Ember and Cheyenne stared at him, then the halfling lifted her purple sparks and cocked her head. “All right, your seconds are up. Why are you working with the assholes powering O’gúl tech?”
“Why?” Matthew laughed wryly. “It’s just business. And I’m not sure if you’re calling them assholes because they’re working with me specifically or because they’re from Narnia or whatever.”
“Ambar’ogúl,” Ember offered.
He shrugged. “Okay.”
Cheyenne killed the purple sparks in her hand and cocked her head. “So, you’ll strike up a deal with a bunch of O’gúl loyalists, but you can’t be bothered to learn the rest of the terminology, huh?”
“I don’t understand why that’s such a big deal. I thought all you magicals stuck together over here?”
Ember’s shimmering violet eyes narrowed. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” Matthew glanced at the fae and the drow halfling sitting in his living room, then snorted. “Hey, admittedly, I don’t care about all the details. They came to me asking if I could help power these machines you seem so angry about because they’re not supposed to work over here.”
“You’re helping the wrong magicals.” Taking a deep breath, Cheyenne swallowed and forced her frustration back down where it belonged. Maybe I should’ve asked Lumil to come with us. “How did they know to come to you for all this?”
He frowned. “Guess I have friends in the right places.”
“Yeah, so do I.”
“Okay.”
“You know what? You need to start talking and giving up some information.” Cheyenne’s drow magic flared through her, despite how hard she fought to keep it under control. “I get a little unpredictable when people don’t answer my questions.”
“I’m under no obligation to answer any of them.” Matthew smiled. “Unless you pull out a warrant for that information or put me in handcuffs and drag me down to some Dungeons and Dragons precinct, that won’t change.”
“All right, that’s it.” Cheyenne lurched from the couch, a sphere of crackling black energy bursting to life in her hands. Matthew flinched back in his chair and stared at the ball.
Ember grabbed her wheels. “Cheyenne!”
“I tried, Em. I really did. If Matthew Thomas wants to play hardball, fine. I can play.”
Ember’s hesitation to say or do anything else made Matthew shrink back even farther against the loveseat’s cushion. “Are you serious right now?”
“She doesn’t mess around with those things.” Ember glanced at the black energy in her friend’s hand. “So yeah, she’s serious.”
“If you hit me with whatever that is,” Matthew muttered, “this won’t work out well for you. Somebody finds me dead or severely injured in my apartment by something like that—”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Cheyenne took one step toward him and studied his reaction. He’s scared and completely serious at the same time. “I’m not in the habit of attacking people who haven’t explicitly done anything wrong. You’re still sitting in a real muddy-gray area.”
“I told you, it’s just business.”
“Em, we have some rope in the apartment, don’t we?”
Matthew looked at the glowing fae in the wheelchair. “What?”
Ember narrowed her eyes. “We’re not tying him to the chair, Cheyenne.”
“Fine. No magic. No rope. Guess I’ll just beat the shit out of him until he says something useful.”
“What?”
“No, you won’t. Not yet.” Ember wheeled toward the loveseat and shot the half-drow a stern warning look. “Cool it.”
Cheyenne raised an eyebrow at her friend and snuffed out the energy sphere. Okay, she’s finally showing up to the party.
Ember pushed her wheelchair as close as she could get to Matthew’s loveseat and leaned forward to study his face. “It might not look like it with all the purple and pink and the glowing aura, but trust me when I say I’m just as pissed as she is to find out you’re the one behind making our lives way more complicated than they should be.”
“Ember.”
“No, I’m talking now. You’ll get your chance when I’m finished, and it better be nothing but all the right answers to every single question we ask you.” The fae gestured at Cheyenne without breaking away from Matthew’s blue eyes. “Because right now, I’m the only thing standing between this drow and your apartment being blown to pieces. After that happens, the whole thing’s out of my hands.”
“Jesus,” Matthew whispered. “I thought you were the nice one.”
“Funny. I thought the same thing about you.”
He stared into Ember’s fae-large eyes. “Okay.”
Cheyenne leaned forward. “Okay, what?”
“Okay, ask whatever you wanna ask me. I mean, these are all private business relationships, but it’s not like I have anything to hide.”
“No, just that you’re encrypting all the data about it under way too many layers.”
“That’s the way I have to do things.” Matthew frowned at her. “You of all people should understand how dangerous technology and information can be in the wrong hands.”
“The wrong hands?” Ember looked at Cheyenne and laughed in disbelief. Then she pointed at Matthew. “You’re the one who put it in the wrong hands.”
“Hey, I just helped write the programs. Put the resources I had into developing the code. These magic people told me the gear they brought from that other dimension was old-school and low-tech, and they wanted help getting it to work here. I can tell you the stuff they handed me in the beginning is way more advanced than ninety-nine percent of the stuff I’ve seen made in our own world.”
“It’s a portal to a connecting world,” Cheyenne muttered.
“Huh?”
“Not a different dimension.”
Matthew closed his eyes and shook his head in jerky twitches. “That’s an irrelevant distinction, but okay.”
“It’s not irrelevant.” Ember cocked her head, wrinkling her nose as she studied the cluelessness written all over his face. “And it sounds a lot like you writing it off as irrelevant is what got us into this whole mess.”
“I still don’t get it.” He glanced at the magicals hovering in front of his loveseat. “What do my business’ private transactions have to do with either of you? Beyond you somehow figuring out how to dig the connection up.”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes and stared at the ceiling, gritting her teeth. “He
