Page 88 of A Shade of Myself
“I know.” The heat had gone out of her tone. “I’m trying, but every time I see you, you remind me of death.”
The mop clattered to the floor. I looked down at my body, half convinced that I was only a shadow like Delilah because surely if I was flesh and blood, my best friend couldn’t have stabbed me in the heart. I wasn’t the Grim Reaper. I’d saved her life and yet she couldn’t see me as anything more than my scythe? I tasted my pulse at the back of my throat.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said quietly.
“Right.” Numb, I bent to retrieve the mop, latching on to the previous thread of our discussion as a way to make it through the rest of this visit. “Maybe if Emmett’s aware of the danger, he can do something to prevent himself from falling into that trance state.”
Jude’s chair scraped back and she stood in front of me. “I never wanted kids because my art was my baby. We joked about world domination, but I had this vision of my creations finding homes in every corner of the globe. And after years of work, it was finally happening.” She licked her lips nervously. “Then I was kidnapped and enthralled.”
There was a long, heavy pause that I didn’t fill because I was scared to open my mouth and say something I couldn’t take back. I fiddled with the mop, my attention on a nonexistent spot.
I felt her eyes on me, heard her tiny sigh. “I spent the time I was chained up preparing to be fully possessed and die, but you saved me. I’d been granted amnesty. Maybe the first Ohrist ever to have been gifted that.”
“You could have just sent a fruit basket,” I snarked.
She clenched her fists, two red spots hitting her cheeks, and unclenched them with visible effort. “I was alive, but I couldn’t create.”
“You don’t use your magic in your art.” I picked up the bucket and dumped the water down the drain. “The fact that you were stymied is not on me.”
“I know that.”
“Then why do I remind you of death? Explain it to me, Jude, because I don’t understand. You say I gave you this gift and it’s not about losing your magic, then why am I still the bad guy?” Swearing under my breath, I stashed the mop and the bucket next to the BBQ on the back porch, slamming the door on my way in.
“Why were you okay using Emmett for his prophecies when you were so angry that a Banim Shovavim had died for that?” Jude said. “That should have been the last thing you ever did, but you used him because it helped you. I did the same. The woman who did this to me had her memories erased so it’s not like I could lash out at her. It’s shitty and I’m sorry. But it’s not like I’m the only one at fault here.”
I hopped up on my counter, watching the moisture on the floor slowly disappear. I’d wanted Jude to be honest with me and now that she was, I wanted her to take it back. There was comfort in not knowing. I wish I didn’t know that I’d pushed Emmett that much closer to magic Never Never Land, albeit accidentally. But if I could forgive myself for that, couldn’t I forgive Jude for what she’d said? She wasn’t acting from a place of malice, she was doing what she thought was best, same as my interactions with Emmett.
Truth sucked, but I’d still rather that than silence, lies, and secrets.
“Well.” I blew a strand of hair out of my face. “Seems like Dr. Takimoto is going to get a few more sessions out of us both.”
Jude nodded. She didn’t ask if we were okay. Our friendship was the scraped-up raw version of itself and it needed time to heal. But the outburst had helped.
“That was a lot of truth bomb for a Tuesday afternoon. Got anything else to share?”
“Uh, yeah?” She leaned back against the island.
I raised my eyebrows. “I was kidding.”
“This is important though. The Wise Brothers collect information that they hand over if you successfully play their game. And you said they always reply truthfully to your questions if they know the answer.”
“That’s right.” I wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but my curiosity had been sparked. “Laurent and I paid a real shitty price to learn about Frances Rothstein, the Banim Shovavim who’d placed the death curse on Tatiana, but at least we knew the information was reliable.”
Jude rummaged around in a cupboard, pulling out the remaining bar in my chocolate stash. “Calling Emmett’s magic a prophecy is misleading because it’s only a partial prophecy. He can only build upon facts that already exist. Think about it,” she added at my frown.
Joining her at the table, I cracked open the package, biting into a large piece of dark chocolate and almonds. During the Topher Sharma case, Emmett had offered up the twinkle twinkle little star prophecy. Most of it was already fact, put into motion by Oliver. Only the final bit about the star being snuffed out had yet to transpire. Even now, with the shark and flowers, that part had happened decades ago with my parents.
“The Wise Brothers deal in certainty,” I said. “Their facts are clearly laid out, whereas some of what Emmett says has happened, but I have to interpret it all for any of it to be useful.” I finished up my first piece and broke off another. “That’s interesting, but I fail to see what you’re so worried about. Other than the possible harm to Emmett, of course.”
“Got a pen and paper?”
I retrieved the items for her glad that my floor was mostly dry. House and clothes all clean, groceries bought, I was a domestic powerhouse.
“I thought that the Wise Brothers and Emmett existed at opposite ends of a spectrum, but I was wrong. My Ohrist contact filled in some important information.” Jude drew a triangle. “This top point is the Wise Brothers. Their information is neutral in the sense that it already exists, be it a person’s name, their location, or whatever. It’s fact. That’s part one. The second part is that there’s no cost to them for the information extraction, only to you.” Beside the top of the triangle, she scribbled “Wise Brothers. Info neutral. Cost to player not dealer.”
Information and games, I had a hunch where this was going. “Emmett’s prophecies aren’t a game,” I said slowly, goosebumps breaking out along my arms.
“They’re puzzles and puzzles are games.” Jude tapped the lower left corner with her pen. “This is Emmett’s magic.” She wrote “Partially neutral. Cost to dealer.”
