Page 6 of A Shade Too Far
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Emmett gotinto the vault without a hitch, and as soon as he was safe, he became a little kid on the first night of Hannukah, eyes alight at the bounty before him.
The vault was much larger than I’d expected and crammed with a motley collection ranging from bizarre to grotesque.
“Whoa! Check it out.” The golem stopped in front of an oval gem on display in a glass case on a pillar and crouched down to read the small plaque. “‘Blood diamond made of real blood. Year 1852.’”
I hovered outside the threshold. “Charming. Get the gloves, Emmett. There. On the right.”
There was a hissing sound. I sniffed the air but couldn’t smell anything.
“Yeah, yeah. Calm your tits.” Emmett gave a wide berth to a scaffold with a rusty saw hanging off a hook and a horizontal wagon wheel with spikes sticking up at regular intervals. A length of old pipe was tossed next to it. My partner shuddered. “It’s got dried gristle on it.”
The hissing grew louder.
I blotted my forehead, feeling hot and dizzy. “Get out of there.” My words sounded weirdly elongated.
“Yeeeeeaaaaah, yeaaaaaah.” Why was he speaking in slow motion? He reached for the wrinkled, leathery, yellowed-with-age gloves by his fingertips—and missed, swaying like a tree about to fall.
“Gas!” I threw my sleeve over my nose. My eyes watered and my lungs burned. “Hurry!”
With a jerky swipe, he grabbed the gloves, but toppled forward, hitting the ground with a thunk.
“When I was a girl in Sicily,” he mumbled.
If they’d dispersed gas, then the jig was up. No wonder there hadn’t been a lock. Holding my breath, I ran inside the vault and grabbed Emmett’s ankles, hauling him out.
The yellow room narrowed and lengthened, dark spots dancing at the edge of my vision. Why couldn’t Jude have made a child golem who weighed less? I collapsed against the outside of the vault door, shutting it, my polyester finery stuck to my skin.
Emmett slurred his third chorus of the Golden Girls theme.
Once my head had cleared, I dropped to my knees, and slapped the golem across the face with the gloves, swallowing against the rush of bile. “Getupgetupgetupgetup!”
He staggered to his feet. “Okay, pussycat.”
We had lurched halfway across the room when Emmett’s head lolled sideways. “Too many doors.”
I stomped my foot because while we’d been in the vault, the rooms had rotated again. Instead of simply the vault door and the exit, there was an extra door. “How the fuck do we get out of here?”
“I’ll get you to safety,” a man with a posh—and familiar—English accent said, “but it’ll cost you.” Naveen Kumar, the handsome Indo-British man in his late thirties who’d entered, wore the same security outfit as the rest of Torres’s crew.
Stuffing the gloves in the pocket of my housekeeping uniform, I squinted at him, hoping he was a hallucination, but he remained maddeningly real. “Nice staff. Compensating, are we?”
Naveen twirled the long weapon made of hard light through his fingers. “Give me the gloves, BS.”
I’d run into Naveen on another case of mine and we’d immediately hit it off. He’d given me a safe place to crash, let Emmett hang out with him, and even introduced me to his niece, Evani. However, everything changed when he learned I was Banim Shovavim. After that, we were kicked out and Naveen’s treatment of me had turned decidedly cold.
Even if I didn’t desperately need the gloves, I wasn’t taking orders from someone who hated me for what I was, not who I was. That, I could have lived with.
“It’s better if I hang on to them than Torres.” My magic danced under my skin.
“No doubt.” He dropped into a crouch, the staff held diagonally in front of him. “But I intend to destroy them.”
“Did you tell your employer that?” I slammed my mesh cloaking over Emmett and me, but Naveen was faster. He swung his staff into my ribs and knocked me to my knees, shattering my magic.
I hit the ground with a cry.
“It’s on a need-to-know basis. And Torres doesn’t.” Naveen flicked a lock of platinum blond hair out of his eyes with an annoyed gesture, his staff resting on his shoulder. His eyes, only slightly darker than his brown skin, had been so warm and friendly at our first meeting, but they sent chills through me now. “Laurent won’t forgive you if you don’t hand the gloves over to me to destroy. You know he barely trusts anyone to be his friend. Does that mean so little to you?”
