“That couch has been here for a long time,” Persh’al muttered.
Whirling to face him, L’zar ran a hand through his disheveled shoulder-length hair and inhaled deeply through his nose. “It was falling apart anyway.”
The blue troll shrugged and spun back to his keyboard. “I guess it’s better than you putting a fist through any of my tables.”
Standing against the wall on either side of the door to the supply closet, Byrd and Lumil stared at L’zar with wide eyes. Lumil cleared her throat. “You good?”
Tilting his head from side to side to stretch his neck, L’zar clasped his hands behind his back and walked at a slow, deliberate pace across the warehouse. “This is the real prison.”
Byrd snorted. “I didn’t think we were that bad.”
Persh’al turned to shoot him a warning glance. “You’d make a piss-poor guard anyway. He was talking about the fact that he can’t do anything for her.”
“I know what he was talking about.” Byrd waved toward the computers behind Persh’al and rolled his eyes. “Get back to your nerdy coding shit. Nobody asked for an interpreter.”
The goblin man stalked toward the couch and flung himself onto it. Another puff of dust erupted from beneath him before the couch creaked, shuddered, and collapsed in the center.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The only thing Cheyenne heard in her apartment was the soft pop of the portal closing behind Corian. “Em?”
“She’s here, right?”
“Yeah. She went to bed right before you broke my lightbulb.”
Corian ignored the comment as he spun in a slow circle, taking in the high ceilings and the wide wall of windows facing north. “So we keep an eye on the place.”
“Shh. Hold on.” Cheyenne cocked her head at the soft, rustling whir coming from the other side of the kitchen. It could’ve been the fridge or a fan in Ember’s room until she heard the quick series of clicks and something metal tapping against glass. “Something’s here.”
She stormed across the kitchen, the nightstalker on her heels. “A digger’s not going to show up quietly and try to sneak in while she’s sleeping.”
“What the fuck!”
Ember’s shout spurred Cheyenne into action. If she’d bothered to try the doorknob, she would have found it locked, but she sent her fist through the door instead. The wood splintered and flew in every direction, and the halfling had enough time to take in at least three dozen tiny, glistening shapes swarming across the bedroom walls before two of them leaped at her.
“Ah!” She batted the flying black things away from her face. They hit the floor with a thud and instantly flipped onto their spindly legs again to face her. “Tiny bugs this time? Are you serious?”
The closest machine-beetle let out a metallic creak and launched a spray of bright-green pellets. The first few caught Cheyenne in the ribs before she dodged sideways to avoid the rest. She snarled in pain and brought her foot down on the two-inch mechanical bug before it could do anything else.
“Cheyenne!” Ember stared at the long lines of machines scrambling up the walls and across the ceiling, forming a canopy over the fae and her bed.
Cheyenne summoned a crackling black orb in one hand and took aim.
Corian gripped her wrist and held her back. “Don’t give them anything else to use against you.”
“Seriously?”
The nightstalker took off in a blur of brilliant silver light. The beetles gathering on the ceiling above Ember screeched as they were scraped off the ceiling and tossed across the room like a handful of pebbles.
“Oh, my God.” Ember hunched over and jerked the comforter up to her chin.
The beetles hit the floor, dresser, and small desk with tinny thuds, then leaped back to their tiny clicking feet and scrambled toward the bed again.
Cheyenne stomped on as many of them as she could while Corian swiped handful after handful of the things off the walls in his enhanced speed. The mechanical creatures took about ten seconds to process what was happening. When they did, the change happened all at once.
The tiny crawling machines stopped skittering toward Ember and focused on their new targets. Cheyenne raised her foot to stomp on the next skittering beetle. The thing clicked at her, and one of its front legs whirled around on its hinge until it stuck straight up in the air.
Her foot came down before she could stop herself. “Fuck!”
She jerked backward and staggered against the wall. The machine-beetle dangled from the bottom of her shoe, its upturned appendage stuck through the soles of both the rubber tread and Cheyenne’s foot.
The halfling blasted it with a churning ball of black energy and incinerated the thing on contact.
Corian slipped out of his enhanced speed right in front of her. “I told you not to do that!”
“It stabbed me in the foot! I’m not touching those things with my hands.” Without giving him time to argue further, Cheyenne unleashed her black and purple sparking attacks on the metal beetles skittering across the wooden floor toward them.
Tiny gears and broken metal shards sprayed across Ember’s room. The fae stared at the whole thing from behind her lifted comforter, the black and purple lights of Cheyenne’s magic pulsing against her face and reflecting in her eyes.
When Cheyenne finished decimating the swarm of O’gúl insect machines, the room was filled with smoke and the bitter scent of hot metal. No one moved.
“None of those things made it through the first shot.” She turned toward Corian and raised one finger. “Nothing to lock onto. Nothing to report back.”
A high-pitched screech and metallic whir came from the top of the headboard before two larger green pellets of magical sludge spewed from the surviving metal beetle. The first splattered her lifted hand, sending searing pain racing through her fingers
