Page 134 of The Shade of Things
Setting the hatpin down, I scooped up the vials. “If you’re scamming me, I’m going to come visit you every day. And make up badges to wear out. The Ladies Who Lunch. The Lunch Ladies. The Lunchable Babes.”
She pressed her lips into a thin line. I recognized that look.
“Are you counting to ten?” I laughed. “Do I make your head throb?”
“Get out of the store before I throw you out,” she said. That monotone of hers was starting to grow on me.
After a quick stop back home for some gear, I stepped through the shadows, tugging free in the Kefitzat Haderech to the sound of a girl reading from one of the Lord of the Rings books with a light Jamaican accent.
The Black girl was in her early teens, wearing a pleated skirt and a gray sweater vest with a school crest over top of a white short-sleeved shirt.
Pyotr was engrossed in her story, and I was able to watch them for a minute, unnoticed. The gargoyle quietly repeated certain words after she’d read them, like “hyacinth” and “gorse.”
She reached the end of the chapter and placed a bookmark between the pages.
“One more,” Pyotr whined.
“Not today.” She rubbed his head. If he’d had hair, she’d be ruffling it. “I have to study. Oh. Hi.”
Pyotr jumped up, hopping from foot to foot. “Now my friends meet. Malorie, Miriam.”
I’d been jealous of a kid. No. Her age didn’t matter. I’d been jealous, and that wasn’t right. This sweet, kind gargoyle deserved every friend he had. I smiled. “Nice to meet you.”
Malorie looked about as interested in meeting an “old person” as I would have been at her age but shook my hand politely enough before grabbing a canvas messenger bag and slinging it over her shoulder. “Mi a leff, inna di morrows.”
“Inna di morrows,” Pyotr said.
“Nice meeting you,” she said to me, and left through the narrow green door.
I helped myself to a sock, wanting to ask if Malorie had solved the riddle and saved herself from ever being damned here in the KH, but I also didn’t want to know if she hadn’t.
“I’ll be back shortly,” I said.
I ran along the dimly lit path, eager to finish this job.
Right before I entered the gambling room, I cloaked myself in case of cameras. Nothing could tie me to the devastation to come.
Other than having been cleaned up, the room hadn’t changed since my last visit. The tabletop model of the game didn’t have any blinking lights on it so they must have removed the bodies. I hoped they’d given them a decent burial even though the families would never be allowed to properly mourn them, their disappearances forever a question mark.
There was nothing else to search, no books, no cabinets, no shelves.
I still didn’t find a door leading to another part of whatever building this was, but since I needed access only to the game, I stepped into near darkness back in the room with the slide, which I had to climb to get into the game itself.
I’d worn a pair of old runners with sticky soles for this very reason, and even so it took me longer than it should have before I emerged out of the chute and climbed down the ladder onto the playground.
The house lights were on instead of the huge light towers. No one else was present but that didn’t mean they weren’t here in the game. They wouldn’t survive once I activated the glitter, but they’d chosen to work for the Consortium. They had blood on their hands.
Vamps preying on Sapiens, I could understand. It’s what they did. It’s what they were allowed to do, and I wouldn’t mourn any vampires who died when I destroyed the game.
But the Ohrist shifters? Maybe the Consortium had put a gun to their heads, threatening them if they didn’t comply, but I doubted it. There were enough bloodthirsty and sadistic people out there to find shifters willing to kill fellow humans. Perhaps these shifters were just as much a product of conditioning as the vampires. After all, they constantly had it reinforced that Ohrists were superior to Sapiens.
Ohrist or vamp, employee or Consortium member, every single being was betraying their fellow (or formerly fellow in the case of vamps) humans. Be it for money, a sadistic thrill, or the determination of those at the top to carry out their experiment, all of them had to be stopped.
The madness of this game had to end.
Still hidden by my mesh, I slipped on an N95 mask, leftover from the time Eli helped me strip and sand my fireplace mantel. I carefully unscrewed the vial cap and poured the glitter in a pile on the ground, then added the vinegar and waited for a reaction.
A pink furry arm bulging with muscles sprouted from the twinkly sludge like a freaky plant grown on steroids. Its hand burst out and grabbed my foot.
