Page 74 of Throwing Shade
I gusted out a breath and dropped my magic.
“How the hell am I supposed to walk now?” Emmett flung his broken shin at the wall.
“Stick it back on.”
“I’m not Play-Doh. My bits have to be cast and fired. Help meeee,” he whined.
“You sold me out.”
“I had to. The vamps got me and I had to prove my worth.”
“Didn’t you? You told them about the dybbuk.”
“I confirmed the dybbuk’s involvement. It wasn't new information and I couldn’t answer other questions because I can’t control when my magic works. I’m defective, and BatKian knows it.” Emmett rubbed his hands over his face. “They’re going to destroy me.”
This was not my problem. I had to find the wolf and get us both out of here before Zev came back and finished us off himself.
“I’ll try to return for you, okay?” I gestured at the door. “But I have to go.”
“Fine,” Emmett said, in an Eeyore voice. “Go. Abandon me, like Jude did. I’ll just lay down and wait to die. Maybe you could roll me over to that smashed sculpture before you go, so they don’t have to clean up two messes?”
His divination might be defective, but his guilt-tripping was top notch.
“I liked you better drunk.” I did a quick sweep of the room and ran over to the office area.
Emmett theatrically flung an arm over his eyes. “Me too.”
I wheeled the rolling desk chair over and helped him into it. Awesome, now I was committing grand theft desk chair. To make matters worse, it had a wonky wheel that pointed in a different direction from the other three. I had to lean into the back of the chair to make it move, but I bumped us out the door.
“Could you push it more smoothly?” Emmett said.
“No, but I could break off your other leg and shove it down your throat so I don’t have to listen to any more complaints.”
“Touchy. Did the wolf even go this way?”
We turned a corner and I stopped so abruptly that Emmett almost fell out of the chair.
Laurent had made short work of the two vamps he’d encountered here. And by short work, I mean that I slid in their blood as I stopped the chair, booting the half-mangled torso of one vamp into the wall.
“I’m going to go with yes,” I said in a warbly voice.
The other bloodsucker lay on his back, his fingers twitching just out of reach of his torn-off face that looked like an undead pancake.
Why couldn’t they all turn to nice piles of ash?
Gagging, I drove the chair over the corpse blocking our way. It took a few tries because office chairs aren’t ATVs, but we resumed our journey, following the wolf’s trail of bloody pawprints and adding our own tracks to the mix. The sound of the squeaking wheel pinched the muscles from my butt to the top of my neck, at which point it burrowed into my brain.
The trail of destruction turned grislier—and gristlier—the farther along we got.
Wet smacking sounds trailed over to us from a hallway branching off to the left, where Laurent gnawed on a vamp’s arm like a chew toy.
I looked him up and down and sighed. “Normally, when it’s my time of the month, I want chocolate and salty snacks, but you do you.”
The fiend’s other arm had been so thoroughly shredded I could have stuffed it in a sausage casing and served it up at the International Hellhouse of Pancakes with the creature’s severed head as a garnish.
If this was the “in-control” version of the wolf, I never wanted to encounter him during a full moon.
“Laurent.” I crouched down with my hand outstretched. Blood matted his fur, not all of it from the vamps, and some of his gashes were still bleeding. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
