Page 2 of A Shade Too Far
Emmett grabbed my sleeve and I nodded, putting away the domino talisman and setting the alarm on my watch. We’d estimated a half hour to accomplish our mission, based on the average length of these fights in previous years.
Still cloaked, we jogged toward the pale yellow manor with its array of arched windows, rounded balconies, and colonnades.
Lionheart, a barefoot Asian woman in a faun-colored sports bra and fitted shorts, exited a set of ground-floor glass doors and strode across the lawn. The tawny hair cascading to her shoulders was straight out of a shampoo commercial, but as she passed us, I glimpsed the flat, dispassionate gaze of an apex predator. The fighter ignored everyone in the crowd attempting to give her high-fives, her balletic grace in no way lessened by the myriad of ragged white scars traversing her body.
The ring was elevated to shoulder height so it could be seen by all the spectators. Stairs on one side provided access, but the fighter ignored them. In one smooth motion, Lionheart grasped the lower ropes and swung her body up and over into the ring. She walked to the corner and sat down on the mat cross-legged, her eyes closed.
If the cheers greeting Lionheart had been enthusiastic, the ones for her opponent, Destructo, were downright deafening. Dude was a wall of a man with two beady eyes and a nose that listed sideways as if bolting for greener pastures. With skin that could transform into a rock-solid surface, he stomped to the ring, roaring and grunting, his blue satin boxing shorts stretched to the breaking point.
Were I to judge a book by its cover—and I were—the chances of him speaking in erudite sentences were small, though I’d bet he referred to himself in the third person.
For months, Ohrist fighters had competed in a series of to-the-death battles, all in hopes of winning the lucrative prize at today’s championship event. Tatiana hadn’t given me specifics but apparently it was enough to set the victor up for life.
Lionheart had to be as bloodthirsty and deadly as Destructo to have triumphed over all the other contenders, but I had no doubt that she’d employ strategy. All Destructo had to do was stand there and let his opponents tire themselves out running into him until they fell to the mat like toddlers at nap time and he squashed them like bugs.
“Betting is closed!” cried a sweaty bald man.
Fun as it would have been to watch the two fighters duke it out to the end, work took precedence.
Emmett and I flattened ourselves against the house, careful to stay in line with an enormous bougainvillea tree. It must have been hooked to the same irrigation system that allowed the lush lawn to grow in this desert climate. What a waste of water for grass that was just getting torn up under people’s shoes.
After careful calculations back home, based on aerial shots of the property, we’d determined that the tree fell into a tiny slice of land undetected by either the motion sensor over the door or the one over the bank of windows to our right, both connected to monitors in a security hub.
A female guard on patrol set off the motion sensor light. She checked in with her team leader on a headset while I tracked the rotating camera mounted above the door. The second she stepped inside the house, Emmett and I fell into line behind her. The trick was to follow the guard closely enough that the door shut without hitting one of us, while not breathing down the woman’s neck, thereby giving away our concealed presence.
Any anomaly would send the guards to investigate with magic blazing.
The golem was so close behind me that he elbowed my back a couple of times, but miraculously, we peeled off from the guard at the end of a long corridor without detection.
A hand-painted ceiling mural of a bloody battle complemented the half dozen pieces of knight’s armor, their closed face shields giving the hallway a menacing air. Grimacing, I hoped for his wife’s sake that Santiago hadn’t carried this design aesthetic into their bedroom.
Emmett grabbed my wrist to check the time, then prodded me to go faster.
The two of us crept down the stairs into the basement in tense silence, checking over our shoulders every few seconds. Some of Santiago’s guards were shifters and we’d braced ourselves to face a tiger or a python or something, but we hit the bottom step without incident.
That was even more unnerving because either our intel was wrong, and the vault was on one of the upper floors, which teemed with guards, or Torres depended on magic booby traps to protect it.
If Emmett and I died finding the gloves, we’d disappear without a trace, since I’d bet good money on Torres’s team having excellent body disposal protocols. My kid and I had our standing TV date tomorrow night, and I wasn’t missing that. Plus, in the event of my demise, my best friend, Jude, was supposed to pluck my chin hairs. There was currently one under my jawline that I’d named Houdini for its ability to escape any pair of tweezers, and I refused to be killed before I’d pulled that little bastard out by the root.
We quickly checked behind doors, finding a private state-of-the art movie theater, a games room featuring a stunning billiard table with hand-carved panels, and both a walk-in humidor and large wine fridge in a lounge area, but no vault.
“There’s one more area to check,” Emmett said.
“Give me a sec.” I unwrapped a protein bar and downed half of it, because keeping us cloaked was running down my magical battery. “Okay.” I crammed the rest of the bar in my mouth, and we headed for the open space to the far right of the stairwell, which served as a small art gallery displaying Torres’s collection of modern pieces.
“Is that…” The golem’s upper lip curled back. “A graffitied toilet? Why?”
“Some people like to push the boundaries of what’s considered art.” I frowned at a nine-foot stack of chairs towering precariously in the corner.
“Some people are idiots. We must have missed a secret entrance down here.” Emmett placed a heavy hand on my shoulders and turned me around.
I stopped, waving a hand at this museum. “This doesn’t fit what I’ve seen of Santiago’s personality. He enjoys aggression, the bloodier the better. Fine wines, good cigars, sure. But a bunch of shitty art?”
I tugged the golem along with me, quickly inspecting each piece for a hidden lever or a button or something, but I came up empty-handed.
“Maybe he ran out of cash for the good stuff.” Emmett nodded his chin at a white wall with a large frame mounted there. A small mirror hung at eye level inside it. The rest of the basement had low, tasteful lighting, but this piece had a high-powered bulb trained on it from the opposite wall.
Was the point of this work to show a person’s reflection inside a frame, making them the art? Deep. I shook my head. “Even if I was rich, I wouldn’t waste money on this.”
