She headed for the fridge. Tonight’s options were mustard on the last slice of deli turkey and half a quart of milk. Cheyenne sniffed the carton’s contents, shrugged, and guzzled it.
“Time to get to work.”
Cheyenne went to the long executive desk that was the only real piece of furniture in her tiny living room. The minute she sat at it and gazed at the dark screens of her dual monitors, her nerves calmed. This was where she belonged, not out in some park blasting away at the first magicals she’d ever seen. The only place where Cheyenne knew what she wanted and how to get it was right here behind her computer. In her computer.
She woke everything up. The fans in the tower she’d built from scratch whirred to life, followed by the blinking lights of her private server hidden behind an updated VPN and the entire world at her fingertips. “Maybe she’ll put me on the visitors' list. Maybe not. I’m not taking any chances.”
The first thing she did was slip into VCU Medical Center’s patient database, which took about thirty seconds once she found the right network. It gave her a minor twinge of irritation that hospital records took less time to find than anything she’d searched for in her online classes as an undergrad.
“This is a joke.” Shaking her head, Cheyenne looked up everything they had on Ember Gaderow. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough.
‘Caucasian female; early twenties; diagnosed GSWSCI at the thoracic level; entry and exit sites both identified; attempted surgical stabilization; possible paraplegia after recovery and decompression.’
Cheyenne swallowed. As far as she could tell—and as much as anyone at VCU Medical Center had bothered to put into the system—Ember was okay. For now. But “possible paraplegia” made the half-drow recline in her chair and give a constricted groan. “She might not be able to walk.”
She closed her eyes and pictured Ember in the recovery ward, unconscious, cut apart and sewn back together, and it was all Cheyenne’s fault.
Because I keep hiding.
She opened her eyes and pulled up information on the hospital’s visitation policy, then accessed a form under Ember’s name and added her information. She paused before typing her name. “They’re gonna figure it out sooner or later, and they’re gonna crap themselves when they realize they didn’t let me in to see her when I asked. Can’t say I didn’t try.”
It was her mom’s name that made people stop and think twice about how they interacted with Cheyenne. That had given her a good smack in the face when she’d enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University for her undergrad. She tried to keep Bianca Summerlin out of the equation whenever possible, but it got harder every year for Cheyenne to carve her own path.
Bianca hadn’t been a bad parent. That never crossed Cheyenne’s mind. It didn’t change her mom’s voice in her head, whenever she found herself with a clear head facing a problem she hadn’t already solved.
“The line between good and bad, fair and unfair, is very thin, Cheyenne. Black and white don’t exist. The trick is knowing when to cross that line. Once you understand that, you’ll understand everything we do comes with a price. Everything.”
Those words had taken on many different meanings since Bianca drilled them into her daughter’s young mind. Cheyenne had soaked it up like a sponge, just like everything else. Now, for the first time, they made sense.
“Okay, Mom. I get it.” Cheyenne sighed and dragged her hands down her face. “Ember was the price tonight. I tried to keep things black and white. Me versus the world.”
Nodding, she dove deeper into her network, using untraceable routes switched out through her VPN with new entry locations every time she dug into the dark web. “Next time somebody asks for my help against magicals, I won’t say no.”
Saying it felt right, despite no one being there to hear her pledge. She knew other magicals existed; tonight, she’d seen the way the orcs dealt with others. “I’ll figure it out. Gonna find the asshole who started it. This Durg.”
Over the last three years, Cheyenne had come across mentions of magicals around the city. She’d gathered a few crumbs about underground businesses, about “the other side.” Tonight, Durg had spouted something about portals and Earth-side. About halflings. What was it Trevor had said? “This Border-rider storms in from Ambar’ogúl, thinking he runs the place.”
That must mean something. Cheyenne was determined to find out what and how it applied to Ember. And to herself. “People like us have to stick together.”
Ember had been so certain of that when she’d said it at the bar, but as far as Cheyenne knew, the things they had in common—the things connecting them into a friendship that had only strengthened since freshman year—had nothing to do with magicals and underground markets and portals. Until they did.
She typed in a few searches and plugged them into her encrypted data sources, coded to ping her with any matches that came up. Not that it was ever as fast as Googling something, but Google couldn’t find what she was looking for. Cheyenne sat at her desk for another ten minutes, hoping her searches would find something quickly but not expecting anything so soon.
Finally, when she sat back and her tank top cracked and rustled with the dried blood stuck to her chest and stomach, she gave up waiting for real-time results. “You do you, Glen.” She pointed at her center monitor and stood from the desk chair. “I
