by Martha Carr
“Professor.” Messy Bun lifted her chin toward the front of the room and leaned forward over the long table and the university-provided computers and keyboards spread out at every station.
The professor’s smile didn’t quite finish the shape it was supposed to take. “Ms. Arcady.”
“I love that skirt.”
The only sound after that was the dull, sporadic tapping of Mattie’s index finger on the surface of the desk.
“Well.” The woman frowned like her student had expressed the opposite sentiment, and her gaze darted around the room. “Thank you. But that was most definitely not what I meant. Who’s got a refresher course from Tuesday for the professor who’s actually teaching said course? In three sentences or less would be fantastic.”
Despite her enhanced hearing, Cheyenne somehow managed to tune out everything the student picking up the teacher’s pet mantle said after that. None of it applied to her anyway; she and Mattie had already agreed that Cheyenne didn’t need this class for anything but fulfilled credit hours toward her master’s. But that sweaty moldy-orange smell and Mattie’s obvious unraveling caught more of the half-drow’s attention and focus than any class she’d taken beyond virtual high school.
Most people wouldn’t notice the switch from eccentric to totally whacko. Then again, most people hadn’t been spending Mattie’s office hours playing “train that halfling” for the last week.
Mattie just nodded in a daze as she looked absently around the room again, her student’s “refresher course” going in one ear and right out the other.
If she could look me in the eye, I might believe it has nothing to do with me.
She had to let it go, though, because scrutinizing Mattie while the woman was already under a lot of pressure wouldn’t help either of them. And they still had those office hours.
Then Cheyenne noticed the three students sitting in front of her, Messy Bun being one of them, had turned around in their chairs and were staring at her. Clearly, she’d missed something extremely important. She raised her eyebrows, and when nobody offered any information, she asked, “What’s up?”
Messy Bun rolled her eyes. The Peter guy sitting next to her smirked; it could’ve been in amusement, disbelief, or some twisted kind of admiration. Who knew with that guy? “I said, you know about that part of JavaScript, right?”
The drow halfling shrugged. “Probably.”
“Right. But the assignment we had on Tuesday, yeah?” Peter glanced at Messy Bun and let out a confused laugh. “We’re trying to put together that last string of code to make the whole thing run. Did you have any problems with it?”
“Nope.”
Messy Bun scoffed. “I call bull.”
“Hey, call whatever you want.” Cheyenne spared a glance at Mattie, who now had all ten fingertips pressed lightly on the top of her desk, eyes closed as she muttered something under her breath. She’s not even paying attention. “I didn’t work on it. Therefore, no problems.”
“Wow. You don’t even care about being here, do you?”
“Well, not as much as some people. More than everyone who isn’t here right now.” Cheyenne pursed her lips. “You know, ‘cause this is such a full class.”
Dorito Breath chuckled behind her, but she was really just hoping Mattie would snap out of it and then snap at everyone else to pay no attention to the girl behind the Goth mask. Not that she couldn’t handle a little misplaced attention, but the halfling was starting to think she’d have to go shake their Computer Sciences professor out of whatever funk she’d fallen into.
“You’re unbelievable.” Messy Bun spun toward the front of the room and opened her mouth to most likely complain, then noticed Mattie’s apparent concentration on her own internal dialogue. The student in the front row turned back toward Cheyenne again and opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
Nice game face.
Messy Bun’s gaze fell to the halfling’s shoulder, and the weird expression morphed into shock. “Oh, my God. Your shoulder.”
Fighting back a laugh, Cheyenne looked slowly at the large and alarmingly red holes in her flesh and won first place in the Keep-a-Straight-Face challenge. “Huh. Look at that.”
“Are you okay? That looks awful. What happened?”
It was the most interest the other woman had shown Cheyenne, which wasn’t saying much. The half-drow just couldn’t help herself. “Bear attack.”
“What?”
Not even that level of shrieking tore Mattie Bergmann out of whatever still had her full, slightly panicked attention. Cheyenne stared at the woman, watching for a sign that things were about to get a lot better or a lot worse.
“Oh, yeah,” she muttered, not bothering to look at Messy Bun despite being able to feel the girl’s stunned awe aimed at her. “Just came at me with its claws raised and…”
She mimed scratching at something with two hooked fingers and leaned to the side when Messy Bun leaned toward her, just to keep her eyes on Professor Bergmann.
Peter forced a cough into his fist and turned quickly back around to hide his reaction.
“No way. I didn’t even know they could do that. How did you… I mean, was it hard to escape?”
“Not really.”
“What did you do?”
Maybe Cheyenne took a little too long before answering the next stupid question, but watching Mattie Bergmann’s fingers twisting in complicated patterns across the surface of her desk was a pretty good excuse. Please don’t tell me she’s trying to cast a spell with her eyes closed in a room full of human grad students.
Messy Bun let out an impatient grunt. “Hello?”
“Probably just punched it in the face.” That came from one of the guys sitting behind Cheyenne, followed by smothered laughter. It sucked that Messy Bun had turned this class into a comedy act this morning, but it was a hell of a lot better than any of these students paying attention to their professor’s serious issue—mainly that a little pocket of air in front of the woman had started shimmering, right out in the open for everyone to see.
“Come on,” Messy Bun muttered. “You can’t punch a bear.”
“Why not?” Dorito Breath laughed, his chair creaking dangerously as he leaned his huge frame against the back of it. “It’s just like punching anything else. One good swing…”
“That’s not…no.” Messy Bun leaned toward Cheyenne again, trying to catch the halfling’s eye. “Did you really punch the bear that did that to your shoulder?”
A thin, barely visible line of blue light appeared in the shimmering air in front of Mattie, and that was when Cheyenne realized the woman had no idea what was going on.
“Yeah. You should try it sometime.” The drow halfling slammed both hands on the lab table in front of her and leapt to her feet. The back of her chair hit the table behind her. “Professor Bergmann!”
Messy Bun reeled away from her, someone else’s chair squeaked across the floor, and Mattie’s green eyes flew open. Cheyenne hoped she was the only one who heard the woman’s sharp gasp of surprise before the partially formed spell in front of her vanished. The halfling was positive no one else could hear their professor’s pulse racing through her veins. Blinking madly, Mattie swept another glazed, absent look across the classroom. “There’s hardly ever a good reason for yelling in any college-level course. Anyone care to tell me why it’s happening in mine?”
Her voice was strained, hiding the trembling undertones only from the students without super-drow hearing.
Why won’t she look at me?
Someone cleared their throat. Messy Bun turned back around to face their professor and muttered something under her breath. For once, Cheyenne couldn’t come up with a witty comeback that would mostly cover up what she was thinking of trying to do. It didn’t matter since Mattie clearly wasn’t about to call the halfling out—not when she’d almost blown magic wide open in front of everybody here.
So Cheyenne pressed her lips together, raised her eyebrows, and slowly lowere
d herself back into her chair. Trying to come up with a viable excuse would just make her look like an embarrassed idiot. Since this whole weird scenario had made her look like an idiot anyway, she might as well own up to it and claim it for what it was.
Mattie cleared her throat. “Well, that was fun. As soon as I’m done talking, I’ll be sending out a group email to the entire class. I hope everyone gets the same kinda kick out of opening that assignment in five minutes and spending the rest of our time in here this morning getting a head start on it before the weekend. You’ll need it.”
That pretty much settled it. Mattie sat for the first time behind the desk, pulled an old, clunky laptop from her briefcase—it had to belong to the Computer Sciences department—and stared blankly at the screen as she typed. The other students either logged onto the lab computers or pulled out their laptops like Cheyenne. She might’ve been the only one after that who didn’t bother to open her email. Her eyes didn’t leave Mattie Bergmann’s face until the end of class.
By then, the professor had already packed up her wheeled briefcase and was the first person out the door. Cheyenne really hoped Mattie made it to her office hours today. I can’t wait to hear her try to explain what just happened.
Chapter Three
The second Cheyenne turned around the first corner of the hallway in the IT building, she felt those eyes on her again. Whose? She still had no clue, and it took all her concentration as she moved across campus to her next class not to let out her frustration and slip into her drow form. Sure, a little rage and some black-and-purple magic bombs thrown around would be a nice release, but it probably wouldn’t help her pin the target on the Peeping Tom.
She tried to find the owner of that cold gaze tingling along the back of her neck. There were too many people on campus—too many of them wearing VCU hats—to pretend she had a chance in hell of finding the guy. Cheyenne stared a little too long at a group of football players joking around on the quad. One of them noticed her eyeballing them and thought it would be funny to raise his arm and throw horns at the Goth chick passing on the sidewalk.
She gave him a deadpan stare until she couldn’t anymore without turning her head. Readjusting her grip on the straps of her backpack, the drow halfling scanned the milling college students heading in every direction, but finally had to give it up. Whoever you are, I’ll find you.
She only had two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which meant she could head directly to her next class, ignore the lesson she could’ve given instead without even looking at her professor’s notes first, and call it a day. Which was exactly what happened, and when that class ended at 12:30, she was the first person out of the room.
“The things I put up with just for a piece of paper that proves I know how.” She thought she’d muttered it quietly, but the guy standing in the hall—around her age despite the premature balding—looked up from his iPad with wide eyes and frowned. Cheyenne almost lunged at him and told him he’d been found out, she’d caught him spying on her, and he better have a good explanation for being such a creep, but he looked away when he saw her glaring at him, his face turning lobster-red.
So this guy wasn’t the creepy mystery stalker. Cheyenne threw him a casual nod and kept walking. Pull it together and go talk to Mattie.
It took her twenty minutes to weave through the massive crowd of students heading to or from lunch in the middle of the day. None of them paid her any attention, and she did her best to ignore them right back. That had been a lot easier to do a week ago before everything got complicated.
She still got to Mattie’s office in the Computer Sciences building almost ten minutes before 1:00. Cheyenne hadn’t shown up here this early before, and the thought of standing outside the woman’s door until Mattie arrived made the halfling shuffle back and forth before she gave up. Instead, she slipped around the corner at the other end of the hall and figured the element of surprise was the best way to go.
The minutes moved way too slowly, and Cheyenne leaned her forehead against the wall with closed eyes. Even a drow halfling was really good at listening intently, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to have a little extra support. Using this kind of second sight, for lack of a better term, made her think of the last time she’d spied on someone like this. That was right before she’d crashed the FRoE sting operation at that event center.
The hallway in the Computer Sciences building, though, was empty.
You’re pushing it on time, Mattie. If nothing else, you said I could count on you being here at this time every day.
The sticky, peeling whisper of rubber-soled sandals came from the far end of the hall, matched in pace by the roll and click of Professor Bergmann’s wheeled briefcase passing over the thin gridlines in the linoleum floor. Cheyenne almost stepped out from around the corner right then, but she got a view in her mind of Mattie’s outline and that color-by-race aura. The woman’s figure was outlined in muted, shimmering silver, which was apparently the color for Nightstalkers.
“…need to wait it out. That’s all.”
The whisper would have been barely audible to anyone else walking down the hall if there had been anyone else. The half-drow’s hearing picked up on it loud and clear, without any other background interference to confuse it.
“They can’t know. There’s no way. This is paranoia, Maleshi. Just let it go and focus.”
The silver figure in Cheyenne’s mind stopped, Mattie’s keys jingled, and the knob on her office door squeaked before the woman disappeared inside. She could still see her professor’s aura through the half-dozen walls of offices between her and Mattie, but she didn’t need to keep watching.
Her black Vans moved silently down the hall, and although Cheyenne normally would’ve knocked, she didn’t bother. She didn’t even stop outside the open office before slipping in and closing the door swiftly behind her. The firm bang was louder than she’d intended, but she wasn’t trying to be quiet anymore.
Mattie let out a little shriek and jolted where she’d stopped beside her desk. She whirled to face her grad student. The woman didn’t look all that surprised to see Cheyenne standing there, but that was probably because she’d just been startled by the slamming door.
“Okay.” Cheyenne spread her arms and gave the woman a second to catch her breath. Instead, Mattie kept holding it. “I get that right after class wasn’t a good time, so I’m here now. Ready to tell me what the hell happened this morning?”
The air finally hissed out between Mattie’s tightly closed lips and ended in a wheeze. She blinked furiously and turned toward her desk again, trying to act like she had it together. Like something hadn’t snapped in her the last time she’d spoken to her half-drow student. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, kid.”
“Nice try. I can only play along with that one for a limited time.” Cheyenne slipped her backpack off her shoulders, set it on the floor by the bookshelf against the wall, and headed toward her professor. “But it’s office hours now, right? This is where you train me and my drow magic that neither of us knows that much about. Where we talk about all the stuff we wouldn’t be caught dead saying in public. Remember?”
“Cheyenne, if you have a specific question you’d like to ask about your abilities or how I can help you bring them under control, you know that’s what I’m here for.” Mattie rummaged hastily through her briefcase and tossed a stack of scattered papers onto her desk. She didn’t turn around, and she wasn’t really focused on anything in her briefcase or on the desk.
Her pulse was racing again, and that moldy, sweaty-orange smell was starting to reappear too. The halfling didn’t doubt her senses when it came to whatever her professor was trying to hide, which was apparently quite a bit.
“Drop the act, Mattie. Come on.” Cheyenne slowed when she saw the woman stiffen beside the desk, her back still turned. “We both know what almost happened in your class. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if I didn’t have to yell at you to get your attention. Honestly, I can
’t even begin to guess why that happened or what’s going on with you. Maybe you’re as clueless as I am—”
“Careful.” Mattie’s warning came out as close to a low growl as Cheyenne had heard the woman’s voice go. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Stopping just behind her professor and calling that the safest bet, the halfling folded her arms and cocked her head. “Okay, so which one is it? You have no idea what I’m talking about, or I have no idea? ‘Cause one of those is a weak excuse, and the other one sounds like a warning. I hope you know by now that I don’t do well with warnings.”
For a moment, Cheyenne held a boring staring contest with the back of her professor’s head.
Mattie finally let out a long, heavy sigh and turned to face her student. The woman’s naturally tanned skin had a grayish tint to it now, and her usually glinting green eyes were a lot more glassy—the kind of glassy that came with so much fear that it turned into numbness. She swallowed and pressed her hand on the top of the desk. It looked like an attempted power stance, but Mattie’s grotesquely neon skirt didn’t completely hide the woman’s trembling legs. “The last time you were in my office, Cheyenne—”
“You mean, yesterday?” The halfling lifted an eyebrow. “It wasn’t that long ago. That makes it even weirder that you thought I wouldn’t notice.”
Mattie closed her eyes to collect her thoughts and gather her self-control again. “When you stopped by here yesterday, things changed. As I told you before, I’m happy to help with your training with drow magic. That’s as far as I can go. Anything beyond that, I’m not equipped to handle.”
“Not equipped?” Cheyenne gave her professor what felt like plenty of time to go into more detail, but it was probably only seconds. It was enough for Mattie to clam up again, at least. “Okay, I’m calling bullshit.”
“I’m serious, Cheyenne. Improving and developing magic is one thing, but—”
