by Martha Carr
“Did you really think you could turn a new Cycle after the Spider, your own flesh and blood, and not be part of this after the fact?”
Of course. It’s always Cheyenne Summerlin being the damn chosen one for every little thing. This is bullshit. She cracked a humorless smile. “I mean, that’s kinda what I was hoping for, yeah.”
Venga thrust a clawed finger toward the door. “If you do not extricate yourselves from this room immediately, I assure you, you will not enjoy the alternative.”
“Mad-fucking-scientist.” Ember glared at his back, then stooped to wrap one of Cheyenne’s arms around her shoulders and help the halfling to her feet. “Good luck with your puke experiment, asshole.”
“Luck is for those without skill. Get out!” Venga pounded the huge bulge in the workbench and popped most of the dent back into place.
“Come on.” Ember supported a staggering Cheyenne toward the doors, pausing briefly to reach for one of the handles.
Cheyenne waved a hand at the doors instead, and they opened at her command. Storming out wasn’t an option at this point, but they hurried into the hall. Venga roared and waved the door shut behind them with a bang.
“Fuck him,” Ember muttered. “I’m this close to blasting another hole in the wall and shoving him off the balcony.”
“I bet he’d like it.” Cheyenne swallowed thickly, then cleared her throat. “Working right next to the Nimlothar and all.”
“Not after I’m done with him.”
“I’m okay, Em.”
“I don’t care. Who does that asshole think he is? Slamming surprise potions into you and saying you’re the problem. It’s the other way around!”
“No.” Cheyenne slowly drew her arm from around Ember’s shoulders, paused, and slowly straightened. “I mean, I’m okay. Right now. Just gotta walk this off.”
“Oh.” Ember studied her friend as the halfling took slow steps down the hall, reaching out to steady herself with a hand against the wall. “You sure?”
“Yeah. The more I move, the easier it gets, and I’m pretty sure I’m done puking.”
“That was seriously messed up.”
“Yeah, I don’t even know how that potion went from my chest to my stomach in under a minute.”
The fae said, “That was weird, but I’m still talking about the necromancer.”
“Right.” Cheyenne’s strength returned enough for her body to handle its weight on its own, and she took her hand off the wall. “Yeah. Messed up, but he’s still the best chance we have of getting rid of the blight the right way. Or at all.”
“I don’t get how you can do that.”
“What?”
“Just ignore the shit he pulled with you in the name of the greater good.” Ember floated cautiously beside her friend, looking for any sign that Cheyenne might need her again. “I mean, yeah, healing the blight is a big deal. Especially since it’s spilling out through the portals, and there aren’t a bunch of fae stationed at every single one of them to fight it back.
“You thought I’d get all pissed and stupid and try to fight the guy without thinking it through?”
Ember blinked rapidly. “Well, yeah. I guess I kinda did. No offense.”
“Not offended, Em. Not even surprised, honestly.” Cheyenne gently stuck her hands in her coat pockets, trying not to tug too hard and make her shoulder wounds even worse. “I guess I’m getting better at seeing the bigger picture.”
“Right. We’ll call it that.”
Cheyenne let out a weak chuckle as they moved through the fortress’ corridors. “So, now what?”
“Until we hear from the crazy asshole about what’s wrong with you?” Ember shrugged. “No clue. I mean, I guess we could try to find the others. Not Persh’al and Elarit. Newlyweds and everything.”
The halfling wrinkled her nose. “Not an image I needed.”
Ember snorted and gazed at the walls. “Or we could keep wandering around this place. I don’t think I’ve seen even a tenth of it.”
“More than I’ve seen. I bet we could find something that would be worth the time to look.”
“I’m not stepping into another torture chamber.” The fae shook her head. “I’ve seen enough of that shit, and even if everything’s been cleaned up and put away, I can still feel what happened in places like that, you know?”
“Not from experience, but I get it. Hold on a sec.” Cheyenne stopped and leaned against the wall to focus on searching through her activator.
“What are you doing?”
“Seeing if I can find anything good before we pick a direction.” Her fingers flicked at her side as she pulled up a map of the fortress’ layout. She scanned the rooms that came with their own names in the system: the Heart, the Sacrificial Chamber, the servants’ corridor, the armory, the machine vault, the Spider’s quarters. “Whoa.”
Ember folded her arms and glanced down the hall. “What?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it cool, but I’m definitely interested.”
“Cheyenne, I can’t read your mind.”
“Right.” Cheyenne pushed off the wall and gestured down the hallway. “Pulled up a map of the fortress, and there’s a section labeled ‘the Spider’s quarters.’”
“Oh.” Ember wrinkled her nose. “You really wanna go after that? She’s gone. No more Ba’rael Verdys terrorizing Ambar’ogúl.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like she had any time to pack her stuff before she took the fastest transport out of the city.” Cheyenne met her friend’s gaze and widened her eyes. “I bet her rooms have some seriously weird shit.”
“Shit that could make a lot of things go wrong if we mess with it.”
“Or shit that might have answers for us. We just have to look at it the right way, Em. Think of it as getting to know our enemy, okay? Sure, Ba’rael’s gone, but this whole shitstorm came straight from her. If she was hiding anything in her quarters…”
“It was probably for a really good reason, Cheyenne.”
The halfling looked at the next branching series of corridors and pointed to the left. “This way.”
Ember sighed. “I’m not gonna get you to change your mind about this, am I?”
“Nope. It’s good to have you around, though.”
“Fine.” The fae hurried after her friend down the next corridor, scanning the walls with her activator but only seeing half of what Cheyenne could read in the system’s code. “We’re leaving her clothes alone.”
Cheyenne laughed. “What?”
“It’s a thing I have, okay? I don’t like looking through other people’s clothes. Creeps me out.”
“Interesting.”
“Don’t say it all judgy like that.”
Cheyenne put on a mock-stern frown and stroked her chin. “Interesting.”
“Okay, that’s worse.”
Chapter Twenty
“There’s no way this won’t be creepier than walking into that darkseller shop.” Ember stared at the narrow fourteen-foot-high door of black metal in front of them. Engraved on the surface was a giant spider with a massively swollen abdomen stretched across etched lines of a web. Daggers and thorny vines like barbed wire decorated the frame. She shivered. “No way.”
“That’s what makes this worth checking out, Em.” Cheyenne stepped toward the door, her activator lighting up a command to open it with her magic. “So let’s find out.”
“Five minutes.”
“Ha. That’s not nearly enough time.”
“That’s all the time I’m willing to spend on the other side of the door, and she didn’t even try to kill me.”
“Okay, fine. Unless we find something you’re really into, five minutes.”
“Thank you.”
Cheyenne waved a hand at the door, flicking her fingers and accepting the activator’s prompted command. The door stayed firmly shut. “Huh.”
“What, is it locked?”
“Very funny. I never have a problem with locks.” Cheyenne stepped awa
y from the door to look the whole thing over. “Must be a sequence I missed.”
“Okay.” Ember folded her arms and looked cautiously up and down the hall. “What if someone sees us here?”
“Then they thump a fist on their chest and move on. If everyone says I’m the one who got rid of Ba’rael, I don’t think they’re gonna care that we’re breaking into her old room.”
“I bet someone would.”
“Then we’ll deal with it.” Cheyenne waved her hand at the door again, but still nothing. “This is weird.” First time I can see the answer right in front of me and can’t use it.
“Well, maybe we should go then.”
“You sound scared, Em.”
“Fuck yeah, I am.”
Cheyenne shot her a sidelong glance. “Don’t be.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. Now that you’ve said it, piece of cake.”
Stepping close to the door again, Cheyenne swiped her fingers across the code scrolling over the engraved surface. The activator told her she’d gone through the correct sequences, but the door stayed where it was. There must be something else, an extra step that doesn’t have anything to do with tech or magic.
Her hand passed over the thick legs of the spider, complete with tiny hairs, and over the base of the thing’s swollen abdomen. Something in the door clicked, and a tiny needle shot from the metal to prick her finger before retracting again.
“Ow.” She pulled her hand back and looked at the tiny bead of blood on her fingertip.
“Shit.” Ember’s eyes widened. “Let me see it.”
“Em, it’s a prick on my finger.”
“Yeah, from the goddamn Spider’s bedroom door. Maybe you don’t think it’s a big deal, but my brain is exploding with all the different kinds of poison she could’ve put on that thing. Or maybe you triggered a trap. Ever think of that?”
The door clicked and whirred, small gears and levers they couldn’t see activating behind the surface. A silver light flashed across the engraved spider’s body, and the door swung slowly inward with a groan.
Cheyenne slowly looked over her shoulder at her friend and raised her eyebrows. “Or the Verdys DNA was the missing piece.”
Ember scowled and snatched the halfling’s hand. “Not taking any more chances.”
“What are you doing?” Laughing, Cheyenne tried to pull her hand away, but Ember held on long enough to let off a burst of gold light and send a rush of warm energy up the halfling’s finger.
“There.” Ember let go of her and gestured at the door. “Now we both know you’re fine.”
“Well, thanks.” With another glance at her finger, Cheyenne turned back to the open door and stepped into Ba’rael Verdys’ personal chambers. The room beyond was pitch-black. She scanned the darkness, looking for lines of code that didn’t exist on the walls, floors, or ceiling. “She cut herself off from everything.”
“Huh.” Ember floated slowly into the room. “That must’ve taken a lot of extra work.”
“Probably, yeah.” Cheyenne checked her activator for possible light spells, but Ember beat her to it.
A flash of soft white light darted from the fae’s outstretched hand and drifted up to the incredibly high ceiling. It stopped and hovered there as a long, narrow bar illuminated the room.
“Okay, one more point for the fae.”
Ember grinned. “Just a spell I knew. Don’t worry, I’m not taking your place as the fastest on the draw with an activator.”
“I wasn’t worried.” Cheyenne glanced around the massive room and frowned. “Just confused now.”
Ba’rael’s private quarters were practically empty. A large, plain metal armoire rested against the far wall, the doors open to reveal two black robes and nothing else. Against the right-hand wall was a thin, uncomfortable-looking pallet on the floor. No draping curtains. No luxurious pillows or exotic bedding. A large, plain metal scrying bowl, now empty, sat on the floor between the pallet and the wall opposite the armoire, which held only a full-length frameless mirror.
“Yeah, this is creepy, all right.” Ember floated past Cheyenne to get a better look at the room. “It’s like no one lived in here.”
“Well, to be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t. The Spider didn’t strike me as someone who’d put a lot of time and effort into creating cozy spaces.”
“What about her Nós Aní? The other drow?”
“Ruuv’i?” Cheyenne headed toward the pallet, searching for anything other than the spartan furniture and clearly unused scrying bowl. “I think they’re married, or whatever the O’gúleesh version of that is.”
“Right. This doesn’t make sense.” Ember approached the armoire and grabbed the handle of the closest open door, swinging it out to check behind it. “Not that I give a shit about what those two did in the privacy of their own room, but this is a whole lot of nothing for two drow rulers to call home.”
“Maybe they just used it for sleeping.”
“So then why the extra blood wards on the door?”
Cheyenne shrugged. “Maybe Ba’rael really valued undisturbed rest. Hard to imagine her sleeping.”
“Might’ve been the only way for her to unwind after a long day of an entire world hating her guts and waiting for someone to show up and force her off the throne. You know, locking herself in here with nothing else.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Cheyenne stepped in front of the full-length mirror and studied her reflection: wild white hair, darker than normal circles under her eyes, tattered holes in her shirt and at her hip. Not a good look, Cheyenne. Next time I make the crossing, I gotta stock up on extra clothes.
She lifted a hand toward her shoulder, meaning to look at the worsening black lines in the dart wound. The other open door of the armoire creaked closed under Ember’s touch.
“Whoa. You need to see this.”
“What?” Cheyenne dropped her hand and turned around.
Ember stood in front of the armoire, the doors closed with two inches of space still between them, and gestured at a low metal table stashed in the corner.
“What is it?”
“I’m not gonna try to guess.” Ember frowned at the low table and swallowed. “But it’s not good.”
Cheyenne stepped onto the pallet and off again to cross the room. When the low table’s contents grew clearer under Ember’s magical light, the halfling stopped. “What the fuck?”
“Right?”
Dropping to her knees in front of the table, Cheyenne snatched one of only two items arranged intentionally on the metal surface. The stand of the picture frame clacked into place when she lifted it for a closer look. It was one of only three pictures Cheyenne had framed and set on the shelves in her old, run-down apartment. This one captured a moment from five years before: Cheyenne in human form, already years into her Goth self-expression, standing beside Bianca Summerlin on their veranda and holding the high school diploma she’d received from online schooling two years before any of her peers. Bianca’s small, closed-lipped smile looked a lot more mocking now than it had seemed back then, even beside Cheyenne’s sixteen-year-old deadpan stare at the camera, her head slightly tilted as she bore all the attention her mother never gave but had almost been made up for by Eleanor.
Cheyenne forced herself to look away from the picture and turned her attention to the only other item on the table, a pair of the brightly colored, comically decorated underwear her old troll neighbors had given her as an awkward thank you for bagging an orc asshole in their living room.
“What the fuck are these doing here?”
Ember couldn’t think of anything to say and kept quiet.
“What is this? Looks like some kinda sick altar.” Cheyenne dropped the underwear and hurled the metal table against the wall. There was nothing underneath. “I don’t get it.”
“You think she was using those to track you?” Ember asked. “You know, before you passed the trials?”
“I have no fucking idea. It’s like she wanted me to
find this.” The halfling’s eyes widened. “Or he did.”
“Who did?” Ember floated over to the armoire when Cheyenne launched to her feet, the picture frame clenched in her hand.
“Ruuv’i.” Cheyenne stormed across the room toward the open door. “Did you see what happened to him after Ba’rael and Neros disappeared?”
Chasing her friend, Ember frowned and tried to remember. “No, I don’t think so. We were all pretty focused on you being a drow dartboard and becoming the new Crown at the same time.”
“Shit. Yeah, it had to be him.”
“You think he set up a shrine to you with an old picture and a pair of underwear?”
Cheyenne stormed through the open door and into the hall. “Either Ba’rael was using these for something, or Ruuv’i left it as a warning.”
“Of what?”
“Em, these things came from my old apartment. I still pay for the place. It’s in my name. I doubt he’d make the crossing to grab these, but someone brought them here and handed them over for that bitch to do whatever the fuck she wanted.”
“But she’s gone!”
“Look! This is me and Bianca.” Cheyenne shoved the picture frame toward her friend. “I knew the Bull’s Head had found my apartment when they painted blood on the door, but now they know about Bianca. They know her face. It doesn’t take someone with half my skills more than an hour to run a search for her.”
Ember stared at the picture as the realization sank in. “You think someone’s going to go after your mom?”
Cheyenne snarled and smashed the picture frame against the wall. Shattered glass hit the tops of her black Vans and she stepped back, peeling the photograph out of the frame before dropping it. She stuffed the picture into her pocket and stormed off. “Maybe they were gonna leave her alone before all this, but since Ruuv’i saw me take Ba’rael’s place and snuck out of here without anyone seeing him? Yeah, he’ll send someone after Bianca just to make us even.”
“We don’t know anything about the guy.”