Then she looked at her reflection in the mirror, also smudged with dried smears of her blood, and almost rolled her eyes. No wonder I feel like shit.
Her shoulder looked a lot worse from three feet away than it did up close, the two holes standing out against her unusually pale skin like a giant, festering spider bite. Dark circles ringed her eyes, which wasn’t that much different than how she wore her makeup. Her High Voltage Raven Black hair was a tangled mess, flying in every direction and barely covering the crisscrossing patterns of thin slashes on both shoulders and down her arms, across her collarbone, and probably even along the top of her back if she bothered to turn around and look. She didn’t.
“All this just from one rough day.”
Cheyenne’s sharp laugh cut off in a grimace when it made both her shoulder and her head hurt even worse.
With a final once-over of her reflection, the halfling lifted the hem of her black tank top and peered at the puckered, twisted flesh of the bullet hole in her right hip. Hard to think she’d been shot a week ago today in that FRoE raid, and the scar already looked like this. Magical-healing formula, Sir had called it. Just a small step up from Rhynehart’s nasty energy bars.
She shook her head with a snort and dropped her tank top.
Whatever the FRoE really wanted from her, they’d screwed up their chances when they’d had their troll doctor insert the stupid tracking device Cheyenne still had to get out of her shoulder. The halfling was done being used and lied to. She could find out everything she needed to know about her dad on her own, without catering to Sir’s egomania. Just might take a little longer.
She turned on the shower to get hot and stripped down, then washed everything away in the scalding shower. When all else failed, she could just scrub it off.
* * *
Clean, hungry, and dressed in her usual all-black, the halfling put on her slightly-paler-than-her-skin foundation and another round of heavy black eyeliner. Her hair could do whatever it wanted for all she cared. Her first graduate class at Virginia Commonwealth University started at 8:30 a.m., and if she got a move on, she’d still have enough time to stop at the gas station down the street for something breakfast-y and get to Mattie’s Advanced Algorithms class a little early.
The least she could do was try one more time to ask Mattie about the stupid puzzle box. She wrinkled her nose at the copper trinket quickly warming in her hand before stuffing it into the bottom of her backpack. “Maybe she won’t be too pissed if I say please really nicely, as if I actually mean it.”
Last thing to take care of before she stepped out of her apartment for the day was to check on Glen. The trusty computer tower had been running the Bunker nonstop since she’d gotten that encrypted file from gu@rdi@n104. The forum admin might have just been running her around in circles for the last twenty-four hours, but it was the only lead she had—if she could even call it that.
Her main monitor flashed when she woke it up, and Cheyenne stood in front of her tech system, which took up the entire executive desk and pretty much all the space in her tiny living room.
The massive file still hadn’t finished processing, so she didn’t even try to sift through what the Bunker had already unpacked. She drummed her fingers on her desk and nodded. “I’ll be ready when you are. No problem.”
Thinking of the Borderlands forum made her pause, but just for a second. Of course, there were way more magicals scattered across the dark web—in that particular forum or not—than those Cheyenne had met in person, not to mention those she could consider asking personal questions. If Mattie couldn’t give her anything more to go on with the drow puzzle box, it still wouldn’t be an awesome idea to put out feelers about the thing on the dark web. That was too much of a risk, especially when she had no clue what the drow artifact was or what it was supposed to do besides freak her out.
Plus, even if she hadn’t sworn off all FRoE shenanigans, she wouldn’t have gone to them for those answers. “That would make Sir’s freakin’ day, wouldn’t it? He’s got a real soft spot for my father.”
With a wry huff, she gave Glen another pat of encouragement and turned off the monitor again. There was always a way to find what she wanted as long as Cheyenne was willing to do what it took to get there. So far, that hadn’t changed one bit.
She slung her backpack over her shoulder, grabbed her keys off the kitchen counter by the front door, and shoved her feet into her black Vans. Door open, door shut, out into the hall—just another day for the Goth grad student pretending not to be a mythical drow halfling in Richmond. She got down to the ground floor of her apartment building, thinking she’d made really good time this morning. That hadn’t happened in a while.
Only when she caught the surprised, almost terrified confusion on her neighbor’s face—the older man who walked his Australian shepherd a bazillion times a day—did she realize she hadn’t bothered to tape another gauze bandage over the black-magic holes tunneling into her shoulder. The man stopped in his usual route to stare at the halfling’s shoulder, then her face, then back at her shoulder again.
The thick chains wrapped around Cheyenne’s wrists clinked against each other when she
