Page 1 of The Shade of Things
1
“Mazel tov,”my ex-husband, Eli Chu, groused ahead of me in the forest, “you just set feminism back two hundred years.”
Excited as I was to be working a missing person case with him, I was less enthused about trekking through the foreboding woods in a rural area outside Vancouver. Had this lead taken us to a spot where the air was rich with the scent of pine? Nope. Was there a wave of verdant green stretching out before me? Nope. How about darting birds trilling and singing? Also nope.
“Clearing spiderwebs for me, a spider-hating person, has nothing to do with gender.” Grimacing, I squelched through a puddle, mud seeping through the canvas of my sneakers into my poor socks.
Sunlight fought to peek through the canopy, the uneven ground was a dull brown covered in slippery rotting leaves, and the air weighed down on us, muggy and sticky. Sure, our hands slapping against our necks to kill buzzing mosquitos had an up-tempo rhythm, but it was hardly birdsong.
The final indignity was all the damn spiderwebs.
Eli stepped over a rotting log with moss sprouting out of it like an old man’s nose hair and ants parading up and down the nubby bark.
“Stop a sec.” I put fist to palm. “Rock paper scissors?”
Eli hadn’t bought my argument that since I’d be taking point when we found the vampire, he should deal with the spiders. So it had come down to this: a children’s game.
“You’re on.” He leaned down, his brown eyes glinting. “One, two, three.”
My rock trumped his scissors. Good call, me, knowing how Eli would play this.
“Huzzah!” I snapped off a short, dead branch and handed it to my ex with a flourish.
He accepted it with a groan. “How did you know I wouldn’t throw rock as usual?”
“Because you hate spiders as much as I do. Using my years-long experience with your psychological profile, I surmised you’d expect me to throw paper to cover your rock and thus, go for scissors instead.” I tapped my head. “You can’t outsmart me, sucker. Now, clear away the eight-legged creepy-crawlies, my good man, and later I’ll protect you from the bloodsucker. The undead one.” I slapped my neck and wiped a smeared mosquito off my hand. “Unlike these assholes.”
Eli banged the makeshift broom against a tangle of branches before pushing them aside for us to duck under. “Stand down, Buffy. You were explicitly warned. Under no circumstances are we to harm Damien.”
“Unless it’s in self-defense. Then it’s still very much on the table.” I smiled grimly. As far as I was concerned, that covered an expansive range of circumstances.
“Stick to fact finding.”
I followed close behind Eli, positive that spiders were dropping down the back of my shirt. “I’ll give you facts. Vamps having blood donors is disgusting. I don’t care if they’re getting paid, it’s not exactly an equal power dynamic. And that’s with Ohrists. Ian Carlyle is a Sapien.”
Ian was under a vamp’s control and the only person with any potential insight into our case, which was why we had to find him.
“Ian isn’t a regular Sapien,” Eli said. “He also witnessed magic, allowing him to connect with Damien in the first place. How do you know he’s not with the vamp of his own free will?”
Sunlight bounced off a large web dotted with fly carcasses and presided over by a fat spider with bristly fibrous hairs covering its legs. Its many eyes tracked us.
I yelped, making swatting motions. “Kill it! It’s the size of a dinner plate.”
“It’s a bread plate at best.” Eli carefully brushed the entire web off the trees, tapping the end of the branch against the ground.
The spider scurried into the dirt, almost running over my foot.
“They shouldn’t be measured in dinnerware at all!”
Nature was bunk. In the city, I had a fighting chance at survival. Here? Forget about it. Give me a crowded sidewalk any day over this skinny dirt track fraught with knobby tree roots and unappealing animal life.
Assuring myself the little bastard was gone, I returned to the topic at hand. “Ian didn’t ‘connect’ with the vamp. He was enticed and backed into a corner where the only way out was opening a vein. I highly doubt free will was involved,” I said bitterly. “Damien has been preying on him for two years.” I stabbed a finger in the air. “Unlike with Ohrists, vamps don’t pay Sapiens if they use them as food on a regular basis. Hasn’t Ian suffered enough?”
Eli shook his head. “I don’t know, Mir.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Think about the circumstances leading him to Damien. Ian comes back from an alleged abduction, disoriented, distraught, and unable to do much more than repeat that he survived the human race.”
