Page 4 of A Shade Too Far
“Hurry up,” the young man said, “or I’ll pick and force one of you through to test whether I was right.”
Emmett confronted me with crossed arms. “Do I or do I not have divination magic?”
The stranger narrowed his eyes at that, considering the golem with a shrewd look.
“You do,” I said, “but…” His magic didn’t work that way, did it?
“I sensed something dangerous behind the other door,” the golem said. “You going to trust me?”
The stranger pointed at me. “What magic do you bring to your decision?”
My fingers twitched because I really wanted to summon Delilah to punch him in the face, but he smirked, his poisoned needles extending further from his skin, and I backed off.
The doors were hung totally flush with the frame, leaving no crack to slip my shadow under and investigate.
“I’ve got logic, not magic,” I said. “If we keep track of the outside wall, we can eliminate doors.” I felt in my housekeeping uniform for a pencil, but there wasn’t one, so I drew in the air. “According to the blueprints I saw, Torres’s house was square. This room seems to end in line with where the outside wall was back in the gallery space. Which means…” I tapped the left door. “This leads outside.”
“You’re wrong.” Emmett put his hand on the door ahead. “I have a bad feeling about this one, and the door behind us leads back to the gallery. We have to take the left one.”
The young man looked between us, tapping his foot. “Magic trumps logic. Left door it is.” His finger needles glistened with inky toxins. “Don’t follow me.”
“You can’t get through the vault without the golem,” I said. “There’s a heartbeat monitor on it.”
Emmett stepped forward. “And I’m not going through without her.”
“Then you can carry her dead body with you after I poison her,” our nemesis said. “Or come with me and leave her behind. Alive.”
The golem’s shoulders slumped. “Sorry, Miri.”
“Good choice.” The young man opened the left door revealing an identical empty yellow room, and I frowned because it should have led outside.
Before I could tell them to wait and figure this out, Emmett sprinted for it, attempting to grab the man before he could get through. They got wedged in the doorway.
“Emmett! Stop!” I didn’t want him running blindly into a room that, by my logic, shouldn’t have been there.
The stranger wriggled out into the new room first, smirked—and was engulfed by a ball of flame hot enough to burn the tip of my nose.
His charred and blackened corpse hit the ground with a dusty thunk and the door slammed shut.
I stood there wide-eyed and hyperventilating.
“I lied,” Emmett blurted out. “I only said I had a bad feeling because I wanted to protect you. I figured if we disagreed, then he wouldn’t hurt you, and once he’d gone into the next room, we’d bolt the other way. But I killed him.”
“No,” I croaked out. “Torres did that. It’s not your fault.” I’d been so certain that the left door led outside. If Emmett and I had gone through it instead of the young man, we’d be dead. I shuddered. How were we supposed to survive if logic didn’t apply here?
Emmett nervously eyed the door to the right. “What do we do if both rooms are booby-trapped? How do we get to the vault?”
I fought through my shock back to the problem at hand. “We must have missed something back in the gallery. A clue. Let’s go back out and search that area again.”
Nodding, he threw open the door we’d originally entered, only to now find it blocked by a wall. “I hate this so much,” he said.
“Eight minutes,” I said anxiously, checking my timer that was counting down until the fight was supposed to end.
The door behind us was a wall and the left-hand one was Tiki Torch Palace. Defeated, I opened our only option, willing myself to move my feet and step into the next yellow room.
Emmett pushed us both inside and the door closed behind him.
I yelped and threw up my hands as if that would save me from immolation, screwed my eyes shut, and waited. When nothing happened, I peered around the room.
