“All right, Doc. Better make sure that puke pan’s close by.”
“Sir.”
Without another word, Mustache turned on his heel and disappeared from Cheyenne’s view. She blinked against the floodlights in the ceiling that seemed like they were shining inches from her face. “Can you turn off those lights?” she croaked.
“You’ll get used to it,” said a male voice.
The doctor looked up at the new arrival, nodded, and left Cheyenne alone with another stranger. This guy wore black combat pants and a black undershirt, and his hands were clasped behind his back. Something about his eyes seemed familiar, but Cheyenne didn’t trust anything her body or mind was telling her right now.
“You have a real chance here,” the man said. “Whoever you are.” He was much younger than Mustache, his biceps dancing under the sleeves of his shirt.
Great. Now I’m hallucinating. Cheyenne blinked at him. “Chance at what?”
The man bowed his head. He leaned over her until he was a few inches away from her face. “You better accept I’m gonna be watching you from here on out. You know, just to make sure you don’t screw up.”
Cheyenne took a deep breath. She couldn’t come up with anything that felt worth the effort.
Her last visitor straightened, nodded, and turned away from the bed. “Get some sleep.”
Like that’s possible. Cheyenne wanted to laugh, but doing even that made her dizzy and nauseated all over again. As if the guy’s final command were a tranquilizer injected into the IV, all-consuming exhaustion overwhelmed her. She slipped away again, the heavy warmth of sleep punctured by wave after receding wave.
This is how Ember slept through the last three days. I get it.
The drow halfling’s eyes closed against her will, but when the brightness of the overhead lights faded, she welcomed it.
What have I gotten into?
* * *
Inside Cheyenne Summerlin’s apartment, the grad student’s open backpack sat propped up against the half wall of the kitchen counter. Inside, nestled between her laptop and the uneaten half of a lamb gyro, the copper puzzle box covered in hair-thin etchings of drow runes gave off a soft silver glow. A series of clicks rose from the mechanism at its heart, and two segments of the box detached from the latches holding the thing together and spun in opposite directions to form a new message for its intended witness. A new cycle had begun.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The first thing Cheyenne Summerlin saw upon waking was white—nothing but white. That wasn’t her general ambiance.
Her vision focused beneath the blinding overhead lights, and she remembered she was in a bed in a place pretending to be a hospital. Besides one stoic doctor, the other people she’d seen weren’t nurses, but some kind of special ops agents more concerned with her secrets than her health.
The drow halfling swallowed, her throat dry and raw. “Hello?”
It hurt to speak, but she’d said it loud enough. She didn’t receive an answer.
“Okay, is someone gonna tell me where I am, or do I have to—” Something metallic clinked when she lifted her hand to rub her forehead. Her hand didn’t make it more than four inches off the thin mattress of the hospital bed.
“What the…” Cheyenne jerked one arm away from the mattress, then tried the other. Neither moved far from the metal rails surrounding the bed. She jerked her head up and glared at the thick silver manacles around her wrists. “Seriously? What’s the point of helping me heal if you’re gonna chain me up?”
She jerked on the chains, filling the room with the frantic jingle of the bonds against the rails. “Get these things off me. Hey!”
The heat of Cheyenne’s half-drow blood flared at the base of her spine as she rocked against the mattress. In under two seconds, the twenty-one-year-old’s pale skin and High Voltage Raven Black hair disappeared, replaced by the dark purple-gray flesh of her drow heritage, bone-white hair, and pointy-tipped ears that betrayed her race, or at least half of it.
Cheyenne’s eyes flashed golden, and she shouted through gritted teeth, “I swear, if somebody doesn’t get in here and take these off me in the next ten seconds, I’m gonna blow this place off the map!”
Not that a place such as this is on a map.
She summoned the smallest bit of her drow magic she could control to her fingertips, except no hot rush pulsed within her. Cheyenne raised her head to check her hand.
No sparks. No magic.
What the hell is this?
“Hey! Hey! What did you do to me?” She tugged at the manacles on her wrists, bucking and writhing on the mattress. Her ankles were chained too, and the restraints made sitting up all but impossible. “Get me out of—”
The door at the other end of the sterile room opened, and a woman entered briskly. Her blonde hair was tied back in a neat bun, the no-nonsense lines of her face accentuated by the thin frames of her glasses. She cradled a tablet in one hand and was scrolling through it with the other, not bothering to acknowledge the panicked drow halfling chained to the bed.
“You’re the doctor, right?” Cheyenne’s chest heaved. “Don’t you have some kind of oath about doing no harm?”
The woman approached the monitors near the halfling’s bed and studied the information.
“What did you do to my magic?” Cheyenne tugged the manacle one more time and tried to summon those purple and black sparks. Still nothing. “Hey, I’m talking to you. You have no right to chain me up like—”
“If you want out of that bed, I suggest you put that rage where it belongs until it’s necessary.” The doctor continued scrolling through the tablet. “Now.”
“Or what?” Cheyenne jerked on the chains, which clanked. “You’ll chain me to the bed and leave me here? Nice try, but we already covered that.”
The doctor turned from her tablet to the drow halfling, although her eyes never quite made it to Cheyenne’s face. They flickered over the rest of her body instead with cold, precise detachment.
Like I
