Page 13 of A Shade Too Far
I declined more tea, thanking the flight attendant for taking away my meal. “Goes twice? Goes not? Huh?” My cousin Goldie, who’d raised me, had spoken Yiddish when I was younger. Now married to a goy, she rarely did, and I’d forgotten most of it.
“‘A fool goes twice where a sensible person doesn’t even go once.’ Don’t be that fool, Miriam.” Content that she’d had the last word, Tatiana picked up the art magazine sticking out of her giant purse.
Disappointed yet unsurprised, I moved the pillow from behind my back to my shoulder, thinking of a way to convince her, but within seconds, I gave a giant yawn and fell asleep.
* * *
The moon was out, the sky clear when we landed back in Vancouver. The night air smelled like diesel and bitter coffee thanks to the plane, but the tarmac still retained a vestige of heat, keeping the breeze at bay.
As expected, Zev BatKian met us on the landing strip. He wore another elegant suit, this one a dark gray. Not a single hair of his short mahogany strands was out of place and his goatee was impeccably trimmed as always. Did vampires’ hair not grow or did this dude have a daily standing appointment with his barber?
I flexed my fingers with their ragged cuticles and nails bitten down to the quick, comparing them to his short, buffed nails. Damn. Outshone by an undead male.
Next to me, Emmett yawned loudly, not bothering to cover his mouth.
The master vamp was accompanied by his human henchman Rodrigo, a hulking man with no sense of humor, unless you counted the chauffeur’s cap with the gold braiding that he wore because it was kind of a joke.
“Undertaker, it’s a joy as always to see your beaming visage,” I said.
His expression, already pretty stony, went positively igneous. I grinned.
Zev tapped his foot. “The Torquemada Gloves?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled. Woe betide anyone who fell afoul of his beloved protocols. Carefully, I pulled the shriveled yellow pair out of my bag and placed them in his outstretched palm.
He didn’t laugh maniacally or stuff them in his suit pocket with a satisfied smirk. For a moment, he simply stared at them like he couldn’t believe they were real. He touched his index finger to them, then recoiled as if burned, that hand balling into a fist.
I’d seen him destroy priceless art without any emotion and ooze more menace in a simple pleasant smile than a chainsaw murderer. In fact, the only time he’d gotten visibly angry that I’d witnessed was in reaction to something Tatiana had said. I had yet to figure out their relationship, but it was layers upon knots upon more layers.
So, when Zev took a single ragged breath, his body bowed slightly over the gloves as if they occupied a much larger physical presence, and rocked back and forth, my eyebrows shot up. This emotion wasn’t anger, however, and while his movements reminded me of something, I couldn’t put my finger on what that was.
Zev stilled, and I got the sense that he’d just remembered that he wasn’t alone. He folded the gloves gently and tucked them in his breast pocket. “Thank you,” he said. “I shall be in touch about the ward.”
Tatiana watched him with a faint frown, her brows drawn together. At least I wasn’t the only one in the dark about what was going on, but she didn’t ask, and he didn’t elaborate.
Rodrigo escorted the vampire into a Town Car with black-tinted windows, and the two of them drove off.
That’s when it hit me. His rocking was akin to a religious Jew when davening—praying. Zev had been a rabbi back in his human life, but he’d been a vampire for a long time. There was no way that someone turned by an estrie—which were demons—still believed in his Jewish God. Was there?
I followed the taillights’ progress until they faded away, doubt slithering through me. Had Zev transferred his faith from a god above to one down below? The Torquemada Gloves were a demon artifact. Did the vampire want them to further some agenda for a demon lord?
Or was it the reaction of a Jew seeking to document an awful chapter in our peoples’ history, perhaps even gleeful at outliving the monster behind it all, especially if it was Torquemada’s skin? Zev might even be old enough to have been alive during the Spanish Inquisition. Having been a rabbi was still very much tied to Zev’s sense of self, and as such, these gloves would have enormous personal value to him. If that were the case, I couldn’t fault him for that.
But which was it? My character assessment of Zev thus far had been pretty spot-on and it bothered me that I couldn’t derive what was behind his behavior with the gloves.
My boss snapped me out of my troubling thoughts with her insistence on driving me home in her death-mobile, a huge gold Buick from the 1970s. Emmett clambered into the back seat with no fear, but I strapped in already white-knuckling the “oh shit” handle in anticipation.
Tatiana never met a green light she didn’t want to slow down through, stop signs were merely suggestions, and the horn was an important part of inter-driver communications—even in the middle of the night when there was no one else on the road.
She honked at a tree’s shadow, slamming on the brakes and jerking me painfully against the seat belt.
“Let me drive!” I screeched.
The golem cackled in the back seat. “Humans. So breakable.”
I twisted around. “Shut it, or I’ll have Laurent rip your leg off again.”
He harrumphed, crossed his arms, and stared out the window.
