Page 115 of The Shade of Things
Jason Maxwell wasn’t like the players in the game, desperate to survive. He was human garbage profiting off misery and suffering.
I could live with my culpability in his death. “I’m glad he’s gone.”
Pyotr casually draped his stone fingers over the bakery box, pulling it closer. “I take this as payment for wounds.” He jabbed his hugely callused finger at me again. “Malorie never cause triplicate.”
A muscle ticked in my jaw, but I took the hit. “Then it only seems fair to have the brownies. And I’m so sorry.”
The gargoyle screwed up his face like I was trying to trick him, then he ripped up his complaint paper. “I changed my mind. You must face me. Every time. With brownies.”
I swept the pieces into my hand and walked over to the garbage can to dump them in. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Too many treats aren’t good for you, and I care about your health.”
His fat lips pulled off quite the pout. “I will ask Malorie for brownies.” His chair scraped across the floor as he stood up. “You stay here with stupid stinky vampire puzzle.” He stomped out of the room.
“Wait! Pyotr. You can smell vamps?” I grabbed the puzzle box and ran into the living room, but he was already gone.
I’d assumed that Giulia was a gargoyle anomaly in terms of her powerful scent ability because she was a cat, but what if that’s how Pyotr found vampires who snuck into the KH to cause trouble? I tried one last time to open the puzzle box and failed. That’s it. BatKian could put aside whatever urgent business he was on and spare me five minutes for an update and to open this thing.
Sadly, Zev ignored my texts about the box in favor of sending Rodrigo to menace me on my stoop.
The Undertaker handed me a small V made of an aromatic wood. “Touch any item with it. If it vibrates, there’s magic.”
“Care to be more precise? Touch it how? A good touch?” I dropped my voice. “A bad touch?”
“Put the prongs against the item. You want to get off on it, that’s your business. Sanitize it after, that’s all I’m asking.”
“I was thinking ‘bad’ in the villain sense. Jeez, Rodrigo, pent-up, are we?”
He clenched his jaw, eyeing me like he was fitting me for a body bag. One he’d personally tailor.
I smiled brightly. “I’ll thoroughly check every item in the Woods Bank with it. Did Mr. BatKian say anything about the puzzle box?”
“Yeah. You can give it to me.”
I dropped it in his meaty palm. Relief! Finally, I could stop worrying about this and let Zev solve a problem for me for a change. “When can I get it back? Opened.”
Rodrigo closed his fist over it. “The moment you hand him the Ascendant. Fail and he’ll destroy this.” He clomped off.
“Wait! No. That’s not fair.” If I didn’t bring Clea the opened box, she wouldn’t give me a way to destroy the reclaimed demon space and end the game once and for all.
My pleas fell on deaf ears.
The only piece of luck I had today was that the KH didn’t have a problem with me bringing the magic detecting device, an Ohrist artifact, through. I checked before I brought it in.
According to Pyotr, it was only people with that magic that upset Smoky. Maybe that was why Emmett was safe. Without a heartbeat, the KH didn’t register him as different from say a fork or a chair with Ohrist magic on it. He was a thing, not a sentient being to them.
Yawning madly, and wishing for a triple espresso, I stepped inside the first hollowed-out trunk. A painting of a man sprouting white bushy eyebrow was hung on the rough bark and illuminated by a warm overhead bulb. I’d been in there all of three seconds when a fat branch shot out, snagged the edge of my cloaking, and tore through it as the branch impaled itself into the opposite wall.
I dove for the door back to the KH, rolling through it as branches crisscrossed the space and, like lasers in a museum, protected the client’s painting.
There were shouts from outside the tree. I slammed my door closed as the one to the forest in France opened. While I heard muffled voices, I couldn’t make out their words, but their tone said it all. Be on the lookout for an intruder.
I waited a good long time before peering back inside the tree, but the branches had retracted, and any guards had left. I twirled my hand up, Delilah rising like a tornado, ready for action.
She leapt across the inside to land on the trunk, stuck to it like a gecko by her hands and feet. Magic pulsed up from the wood through her feet and into my own, but she didn’t set off the security system.
Let her test the items then. I’d stay where I was.
She placed the V-shaped wood against the canvas and a mild electric shock snapped through me. I wouldn’t call that a vibration, Rodrigo.
