piece of toilet paper.
Cheyenne shook her head. “No.”
“Think about it,” Rawley added. “Anything you can remember from that night that might help us find the people who did this to your friend?”
The halfling pretended to give it a moment of consideration. “No, sorry. I remember everyone running away after the gunshots. I thought it was weird nobody stopped to check on the person who went down.”
“And that person happened to be your friend.”
Cheyenne glared at McMathers. Now he’s being a douche. “Yeah. My friend got shot and might not ever walk again. But at least she’s still alive. So like I said, we both got lucky.”
“You sure did.”
Rawley nudged her partner’s arm with the back of her hand, then nodded at Cheyenne and looked both grateful and sympathetic. “Thank you, Miss Summerlin. We appreciate you taking a minute to talk to us. If you end up thinking of anything else, if it seems like the most mundane detail, give me a call.”
The woman pulled a business card from her jacket and handed it to Cheyenne. The halfling took a quick glance at it—Michelle Rawley, Richmond Police Department—and tucked it in her pocket. “Okay.”
“Okay.” McMathers squinted at Cheyenne, and Rawley all but rolled her eyes.
“Have a good night.” With a nod, Rawley stepped past Cheyenne down the hallway, followed by her reluctant and suspicious partner.
He can be as suspicious as he wants. No humans-only police department is gonna be able to solve any kind of case with people and powers they don’t know exist.
She waited for the officers to turn the corner past the nurses’ station, then slipped back inside Ember’s room. “Man, they’re taking thorough questioning to a whole new…”
Ember was asleep, the head of the bed still raised to support her. The pizza rolls were gone.
With a little smile, Cheyenne crossed the room and grabbed the Gladware. She plugged Ember’s phone into the wall beneath the window and took the tote bag of her friend’s clothes to the desk on the opposite side of the room, then searched around the hospital bed until she found the button to lower it until it laid flat. After studying Ember’s sleeping face, which had foregone peaceful and went straight for knocked-the-hell-out, the half-drow gave her friend’s hand a gentle pat. “See you tomorrow, Em.”
No one stopped the drow halfling on her way out of the Medical Center. When Cheyenne got halfway to her car, she detected the prickling sensation of someone’s eyes on her.
You’d think if I went missing for five days, whoever was following me would’ve given up by now.
It crossed her mind it might have been Sir sending one of his FRoE operatives to watch her, but she batted that thought away. They agreed to their end of the deal. And my conditions didn’t include no tracking devices in that stupid burner phone, but they don’t know I already took care of that. They’ll know when they call me.
They hadn’t called her. Yet.
The eyes on her brought an all-too-familiar feeling. Cheyenne didn’t slow down until she got to her car and unlocked the driver’s side door. She took the time to glance around the parking garage before getting in. The sun had almost set, but in the not-quite-twilight, nothing moved. Nobody was walking around, and the garage was mostly empty after visiting hours. The minute she opened the door and slipped into her car, the feeling of being watched faded.
I’ll find out soon why you’re following me, whoever you are. Trust me.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Cheyenne slept well for having spent five days asleep in the FRoE compound chained to a hospital bed. When her alarm went off at 6:30 a.m., she got straight up.
Before heading to her first class of the day with the joyless, monotonously droning Professor Hersh, she took a peek at the Borderlands forum and the new topic she’d put up the night before. It had taken her a little while to gather her thoughts after coming home from the medical center, but she’d settled on a topic title that left pretty much zero room for misinterpretation.
Topic #1763 by OP ShyHand71: I’m looking for Durg.
And the first comment under the title, of course, only had the critical info that needed to be gotten across.
ShyHand71: Any information is helpful. Willing to negotiate for information. PM me if you want to work something out.
Nobody had left her a comment yet, but she’d made the first move, and it was a pretty bold one.
“Maybe gu@rdi@n104 will have something to say.” She exited the Borderlands forum. “Doesn’t he always?”
After straightening her High Voltage Raven Black-dyed hair and letting it fall flat on either side of her face—mostly habit at this point since she’d spent the last fifteen years hiding her slightly pointy ears, she decided to grab a breakfast burrito from the gas station a block away from her apartment complex before hitting the road. Cheyenne strolled into the convenience store.
Looks like the owner cleaned the place up since last time I was here. Granted, it needed a serious cleanup because I was here.
Evidence of the standoff she’d had with the idiotic humans robbing the place last week was erased. The security camera in the corner at the end of the beer cooler had been replaced, no longer taped between two thick pieces of cardboard. And Katie was behind the counter this morning.
“Hey.” About Cheyenne’s age, Katie gave Cheyenne a genuine grin when the half-drow came to the register. “It’s been, what, a week, maybe? Feels like forever.”
“A lot can happen in a week.” Cheyenne set the burrito on the counter and waited for the girl to ring it up. “I didn’t know you were working mornings.”
Katie shrugged
and released a skittish laugh. “It was time for a change. I’m not sure I’m into the nightshift anymore, you know? Did you…did you hear what happened?”
Would you believe I was here for it? You wouldn’t have recognized me with the gray skin and white hair and magic shooting out of my fingers.
“Cheyenne?”
“Huh?”
“You okay?”
She gave Katie a slow smile and nodded. “A little tired. Sorry. Yeah, I heard what happened with the robbery and everything.”
“Attempted robbery. I, uh…” Katie rubbed the back of her neck and wrinkled her nose. “I passed out when it happened, but I’ve been told somebody came in here and saved my life. I don’t know. It sounds kinda crazy when I say it out loud. I figure days are safer for me at this point, you know?”
Cheyenne handed over her credit card. “Sounds like a good call.”
“Hey, thanks.” Katie appeared touched to hear someone supporting her decision or not calling her a weak idiot for passing out when she had a gun pointed at her face. “The thing I don’t like about the switch is I’m not around to say hi when you come in at night. But hey, turns out you buy all your meals here. Who knew?”
With a little chuckle, Cheyenne grabbed her burrito and the napkins Katie offered and said, “Best breakfast burritos within a block of where I live. I’m glad you’re doing okay.”
“Thanks. Have a good one.”
“You too.”
By the time Cheyenne got to her car, she almost had the burrito unwrapped. She felt those eyes watching her again—a cool, tingling, crawling feeling at the base of her neck. It spread over her shoulders and down her arms, and she knew it wasn’t her imagination.
Look at this. Goosebumps.
She took a violent bite of the burrito and slipped into her car.
Not gonna let Mr. Eyeballs freak me out today. I have a lot to do.
* * *
Cheyenne strode into Professor Hersh’s graduate class five minutes before 8:00 a.m. and grabbed her usual seat on the far-left side of the room. That made it a lot harder for anyone else to sit close to her since nobody wanted to climb over her at the end of the row to get into another seat.
The class filled up with the small number of graduate students taking Hersh’s course for 2021’s fall semester. Exactly one minute before the class was scheduled to start, Hersh bustled in, his haggard face redder than usual.
It’ll return to its normal oatmeal color in the next half-hour.
Cheyenne pulled her laptop out of her backpack and pretended to take notes. It was impossible to pay attention to Hersh. The man droned on in his tepid monotone, never asked questions, maybe wrote equations on the whiteboard, and pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose every forty-five to sixty seconds. For all the man’s posturing and lines like, “I hope you’ll use this opportunity to learn something and expand your mind,” he didn’t leave much room for either of those things in his class.
She hadn’t realized she’d been dozing off until someone’s phone rang, accompanied by a surprising buzz in the pocket of her black jeans, which were checkered with squares of black satin. The halfling lurched in her seat and clamped a hand down on her back pocket before somehow fumbling around and pulling the FRoE burner phone from her tight pants.
Hersh glared at her from behind the desk at the front of the room.
“Excuse me. I’ll…I have to take this.”
“It better be important,” Hersh muttered.
The phone kept ringing with its super loud, annoying digital ringtone from ten years ago, and Cheyenne jogged to make it out of the classroom and into the hall before the ringing stopped. She jerked open the flip phone and pressed it against her ear. “I’m a little busy right now.”
“Not too busy to answer the phone we gave you,” Rhynehart said. “That’s good to know.”
“Yeah, well, we made a deal. Can you call me back in like an hour?”
“Ha. That’s funny, Blakely.”
For a moment, Cheyenne had forgotten about giving the FRoE her middle name instead of the name the rest of the world used. Besides “halfling.” “No, seriously. I have a lot going on today.”
“Well, move it around. That was part of the agreement, remember? You’re on call.”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes and waited for him to keep talking.
“I need you to come with me this morning. There’s a low-level asshole making problems for some people we don’t want to piss off, and he needs to be sat down for a little chat.”
Cheyenne frowned at the closed classroom door before her. “That sounds like something way below your paygrade.”
“Of course, it is. But I told you I’d be keeping an eye on you, so guess who pulled the short straw in being your partner for this first assignment?”
“Assignment?” Listen to him, talking like I get a paycheck for any of this. “Lucky you.”
“Yeah, lucky fuckin’ me. Where do you want me to pick you up?”
Cheyenne paced and shook her head. “Give me an address. I’ll meet you there.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“I don’t need a chaperone. Unless you’re doubling as an Uber driver now.”
Rhynehart paused. “Look, the place we need to go is two hours away. Right outside Prince Frederick, Maryland. And you need a ride.”
“No, I don’t. I have a car.”
The man exhaled. “You’re not gonna give me this one, are you?”
“The chances of that are about as high as you agreeing to call me back in an hour. Text me the address, and I’ll meet you there at…” The half-drow pulled the phone away to look at the time on the weird green backlit screen of the flip phone. “Eleven o’clock, yeah?”
“We’ll have a serious problem if you’re late, halfling.”
“Yeah, I figured as much.”
“Okay. Check your messages.” Rhynehart hung up without another word, and Cheyenne was left standing there in the hallway, scowling at an old-school burner phone and hating the fact that she’d left all her stuff inside the classroom.
She put the phone on silent, slid it into her back pocket with an extra shove, and re-entered Hersh’s titillating lecture on programming theory.
The second she sat back down in her seat, the professor pointed at her and blinked furiously behind his thick glasses. “Thank you so much for gracing us with your presence again, Cheyenne. I have a feeling you already know the answer to this equation up here on the board. Would I be right?”
“Yeah.”
The man blustered behind the desk and slapped the whiteboard with the back of his hand, eliciting choked-back sniggers from one or two students in the class. Cheyenne recognized the huge redheaded guy with the unwieldy beard who smelled like Doritos in the second row up front. Guess I’m sitting upwind this time.
“This equation right here,” Hersh repeated with another smack. “You already know the solution, or you know how to find it?”
“I already know it. If you need some help, I’m more than happy to email it to you later.”
The man’s face had regained its redness, this time from rage instead of exertion. “Would you like to stand up here and teach this class for me?”
Seriously? He sounds like my eighth-grade English teacher. Cheyenne grimaced, embarrassed not for herself, but for the programming theory professor who seemed so intent on digging this hole deeper for himself. “No. I don’t want to teach your class.”
“I’ve dealt with a lot of students like you, Cheyenne. They all think they know more than their instructors and professors until they end up failing and never graduating to make anything of themselves.”
The drow halfling grimaced. This is getting painfully awkward.
“So if you’re intent on disrupting a lecture if it’s not to your specific taste, by all means, come on up here and have a go at it yourself.”
The classroom fell ridiculously silent, and Cheyenne bit her bottom lip until Hersh shook his han
d at her again in emphasis. “I’m sorry my phone rang during your class,” she said evenly. “And I’m sorry I had to take it. You’re the professor. Please continue.”
“Do I need to make this an assignment?”
Some of the students turned around in their seats to flash sympathetic looks at the Goth girl getting chewed out for something adults frequently had to do in life—answer their phones.
Okay, I guess me trying to be nice isn’t working.
“You can make it an assignment if you want, I guess.” She shrugged. “But I don’t wanna embarrass you in front of all your other students.”
Someone two rows in front of her choked on their stifled laugh.
Hersh looked like his head was about to blow right off his narrow, overly round shoulders. “Do not interrupt my class again. Are we clear?”
Cheyenne nodded and gestured for him to proceed, which made his face go from slight-sunburn-pink to boiled-lobster-red.
I know there’s a big difference in age here between Professor Dinosaur and his students, but we’re all adults here.
Hersh apparently decided that continuing his lecture—which in all likelihood was supposed to focus on practical application—was better for his health and his ego than continuing to hold his breath and glare at Cheyenne with his eyes popping out of his head. He straightened, pressed his finger on the printed notes on the desk, then went back into his speech where he’d left off.
This time, when the burner phone in Cheyenne’s pocket vibrated, there was no annoying ring from ancient technology. The half-drow leaned sideways again, grimacing at the pain it punched through her hip, and slowly flipped the phone open in her lap.
It was a text from an unsaved number, obviously, but it couldn’t have been from anyone but Rhynehart.
Prince Frederick, Maryland. Highway 402 past Wilson Rd. 1100 hours.
And that was it.
Awesome. Cheyenne slipped the phone back into her pocket, folded her arms, and slid farther down in her chair until the soles of her black Vans touched the back of the seat below and in front of her. The last thing I need right now is Hersh crawling all over me again. I can sit through the rest of the class and take care of everything else afterward. No problem.