It didn’t take long before things began to get weird. Or weirder, rather, considering Cheyenne considered her life to be pretty damn weird by that point. But it had seemed like a harmless sort of weird for the longest time, aggravation aside.
And then, the weirdness started to get less harmless.
It started out small. She would feel the urge to look out the nearest window, just to make sure there was no one there. Or she would go outside to find something, only to find it missing or moved, or to find footprints in the grass and the gardens. After one such peek out the window, she stepped outside just to be sure—just to put her mind at ease—and found the gate hanging open, as if someone had departed in a great hurry. Cheyenne swore that no one had left the house to use the gate that day, though.
She mentioned it to Harry, concerned that someone was trying to case the house to rob it, but he didn’t seem worried. His security system was top of the line, after all, and it seemed pretty likely that it was just some local kids. Rich teenagers got bored and liked to try dumb things.
It seemed like sound enough logic, so Cheyenne tried her best to believe him, and for a while it worked well enough.
Harry’s logic stopped being comforting before long, though, and everything began to go downhill very quickly.
*
The feeling was slow when it started creeping up on her. At first, she just thought it was lingering paranoia after everything that had happened with Lorraine, considering how long she had spent tense and hyper-focused. It would make sense if it was just a little difficult for her to let that feeling go, so at first, she simply assumed that she was jumping at shadows. As it was, the hormones were already making her a little crazy, and she spent most of her time feeling some degree of frazzled. In fact, on multiple occasions, she had looked down at her stomach and cooed, “You’re all going to be out soon. Yes, you are. I’m so fucking glad.”
On the whole, she hadn’t put any stock in the feeling that someone was watching her. She wasn’t anyone particularly special or unique. She didn’t even have much of a job at that point, other than filling in to do a few errands for Harry on occasion. There was no reason for anyone to watch her.
Even so, the feeling kept nagging at her, and after a point it was just more comfortable if she had Daphne or Harry with her when she went into the city. Neither of them seemed to object, considering she was eight months pregnant with triplets and looked like she was fit to burst, and neither of them liked leaving her unattended if they didn’t have to.
It was on one such excursion into the city, picking up a few replacement bottles of the various vitamins and supplements that Cheyenne was supposed to scarf down on a daily basis, that she realized that maybe she should have paid a little more attention to that feeling.
Daphne grabbed her elbow as they left the shop before they could start back towards the car, with a sharp, “Hey.”
Cheyenne blinked at her, halting mid-step before putting her foot back on the sidewalk. “Yeah…?” she asked slowly, bemused. “What’s up?”
Daphne lifted a hand, pointing across the street as surreptitiously as she could manage. Admittedly, it still wasn’t particularly subtle, but it did the job, and as Cheyenne’s gaze followed the direction of her pointing finger, she watched a familiar blonde hastily turn away and begin walking steadily down the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
Cheyenne’s chest went cold as she watched Lorraine’s back retreat, and it took her a moment to realize Daphne was saying something. She started paying some semblance of attention again around halfway through the sentence.
“…mean, sure, it could be coincidence, but it seems pretty fucking weird to me, don’t you think?” Daphne shook her head slightly. “Come on, let’s just get out of here.” She looped her arm around Cheyenne’s and started walking once again, leading her steadily towards the car.
Cheyenne was quiet as she sat in the passenger’s seat, and they were halfway back to Harry’s house before Daphne finally broke the silence, sliding a brief, furtive glance in Cheyenne’s direction as she asked, “You okay?”
“A little weirded out,” Cheyenne replied, drumming the fingers of one hand on the car door. “I sort of figured everything with Lorraine was over and done with when Harry fired her.”
Pulling a hand off of the steering wheel, Daphne reached over and squeezed her arm. “It might be nothing,” she pointed out. “A ‘wrong place, wrong time’ sort of thing.”
“She looked like she was trying to get out of there in a hurry,” Cheyenne pointed out skeptically, still looking out the car window as she said it.
Daphne snorted, and her hand fell away from Cheyenne’s shoulder to instead return to the steering wheel. “Well, yeah, of course,” she replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Whether she meant to be there at the same time as us or not, she’s still going to recognize you, and she still got fired and you were a pretty intrinsic part of that. Of course, she doesn’t want to be in the same place as you if she doesn’t have to be.”
Daphne’s logic seemed sound enough, at least for the time being. If it happened again, then Cheyenne wasn’t going to consider it just an uncomfortable happenstance, but for the time being, it seemed harmless enough to go without mentioning it.
After all, she already had proof that Harry wasn’t going to believe her on these matters until he was directly confronted with it, and she wasn’t in the mood to put herself through that again if she didn’t need to. She was pretty sure she didn’t have the fortitude for it.
Besides, if it turned out to be an actual problem, she could call the police later just as easily as she could call them then.
The rest of the drive was quiet, save for the sounds of traffic. Even with her tentative hope that it had just been an accident, Cheyenne couldn’t help but feel discomfited, and Daphne kept sliding her worried glances for the duration of the drive, until she was pulling into Harry’s driveway once again.
Neither of them mentioned anything to Harry that evening. Not even Daphne, who tended to air on the side of the overly cautious. Cheyenne wasn’t fully confident that Daphne actually believed it had just been happenstance that led to them crossing paths with Lorraine, but she also knew that Daphne’s opinion of Harry wasn’t exactly the highest, and she supposed it was entirely possible that she had also decided not to bother mentioning it to him if she didn’t think he was going to do anything.
It was yet another thing Cheyenne supposed they were going to have a very long conversation about after the babies were born and she was a bit better at stringing her thoughts together. If she tried it just then, she was pretty sure she was either going to make no sense or she would just insult him on accident.
*
As exhausted as she frequently was, Cheyenne felt moments of near manic energy from time to time, as if she was going to burst apart at the seams and fall into a billion pieces if she didn’t get out and do something.
It tended not to be anything huge. Walking long distances wasn’t really an activity that agreed with her for the time being, and she couldn’t really comfortably fit behind the wheel of a car anymore, so that wasn’t an option. And besides, those bursts of energy tended not to be anything particularly long-lived.
But she had her allowance from Harry, considering she was on maternity leave but she had refused to just sit around the house like the air would poison her if she left, and Harry hadn’t put up much of a fuss about giving her money each week. After all, it’s not as if he was really going to notice its absence.
He put up more of a fuss about Cheyenne going out on her own. Come to think of it, Daphne wasn’t crazy about the idea either. Cheyenne wasn’t entirely sure why. Well, alright, she knew why: the babies. But that still didn’t seem like a great excuse for either of them to get worked up, as far as she was concerned. If anything went wrong while she was out, she always had her phone with her, and even if she didn’t, it would be pretty damn hard for someone to miss an absurdly pregnant woman having trouble, so someone would be able to dial 911 for her even if she couldn’t do it herself. And then she would be off to the hospital, just as she would be if something went wrong while she was at the house by herself, as she so frequently was, since she was the only one residing there who didn’t work nearly every day.
But if they wanted to be a pair of nervous nellies, she wasn’t going to argue with them. There were better things she could do with her time and her energy whenever she actually had any of it to spare.
Considering that determination, though, of course it was all but inevitable for something to make her change her mind.
She was walking in the strip district in the early afternoon, making herself useful because an energy high had struck and the house seemed almost oppressively empty and silent. If nothing else she could hit up a few of the organic grocers along the strip and get something to make for dinner. It had been a while since she had gone all out when it came to cooking, but food shopping at least seemed like something well within the timeline of her typical bursts of energy. It also meant she would have something reasonably non-taxing to do once she was back at the house.
There were two grocers and a fishmonger that she planned on visiting, and it was as she stepped out of the first grocery store that she felt a touch off. As if something was trying to bore into the side of her head. She paused and glanced around on the sidewalk outside the store, and a teenage girl with a dog paused and asked her, “Hey, you okay, lady?”
Cheyenne offered the girl a smile and waved her along. “Just fine,” she replied. “Feeling a bit off is just a fact of life by now,” she added, one hand on her belly, a shopping bag in the other hand.
The girl gave her a wary smile before she continued on her way, glancing over her shoulder one last time before she picked up her pace again.
Cheyenne looked around once more, but everything seemed normal. She scowled down at the sidewalk for a moment before she shook her head in exasperation and kept walking. She was going to have a good afternoon, goddammit. No one and nothing was going to ruin it for her, least of all her own paranoia. With that thought bolstering her, she continued on to the second grocery store with a spring in her step that only felt a little bit too forced.
She made it to the store without any issues, and when she stepped inside, everything was perfectly fine. She would admit, she lingered a bit longer than she needed to as she picked up the ingredients she needed. She chatted with the cashier for a bit longer than was strictly necessary before she stepped back out the door and onto the sidewalk once more.
Once again, there was just something off, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. Her eyes narrowed as she peered around, but she didn’t take long to search, since it took only a moment before people started to look at her like she was crazy, and it wasn’t long before a couple were asking her if she needed any help with anything.
Cheyenne pasted a smile into place as she assured them, “Thanks, but no. I’m fine. It’s just been a long day.”
Both of them seemed a bit reluctant to keep moving, so Cheyenne made the decision for them, with one last smile before she carried on down the sidewalk. She just had to get to the seafood store and from there she could call a taxi to come get her. It wouldn’t be an issue.
She was fairly sure she wasn’t going crazy, but as she took one last look around before she picked up a more purposeful pace, she couldn’t help but feel like maybe she was. She pushed that thought to the back of her mind for the time being, though she didn’t bother trying to tell herself that she was going to have a good day. That possibility had sort of vanished.
It seemed like a silly thing to get emotional over, but she still had to squeeze her eyes shut for a few seconds as she walked. By some miracle, she didn’t bump into anyone.
When she got to the seafood store, the smell was almost overpowering, not helped at all by how tight and cramped the shop was, trapping the smell in every beam, brick, and fiber of the building. And yet even that was preferable to the strange, subtle dread of being outside. So once again, she took her time browsing the fresh selections, and the woman manning the counter was a cheerful, pleasant sort, so conversation was easy enough to make. Cheyenne honestly did get swept up in it without even needing to force it.
But soon enough, she had what she was looking for, and she stepped back outside. She had been in the shop for longer than she expected.
Perhaps that was why, once she stepped out onto the sidewalk, she actually managed to catch sight of her problem.
There was Lorraine, standing across the street. It took her only a split second to realize she had been spotted, and she ducked into a passing crowd and all but disappeared. Cheyenne stared blankly at where she had been standing until someone bumped her with their shoulder, and she snapped back into the moment. Adjusting her hold on her purchases, she turned and stepped right back into the shop.
“Something wrong with the fish, dear?” the woman behind the counter asked.
“No, no, nothing like that.” Cheyenne offered a shaky smile, followed by the first story she could think of that would be believed and taken seriously. “I need to call a taxi, but…well, I know you don’t have a lot of space in here, but can I wait in here for it to show up? My ex-boyfriend is waiting for me outside.”
For a moment, the woman looked outraged on Cheyenne’s behalf, but she calmed quickly and offered a firm, “Of course, dear. I insist, in fact. And if he tries to come inside, you point him out to me, and I’ll tell him what’s what.”
Cheyenne couldn’t help but laugh at that, as she imagined the small woman in front of her menacing some imaginary man with a cleaver.
Cheyenne offered a very heartfelt, “thank you,” before she pulled out her phone to call a taxi.
There was an old chair in the corner of the shop, tucked out of the way of the crowds that went in and out, and the woman running the shop ushered Cheyenne into it as soon as she was done calling the cab company. Cheyenne took it gratefully, her shopping bags sitting at her feet beside her. She could still see out the front window from there, and she watched the opposite side of the street, waiting to see if Lorraine would make another appearance. Every time she caught a glimpse of blond hair, her chest felt tight, and she swore she was going to vomit. It didn’t happen, though, and for that she was grateful.
Lorraine made no further appearances after that, evidently not willing to try her luck after she had already been spotted. As if Cheyenne could actually do anything to her.
She was almost willing to consider that she had been imagining things, considering she had been fairly stressed out, but she knew what she saw. It helped that Daphne had been there the last time Lorraine tried it, just to offer validation and proof that Lorraine was, indeed, willing to resort to following Cheyenne down the street.
What did she even want to do? What was she hoping to accomplish? Did she think she could just grab Cheyenne off the street and she wouldn’t make any sort of fuss about it? That wasn’t going to happen.
(Then again, whether or not she made a fuss was possibly irrelevant, if Lorraine managed to drag her somewhere secluded and then eat her before she was discovered. But Cheyenne didn’t want to think about that while she was completely surrounded by the smell of fish, or else she was absolutely going to throw up. So, she stomped that thought back down into the depths it emerged from, at least for the time being. No, thank you.)
Cheyenne was so lost in her thoughts she didn’t even realize when the cab showed up, pulling to a halt at the curb outside the shop. The woman behind the counter tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention, and with a sheepish smile, Cheyenne gathered up her bags and hurried out the door, and she could feel the woman watching her like an overprotective hawk the entire time.
She offered the address to the cabbie as she climbed into the backseat, and the ride passed in a distracted haze as she stared out the window. The cabbie tried to make conversation a few times, but he gave up when Cheyenne answered him with monosyllables and nothing else. She wasn’t feeling particularly chatty just then, and more than anything she just wanted to be back at the house, where she knew she was safe.
When the cab pulled to a halt outside Harry’s house, the cabbie offered to carry her bags to the door for her, and Cheyenne figured she really must have looked miserable if he was offering that. She pasted a smile into place and handed him his payment. With a polite, “thanks, but I’m fine,” she picked up her bags and made her way back to the house.
Once she was inside, the house felt no less enormous and empty and quiet as it ever did, but in that moment, it was like a balm, and Cheyenne sagged back against the door as soon as she was standing in the entryway. She let her head thump back against it and closed her eyes, and for a moment she just breathed, before she pushed herself away from the door and headed towards the kitchen. She would tell Harry about what happened once he was back from work. In the meantime, she needed to keep herself distracted, so it seemed like a good time to start preparing dinner.
Almost as an afterthought, she locked the front door.
*
By the time Daphne got back, the kitchen and much of the ground floor smelled like cooking food, and most of the kitchen and a solid portion of the living room had been cleaned. Cheyenne hadn’t touched Harry’s office—that seemed like too much of a breach of privacy—but the difference elsewhere was still striking.
Daphne looked around slowly as she moseyed into the kitchen. and pointed out, “You’ve been busy,” rather than actually asking what was wrong.
Cheyenne was sitting at the kitchen table by then, scrolling listlessly on her laptop. The remaining steps for dinner were finicky enough that she should stay in the room, but that didn’t mean she was suddenly perfectly comfortable.
“I had to keep myself busy,” she grumbled, closing her laptop with a bit more force than was strictly necessary. It was failing at keeping her distracted, and it seemed like Daphne would probably do a better job.
“Uh oh,” Daphne sighed, and she sat down on the table. “What’s up?”
“I went to the strip today, and Lorraine was stalking me. Again.” Cheyenne groaned and folded her arms on the table to let her head thump down against them. “This is getting ridiculous. At this point, I’m about ready to see what it would cost to get her shipped to the moon. I doubt she would be able to find her way back from there any time soon.”
“What are you going to do?” Daphne wondered, patting Cheyenne’s shoulder.
Cheyenne shrugged helplessly without lifting her head off of her arms. “I need to tell Harry, I guess,” she replied. “Though I’m pretty sure once I do, I’ve doomed myself to never being able to step out the front door without an escort.”
Daphne snorted. “Chey, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you doomed yourself to that as soon as you told me. I mean, once when she’s upset, sure, but if she’s going to make a habit of stalking you, then like hell am I just going to twiddle my thumbs and pretend I don’t know about it.”
Cheyenne sighed slowly, shoulders slumping until it seemed as if she was going to melt right there on top of the table. She didn’t move until a timer went off, and she hoisted herself back to her feet to go tend to the food.
“I guess that’s fair,” she conceded eventually, though it seemed more like she was mumbling it to the stove. “I just can’t wait for all of this to be over with.”
“All of this with Lorraine, or with the pregnancy?” Daphne wondered, leaning back against the counter beside the stove.
Cheyenne scoffed, and it was followed by an emphatic, “Both. Both of them are making me miserable. And crazy. And I would like everything to go back to something at least passably resembling normal.”
“Soon enough,” Daphne reminded her, glancing down to Cheyenne’s belly. “I mean, you’ve got, what, a couple weeks left?”
“Something like that,” Cheyenne confirmed. “Time cannot pass quickly enough, I swear.”
*
If nothing else, dinner that night was incredible, and Cheyenne supposed she owed it to her anxiety. Granted, she would have happily eaten a bowl of dirt if it meant she wasn’t being stalked by a literal lioness who probably wanted to eat her.
She didn’t speak much throughout dinner, which meant no one really spoke much, since Daphne and Harry still didn’t carry on any particularly in-depth conversations between each other and relied on Cheyenne to act as some kind of relay service. Normally, it was sort of entertaining to watch them try to act as if the other wasn’t there, but that evening Cheyenne just wasn’t in the mood to act like a carrier pigeon.
Daphne seemed understanding enough, and she excused herself quickly once her plate was empty, mumbling something about just leaving the dishes to her afterwards because she would get to them before she went to bed.
Cheyenne was going to assume that was Daphne’s way of taking away any sort of excuse she might have had to avoid having the conversation about Lorraine with Harry. And she could see why Daphne might think she would do that, but that night it wasn’t much of a concern. Cheyenne was thoroughly fed up with everything, and for once it was a conversation she wanted to have, if for no other reason than to say that she was trying everything she could to make the mess go away.
So, she drew in a breath, sighed it out slowly, and suggested, “Let’s head into your office. I need to tell you about something.”
Harry’s eyebrows rose as he got to his feet, but he didn’t protest and instead simply led the way to his office, where he made himself comfortable in his usual chair. He watched Cheyenne for a moment, maybe waiting for her to sit down, as his eyebrows rose again when she instead began pacing back and forth across the rug.
“Something happened while I was shopping today,” she began finally, running a hand over her hair as she said it. Harry shifted in his seat as if he was bracing for impact, and Cheyenne began to explain the events of the day. She spared no details, making sure she mentioned the growing dread and distress, how even strangers on the street could see that there was something wrong, and how she had to rely on the kindness of a patient stranger to make sure she was safe while she waited for a cab.
“And this isn’t the first time she’s done something like that,” she finished, her voice low. “You can ask Daphne if you want. She was with me the last time—well, the last time we caught Lorraine.” She had been close to saying ‘the last time it happened,’ but she had no proof that it hadn’t happened since then and she simply hadn’t noticed.
Falling silent, she looked at Harry expectantly.
Harry was calm, though something like muffled rage burned behind his eyes, and his hands were tight against the arms of his chair. But still, he was calm, which Cheyenne hadn’t quite expected. So, maybe she could get something like decent advice.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she admitted, shrugging helplessly. “Should I call the cops? I mean, I don’t want to confront her myself; that isn’t going to go well. And there are a billion different ways it could go wrong if you confront her.”
“Calling the police might not go over well,” Harry pointed out reasonably, burying his anger for a time when it would be more productive. “She lives in the city, and the cops are going to know that. I don’t think you can really get her arrested for being in the same area as you in the city she lives in, even if we know something else is going on.”
Cheyenne groaned and sat down on his lap, the side of her head thumping against his shoulder. “Why do you have to be right?” she grumbled. “It’s really annoying right now.”
Harry ran a hand soothingly up and down her back. “That’s probably why it doesn’t happen that often,” he replied. “I’m really annoying when it does happen.”
“Well then, thanks for taking one for the team,” Cheyenne sighed. After a moment, she tacked on, “I’m not getting up, by the way. I figured I should just let you know that.”
“Yeah, I sort of figured,” Harry replied dryly. “You just make yourself comfortable.”
It didn’t solve any of their problems, but even so, it wasn’t a bad way to end the evening. Cheyenne would just hold onto that feeling for a while. She figured the odds were pretty likely that something would come along soon enough to ruin everything all over again, so she would take advantage of every good feeling she could get.
But really, how sad was it that she needed to ration the good feelings out like that? She couldn’t wait for everything to go back to normal.
*
Cheyenne adjusted surprisingly quickly to needing to have a babysitter everywhere she went, if only because she was unexpectedly grateful for it. It seemed like every time she even stepped off the porch, Lorraine was lurking somewhere nearby. Occasionally, Daphne or Harry, depending on who was with her at the time, spotted her as well, but they weren’t quite so paranoid about it as Cheyenne and so weren’t quite so eagle-eyed.
If Daphne spotted her, then the look on her face was always one that could put a feral cat to shame, sneering like she intended to go right for the throat. Just long enough for Lorraine to duck into the nearest hiding spot or crowd, and then Daphne would hook one arm through Cheyenne’s and start towing her along.
And Harry’s reactions were…gratifying.
Harry would slip an arm around Cheyenne’s waist and pull her close, gaze skirting past Lorraine as if she wasn’t even there. The message was clear. As far as he was concerned, Cheyenne was the winner; Lorraine could cease to exist and maybe he would notice, but the odds were he wouldn’t.
Every time, Lorraine would look stricken for a split second, before she would disappear again. If Harry noticed that side-effect, he never mentioned it, and Cheyenne was content to keep it to herself. Considering everything Lorraine had done, Cheyenne wasn’t ashamed to admit that those memories of Lorraine looking as if her heart had been ripped right out of her chest made Cheyenne happy.
*
Cheyenne woke up with a jolt when she heard a noise outside. She had been sleeping lightly, her dreams taking odd directions that prevented her from truly settling down, so she wasn’t immediately too concerned; it could have just been a raccoon or a bird. But once she made her way over to the window and peered outside, she swore the world stopped turning for a moment and the breath in her lungs went cold.
A pair of reflective eyes were visible for just a moment, too high off of the ground to belong to any of the common but small wildlife that frequently roamed the street. It was too large to even be one of the rare coyotes that occasionally made its way into the city.
Cheyenne knew exactly what it was—who it was.
And she knew that there was still no way for her to report it. How was she supposed to explain that to the police? ‘This woman who can turn into a lion is stalking me.’ They would have her sent to the psychiatric ward within the hour.
Cheyenne let the curtain fall closed again and simply stood there for a very long moment, staring blankly at the fabric. When she at last jerked herself into motion to go back to bed, she moved as if she was in a daze.
She didn’t get any more sleep for the rest of the night.