Her voice was strained, hiding the trembling undertones only from the students without super-drow hearing.
Why won’t she look at me?
Someone cleared their throat. Messy Bun turned back around to face their professor and muttered something under her breath. For once, Cheyenne couldn’t come up with a witty comeback that would mostly cover up what she was thinking of trying to do. It didn’t matter since Mattie clearly wasn’t about to call the halfling out—not when she’d almost blown magic wide open in front of everybody here.
So Cheyenne pressed her lips together, raised her eyebrows, and slowly lowered herself back into her chair. Trying to come up with a viable excuse would just make her look like an embarrassed idiot. Since this whole weird scenario had made her look like an idiot anyway, she might as well own up to it and claim it for what it was.
Mattie cleared her throat. “Well, that was fun. As soon as I’m done talking, I’ll be sending out a group email to the entire class. I hope everyone gets the same kinda kick out of opening that assignment in five minutes and spending the rest of our time in here this morning getting a head start on it before the weekend. You’ll need it.”
That pretty much settled it. Mattie sat for the first time behind the desk, pulled an old, clunky laptop from her briefcase—it had to belong to the Computer Sciences department—and stared blankly at the screen as she typed. The other students either logged onto the lab computers or pulled out their laptops like Cheyenne. She might’ve been the only one after that who didn’t bother to open her email. Her eyes didn’t leave Mattie Bergmann’s face until the end of class.
By then, the professor had already packed up her wheeled briefcase and was the first person out the door. Cheyenne really hoped Mattie made it to her office hours today. I can’t wait to hear her try to explain what just happened.
Chapter Seventy
The second Cheyenne turned around the first corner of the hallway in the IT building, she felt those eyes on her again. Whose? She still had no clue, and it took all her concentration as she moved across campus to her next class not to let out her frustration and slip into her drow form. Sure, a little rage and some black-and-purple magic bombs thrown around would be a nice release, but it probably wouldn’t help her pin the target on the Peeping Tom.
She tried to find the owner of that cold gaze tingling along the back of her neck. There were too many people on campus—too many of them wearing VCU hats—to pretend she had a chance in hell of finding the guy. Cheyenne stared a little too long at a group of football players joking around on the quad. One of them noticed her eyeballing them and thought it would be funny to raise his arm and throw horns at the Goth chick passing on the sidewalk.
She gave him a deadpan stare until she couldn’t anymore without turning her head. Readjusting her grip on the straps of her backpack, the drow halfling scanned the milling college students heading in every direction, but finally had to give it up. Whoever you are, I’ll find you.
She only had two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which meant she could head directly to her next class, ignore the lesson she could’ve given instead without even looking at her professor’s notes first, and call it a day. Which was exactly what happened, and when that class ended at 12:30, she was the first person out of the room.
“The things I put up with just for a piece of paper that proves I know how.” She thought she’d muttered it quietly, but the guy standing in the hall—around her age despite the premature balding—looked up from his iPad with wide eyes and frowned. Cheyenne almost lunged at him and told him he’d been found out, she’d caught him spying on her, and he better have a good explanation for being such a creep, but he looked away when he saw her glaring at him, his face turning lobster-red.
So this guy wasn’t the creepy mystery stalker. Cheyenne threw him a casual nod and kept walking. Pull it together and go talk to Mattie.
It took her twenty minutes to weave through the massive crowd of students heading to or from lunch in the middle of the day. None of them paid her any attention, and she did her best to ignore them right back. That had been a lot easier to do a week ago before everything got complicated.
She still got to Mattie’s office in the Computer Sciences building almost ten minutes before 1:00.Cheyenne hadn’t shown up here this early before, and the thought of standing outside the woman’s door until Mattie arrived made the halfling shuffle back and forth before she gave up. Instead, she slipped around the corner at the other end of the hall and figured the element of surprise was the best way to go.
The minutes moved way too slowly, and Cheyenne leaned her forehead against the wall with closed eyes. Even a drow halfling was really good at listening intently, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to have a little extra support. Using this kind of second sight, for lack of a better term, made her think of the last time she’d spied on someone like this. That was right before she’d crashed the FRoE sting operation at that event center.
The hallway in the Computer Sciences building, though, was empty.
You’re pushing it on time, Mattie. If nothing else, you said I could count on you being here at this time every day.
The sticky, peeling whisper of rubber-soled sandals came from the far end of the hall,
