by Martha Carr
“This is stupid.” The next coin bounced off her chin. “Did you do this with all those orcs you won’t talk about?”
“Ha. They got fellfire and a couple of bursts of… You know what, that was different. I trained orcs not to feel pain. I’m training you not to give a damn.”
“Yeah, that’s not what I want.”
“It is when you’re trying not to unleash the beast within.”
“Good god.” The next coin headed straight for Cheyenne’s ear. She jerked her head away at the last second, and the penny pinged the far wall. “This isn’t gonna work.”
“Oh, it will.” Mattie picked up one coin at a time and began flinging them at her student. “Is this annoying?” Fling. “Stupid and pointless and juvenile, huh?” Toss. “Doesn’t it make you wanna come over and stop me?”
Cheyenne snatched the next coin from the air and clenched it in her fist. “Stop.”
“Uh-huh.” Mattie lifted her chin and stared at Cheyenne’s forearm, the coin still in the halfling’s fist.
When she looked down, Cheyenne saw dark-gray patches blooming on her pale skin. A few of them grew, but it was slow. She swallowed.
“Happy place,” Mattie reminded her. “Or whatever’s the opposite of how you bring out the drow.”
“The opposite.” Cheyenne took a deep breath and stared at her forearm. It felt as if she could will the dark splotches away if she focused hard enough, breathed slow enough.
Another penny struck her shoulder.
“Ugh! I almost had it!” The halfling chucked the penny across the office, and her drow transformation swept over her before the coin left her hand. It cracked into one of Professor Bergmann’s framed certifications and bounced on the carpet. Then, the office fell silent.
“‘Almost’ isn’t good enough. Not in this situation,” Mattie said. “And you know it.”
“I also know I’m never gonna be target practice for a carnival coin-toss booth. Outside of your office.” Purple sparks crackled along Cheyenne’s fingers. She clenched her fists and dampened them.
“That would be hilarious, wouldn’t it? But you may find yourself trying to get some sleep or study or focus, and some dog two doors down won’t stop barking. Or how about toddlers on an airplane? The ones that don’t make the flight more entertaining for everyone and end up doing the opposite. Maybe somebody rear-ends you at a stoplight, and you have to deal with that mess.” Professor Bergmann spread her arms and leveled a bold stare. “What are you going to do then? Pull over and scare the poor bastard off when a gray-skinned woman with pointy ears tries to exchange contact information and blows his car up instead?”
Cheyenne glared, then she let out one continuous, irritated sigh.
“I’m throwing coins at you because that’s what I’ve got today as a Virginia Commonwealth University professor. We’re not ready for a magic duel just yet. So if you want to learn, this is part of it. Target practice goes both ways.”
“You mean I get to chuck things at you after this?”
Mattie lifted a finger. “Not that way. You’re the target, Cheyenne, because accessing and using your magic can only happen when it counts. When there’s no other way to handle things in the guise the rest of the world sees you in, then and only then, do you let the illusion drop.”
“What about all the other people walking around without illusions, huh?”
“What?”
“I’ve seen, I don’t know, half a dozen orcs and a spare troll and goblin in the last few days. None of them tried to look human. Why should I have to?”
Mattie swallowed and shook her head. “The rules are different for you.”
“Why? Because I have drow blood? Or because of who my mom is?” Heat flared in Cheyenne’s veins, and she did not have the patience left to contain it. “Trust me, the rules have been different for me all my life. If I’m to play by some rule that doesn’t apply to everyone else, the least you can do is give me a straight answer, something that isn’t bullshit.”
“Cheyenne.” Professor Bergmann’s tone was sharp and authoritative, but she didn’t move a muscle. “We’ll talk about that after you handle getting hit with pennies longer than I can handle throwing them.”
“Nope. If you want me to hang out and follow your screwed-up training techniques, I need to know why. I’ve made it twenty-one years without any of this. I can go another twenty-one.” The halfling’s nostrils flared, and she spread her arms. “Go ahead.”
“I know you understand politics,” Mattie said. “Your mom taught you plenty, I’m sure. The world I came from—the world your father came from—has its own politics too. And they are…complicated.”
“Whatever.” Cheyenne whirled toward the professor’s desk and headed for her copper puzzle box. “You know, most people see my name and assume I’m Bianca Summerlin’s entitled brat, and I couldn’t care less about that. But this?” She lifted the box toward Mattie and shook it. “I am entitled to know these things. They’re mine.”
“It’s not my place to open that door for you until we both know you’re prepared to use the information the way it needs to be—”
Cheyenne scoffed. “You won’t open that door. Cool. I’ll just open this one.”
She went to the professor’s office door and jerked it open. The door squealed out of the frame, and the brass knob popped off in her hand. She glanced at it, tossed it behind her shoulder, and took one step toward the hallway.
The door slammed shut and would have knocked her sideways if she’d been any closer. Cheyenne whirled around to see Mattie flick her fingers toward the door again. The knob that had never hit the floor whizzed past the half-drow and clicked back into place before reattaching itself.
“You can’t do that,” Cheyenne snarled.
“I just did.” The professor lowered her hand, her jaw clenching and unclenching as she stared at the door.
“Tell me why the rules are different.” The words sounded more like a growl from the drow halfling’s throat. She held her professor’s gaze and wondered if she’d let herself use magic on the only woman who knew enough to tell Cheyenne anything she wanted to know. “Or I’ll find someone who isn’t a spineless—”
“Because you’re a halfling, Cheyenne.” Mattie huffed out a sigh like she’d been holding that sentence in for way too long. “Most magicals haven’t seen a halfling in their lifetime, which is why they treat those of you who exist like a myth. But the FRoE knows. I don’t know how long they’ve been aware, and I’m sure they’ve come across only a few. They know about a halfling’s magical blood manifesting certain traits when that halfling feels…intense about something. They know a halfling’s natural state makes them look human. And they just don’t care.”
“Then it shouldn’t be an issue.”
“They don’t care about you. If you don’t learn how to control your magic and hide who you are on a deeper level than black hair and makeup and studs, the FRoE will find you. If you make any trouble on this side where humans can see, where there’s the slightest human whisper about magic, they’ll come for you.”
Cheyenne shook her head. “Yeah, that doesn’t scare me. I can handle somebody trying to take me down.”
“Not these people, Cheyenne. They’re way more prepared than even I know. All I do know is if they come for you, they will book you and tie you up and ship you out to the closest Border reservation. They’ll haul you back across and dump you in the middle of a world that wants nothing to do with humans and has no problem destroying a halfling just because that halfling happens to look like one.”
Professor Bergmann closed her eyes, swallowed, and bowed her head for a few seconds. “I know that only brings up more questions. And I’m sorry. Believe me, the way this plays out for you if you don’t get a grip on covering up your magic is the worst-case scenario. And it will happen.”
Cheyenne chewed the inside of her lip. “The FRoE’s just another kind of border patrol.”
“Yes.”
; “And they don’t want magicals on this side?”
Mattie dipped her head. “Not if those magicals refuse to follow the law, which is still tenuous and somehow all the more enforced because of it. Things are better than they were in some respects when the FRoE was organized and the reservations opened up to the general magical public. They still have a lot of room for improvement. And that’s an understatement.”
“You mean, like Native American reservations?”
The corner of Mattie’s mouth twitched. “More like the model for Native American reservations. Trust me, the ones created for magicals on this side have been around much longer.”
“Okay.” Cheyenne rolled her shoulders and stretched her neck out. Might as well take a chance on making a few more connections. She doesn’t know I found that report. “And this whole FRoE thing started when?”
An uncertain look crossed Mattie’s face. “Sometime in two thousand. At least, that was when they made the official announcement in what few channels we had for communication. I’m sure the idea and the planning started a long time before that.”
At least she knows that much. Cheyenne nodded and muttered, “Twenty-one years ago.”
The programming professor let out a dry laugh and shrugged. “Hell of a way to usher in the twenty-first century.”
“Yeah. Seems so. For a whole bunch of people.” Like my parents. And magicals all over the place who wanted to be here for some reason.
“Now you know at least that much.” Glancing at her watch, Mattie set the tray of coins on the shelf and went to her desk. “It’s three fifty-seven. Might as well call it a day. I’ll be here tomorrow, in case you were wondering, and I’m still willing to keep throwing things at you until you don’t lose it on me.” She glanced at Cheyenne as she packed her wheeled briefcase, stuffing it with folders and loose papers.
The half-drow shrugged. “No one else has stepped up to take the job, so I guess you get to keep doing it.”
“Yes. I’m just that lucky.” Mattie chuckled, straightened, and grabbed the metal handle of her briefcase. “I’ll help you as much as I can, Cheyenne. But what you’re looking for is beyond my knowledge as a professor or a trainer or even as another magical who crossed over.”
“What do you think I’m looking for?”
Professor Bergmann nodded at the copper-coated drow artifact in her student’s hand. “A way to open that box. And how to use what’s inside.”
With a curt nod and a half-effective smile of encouragement, Mattie wheeled out of her office and into the hall. “Lock up when you’ve cooled down.”
The runes etched into the copper cube flashed beneath the lights when Cheyenne turned it every which way again.
A puzzle box. I just have to put the right pieces together. Or…
She gritted her teeth and tried to twist the top of the box off. Maybe they were the sides. Her dark-gray skin tingled a little at the effort, and then a bright silver light erupted from within every single rune and sent a painful electric jolt up her arms.
“Whoa.” Cheyenne released one side of the box and held the thing in her palm as far away from her as she could stretch. “You little shit.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The first thing she did when she got back to her apartment was call Ember’s cell. It was one thing for Cheyenne to insert herself onto her friend’s approved visitors’ list at the hospital, but filling out a new form giving the place permission to call her with updates on Ember’s condition would have taken it a little too far. Plus, while it wouldn’t have been impossible, she would have had to pretend to be Ember Gaderow and forge her signature. Which might be suspicious.
Ember’s phone went to voicemail right away, which meant it was dead.
Cheyenne went to her desk, dropped her cell beside her main keyboard, and went for a little hunt through VCU Medical Center’s patient database. Before she could click into Ember’s file, a duck quacked on her screen, and the yellow notification lit up in the bottom right corner.
“Oh, good. As soon as I try to do something else…”
With growing curiosity, she clicked on the notification and opened the first search result that had come through. It wasn’t just one, though. Her deep search had flagged four listings as a match to “border,” “portal,” “O-class,” and “crossing.” From four different IP addresses. There was no way to tell if the listed addresses were real or decoys, but the command report explained why it had taken her programs so long to come back with anything useful. They’d had to break through over a dozen layers of encryption to put the hits together, compile everything, and return the info.
Somebody doesn’t want people digging around in their sandbox.
Cheyenne clicked on the first result and opened it.
Too bad. I’m digging anyway.
The first file didn’t make much sense on its own, but it contained cross-references with the second and more with the third and fourth. Reading them one right after the other felt like a transcript of a private message someone had split and rearranged. Cheyenne reassembled them as best she could, layering one over the other to find common phrases.
They had embedded the conversation with un-closed code lines, chopped somewhere before the end. Which meant the other end—and the rest of the conversation in any order that made sense—was still in the files.
It took her an hour to run the series of overlapping tests to find which severed end of code matched the other. At least I know I have the glass slipper and the foot in the same place. Probably.
When the pieces clicked into place, another notification quacked on her screen, and a bright-red warning message popped up in the center.
Unauthorized Access Detected.
“No. Ya think?” Cheyenne cloaked her trail and cut a few corners around the security wall. She didn’t override the system so much as made it think she was part of it, and then she was past the last bit of encrypted security and could read the combined conversation.
“Jesus.” It came out as a whisper while Cheyenne read the document she’d dug up and assembled. It discussed four locations and four people, all operating on behalf of the FRoE, whatever that meant. The document outlined a series of operations over the last six months by magicals smuggling other races over the Border and bypassing the reservations. She uncovered surveillance and cataloging records of magicals who came across, and the ways they blended in with the humans on this side. Lists of businesses. Lists of families. Account balances and debts owed to this trafficking organization. Locations squeezed for protection money. New targets made of a dozen magicals and their businesses across the country, all of whom had been on this side, living with humans, for years—decades, even.
The most interesting part was the detailed instructions for avoiding FRoE detection and slipping under the radar of an organization created to regulate the magicals on this side and keep them in line. Hotspots of FRoE activity and where the magical-policing agency had overlooked its own blind spots.
“Illegal magical network.” Cheyenne blinked in raw amazement at her discovery and leaned toward her monitor. “How long have these people been doing this?”
She read over the detailed lists and the gathered information three times before she found a reference to the next operation on the network’s list of scheduled “meetings.” It was easy to miss when they referred to it as “an on-site update with real-time communication.” What the hell? They weren’t talking about software or servers at that point. They were talking about meeting in person to make some kind of nefarious deal.
Tomorrow night.
Cheyenne leaned back in her chair and rubbed her face. “Jesus. I need to find out who’s gonna be there.”
All the hints and vague descriptions pointed to something big. Not only big, but harmful to a lot of magicals with established lives on this side. Beyond that, she knew if she could tap into this network and find their databases beyond a few conversational updates and operating plans, she’d find Durg. The who
le thing stank as much as the orc who’d shot Ember.
If I don’t find him, I can at least keep this deal from being made and help who knows how many magicals by crashing their giant party.
Cheyenne set up bloodhound programs to sniff out the actual IP addresses from all four pieces of this messed-up correspondence, then she pulled the encoded location sites from the list and ran those through a decoder that would match them with corresponding GPS coordinates.
“This hole keeps getting deeper.” The halfling stood, double-checked everything was set up to do the heavy lifting, and nodded. “I’ll get to the bottom of it. It’s just gonna take a minute.” She stretched her arms overhead, then made a sour face and sniffed her armpit. “Gross. Time for a shower.”
She passed the time after her hot shower by practicing her shifts from human to drow and back again. The first one was easier now with every attempt, but the cooldown was still a big issue. Cheyenne stood in front of her bathroom mirror with a towel wrapped around her, staring at the reflection of her purple-gray face and golden eyes flashing in the vanity lighting.
“I found the trick to letting this part out.” Her skin tingled with heat and magic. “So, what’s the trick to calming down?”
What an oxymoron of an assumption—that humans were calmer than anything non-human. Calmer than magicals. It was likely true only because humans had no idea these Borders letting magical beings into their world even existed.
Think of something. Cheyenne brushed her still-wet, bone-white drow hair away from her face and ignored her pointed ears. Something that makes this go away.
With a deep breath, she stared into the mirror and found herself thinking of the Virginia woods around her mom’s twenty-acre plot of land. Their family’s plot of land. All the maples and the rivers, the wildflowers bursting across the meadow in violet, yellow, red, and white. She thought of the family of deer she’d found in the thicket just over the hill behind the farm. Two fawns and their mother, lying in the dappled sunlight coming through the leaves. She’d been so quiet, moving through the woods on bare feet because it always felt better, more natural. She had paused a few yards away from the animals as they rested in the mid-morning sun. The doe had lifted her head and observed Cheyenne crouched behind the trees. No fear. No concern for her fawns. Just recognition that the girl who looked human but wasn’t—not quite—existed in this place with her.