“What?” Cheyenne stepped back from the wall, and the recessed brick closed on its own. Tiny crumbs of red brick slid out of the opening and dropped onto the floor of the alley, and the half-drow turned with the next ridiculous clue in her hand.
She had no idea what this one meant, and it was even weirder. Cheyenne wasn’t much of a flower person, except for the black goth roses she’d used to decorate her room with back when she lived with her mom. But Bianca Summerlin’s estate was way out in Henry County, and it was pretty clear that a scavenger hunt with a map only of Richmond wasn’t supposed to send her over forty-five minutes out of the city.
“A few pokes.” The halfling snorted. “That could be taken so many different ways.”
She sniffed and rubbed an itch out of her nose. Her fingers brushed against her nose ring, and she froze.
Glancing back down at the blue paper and the clue, Cheyenne tried to find something written there that would undermine her first guess, but it all made sense. And that didn’t make any sense at all.
The Jagged Rose was a tattoo and piercing parlor about a five-minute drive from here. Cheyenne didn’t have any tattoos, but she had plenty of piercings, and she used to have even more than the ones she’d kept. When she’d graduated with her Bachelor’s last year, she’d treated herself at the Jagged Rose with the industrial piercings through both ears, just for fun and because she could. She hadn’t been there since, but that was the only place she could think of that fit the ridiculous description laid out in that clue.
Crumpling the blue paper, she shoved it back in her pocket and stuck her earbuds in again.
* * *
It took her a little over ten minutes, and then she was standing outside the Jagged Rose, gazing through the windows at the front desk and all the sketches and artwork—on skin or otherwise—displayed by the tattoo artists who worked there. Nobody passing her on the sidewalk or tossing her brief nods through the tattoo parlor’s windows thought twice about a Goth chick standing out front here.
Now all she had to do was find another clue. Or not do that and call this whole thing a failed attempt on her part to find useful information and a roaring success on gu@rdi@n104’s part to waste her time.
She looked the storefront over, then compared the closest area on that screwed-up map to where she now stood. No more dotted black lines. There weren’t any lines, blue or red or otherwise, so that was another short, quick dead end.
Awesome. Back to square one. And now I feel like a total idiot— Wait. What’s that?
Blinking, Cheyenne stared at the potted plant sitting on the window ledge of the Jagged Rose’s storefront. It was pretty much empty, full of dry dirt with a dead twig of whatever the plant had been poking out of the top. But she wasn’t looking at the plant or the dirt. A gold shimmer came from the bottom of the pot. It wasn’t something stuck on the outside or buried beneath the rim of the little plate the thing sat on. The halfling took one step to the side, and the shimmering gold shape stayed where it was. It looked way too much like her drow sight when she used it to see through walls and count the colored body shapes of anyone who was on the other side. But that was with her eyes closed.
She glanced at all the people walking around completely ignoring her, then sidled up to the window ledge and leaned against the glass at the corner of the Jagged Rose. That little gold shape was still there, even when she slipped her fingers between the back of the pot and the window. Her fingers brushed another thickly folded piece of paper, and she stared with wide eyes at the sidewalk.
How the hell did I find this thing?
When she got a good grip on the paper between her fingers, she pulled her hand back as nonchalantly as she could and pushed herself off the corner wall and the window. Then she took off walking again down the street because she didn’t want to stay in one place while she opened another clue she’d somehow been able to see through the pot.
The paper wasn’t glowing with that golden shimmer anymore when she looked down at it. Just a normal scrap of blue paper in her hand, with the same twisted handwriting on it as the last.
There’s no better way to learn than by tossing around ideas with one’s peers. Or opinions. Careful, though. When everybody screams all at once not the void, it’s hard to hear a single thread of truth.
“Okay, that sounds like Twitter.”
She looked up and down the sidewalk and met the gaze of a middle-aged man in a sweater with a rolled-up newspaper tucked under his arm. He nodded at her and muttered, “Yeah, I don’t understand it, either.”
It made her laugh when he walked past without another word. Then she stared back down at the blue paper and the written clue and wanted to tear her hair out.
Something about learning. About…the VCU campus?
The second she thought it, that prickling tingle of the invisible thread she hadn’t felt until the first clue at the brick wall flared up again between her shoulder blades. It might have excited her, thinking she was on to something, if she wasn’t totally creeped out. Her magic had flared up three times now to help with clues from a stranger, and she didn’t have to go drow mode.
She wished she could turn the music up even louder in her earbuds because she didn’t want to be able to hear herself thinking about what was happening right now. That maybe she really was losing her mind, and this was just the last piece of the puzzle before she went
