by Martha Carr
Realm of Infinite Night
Goth Drow Unleashed™ Book Three
Martha Carr
Michael Anderle
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2020-2021 Martha Carr and Michael Anderle
Cover by Mihaela Voicu
http://www.mihaelavoicu.com/
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US Edition, March, 2021
(Previously published as a part of the megabook Once Upon A Midnight Drow)
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64971-577-7
Print ISBN: 978-1-64971-578-4
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Free Books
Assistant Notes - Grace Snoke
Connect with The Authors
Other Books By Martha Carr
Books By Michael Anderle
The Realm of Infinite Night Team
Thanks to the Beta Readers
John Ashmore, Kelly O’Donnell, Mary Morris, Larry Omans, Rachel Beckford, Daniel Wiegert
Thanks to the JIT Readers
If I’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Angel LaVey
Daniel Weigert
Deb Mader
Debi Sateren
Diane L. Smith
Jackey Hankard-Brodie
James Caplan
Jeff Eaton
Jeff Goode
John Ashmore
John Ashmore
Micky Cocker
Misty Roa
Paul Westman
Peter Manis
Veronica Stephan-Miller
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
Dedications
From Martha
To everyone who still believes in magic
and all the possibilities that holds.
To all the readers who make this
entire ride so much fun.
And to my son, Louie and so many wonderful friends who remind me all the time of what
really matters and how wonderful
life can be in any given moment.
From Michael
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
To Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
To Live The Life We Are
Called.
Chapter One
Cheyenne Summerlin had no idea how much it would hurt just to turn off her alarm. The not-so-gentle blare coming from her cell phone on the bedside table was the only sound that got her to wake up with any kind of regularity. Except for today. Today, when the drow halfling flung her hand onto the bedside table to fumble with the alarm—or at least hit snooze—the agony piercing through her shoulder was a better wakeup call than an ice-cold bucket of water splashing all over her face.
“What the— Oh, man.” Groaning, she clutched her shoulder and felt the thick, folded wads of surgical gauze taped over her flesh. That and staring at the blank wall across her bedroom reminded her of what kind of dumb halfling decision she’d made the night before. “So stupid.”
She pushed herself up off the mattress and crossed her legs beneath the comforter, squinting a little but not resisting the need to look at what she’d done to her shoulder. When she peeled away the medical tape and the gauze she’d stuck there before going to bed, the two gaping holes in her flesh looked even bigger than when that Skaxen asshole had put them there.
“Damn CVS tweezers!” She hissed when her fingers brushed an especially sensitive bit of raw red completely unhealed flesh, which was pretty much all of it.
She ripped the rest of the gauze and tape off before she promised herself she’d put a new bandage over it as soon as she got to the bathroom. Fully awake now, she turned back toward her bedside table to reach for her cell phone and nearly threw herself to the other side of the bed.
There, right behind her phone, was the copper puzzle box etched with drow runes on all six sides—runes she had no idea how to read or where to start trying to decipher.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Cheyenne eyed the box sideways and reached out again to poke it and make sure it was actually there. She’d made a big deal out of leaving it on the carpet just inside the front door of her apartment last night. “Great. I have my own dark elf Chuckie doll.”
Blinking the rest of the sleep out of her eyes, she snatched the puzzle box off the bedside table and held it in her lap. She tapped it, then gave it a little shake. It didn’t budge when she tried to twist apart the pieces the way she’d seen it do all by itself yesterday, like some kind of possessed Rubik’s cube. Nothing.
Her shoulders sagged in disappointment.
The copper box vibrated in her hand, a faint golden light just barely shining from all those hair-thin lines etched into the metal surfaces. In three seconds flat, the cube went from cold to warm to burn-holes-in-your-hands-hot, and the half-drow dropped it onto the rumpled sheets beside her.
Whatever made this thing start moving around after twenty-one years of just sitting on her shelf or dresser and looking halfway pretty, she’d figure it out. Professor Bergmann at least knew what the puzzle box was, if not what the drow called it, so maybe Professor Bergmann knew why it was doing whatever it was doing.
Puffing out a sigh, Cheyenne dragged her body out of bed and shuffled into the tiny bathroom in her tiny apartment. When she flipped on the light, her gaze fell first to the blood-splattered sink and countertop, the red-soaked cotton balls and wads of stained gauze, and those stupid tweezers only a moron would consider useful to dig a tiny FRoE tracking device out of her battle wound.
Then she looked at her reflection in the mirror, also smudged with dried smears of her blood, and almost rolled her eyes. No wonder I feel like shit.
Her shoulder looked a lot worse from three feet away than it did up close, the two holes standing out against her unusually pale skin like a giant, festering spider bite. Dark circles ringed her eyes, which wasn’t that much different than how she wore her makeup. Her High Voltage Raven Black hair was a tangled mess, flying in every direction and barely covering the crisscrossing patterns of thin slashes on both shoulders and down her arms,
across her collarbone, and probably even along the top of her back if she bothered to turn around and look. She didn’t.
“All this just from one rough day.”
Cheyenne’s sharp laugh cut off in a grimace when it made both her shoulder and her head hurt even worse.
With a final once-over of her reflection, the halfling lifted the hem of her black tank top and peered at the puckered, twisted flesh of the bullet hole in her right hip. Hard to think she’d been shot a week ago today in that FRoE raid, and the scar already looked like this. Magical-healing formula, Sir had called it. Just a small step up from Rhynehart’s nasty energy bars.
She shook her head with a snort and dropped her tank top.
Whatever the FRoE really wanted from her, they’d screwed up their chances when they’d had their troll doctor insert the stupid tracking device Cheyenne still had to get out of her shoulder. The halfling was done being used and lied to. She could find out everything she needed to know about her dad on her own, without catering to Sir’s egomania. Just might take a little longer.
She turned on the shower to get hot and stripped down, then washed everything away in the scalding shower. When all else failed, she could just scrub it off.
Clean, hungry, and dressed in her usual all-black, the halfling put on her slightly-paler-than-her-skin foundation and another round of heavy black eyeliner. Her hair could do whatever it wanted for all she cared. Her first graduate class at Virginia Commonwealth University started at 8:30 a.m., and if she got a move on, she’d still have enough time to stop at the gas station down the street for something breakfast-y and get to Mattie’s Advanced Algorithms class a little early.
The least she could do was try one more time to ask Mattie about the stupid puzzle box. She wrinkled her nose at the copper trinket quickly warming in her hand before stuffing it into the bottom of her backpack. “Maybe she won’t be too pissed if I say please really nicely, as if I actually mean it.”
Last thing to take care of before she stepped out of her apartment for the day was to check on Glen. The trusty computer tower had been running the Bunker nonstop since she’d gotten that encrypted file from gu@rdi@n104. The forum admin might have just been running her around in circles for the last twenty-four hours, but it was the only lead she had—if she could even call it that.
Her main monitor flashed when she woke it up, and Cheyenne stood in front of her tech system, which took up the entire executive desk and pretty much all the space in her tiny living room.
The massive file still hadn’t finished processing, so she didn’t even try to sift through what the Bunker had already unpacked. She drummed her fingers on her desk and nodded. “I’ll be ready when you are. No problem.”
Thinking of the Borderlands forum made her pause, but just for a second. Of course, there were way more magicals scattered across the dark web—in that particular forum or not—than those Cheyenne had met in person, not to mention those she could consider asking personal questions. If Mattie couldn’t give her anything more to go on with the drow puzzle box, it still wouldn’t be an awesome idea to put out feelers about the thing on the dark web. That was too much of a risk, especially when she had no clue what the drow artifact was or what it was supposed to do besides freak her out.
Plus, even if she hadn’t sworn off all FRoE shenanigans, she wouldn’t have gone to them for those answers. “That would make Sir’s freakin’ day, wouldn’t it? He’s got a real soft spot for my father.”
With a wry huff, she gave Glen another pat of encouragement and turned off the monitor again. There was always a way to find what she wanted as long as Cheyenne was willing to do what it took to get there. So far, that hadn’t changed one bit.
She slung her backpack over her shoulder, grabbed her keys off the kitchen counter by the front door, and shoved her feet into her black Vans. Door open, door shut, out into the hall—just another day for the Goth grad student pretending not to be a mythical drow halfling in Richmond. She got down to the ground floor of her apartment building, thinking she’d made really good time this morning. That hadn’t happened in a while.
Only when she caught the surprised, almost terrified confusion on her neighbor’s face—the older man who walked his Australian shepherd a bazillion times a day—did she realize she hadn’t bothered to tape another gauze bandage over the black-magic holes tunneling into her shoulder. The man stopped in his usual route to stare at the halfling’s shoulder, then her face, then back at her shoulder again.
The thick chains wrapped around Cheyenne’s wrists clinked against each other when she lifted a hand in greeting and gave the guy a tight smile. “You should see the other guy. Wild Wednesdays, am I right?”
Her neighbor sounded like he might choke from just being near her if she stuck around any longer, so the drow halfling hoofed it to her car and found herself debating if it was worth it to stop somewhere before class for another homemade bandage. She decided that instead of staring at the scary Goth chick’s face, everyone could stare at the even scarier holes in her arm. Keep ‘em guessing.
Chapter Two
The room for Mattie Bergmann’s Advanced Algorithms graduate class was empty when Cheyenne stepped inside at 8:09 a.m. The door was unlocked, at least, but she had to turn on the lights to get to her usual seat at the middle row of tables lining the room. For the next twenty minutes, she found herself daydreaming of how nice it would be if nobody showed up.
A halfling can dream, right?
That was when the other students started filtering into the room like so many dazed, confused little bugs. There was Messy Bun with her hair done up in the same ridiculous “I spent hours on making myself look like I don’t care how I look” style, rolling her eyes as she tried not to laugh at something that Peter guy said that probably wasn’t anywhere near as funny as they both seemed to think. Cheyenne glanced at them briefly before focusing on her open laptop again. She’d be jealous if she saw my bedhead this morning.
The half-drow smelled the giant guy with the huge beard who sat behind her in half her classes about twenty seconds before he stepped into the room. The guy went back and forth between eau de Doritos and essence of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. For his sake, she hoped the smell came from having eaten one of those things at some point during the day. Others came in: a skinny guy who was so tall that his cargo shorts looked like basketball shorts from the ‘80s on him. A few other students, some of them holding hushed conversations, most of them silently minding their own business.
Still, something felt a little off, and Cheyenne couldn’t put her finger on it. Nobody said anything she didn’t expect to hear from a bunch of normal grad students, and she’d heard it all before anyway. A slow, simmering weight settled over the classroom, like the rippling heat waves rising off the sidewalk or the hood of her car on a hot day, only the half-drow could feel it. Apparently, she was the only one.
“Two minutes late today. I’m right on time.” Mattie Bergmann’s voice burst into the classroom a second before her physical person. The professor had gone with some kind of Renaissance-peasant theme today—on LSD, maybe. Neon-green flowy skirt with something glittery-pink underneath, a weird puffy shirt cut off the shoulders, pastel-purple and silver stripes clashing unapologetically with the skirt, a wide cherry-red belt over all of it, with an obnoxiously large belt buckle the woman could’ve used as a shield, earrings that matched each other only in how far they dangled below her jawline, and a navy-blue bandana covered in white paisley wrapped around the dark hair piled haphazardly on top of her head.
Cheyenne seriously hoped Mattie hadn’t spent anywhere near as much time dressing herself today as Messy Bun had admitted to spending on her hair, unaware that the half-drow could pretty much hear everything in the classroom. And I’m the one getting the jokes about Halloween only being in October. What is goin’ on with Bergmann today?
The professor’s brightly colored Tevas peeled off the linoleum floor with a sticky slurp as she rushed toward the desk a
t the front of the classroom. Her wheeled briefcase clicked and rolled swiftly behind her, taking its usual place beside the desk with that metal handle sticking up. Mattie scanned the dozen faces staring at her but didn’t meet Cheyenne’s gaze. “Oh, good. Everyone looks as happy to be here as I feel. Bright and early.”
For the first time, it wasn’t clear whether the woman was making another of her dry jokes or if she was serious. Stranger than that was the smell. Cheyenne had gotten a big whiff of it as the woman stormed through the doorway, but it was still there. Like a dried orange peel just beginning to mold mixed with…the closest thing the halfling could compare it to was sweat. But that wasn’t really it.
Mattie whipped a stack of papers out of her briefcase, rummaged violently through the desk drawer for the smartboard remote, and jabbed buttons to get her lesson up and running with tech that was outdated even for the undergrad courses.
Cheyenne folded her arms and narrowed her eyes. She was more rattled than yesterday. Something was wrong.
“So.” Mattie clapped and tossed the remote onto the desk before sliding it toward her again. “Who wants to play teacher’s pet this morning and—”
