Page 37 of A Shade of Myself
While I found the building no problem, I wasn’t sure how to get Giulia’s attention. She didn’t respond to my whistles, and I’d left my phone in the car, so I paced back and forth in front of the gates to the inner courtyard, occasionally touching my ear like I had a Bluetooth unit on. I repeated her name loudly throughout this fake call, pretending I couldn’t believe what she was saying and hoping she’d hear me.
“You know you are not actually speaking with me, ragazza, sì?” said a honey-rich female voice.
I spun around, my hand on my heart.
The cat gargoyle lay on her belly, just outside the front door of the main entrance. I hadn’t even heard her jump down from the rooftop. She propped her head on her front paws, blinking languorously with eyes that glittered like fathomless beads under a heavy brow. While she had no tail, she gave the impression that she’d be flicking it slowly if she did.
“Ciao, Giulia,” I said.
“No Laurent?” Her wide mouth pouted.
“Not today.” Was that a mistake? “Nice collar.”
She stroked the wide mosaiced band in blues and purples that popped against the mottled black “fur” texturing her body. “It was a gift from Cam,” she said. “You know this one?”
“We met recently.” Great. Now I looked like a dick for not bringing a gift.
She scoffed and tossed her head. “She thinks to buy my favor. Ma quella ragazza é completamente pazza.” She flicked her claws out of her three long toes, dragging them slowly across the pavement. They were so sharp and she was so strong that cracks spiderwebbed in the concrete. “Laurent is mine. We women know when another is moving in on their territory, yes?”
“Yup.” I tried to scratch the spot between my shoulder blades that had suddenly gotten very prickly. “Only a fool would try to get between you and him.”
Giulia sat up abruptly and I took a large step backward. The gargoyle’s head came to about chest height on me, her wide cat ears adding another couple of inches. She nodded earnestly, making expressive jabbing motions with her front paws. “Exactly. You will protect him from her?”
This temperamental Italian would eviscerate me if she ever found out what I’d done with “her Laurent.” My mind flooded with very explicit memories of going down on him while he fingered me and I flushed, fanning out the front of my sundress.
“What is with that look on your face?” Her nostrils twitched.
“N-nothing,” I stammered. “It’s hot. But you don’t have to worry about Cam. Laurent doesn’t think of her that way.”
“Good.” She jutted her chin up pertly. “You will make sure no others get their paws on him either.”
“Happy to.” It wasn’t as if there was any possibility of a future between Giulia and Laurent, but I still felt like I was breaking some sisterhood code. “Enough of him. I heard you’re filling in for Harry and I hoped you could help me.”
“Mommy.” A little boy pointed at me. “That woman is talking to the cat.”
“Don’t point, Jacob.” His mother gave me a strained smile but hurried him past like I was contagious.
The kid glanced over his shoulder and Giulia hissed at him, her fur standing on edge. He broke into tears, but in the second it took for the mother to look back, the cat was once more a statue, and I was the one who got glared at.
“Kids are delightful,” Giulia purred. “Their perception filter is so weak.” She paused. “Just like they are.”
I shivered. She didn’t eat children, did she?
“Now, what do you need?” she said.
Inanimate gargoyles’ original function was to ward off evil. The few who gained sentience and had wings did this by flying over the city and seeing what evil lurked. Those without wings, like Giulia, did it by gaining sight through the sightless, such as statues or ornamental faces on façades of buildings. She let them be her eyes, or as Laurent had more poetically put it, she “saw through the eyes of those who blindly watch.”
However, if she was filling in for Harry, then she had to know the supernatural who’s who. I hoped that gargoyles’ knowledge of the magical community worked like my cousin Goldie and her friends being able to name every single vaguely famous Jew in the past hundred years.
“Two things,” I said. “Do you know of any gargoyle living up north in British Columbia about thirty years ago who’d have been plugged into any supernatural goings-on?”
Tatiana’s advice about being careful who I showed my weaknesses to weighed on me, but I’d figured asking Giulia about any other gargoyle who might have intel on my parents was a safe bet as gargoyles were neutral parties.
Giulia scratched under her chin. “That would have been Fernanda, but she died years ago.” Damn. “Mi dispiace, I can’t help you with that. What is the other thing?”
“A demon with the ability to read magic off objects.”
Tatiana had told me back at the speakeasy that while sensing magic wasn’t an Ohrist ability, some demons had this power. Whether a Banim Shovavim could also do this was another question, but as the only person I could ask was one of the Wise Brothers, that was a hard pass.
