Matthew pointed at them and took another step back. “You’re cats.”
“Always the first observation,” Corian muttered.
“At least he can see.”
Cheyenne emerged from the portal behind them and folded her arms. “We need to talk.”
“You know what? Take a seat.” Ember pointed at the high-top dining table around the corner and the matching set of chairs that looked more like bar stools. “Sounds like you need a minute to find your voice, so go ahead and get comfortable. I’ll talk.”
“Ember.” Matthew spread his arms and gazed at her with terrified eyes. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Now!”
“Shit. Yeah, yeah.” He spun first one way then the other before remembering his dining table was six feet behind him. Stumbling toward it, Matthew tried to look back over his shoulder and watch where he was going at the same time. The urge to keep an eye on the strange magicals in his home won, and he staggered back, both hands lifted in surrender. “I don’t know why you people just showed up like this.”
He yelped when he backed into the closest chair and struggled to keep from knocking it over as he hastily pulled it away from the table.
Cheyenne raised an eyebrow while playing with the silver activator coil in her jacket pocket. If that’s an act, it’s way better than last time.
Ember cocked her head and stared at their neighbor. “I’m only gonna wait so long for you to sit.”
Stammering wordlessly, Matthew scrambled onto the high dining chair. Twice, he almost slipped off, but he clutched the sides of the gray-painted wooden seat and gulped. “What is this?”
“This is what happens when you screw around with the wrong magicals, okay?” Ember pointed at Cheyenne and the nightstalkers without turning around to look. “They checked out that name you gave us—Syno. Turns out, the guy set traps at his locations and didn’t leave a whole lot behind for us to work with.”
“What?”
“He’s gone, Matthew. And all his gear and his tech and the machines you helped him power with your fancy little program are gone too. That makes it look a lot like someone tipped him off about having visitors.”
“Ember, I swear to you, I didn’t say a word to Syno. I gave you that information to help.”
“Well, it wasn’t very helpful. It was the opposite of helpful.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand because you don’t stop talking!” Ember thrust a pink-tinged finger at him and leaned forward in her chair as she gazed at him. “Shut your mouth and listen.”
Maleshi looked slowly over her shoulder at Cheyenne and raised her eyebrows, and the halfling shrugged. Ember’s badass is showing. Maybe we didn’t need backup.
“You wasted our time with one name that didn’t get us anywhere, and you put thousands of innocent people at risk because you’re worried about incurring losses. Two of those machines running on your programs showed up at VCU this morning.”
Matthew stopped holding his breath and started panting. “What?”
“Yeah. Popped right out of the ground for everyone to see and started attacking people.”
Cheyenne forced herself not to laugh. Technically just Maleshi and me, but points for stretching the truth.
“The only reason no one got hurt or killed in what they all think was a random and unexplainable earthquake was that Cheyenne was there to stop it.” Ember grabbed the wheels and moved toward him until her knee bumped his sock. “We were nice last time. You need to give us the names of every single magical client you have who’s been paying you for programs, software, tech support, supplies, or whatever the hell else you give them. All their information. Everything. And just in case you don’t think I’m dead serious about this, take another good look at the nightstalkers standing behind me.”
Maleshi grinned when Matthew’s blue eyes settled on her. On cue, she lifted a hand tufted with black fur, and her glinting, blade-like claws shot out with a slicing hiss.
“What the fuck?” He stared at the deadly weapons and swallowed thickly. “You wouldn’t just let that thing attack me.”
“Not sure who you’re calling ‘thing,’” Maleshi tilted her head. “But I promise you I don’t need Ember’s permission for anything. I am here to back her up, though.”
“This is insane.” Matthew’s foot slipped off the rung of the chair as he tried to push himself farther against the backrest. “You’re strong-arming me. That’s what this is, right? Hey, it’s not the first time you people have tried something like this. Hell, it is definitely the scariest.” He swallowed again and cleared his throat. “I can’t in good conscience just give up that kind of sensitive information, not without proof.”
Maleshi let out a low whistle. “Somebody’s got their priorities mixed up.”
With his hands clasped behind his back, Corian dipped his head toward Matthew and muttered, “We can change that.”
“I said no.” Cheyenne pointed at the nightstalker man before stepping into the dining room. “You want proof, Matthew? Sure. I’ll give you proof. Where’s your computer?”
“My what?”
“Come on, don’t make me explain to you what a computer is.” She pulled the activator coil from her pocket and stuck it behind her ear. Her eyelids fluttered as the tech synced with her magic and her vision, then looked around his apartment. She didn’t need the activator’s blinking lights to tell her that was his laptop sitting on the granite-topped island in the kitchen, but she couldn’t mistake it for anything else.
Matthew tried to slide off the chair. “Wait, wait, wait.”
“Sit!” Ember pointed at him, and purple light burst from her fingertip.
Matthew choked and scrambled back up in the chair again. “Cheyenne, seriously. You can’t just show up in my apartment and start going through my things. This is a huge violation of personal space. Privacy. Basic rights. Hell, this is illegal.”
“Yeah, what you’re doing should be too. Too bad nobody knows anything about it, huh?” Cheyenne stepped around the kitchen island, her shoes crunching on the shattered glass in front of the sink, and opened his laptop.
“You might as well stop
