Page 5 of A Shade Too Far
We were both fine. Grateful as I was, why had the original door led back to a brick wall, and why didn’t the one on the left lead outside? I paced in a tight circle, sorting through possibilities. “Fuck me. The rooms must rotate.”
“On top of that, we’ve got the same problem as before.” Emmett rubbed his chin, eyeing the two new doors in this room. “How do we decide which to take next?”
I unstrapped the wristwatch.
“What are you doing?”
“Pick a door,” I said. “I’ll toss this through and if it sets off a booby trap, then we go through the other one.”
Emmett opened the one on the left again and I tossed the watch in.
The watch hit the ground, remaining totally intact. Mainly because it didn’t have a head for the giant intruder-decapitating blade that came swinging out of the ceiling to remove.
“All righty, then,” Emmett said, and went through the non-bladed door.
Shocker, we stood in our third empty yellow room. However, there was only one other door here. It was taller and wider than normal, the thick wood ornately carved with “S.T.” Santiago’s initials.
Emmett high-fived me. “Made it.”
Like the other heartbeat alarm that we’d previously encountered, this door featured a sensor panel—cutting-edge biometric technology. Anyone stepping through it had their heartbeat scanned, and if it didn’t match the owner’s, an alarm sounded.
“There’s no visible lock, just the sensor.” I depressed the handle partway. “It’s not even a bank vault door. Why make it this easy?”
“Easy? We were almost burned and decapitated.”
“Exactly. Why wouldn’t there be an even worse trap to stop the people who got past everything else?”
“How many other people without heartbeats are going to make it this far?” Emmett scoffed. “We got lucky, vampires have to be invited into Torres’s home, and even Delilah can’t go in.”
Ohrist magic came from their ability to tap into “ohr,” a supernatural life force. It allowed them to manipulate light and life energy. At least ninety-five percent of everyone with magic was an Ohrist, but they were hugely outnumbered by Sapiens, powerless humans who had no clue magic existed.
I was one of the rare Banim Shovavim, the rebellious children of Lilith and Adam whose powers were rooted in death and darkness. My talents included cloaking and an animated shadow, which was incredibly cool, but a faint heartbeat—the echo of mine—beat inside Delilah, and she couldn’t enter the vault.
“Be careful.” I grabbed Emmett’s wrist because he’d already reached for the handle, an excited gleam in his eyes. “Don’t touch anything other than the Torquemada Gloves. Got it?”
“You never let me have any fun,” he grumbled and trudged inside.
