Page 86 of Throwing Shade
The dybbuk had burned that guard’s spine away with her light magic. What had she done to my best friend?
The wolf caught hold of my sleeve and herded me through the corridors. The stench of human BBQ had me gagging long before we reached the kitchen, where burned bodies littered the ground, some still smoldering.
“No,” I said softly.
The wolf head-butted me forward. Wolves’ fur might look silky, but it was like being propelled by a bristly kettlebell.
I dug my heels into the ground. “I don’t want to see her.”
He trotted over to the first pile and knocked corpses aside.
I shuddered. He wasn’t going to eat them, was he?
When he was done, he looked back at me expectantly. I stared blankly at him, and he pawed at one of the men.
Oh! Was that why he’d touched dead people with his muzzle? To show me there were no women?
I hopscotched my way from pile to pile, confirming that every single one of them was male, while Laurent cleaned himself, then I sagged against the stainless-steel counters. “Jude is still alive. Thank you.”
He thumped his tail.
“Zev was convinced Jude would be here,” I said, “and even Emmett confirmed it. So where…?”
The golem. If I could figure out how to use my magic, he could do the same and divine where Jude was.
“To the car,” I said, striding past the wolf. “We’re not out of leads yet.”
We took the stairwell back upstairs to the ground level of the substation. Blood droplets ran from a discarded cigarette all the way to the rotted outside door. I decided not to ask what had become of the guard, choosing to believe that Laurent had merely ripped off his arm.
I shook my head, mentally chiding myself. How had that become my most palatable scenario?
Back at the vehicle, I opened the door for the wolf but he didn’t get in the car. “Do you want to shift?”
He nudged me aside, snatched his jeans off the seat, and loped into the woods.
I sat in the driver’s seat, my leg jiggling, trying to distract myself with music and not go after him and spy on his transformation.
Did he burst out of his skin or fur all at once like the Hulk? Did his hair and teeth fall out? Wincing, I leaned into the back to check, but happily that wasn’t the case. I drummed my fingers on the wheel. Did Laurent know he was shifting? Was there a switch when his thinking became more human than animal and vice versa? He understood me in wolf form, but he also had no problem tearing his enemies apart. Did he always possess the same level of sentience and those were both aspects of who he truly was?
I got a crick in my neck trying to peer into the trees and satisfy my purely academic curiosity, but I couldn’t see anything.
Laurent finally emerged, barefoot, popping a shoulder into place, and I winced. Maybe I didn’t want to see a shift.
He shrugged into his Henley, shoved his socks in his pocket, and got into the car. When I started the engine but didn’t go anywhere, he glanced up from pulling on his boots. “What are you waiting for?”
“You to finish and put on your seatbelt.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
I half-turned to face him. “Do I look like I’m kidding?”
He yanked on his other boot and clicked the seatbelt in. “Happy?”
“Delirious.” I started the engine.
He pulled out his phone and made a call. “Get your asses out to the old Kemp substation. Mei Lin’s dead and you need to clean up her mess.” His eyes narrowed as he listened. “Yeah, well, it was a surprise to me too when I found she took out her own crew. Dybbuks, man. Maybe next time, believe me when I say I know what I’m talking about, and back me up against the vamps.”
Disgusted, he hung up.
