Page 1 of A Shade Too Far
1
In just over half an hour,I’d either have pulled off an impossible heist during an illicit underground magic fight, or I’d be dead. Oh, and to make things interesting, I had to accomplish this feat on a private tropical island filled with shady Ohrist guests swanning around sipping champagne while openly flexing their magic in front of each other.
Then there was my employer, Tatiana Cassin, who moved through the crowd like an eighty-year-old shark in a sea of guppies acting like they had teeth.
My boss chatted briefly with everyone, who paid their respects Godfather-style. The few who snubbed her received a serene smile with a hint of menace, which made most of them scurry over to correct their misstep. She didn’t give a damn what anyone believed of her, actively encouraging all the rumors about her presence today.
I had much to learn from Obi-Wan Corleone.
An Indian woman in an orange saree, who was literally as insubstantial as the smoke from her cigarillo, waited impatiently for her turn with Tatiana next to a man in a kilt with skin as hard and bizarrely defined as an alien exoskeleton.
Tatiana’s bloodred silk couture gown weighed more than she did, but her blue eyes were as sharp as the bone spikes magically fanning out from the neck of a Black woman in a fitted tuxedo, who bent to kiss Tatiana’s wrinkled hand.
They both looked majestic, whereas I was shvitzing worse than an old Jewish man in a sauna due to my overly starched formal housekeeper’s uniform worn by all the servers employed by Santiago Torres. I swear, the combination of sweat and polyester had terraformed a microbiome in my armpits.
Note to self: next time I secretly crashed an event, wear breathable fabrics.
My golem partner nudged my hip, both of us hidden under my magic cloaking. “How much longer?” he whined in a whisper.
Sighing quietly, I showed Emmett the old windup watch on my wrist—exactly like I had the other dozen times in the last half hour. Five minutes to showtime.
He rocked back and forth from his heels to his toes but was distracted by a woman sashaying by in a flowy caftan made of living bees. With his hands, he measured his hips in comparison to hers.
“I could rock that,” he mused, looking sadly at his sweatpants and runners.
I tapped my index finger against my lips, directing him to keep quiet. While no one could scent us or detect my heartbeat under the black invisibility mesh created by my shadow magic, they could hear us speaking.
Everyone was taking their seats for the outdoor fight, except for Emmett, me, and the security team, who made no attempt to be subtle. They patrolled through gardens where short bulbous cacti nestled in beds of red rocks, between rows of gently swaying palm trees, along the beach with the aquamarine Sea of Cortez beyond, and around the perimeter of the ring.
Taking calming breaths of warm, salt-tanged air, I pulled out the domino that I’d won in the Kefitzat Haderech and ran my thumb over the single black line carved into the tile face. Neither Tatiana, nor our client, Vancouver’s head vampire Zev BatKian, had been able to learn much about what we faced en route to our target: the Torquemada Gloves. The vault containing them was in the basement of Torres’s opulent mansion and had a heartbeat-monitored door.
That was it. A whopping two facts: basement and special door. I was literally operating on nothing.
And if my manipulative employer and the most paranoid vampire in Canada couldn’t sniff out any more details than that, no one else could.
Did working for Zev leave an oily feeling deep in my soul? Why, yes. Did I have a choice? Also, yes. Though with my family’s safety and my continued breathing at stake, it wasn’t a difficult one to make.
I wouldn’t betray Zev, yet he’d still taken a few dozen opportunities to press upon me the importance of loyalty. Not being a total moron, I’d understood his feelings on that subject at our first encounter. At this point, he was just beating a dead horse about how scary he was. It had taken all my willpower not to affect a terrible Dracula accent during our last meeting and say, “I vant to suck your blood. Blah. Blah. Blah.”
Another reason I wasn’t all that worried about the vampire if I failed? He’d be late to the party. Torres’s people would have already killed me, being trained to suss out threats using both magic and high-tech means. However, if I didn’t present the Torquemada Gloves to Zev, I could kiss the ward to keep out demons and other dangerous supernatural baddies goodbye. I’d blown my first shot at the vampire’s assistance and this gig was the rare gift of a second chance.
Thankfully, he couldn’t accompany us to the island. Even if he’d dissolved into smoke and snuck through the lowered wards alongside Tatiana, as Emmett and I had under my cloaking, the fights were held in broad daylight, precisely so no unwanted bloodsuckers showed up. Zev might be able to go outside under an umbrella on a sunny day in Vancouver, but the tropical sun here would incinerate him.
I curled my nails into my palms to keep from scratching my itchy armpits. Had the makers of these uniforms never heard of natural fibers?
Two minutes left.
Positive thoughts, Feldman.I wasn’t coming into this totally unprepared. In fact, my entire life had trained me for dealing with the unknown. Forty-two years of experience, my honor roll chops, ex-librarian meticulousness, resilience from navigating a divorce, and some pretty sweet magic talent made me a force to be reckoned with. I bounced on my toes, as alert as an Olympic sprinter braced for the starting gun.
With a smile as suave as his bespoke linen suit, Santiago escorted Tatiana to her ringside seat, which was in my direct line of sight. He’d been hosting these championship fights for over forty years, and Tatiana had attended every one with Samuel, her aficionado husband.
Though this was the first time since his death seven years ago that she’d made an appearance.
Santiago’s wife, Sherisse, a frosted blonde with a distracted air and leathery skin, joined them. Tatiana leaned over Santiago to speak to the woman, who shook her head with quick nervous movements. When Tatiana sat back in her seat with her chin propped on her fist, Santiago turned a hard look on his wife, but was all smiles again when he resumed chatting with my employer.
There was no way to contact Tatiana to learn if there was an unanticipated and unwelcome wrinkle in our mission, because I couldn’t carry a phone for fear of it being tracked. Once the fight was over, Emmett and I were to meet back at the private plane she’d chartered, but until then, we were on our own.
A bell rang out and a loud cheer went up.
