The halfling forced a long sigh between her teeth, her chest heaving. Cool it. Come on. “Well, then have you found anything about where they are?”
“No. We’re still looking.”
“Oh, yeah? Where do you start?”
“Look, kid. We’ve got informants and friends keeping eyes on different areas of town. I’ll make some calls and get more eyes on this thing, but I can’t send out a team if I don’t know where we’re going or what we’re up against. And…shit. And you know I have to run this through the chain of command first anyway, okay?”
“Well, you better make it convincing.”
“I’ll do what I can.” Rhynehart sighed over the phone. “Just sit tight and don’t go rushing into this without backup, yeah? Which I’m pretty sure is gonna come from my end.”
“Whatever.”
“Hey, where’d you find this stuff, anyway? Might be a good resource for us in the future.”
Cheyenne swallowed and settled her gaze on Glen. “You wouldn’t know what to do with it if I told you.”
“Okay. Whatever it means, good work. We’ll find them, Cheyenne. That’s what we do.”
Except the FRoE couldn’t find me until I literally ran into them. “Call me when you have something.”
She slapped the flip phone shut and almost chucked it across the room, but she shoved it into her jacket pocket instead and kept pacing. Her next-door neighbor had started humming a little tune with the drumming rhythm on the table, way out of key. Cheyenne’s back ached and it didn’t go away, even when the flaring heat of her drow blood rose up her spine. She shoved it back down and stormed toward the kitchen to snatch up her keys. I gotta get outta here.
Smashing her feet into her black Vans, she jerked open the front door and stopped. The halfling gritted her teeth and leaped back to grab the copper legacy box and tuck it under her arm.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
She pulled up in front of the house-turned-into-rental-units and turned off the engine. The copper box glinted in the light of the streetlamp, and Cheyenne glared at it in the passenger seat. It was cold and lightless when she scooped it up and got out of the car. The slamming door echoed down the empty street, and the halfling stomped across the grass around the side of the house toward the steps leading down to the basement door of Apartment D.
Puffing out a sigh, she knocked once, and a blast of orange light flared between her knuckles and the metal door. A fiery jolt raced up her arm, and her drow form took over before her back hit the far wall of the bottom stairwell. “What the hell?”
The door shimmered with orange light again and jerked open. Corian’s wide silver eyes stared at her from the foot-wide opening. “Cheyenne,” he hissed. “What are you doing here?”
She lifted the legacy box in her hand and scowled at him. “What are you trying to do to me?”
“What?”
“Your door’s a giant electrical socket.”
The Nightstalker rolled his eyes. “I’m beefing up security around here, okay? Told you I had to put up some wards.”
“Then you need to beef it up even more.” The halfling shook out her hand. “That hurt, but I’m pretty sure I could have knocked the door off its hinges if I’d really wanted to.”
“Yeah, well, the wards aren’t for you.” Corian leaned through the door to peer up at the top of the stairwell. “And if you’d told me you were coming, I would’ve taken them down until you got here.”
“Oh, sorry. Did I need to schedule an appointment with your secretary?”
He met her gaze again, his tufted ears twitching where they poked up out of his messy brown hair. “You’re pricklier than normal. What’s going on?”
“Messed-up day, and it only got worse when I checked the forum about forty-five minutes ago.”
Sucking his lower lip, the Nightstalker wrinkled his nose and stepped away from the door. “At least come inside before you start talking about it. Come on. Hurry up.”
Cheyenne slipped through the door, careful not to brush the metal, and stood in the unfinished basement while Corian shut it again. He cast a spell in a few quick gestures with both hands, and the orange light rippled across the door again. Then he turned, looked her up and down, and walked past her toward his laptop on the cheap card table. “Heard about the kids, huh?”
“Yeah. Before anyone else. Probably even before their parents.”
“What?” He stopped with his hand on the back of the chair and cocked his head. “You know something about this?”
“Those kids were taken this morning by the same assholes selling all that black-magic crap. To kids.”
Scratching behind his ear, Corian gestured toward the other chair at the table. “Have a seat and tell me what you know.”
Slowly, the halfling walked past him to pull out the other chair.
The Nightstalker sniffed the air and frowned at her. “You smell like blood, fellwine, and…”
“Spices? Yeah, I know.” She sat and thumped the puzzle box onto the table. “Long story.”
“Okay.” He raised an eyebrow and clasped his hands in his lap. “I’m listening.”
“I went out with some people this morning.”
“I know you’ve been playing special ops with the FRoE, Cheyenne. You don’t have to talk around it.”
The halfling blinked and had to try twice before she could swallow. “And you’re not freaking out about it?”
He snorted. “Please. Those people think they know what they’re doing. Sometimes they get lucky, and it looks to everyone else like they know what they’re doing too. But they’ve only been around for two or three decades, and that’s nothing compared to how long some of us have been laying low Earthside.”
“Like you.”
“Yes, Cheyenne. Like me.”
“It’s not gonna be an issue if I’m working with those guys?”
Corian shrugged. “I couldn’t care less, honestly. The
