by Martha Carr
Slowly, she turned around and faced the other wall of the alley. The little tug spun with her and moved through her chest now, leading right to that other wall and…what? Cheyenne crossed the alley, frowning at the bricks, and the pull by an invisible hand got stronger with each step she took. Then she was standing right in front of the wall with only a few inches of space between the toes of her black Vans and the bricks.
“What kinda weirdness is this?” She studied the wall. There was something there. She could feel it.
“Mommy? What’s that scary lady doing?”
Cheyenne turned to see a three-year-old on the sidewalk outside the alley, one hand in her mother’s and the other pointing at the Goth chick staring at bricks. The mother gave Cheyenne an uncomfortable apologetic smile and tugged on her daughter’s hand without answering the question. The half-drow turned back toward the wall and rolled her eyes.
“Just another crazy person talking to herself in an alley,” she muttered under her breath.
She lifted a palm toward the wall and drew it over the bricks, almost but not touching them. There was still air between her hand and the wall, until it wasn’t. A sharp tingle like an electric shock without much power behind it zapped through the center of her hand. Cheyenne frowned and drew her hand away. The zap returned when she passed her fingers over the same brick, and she couldn’t help but glance around the alley to make sure this wasn’t some kind of joke meant just for drow halflings.
There was no one here but her.
Feeling like an idiot, she pressed her fingers to the brick that had not quite zapped her and heard something click behind it. “No.”
She pressed harder, and that brick withdrew into the wall like a secret doorway opening. There wasn’t much space there for much of anything, but the bright-blue piece of paper wadded up and stuck into the recessed opening caught her attention. When she reached in to pluck it out, she still hadn’t written off the possibility that she’d lost her mind.
The paper unfolded easily enough, and then Cheyenne was looking at the same cramped, tiny handwriting that had been too hard to read on the decrypted file at normal size. It was clear enough now.
Roses have thorns. That’s just how they’re made. This one has rough edges all around, but a few pokes never hurt anyone much. Especially when they’re asked for by name.
“What?” Cheyenne stepped back from the wall, and the recessed brick closed on its own. Tiny crumbs of red brick slid out of the opening and dropped onto the floor of the alley, and the half-drow turned with the next ridiculous clue in her hand.
She had no idea what this one meant, and it was even weirder. Cheyenne wasn’t much of a flower person, except for the black goth roses she’d used to decorate her room with back when she lived with her mom. But Bianca Summerlin’s estate was way out in Henry County, and it was pretty clear that a scavenger hunt with a map only of Richmond wasn’t supposed to send her over forty-five minutes out of the city.
“A few pokes.” The halfling snorted. “That could be taken so many different ways.”
She sniffed and rubbed an itch out of her nose. Her fingers brushed against her nose ring, and she froze.
Glancing back down at the blue paper and the clue, Cheyenne tried to find something written there that would undermine her first guess, but it all made sense. And that didn’t make any sense at all.
The Jagged Rose was a tattoo and piercing parlor about a five-minute drive from here. Cheyenne didn’t have any tattoos, but she had plenty of piercings, and she used to have even more than the ones she’d kept. When she’d graduated with her Bachelor’s last year, she’d treated herself at the Jagged Rose with the industrial piercings through both ears, just for fun and because she could. She hadn’t been there since, but that was the only place she could think of that fit the ridiculous description laid out in that clue.
Crumpling the blue paper, she shoved it back in her pocket and stuck her earbuds in again.
* * *
It took her a little over ten minutes, and then she was standing outside the Jagged Rose, gazing through the windows at the front desk and all the sketches and artwork—on skin or otherwise—displayed by the tattoo artists who worked there. Nobody passing her on the sidewalk or tossing her brief nods through the tattoo parlor’s windows thought twice about a Goth chick standing out front here.
Now all she had to do was find another clue. Or not do that and call this whole thing a failed attempt on her part to find useful information and a roaring success on gu@rdi@n104’s part to waste her time.
She looked the storefront over, then compared the closest area on that screwed-up map to where she now stood. No more dotted black lines. There weren’t any lines, blue or red or otherwise, so that was another short, quick dead end.
Awesome. Back to square one. And now I feel like a total idiot— Wait. What’s that?
Blinking, Cheyenne stared at the potted plant sitting on the window ledge of the Jagged Rose’s storefront. It was pretty much empty, full of dry dirt with a dead twig of whatever the plant had been poking out of the top. But she wasn’t looking at the plant or the dirt. A gold shimmer came from the bottom of the pot. It wasn’t something stuck on the outside or buried beneath the rim of the little plate the thing sat on. The halfling took one step to the side, and the shimmering gold shape stayed where it was. It looked way too much like her drow sight when she used it to see through walls and count the colored body shapes of anyone who was on the other side. But that was with her eyes closed.
She glanced at all the people walking around completely ignoring her, then sidled up to the window ledge and leaned against the glass at the corner of the Jagged Rose. That little gold shape was still there, even when she slipped her fingers between the back of the pot and the window. Her fingers brushed another thickly folded piece of paper, and she stared with wide eyes at the sidewalk.
How the hell did I find this thing?
When she got a good grip on the paper between her fingers, she pulled her hand back as nonchalantly as she could and pushed herself off the corner wall and the window. Then she took off walking again down the street because she didn’t want to stay in one place while she opened another clue she’d somehow been able to see through the pot.
The paper wasn’t glowing with that golden shimmer anymore when she looked down at it. Just a normal scrap of blue paper in her hand, with the same twisted handwriting on it as the last.
There’s no better way to learn than by tossing around ideas with one’s peers. Or opinions. Careful, though. When everybody screams all at once not the void, it’s hard to hear a single thread of truth.
“Okay, that sounds like Twitter.”
She looked up and down the sidewalk and met the gaze of a middle-aged man in a sweater with a rolled-up newspaper tucked under his arm. He nodded at her and muttered, “Yeah, I don’t understand it, either.”
It made her laugh when he walked past without another word. Then she stared back down at the blue paper and the written clue and wanted to tear her hair out.
Something about learning. About…the VCU campus?
The second she thought it, that prickling tingle of the invisible thread she hadn’t felt until the first clue at the brick wall flared up again between her shoulder blades. It might have excited her, thinking she was on to something, if she wasn’t totally creeped out. Her magic had flared up three times now to help with clues from a stranger, and she didn’t have to go drow mode.
She wished she could turn the music up even louder in her earbuds because she didn’t want to be able to hear herself thinking about what was happening right now. That maybe she really was losing her mind, and this was just the last piece of the puzzle before she went full drow-halfling psycho.
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Cheyenne followed that tingling pull—first from between her shoulder blades, then sort of through her shoulder until she turned and it tugged at her chest again—all the way to the VCU campus. Not really a big
surprise, honestly, seeing as the whole “pull a drow halfling along by an invisible string” trick had started up again when she’d thought of her school. That didn’t make it any less weird.
The pull on her senses—or the sixth sense, or whatever she wanted to call it—grew stronger the closer she got to the student center and the quad just beyond it. She passed only a few other people along the way, all of them taking their sweet time moving down the walkways because they had nowhere else to be on a Saturday at lunchtime. Weekends were cool like that.
By the time she passed the student center and stepped onto the green grass in the quad, the tug coming through her chest was almost an ache—dull, throbbing, just strong enough that it was impossible to ignore but not alarming.
“Hey, there!” A group of students wearing seventeenth-century costumes and loaded down with stage props veered around her on the walkway, laughing with each other. The one who’d called out extended a flyer toward Cheyenne. “Beautiful day, right? Come see our play in November.”
Cheyenne ignored him and picked up the pace across the quad, trying to pay attention to where she was putting her feet and where that tug on her chest was leading her at the same time. Then she passed the student message board where the walkways intersected, and the incredibly strong pull on her body whipped through her shoulder blades and almost knocked her on her ass.
“Woah!” Her Vans skidded on the sidewalk, and she spun to face the message board. The sharp pull moved back to her chest again, and it made her cough this time. “This is insane.”
The halfling glanced around to make sure no one was watching her, but why would they be? She was just another student on campus, stepping toward the message board to check out all the flyers and posters for student bands, fundraisers, local parties, and open invitations to debates or shows or clubs. Maybe the next clue was tacked up under the call for new members of the chess club.
Before she got three feet away from the message board, the tug on her body jerked sideways, almost through her black-magic-wounded shoulder. Cheyenne gritted her teeth and grunted, trying not to stumble around like a drunken idiot in the middle of campus. She noticed that the pull seemed to head right for the bench bolted into the ground just off the walkway.
Just sit down and rethink all my choices that led me to this point, because I’m now playing tug-of-war with my own magic.
Despite her sarcastic internal complaints, the halfling followed her magic—if that was what it was, and it kind of had to be at this point—toward the bench. The urgency of that pull let up a little when she reached the bench, and she sighed in relief before sitting on the cold metal seat. Her black-nailed fingers drummed on the overhanging edge of the bench on either side of her thighs, and she waited for something else to pop up out of nowhere and tell her where the heck to find the next clue. Then the cold metal beneath her, which she could already feel a little through her pants, started to warm up. In the next fifteen seconds, it got hot, until Cheyenne leapt sideways on the bench with a shout of surprise.
“What?”
There it was, beneath one of the metal slats where she’d just been sitting. A tiny corner of bright-blue paper peeked out from the underside of the bench, and the halfling pressed her lips together. I guess that’s one way to find it. Just sit on it ‘til it bites you in the ass.
Rolling her eyes, she slid off the bench to kneel in the grass and reach under the bench. Her fingers quickly found the little flap of it, and then she was pulling it out from where it had been wedged. The halfling sat back on her heels and unfolded the third physical clue. On it was just an address and a much shorter message that wasn’t even a clue.
Ask for Dianna. Tell her you’re there to pick up N-1075.
Shaking her head, Cheyenne pulled out her phone and typed in the address written on the blue piece of paper. What the search pulled up was so ridiculous, she burst out laughing as she knelt in front of a bench in the middle of the university quad.
The address belonged to a dry-cleaner’s. She shoved the newest clue into her pocket with the others and pushed to her feet. “I’m not a personal assistant.”
Shaking her head, she looked out over the mostly empty quad and reoriented herself in the direction she wanted to go. Just walk back to the car and drive across town. Easy enough.
The halfling stuck her hands into her pockets and walked back across campus, heading northeast toward where she’d parked her car in the lot beside Gnarly’s. Part of her expected that weird tug to return, to cart her off in some other direction because she’d missed something, but it didn’t. So now she got to do nothing more than enjoy her music, walk back to her car, and hope this package was the last thing she had to track down before she got what she needed to track that orc bastard Durg.
* * *
Just as she’d expected, it only took her about fifteen minutes at a quick pace to get to her car. Then she plugged the dry-cleaner’s address into her GPS and took off to follow the trail, this time on wheels. She half-expected the dry-cleaner’s to have some kind of irritatingly inconvenient weekend hours so she’d have to wait until Monday to finish this thing, but they were open.
She parked in the lot, got out, and felt like a total loon as she headed toward the front doors.
The bell on the door jingled when she opened it and stepped inside, although it couldn’t possibly be heard by anyone in the back over the sound of all the mechanical racks moving around and the steam-cleaner or whatever they used hissing away behind all those clothes. Cheyenne stepped up to the front counter and pressed the red rubber button on a little stand with a strip of paper taped to the front that read, Please ring once. We can hear you.
It took another minute for someone to come out of the back, and that was fine. The halfling wasn’t one of those people who thought her time was more important than everyone else’s, especially when she had no idea if this supposed package was going to be worth her time at all.
A short, thin woman in her mid- to late forties with dark hair cut in a straight, shiny bob bustled up to the counter and smiled at Cheyenne. She folded her hands and settled them on the top. “How can I help you?”
“Yeah, um, I’m looking for Dianna.”
The woman spread her arms. “Well, good job. You found her.”
“Awesome. So, I was sent in here to pick up a package, I think. N-1075.”
Dianna blinked, her smile flickering on her lips like she couldn’t decide whether to be pissed or laugh. “N-1075?”
“Yep. That’s what I was told.” The halfling attempted a smile but didn’t manage much more than a grimace.
“Huh.” Dianna’s smile finally settled on something like disbelief and amusement wrapped into one as she eyed the half-drow. Then she tapped a finger on the counter and stuck it in the air. “I’ll be right back, okay? You just wait right there.”
“Sure.” Sticking her hands in her pockets, Cheyenne had to make the conscious decision to breathe through her mouth right now instead of her nose. There were way too many smells in here from way too many people, all of them pumped up to maximum strength by whatever cleaning solution the woman used back there on so many different “dry-clean only” items. She chuckled.
No wonder I always hated it when Eleanor brought home Mom’s dry-cleaning. I was smelling a whole bunch of strangers’ things all mashed into everybody else’s clothes.
A little over a minute later, Dianna came walking briskly back up to the front with what was apparently N-1075. And it didn’t look anything like dry-cleaning. “Here you go.”
The woman handed the long brown paper bag across the counter with both hands. Cheyenne got a glimpse of white paper rolled up inside it.
“Okay. Thanks.” When the halfling took the unexpected package, she almost dropped it right there on the counter. Not that it was all that heavy, but she definitely hadn’t expected the weight.
With another secretive smile, Dianna studied her unexpected customer and nodded. “Anything else?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t owe you anything for this, do I?”
The woman chuckled and shook her head. “Already paid for. You’re just the messenger, right?”
With an unsure smile, Cheyenne dipped her head toward the woman and muttered, “Something like that. Thanks.”
“No problem. Maybe I’ll see you next time, then.”
“Yeah, maybe,” the halfling called over her shoulder as she headed right back out of the steamy, noisy, smelly dry-cleaner’s. She didn’t even try to look into the weird package until she got back behind the wheel of her Focus, started the engine, and rolled down the window to let in more fresh air.
Cheyenne peered into the top of the paper bag and frowned at the thin white butcher paper wrapped around whatever was inside. When she started to slide the thing out of the bag to take a closer look, a buzz rose from the passenger seat, accompanied by the flashing light on the FRoE burner phone. “Oh, come on. Can’t I finish something without getting interrupted?”
As much as she wanted to chuck that burner phone right out the open window of her car and cut all ties with Sir and his demands on her abilities in action, she didn’t. She grabbed it, flipped it open, and put it to her ear. “Yeah.”
“Hey, rookie,” Rhynehart chirped. “Time for that one last favor before you start moving up the ranks and getting your answers. You ready?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not if you want an escort to Chateau D’rahl.”
She sighed into the phone and wedged the brown bag onto the passenger seat. “Fine.”
“Sweet. I’m gonna text you an address. It’s about a thirty-minute drive from the mall, and I’m guessing you’re not all that far away from there, yeah?”