Page 23 of The Shade of Things
6
After Sadie toreout of the house on Thursday morning, having left at the last possible second to get to school on time, I went through the rest of the documents in the box of James Learsdon’s papers that Zev had delivered to my home after he hired me. Given they belonged to a dead man who’d begged me to save him, it had taken me a day or two to build up my courage to go through them. It’s not like I thought he’d haunt me for it, but the more I got to know him as a person, the worse I felt about my failure to keep him alive.
James was an archeology professor who’d followed whispers about the magic amplifier for years. It had eventually led him to learn about my parents and through them he found me. He was dead now at Zev’s hands, part of a business transaction with a vampire called Dagmar, whom James had stiffed. I suspected that BatKian had willingly taken this blood on his hands in exchange for access to James’s things.
I wasn’t an idiot. Zev didn’t intend to gift the Ascendant to Tatiana to help her find closure or ease the pain of the past. He wanted it for himself. This was now the second time I’d chosen to retrieve a magic artifact for the vampire without knowing what it did. I didn’t trust Zev any more than I had when we’d first met, and I’d lucked out that the previous item ended up being something that Zev didn’t intend to use for dark purposes.
I couldn’t guarantee that now.
In exchange for the first artifact, the Torquemada Gloves, Zev created a ward to keep supernatural baddies off my property. The gloves were part of the greatest tragedy of the vampire’s life and not evil at all.
This second job had come about because Learsdon admitted during an interrogation session that the hunt for the Ascendant had begun again. That search already had a body count that included my parents and a Lonestar complicit in covering up their deaths. I shivered recalling the snap of McMurtry’s neck right before he was about to tell me who had hired him and the demon parasite that had inhabited the man for decades before slithering out of his corpse to disappear in the wind.
Had the unseen killer left me alone because I wasn’t a threat to them or because the parasite posed a greater danger to them?
What about the next time I crossed paths with them—if there was one? What about my family? Even if this assassin wasn’t hunting for the Ascendant now, any new players would be equally dangerous.
I couldn’t say no to finding the amplifier in exchange for Zev’s protection, but I lay awake a lot of nights wrestling with my choices.
Sighing, I squinted at a paragraph in one of the files. I’d spent the past week going through all of James’s papers. Not only was his handwriting almost indecipherable, his notes were sparse. The sole lead I’d found was the name of the Banim Shovavim who’d allegedly hired Tatiana to find the Ascendant: Arlo Garcia.
James had invested a lot of time and money trying to find Arlo, but the man had lived a very private life and there’d been no trace of him for years. However, there wasn’t any record of a death certificate either.
I’d given that information to Zev a couple days ago, but upon hearing that, he’d snapped a marble statue in two like a pencil, at which point I’d fled. I dropped the remaining pages back in their box and rubbed the back of my neck, aware of the blade hanging over it.
All right, time for a trusty list. Arlo Garcia was either dead with no body found, in hiding, or missing.
He’d been wealthy so tracking him down if he’d gone into hiding could take years, plus James had already tried. If he’d been kidnapped and returned, wouldn’t James have found some mention of it? Arlo’s death seemed more and more likely, especially since he’d been a few years older than Tatiana when he hired her.
What had happened to him and was it relevant to my search? Maybe not, but he was all I had. Swigging down the last of my now-cold caffeine, I drew a cube in red pen on a napkin. Think outside the box.
Hmm. Ian was taken to a hidden space. What if the same thing had happened to Arlo? Not the game, since Arlo wasn’t a Sapien, but there were plenty of reasons why someone rich and powerful enough to hire Tatiana would go missing. Especially since the Ascendant was a magnet for trouble.
I sat up, quickly flipping through my notes. The only two relevant to my current line of thinking were that Arlo Garcia had owned an import/export business, which sounded super shady, and he was Banim Shovavim. My parents, Arlo, this was a popular artifact with that crowd.
Sucking on the end of the pen, I circled back to the idea of a hidden space. What if Arlo hadn’t vanished, he’d doomed himself to wander the Kefitzat Haderech forever tormented? I accidentally jostled the file and lunged to catch a couple papers before they fell. Heartless as it was to wish for his eternal damnation, there was only one way to test my hypothesis.
I stepped into the shadows, coming out a heartbeat later in the Kefitzat Haderech.
The only time during any of my visits that the reception cave had changed was when Pyotr had been temporarily reassigned to Customer Service and forced to fill out reports of my ineptitude. He’d been replaced by the least charming golem ever, and since then, the first thing I did was ascertain that my favorite morose gargoyle was around to greet me.
He wasn’t seated at the fold-out table. The laptop loaded with action movies that I’d bought him lay closed next to the old television set and Pong game console. Careful not to whack a shin on a grayish-black stalagmite, I checked all around the large stone slab piled high with single socks.
“Pyotr?” The vents in the rock ceiling depositing socks onto the pile was in working order, and the place stank of fabric softener.
“Am here,” said a gloomy Russian-accented voice.
I headed into a far dark corner, almost tripping over the gargoyle sitting on the ground. In his usual brown plaid shirt and brown pants, I’d mistaken him for a shadow. “Ow!” I swore under my breath, shaking out my poor toes. “What are you doing?”
“Gardening.” He held up a small pot containing a scraggly fern in his oversize stone hands.
There was a lot to unpack with this image. I rubbed a hand over my chin and compressed all my questions into one. “Why?”
“Am on devices too much. Sign says need other hobbies.” He glared balefully at the wall, but his scowl softened into a fond smile for the fern. Near as I could make out, Pyotr’s boss was a neon sign, while the CEO of the KH was a ghostly skeleton face made of smoke.
Was the idea that a sign was concerned with screen time weird? Not particularly. My circle of friends included a couple of gargoyles, a golem, and people with magic, and I was hooking up with a werewolf. Weird was a distant signpost in the rearview mirror of my life.
I crouched down and prodded the dry soil. “You need to water it and plants need light.”
