Page 65 of A Shade of Myself
Hovering protectively over her charge, Tatiana helped her assistant up. “We’ll have tea. I’ll make it. Come, Marjorie.”
“You want me to stay?” I said.
“No. I want you to get me information on Carpe Demon as I requested.” Tatiana’s expression softened and she nodded. “Thank you, Miriam.”
“Of course.”
I drove home feeling grateful that I wasn’t an Ohrist, even though we Banim Shovavim had our own price to pay for magic use. If any of my kind believed the story that the angels had laid down about us being evil, and judged themselves accordingly, they’d damn themselves to eternal torment in the Kefitzat Haderech. Exactly like the woman I’d met on my first visit there had done.
But if they solved the riddle the neon sign gave, like I had, understanding that it was the angels’ prejudices and we weren’t inherently wicked, that fate would be avoided.
Ohrists, on the other hand, had this axe hanging over them. The ohr might never show up in generations of a family or the tiniest magic act could set it off. It was a hell of a thing to live with.
After I dutifully sent my boss the few details of Carpe Demon’s layout that I had, I took the rest of the evening off. Sadie was out with Caleb for another hour, so I sat in my backyard with a book, losing myself in the latest Tana French mystery.
Well, I tried to, but I kept circling back to James Learsdon and my parents, so I gave up on the chapter and started typing out facts.
My parents were murdered almost thirty years ago, and their deaths were covered up by the Lonestar in charge of Northern British Columbia: Fred McMurtry.
In exchange for his cooperation, he was brought into the demon realm and infected with a parasite that cured his cancer but also piloted him or something until he was murdered in the same way with the same cover-up a couple months ago at his home.
This parasite was capable of transporting Ohrists from one place to another, through walls, which was why Eli and I now had a ward around our property.
Early Monday morning, I’d been called to Davide Forino’s house, supposedly to dispose of some sensitive material. Instead, I’d found a crime scene. Wallace Edwards had been dybbuk-possessed, using a pizza delivery to gain access to Davide, a well-known stoner. He’d then attacked the snowboarder, died from excessive magic use, at which point the dybbuk had enthralled Davide.
The text that Tatiana had received from Davide asking for her services hadn’t been sent by him.
James Learsdon, the stranger on the beach, hadn’t admitted to setting up the crime to verify my powers, but he’d been surprised that I’d hidden them all those years and hadn’t been a blank. He’d asked if I was a baby shark or if I was planning to finish what my parents had started and said he followed faint whispers. About what?
I googled him, sorting through results until I’d narrowed it down to three likely candidates, since I didn’t know what he looked like. After a bit more digging, I eliminated two of them. One man was in Wyoming for a rodeo competition and the other had posted on social media about his brother’s wedding that night.
The last one was an archeology professor. I noted that down, along with his age, thirty-five. Ryann had already told me he had healing magic, so I added that fact as well.
Shaking out the cramp in my hand, I resumed jotting down my thoughts.
Two years ago, Uncle Jake had disguised a key to a storage locker in one of his pun-laden birthday cards, leading to an envelope held by a woman called Rhonda who’d known my parents and didn’t believe the house fire story either.
I had to pass a test to get the letter because Jake was worried someone would come after it, but all that was inside was the sentence “It wasn’t an accident” and pages of stars with the words “the Ascendant.”
Despite the many facts, I barely had any grasp of what I was dealing with. The best thing to do would be to go to sleep, let it percolate in my brain and see what popped loose.
Sadly, there were no new epiphanies on Saturday morning, but I had to put aside further questions about my parents in favor of my paying assignment. After I let Giselle know that I was coming to New York and got her permission to speak with her best friend, I stepped into a shadowy corner in my hallway.
Transitioning into the KH felt like stepping into a warm, shallow pond, the shadows rippling outward and a sponginess beneath my feet. In the single, slow blink that it took to cross over, I was certain that the only thing carrying me through was Wile E. Coyote logic, and if I so much as glanced down, gravity would kick in and I’d plummet into a bottomless chasm.
Coming out on the other side came with the same small tug as when I exited gentle waves onto a beach, the shadows falling off me like droplets.
Pyotr wasn’t there. A sign on his table read “Back in 15. Help yourself to a sock.” Le gasp. He was permitted a break? It wasn’t exactly union standards, but good for him. I grabbed a fuzzy pink ankle sock as it floated out of the chute and headed through the narrow green door.
The path between doors was generally a pulsing strip of light, giving me about ten feet of vision before becoming an all-consuming darkness that felt like the empty void into which we were born and in which we’d die. Today, however, the lights were out. I backed up against the rock wall feeling behind me for the door I’d stepped through, but it was gone.
“Hello?” My voice echoed off the walls in a distorted echo. I couldn’t animate Delilah or summon my scythe and my cloaking was pointless. “Yo!” I snapped my fingers. “This does not conform to work safe standards.”
I’d have given anything for the neon sign to light up with some smartass comeback, but there was simply silence and darkness. I’d gotten used to traveling through the Kefitzat Haderech without getting the heebie-jeebies, but this was another level of creepy entirely. I inched forward, one hand on the rock wall, unable to stop myself from making a list of every single horror movie cliché.
The cold metallic bite that usually permeated the air felt more pronounced, as if it was a hungry predator with teeth. That sensation of being hunted amplified when the opening strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue on a pipe organ started up. My heart leapt into my throat, my fight or flight instincts kicking in, and I ran blindly through the darkness, my arms outstretched in front of me, until a hand grabbed my shoulder.
If I was going down, I was going down fighting.
