Page 67 of A Shade Too Far
I’d done a phenomenal job of keeping my powers under wraps thus far, but Delilah exploded out of me, tearing around the set like a tornado, scattering cards and rattling the wooden slats.
“Stop.” Laurent spoke the one word softly but with a wealth of power and Delilah froze.
I sank my head into the palms of my hands, pressing so hard that I saw stars. Everything in this world was games and manipulations and reading between the lines, designed to test every single moral code and relationship.
So be it. I refused to lose now.
I raised my head. “I’ll—”
“Days of the Week,” Laurent said clearly.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
He gave a bitter laugh. “What else do I have to lose?”
“You really want to taunt the universe like that?”
The shifter held my gaze, the wolf in him peering out, unblinking, unflinching, even without his Ohrist magic.
“All or nothing,” he said.
I looked away first.
Hiram plucked a card out of his dwindling stack. “This event shares the date of March 15 with another famous betrayal.”
Laurent tensed.
I hunched back against the sofa, fear pricking me with icy hooks. The shifter had many failings, including his failure to see any shades of gray where dybbuk killing was involved, but betrayal? I couldn’t reconcile that idea with the man I knew, and yet it was worse if someone had betrayed him, stabbing him in the back like Brutus had to Caesar. Even now, with this impossible gulf between us, I’d want to destroy that person.
“On what day of the week—” I expected Hiram to pause theatrically again to draw out the suspense, but he gaped at the card for a moment before he cleared his throat a couple times and composed himself.
Hiram hadn’t broken character as the host for any other question. What had his divination magic just revealed to him on that card that was so shocking?
Laurent’s chest rose and fell raggedly as if he’d run a marathon and his pulse fluttered in his throat.
I clenched my hands into fists, willing Hiram to end my friend’s torment.
Hiram didn’t appear to notice our distress, tapping the cards into a neat pile and schooling his expression back to that of a pleasant host. “On what day of the week did you betray your alpha oath to protect your pack and walk away from them, leaving chaos and bloodshed as others attempted to seize the power vacuum you’d left?”
No. He’d never. Shaking my head, I turned to Laurent to implore him to speak up and clear his name.
His pupils were fully dilated, almost crowding out the whites of his eyes entirely. “Saturday,” he whispered hoarsely.
The slat flipped over, but its bright sound came off like a death knell.
“Saturday it is!” Hiram exclaimed.
I sat there, numb.
Laurent was lost to his pain, his fingers in claw formation without becoming claws, though he shook from the effort of trying to transform. He couldn’t even get up because we were pinned in place. He scrabbled frantically at the magic seat belt, his breathing labored.
“Let him out!” I demanded.
“Ask your final question,” Ephraim said. “The big prize,” he added sarcastically.
When Laurent and I were in our huddle earlier, I’d suggested asking where to find the Banim Shovavim, pointing out that if we got her name, we’d still need to narrow her location down from the entire world, but my partner had pressed for the reverse. He’d stated that if we asked where to find her, they could very well say “behind the blue door in Timbuktu,” at which point we’d still have to hunt her down and we wouldn’t have anything to go by.
I went with Laurent’s question, asking, since he was in no state to. “What’s her name?”
