Page 63 of A Shade Too Far
“Great topic!” I enthused.
“I was seven,” Laurent said. “And I didn’t cr—” He glanced at Hiram’s expression and swallowed the rest of that sentence. “Charlotte’s Web,” he said sulkily.
The final slat in that category turned over with a bing.
“A successful round,” Hiram said. “Ask us your first question.”
We hadn’t prepared a list beforehand, and Laurent jumped in before I could.
“Can a Pulsa diNura be broken?” he said. A reasonable place to start.
“Yes,” Ephraim said enthusiastically.
When Laurent realized the catch—that the questions were like legal contracts where the Wise Brothers would answer extremely literally—his growl made both Hiram and me jump.
At least the Wise Brothers couldn’t tell he’d lost his magic.
“Round two.” Hiram turned to the board. “Laurent will start.”
“Wait.” I held up a hand. “Can we have a moment to huddle up before he selects his category?”
Hiram shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”
I leaned over to Laurent. “We have four more categories and four more chances to get answers.”
“If we get them right. What if one of us doesn’t remember some ridiculous fact from our past?”
“Given what they’ve already asked, I doubt these are moments easily forgotten. They’re stripping our dignity, not our clothing. Let’s make a list of what we need answered,” I said with resolve.
Our next two questions to ask the Wise Brothers were easy enough to compile, but we disagreed on the final ones. “How about we wait and see if our other inquires take us in the direction we suspect?” I said. “We can choose from our list then.”
“Great,” Laurent said tonelessly.
The cost of this information was totally shitty, but our chances of success were high. Still, I clutched the domino for an extra bit of luck.
Hiram arched his eyebrow. “Ready to choose your category?”
“Wolves,” Laurent said with that same lack of inflection.
We won the second round thanks to Laurent divulging his panic attacks as a kid, and my clear recollection of the bullying I’d faced in elementary school for my weight. There was nothing about either of these revelations that we should have felt ashamed of, but of course we both did. The Wise Brothers were homing in on the memories that we still carried humiliation or regret for, and I dreaded where the game would go from here.
Or what they planned to do with this information.
It was impossible to tell where Laurent’s head was at, so I asked the Wise Brothers our second question. “How do we defeat the death curse?”
Ephraim informed us we either comply with the curser’s demands or kill them. Since we couldn’t get our hands on the gloves, we were looking at murder. Fan-fucking-tastic. Though I was open to the idea, just not for the Ohrist woman.
The game show cut out for a “word from our sponsor” with some retro-sounding jingle about toothpaste. It was catchy in a batshit insane way.
“There has to be some other means to break the curse,” I said to my partner.
“There isn’t. You heard them.” He scratched at some dried blood on his arm.
“I know, but—”
“Had you given the golem the vial, like I wanted to, we would not be in this position,” Laurent said.
“So, it was okay to let Emmett lose his magic and possibly die, but you’re pissed that you—” A muscle ticked in his jaw, and I revised the rest of that sentence. “That yours has been temporarily suspended?”
