Page 51 of A Shade Too Far
“Rematch!” the golem demanded.
Tatiana gathered up the cards. “My winning streak will have to stand. We have company.”
Emmett glanced over his shoulder at us, providing us with a proper look at his outfit.
“Bloody hell,” Naveen muttered.
“Looking good, buddy.” I flashed Emmett a thumbs-up.
“I know.” He stood, showing off his bellbottom velour pantsuit that was obviously a Tatiana borrow, because the purple fabric strained around his bulkier chest. He didn’t have a wig on his bald red head, but someone had done a nice smoky eye on him.
My boss on the other hand, wore a loose pink sweat suit with the word “juicy” bedazzled across her butt. Jude was going to kill Emmett for stealing that.
“Emmett thought we should swap clothes today to fool anyone who came after me.” Tatiana smiled at him indulgently.
The men’s disdain for this idea couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d tattooed it across their foreheads.
“Very clever,” I said.
Something heavy dropped overhead and then Raymond called out an “All good.”
Tatiana rolled her eyes but did not yell back that he was fired. “Let’s meet downstairs.”
Emmett hung back to grab my arm, keeping me in the kitchen while the others left.
“What’s up? Everything okay? Are you getting along with Raymond and Marjorie?”
“I’m teaching Marjorie to stand up for herself and Raymond to…” There was another thump and Emmett glanced at the ceiling. “That stump isn’t teachable. But he’s harmless. No, that’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“Tatiana keeps spacing out. It’s freaky.” Emmett wasn’t the most astute being so for him to notice Tatiana’s deviation from her usual behavior meant she was really worried about the curse.
“You want me to talk to her?”
“No,” he said. “I’m distracting her. But it’s a good thing you got here because there was nothing else of hers that I could fit into and we’d played that same card game six million times.”
“You’re a good egg, Emmett.” I squeezed his shoulder.
He puffed up with pride and ducked his head. “Just doing my job.”
I let him go ahead of me. Emmett had been a pain in my ass since day one, either getting drunk as a skunk on missions with me, zoning out at inopportune moments to prophesy, or stealing clothes from my best friend, boss, and very nearly my kid. He had a foul mouth and dangerously little color-matching skill, and he was fast becoming one of the noblest people I knew.
And yet here I was, debating if I could bear to save Tatiana if it meant reducing him to a two hundred pound lump. My hand ghosted over my purse with the vial and my shoulders slumped.
I was the last one into the small basement room. It didn’t have windows and Tatiana said it was impossible to bug so we could speak freely.
Laurent looked slightly mollified by her precautions, but when I sat down next to him, he touched the small of my back. “You okay?”
I nodded, the vial growing heavier by the second. “Let’s compare notes.”
The humans huddled around a metal folding table while Emmett barred the door. Naveen shared his intel first.
Wendy, the Ohrist in charge of Santiago’s security, was aware of the death curse, but Santiago had refused to even consider handing over the Torquemada Gloves. He’d planned to gift them to one of the guests, Estrella Cabral, after the fight, as a goodwill gesture to move a proposed business venture forward. That was why he’d held the championship event despite the curse. Santiago was determined that Estrella not suspect any weakness in his operation.
“Santiago was a fool to do business with that snake.” Tatiana had brought the cards. She’d been playing Solitaire while Naveen updated us, but running into a dead end, she gathered up the deck and shuffled. “No wonder Sherisse was so worried. She didn’t know about the curse, did she? She was anxious that she was going to be replaced.” My boss made a tutting sound, setting up the next round by distributing the deck into eight piles. “Estrella always mixes business with pleasure a little too much.”
“It’s true. Sherisse had no idea about the curse,” Naveen said.
