Page 97 of A Shade Too Far
“You had his eye previously?” I scratched my chin. “How does that work?”
“It’s detachable,” Chester said, like that answered the question. “Give me a moment to complete regeneration and I’ll tell you where to find him.”
“Are we going into the demon realm?” I asked.
Chester fixed me with a cold stare. “Humans do not go into the demon realm.”
Wrong. Thanks for playing. “My mistake. Naveen, you get the directions. Laurent and I will wait for you downstairs.” We were hashing all of this out right now.
I marched into the basement, expecting Laurent to follow. Arguments crowded my brain, but then I hit the bottom of the stairs and saw the sole item in the small room: a huge wooden cabinet with dozens of small drawers.
Ignoring the heavy glass head with creepy marble eyes on top of the cabinet, I opened the drawers.
One held nothing but unused fuses, another dozens of felt finger puppets. A third drawer yielded tiny Etch A Sketch sets. Decks of tarot cards, toy magnifying glasses, ceramic knobs, packages to grow your own crystals—for a moment, all my anger fell away, replaced by the delight of unearthing treasure.
Though I kept glancing at the stairs.
By the time Laurent finally deigned to join me, I didn’t want an argument. I wanted us to be us again. Feel like a team.
“This reminds me of old library card catalogues,” I said. The next drawer held a stash of tiny makeup kits with fake beards. “You’re probably too young to remember those.”
“Les catalogues de bibliothèques. I’m not that much younger than you.” Laurent peeked into a drawer with stickers of 1950s pinup girls. “They had…” He made the shape of a rectangle.
“Index cards, yeah.” I pulled out an oblong glass item, tapping a finger against it before recognizing the old-fashioned vacuum tube. “Going through these drawers reminds me of all the hours I spent searching through index cards for weird and wonderful book treasures when I was younger. Losing all sense of time as I chased down different topics from one drawer to the next.” I smiled wistfully as I closed a drawer of plastic scorpions. “Flipping through card catalogues definitely wasn’t everyone’s idea of fun, but for someone who’d always memorized her library card number, it was mine.”
Digital catalogues may have been faster and easier to use, but I’d mourned the loss of those cabinets, every drawer its own map to new and wondrous secrets. Just like the ones here.
Laurent poked around in the cabinet as well, but the silence between us didn’t regain any more companionability.
My palms clammy, I focused on a trove of silly mustaches like they held all the answers. Or any at all. “We need to talk about what happened. Find a solution.”
He stepped closer, and no matter how hard my gaze burrowed into the three-inch gap of the drawer, it wasn’t enough to hide the ragged rise and fall of his chest.
Between the Kefitzat Haderech and the Wise Brothers, Laurent had been ripped apart into painful shards, and without his Ohrist magic he was fusing back together wrong, like a bone that was never set properly.
“Bien. Let’s write a list.” He braced an elbow on the top of the cabinet, propping his head on his hands and wearing a lazy half-lidded stare.
“That’s not what I meant.” I untangled two Slinky toys in one of the drawers, almost preferring outright anger to sarcasm, though it was justified.
After all my concern about what might happen to Emmett if he took the potion, how could I have forced that vial on Laurent? Was there really no other way at that moment or had I blindly charged in, believing I knew best? I could tell myself that I didn’t think that it would take his shifting away forever, but Zev had warned me that magic was unpredictable.
I’d had that fact, but I didn’t take it into consideration. Did my problems stem not from a lack of information, but from a surfeit? Because I’d been picking and choosing which facts mattered, which I needed to act on? Not to mention, for all my piercing character assessments, I’d failed to realize how important and necessary Laurent’s Ohrist magic was to how he viewed himself as a person. I’d focused on the thing we had in common, his Banim Shovavim magic, and dismissed the rest of it.
“You’re right,” he said. “There are no solutions. Only outcomes. Ohrist magic returns.” He ticked off his index finger. “Or not.” He ticked off his middle finger then held the two fingers up. “We won’t be overwhelmed by possibility.”
I opened one last drawer buying time to calm down. It was filled with glow-in-the-dark stars. “The sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out; at one stride comes the dark,” I murmured.
“Instead of the cross, the albatross around my neck was hung,” Laurent parried back glibly.
He knew “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” but of all the lines he could quote, he chose that one? My jaw tensed. I wasn’t an albatross weighing him down.
“We’ll get this eye Chester wants,” I said tersely, “and he’ll hand over the woman’s name and location. Then—”
“I’ll kill her.” Laurent’s eyes were no longer the deep verdant of a rolling meadow but the cold depth of a glacier. “But you go on playing Nancy Drew and getting your little facts about ancient history. So helpful.”
“You sure you can take her?” I regretted the words as soon as I said them.
“Even without my shifter powers, I’m good for one or two things.” He widened his eyes in mock sympathy. “Too bad you can’t say the same about your magic and that ward.”
