“This?” She lifted the box toward him one more time, and the Oracle hissed. “This scares you?”
“If you cannot see the woven threads, you will not understand the cycle.” Gúrdu finally licked all the spit and splinters off his lips, and his orange-brown eyes flashed again. “Only the scion never pursued will rise to their destiny.”
Cheyenne’s gut went instantly cold. “What did you say?”
“It’s written in the very lifeblood of your legacy, drow. It is not my place to get involved. I may be only slightly less miserable on this side of the Border, but I still value my life.”
How the hell did he just pull out the same line from my crazy-ass dream last night?
The drow halfling and the Raug stared at each other. Then Cheyenne snuffed out the black sphere of her magic and dropped the puzzle box into her backpack. She jerked up the zipper and slung the thing over her good shoulder. “Fine. Then I’ve wasted my time here.”
“Mine too, don’t forget.” Gúrdu ran a thick dark-gray tongue over his sharpened teeth and pointed at her with a gnarled claw. “Come back with a question truly meant to be answered, and we’ll settle on a price then.”
“Probably not.” She eyed him on his throne of pillows, then turned away and tossed her arm up. “I’ll show myself out.”
“I’d get rid of that cursed thing before it wipes your face from living memory too,” Gúrdu called after her. “The others had no warning. Don’t be an idiot by ignoring this one.”
Without a word, the halfling stormed across the wobbly piles of pillows, ripping aside the curtain of beaded strands on her way to the front door. She thought she heard some of them scatter across the floor, but she didn’t give a crap at this point. If this box was supposed to kill me, twenty-one years is a long time to wait. And I’m swearing off Oracles.
The front door jerked open with a squeak, and she stepped quickly out into the hallway of the apartment building’s ground floor. A harsh squawk erupted in front of her, and she tripped in an attempt not to crush a panicking chicken’s head beneath her foot. Feathers flew up everywhere as the other fowl caught onto the chaos and scrambled around in idiotic circles, flapping and clucking and pecking at each other.
“Oh, what the—” Cheyenne accidentally kicked one that ran right into her foot as she tried to avoid the others. “Who the hell keeps chickens inside?”
Finally, she picked her way carefully and quickly away from the idiot birds, glancing over her shoulder once to see two of the chickens had cornered a third and were now trying to smash it against the wall with buffeting wings. Shaking her head, she stepped back through the open door of the apartment building and froze.
A cold prickle climbed up the back of her neck—the feeling of being closely watched that had followed her for a week now. The halfling scanned the narrow side street in the industrial area and quickly found the one other person walking around out here just before 4:00 p.m. on a Friday. The guy was heading away from her down the street, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his tan coat. And he was wearing a VCU baseball cap.
I got you now, you goddamn creeper.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
She didn’t even know what she’d do when she got to him. The only thing flaring through Cheyenne’s mind now—and racing through her half-drow veins—was that she’d finally found the asshole who’d been following her everywhere.
An earsplitting crack echoed through the industrial buildings around her as she took off at full speed toward the man in the VCU hat. He jumped and spun around to search the street. At the same second, another crack blasted toward him, followed by the shockwave of Cheyenne’s appearance. The man would have fallen on his ass if she didn’t have a fistful of his shirt in one hand. She threw him against the closest building and brought a shower of purple sparks spitting from her fingertips by her side.
“Why the hell have you been following me, you—” Cheyenne stopped. The man’s face had gone so white, he looked like he was about to pass out right there against the brick wall. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly as he stared at the raging golden eyes in the purple-gray face surrounded by wild, stark-white hair. She could smell the terror oozing off him and hear his heart racing in his chest as he struggled to breathe, and she couldn’t understand why he’d react like this. Then she glanced up at the baseball hat on his head and growled.
Not the right hat. Same dark maroon color as VCU’s mascot, but this guy’s hat had a South Carolina Gamecocks bird embroidered on the front instead. Not the right guy, either.
“Shit. Sorry.” The halfling snuffed out her purple sparks, which the guy hadn’t seemed to notice because he’d been too terrified of her face. She quickly released his shirt, tugged on it to smooth it out, and shrugged. “My bad. Thought you were my brother.”
“Y-y-your…” The man wheezed and sagged back against the brick wall.
The halfling took a deep breath, grimaced in apology, and stepped away. “Just forget what you saw. It’s not real.”
She’d pulled back her drow rage and returned to her human form by the time she spun away from the wrong guy to head back toward her car. Halfway there, she heard the guy whimper and take in a sniveling breath.
She unlocked her car with a quick jerk of the keys, slid behind the wheel, and quickly shut the door. Her backpack went right back into the passenger seat, and the halfling gripped the steering wheel with
