Page 79 of The Shade of Things
I shook my head, my throat clogged with sorrow and my chest tight with anger. I kept being thrust into these impossible situations with him and he didn’t cut me any slack. I was so tired.
Emmett grabbed my elbow as my legs buckled. He glared at Laurent, who was now clothed. “You’re an asshole. She should have let you die.”
Laurent gave him a tight smile and pushed unsteadily to his feet. “Something we finally agree on.”
Saving that jerk from certain death was the opposite of betrayal, even if he lost his magic for good, which he wouldn’t. I clenched my fists. He was so cavalier about his death. I’d give anything for five more minutes with my parents. Why couldn’t he appreciate the fact that he was still alive?
“Mir, get in here,” Eli called insistently from the next room.
I didn’t bother checking to see if Laurent followed Emmett and me through the doorway. Nor did I look back at the tear to Gehenna. What was the point? Laurent didn’t have the magic to fix it now and neither did I. It went on my mental list of evils to be stopped. Damn, that list was getting long.
Daw had finally gone quiet, curled up on a sofa with her face pressed to the cushions. I was so grateful for her silence that I could have wept.
A low table the size of two conference tables was surrounded by leather couches and club chairs while half-finished drinks and plates of food lay strewn on end tables.
Eli poked at a lipstick-stained cigarette still smoldering in an ashtray.
We’d just missed whoever had been here, but there was no other door visible to follow them. It must have been magically concealed.
My disappointment was muted by the item taking up the entire huge table: a model of the game.
Teresa and Okeyo warily circled it.
The young woman let out a shuddery breath. “Look.”
She stood over the graveyard replica where two stationary dots blinked red.
“There’s another one here,” Eli said, motioning to the part with the homes. “It’s the deceased.”
We found the final two players who were unaccounted for. One was in the forest where Teresa had been and the other was downtown.
“I cannot…” Okeyo collapsed into a chair, displacing a sheet of paper that had lain there.
I picked it up, reading the detailed profile of player one: Rahm Malka. The sheet listed his age, education, height, weight, rap sheet, and skills. There were also the odds on him winning in comparison to the other players. They were pretty good, so the buy-in to “enter” him was higher than some of the others.
“Good call, Detective Chu.”
Eli shoved the paper in his pocket. “I wish I’d been wrong about people choosing Sapiens as avatars,” he said quietly. “It’s sick.” He moved over to Okeyo, crouching down and assuring him that this was almost over. My partner had been a rock through this whole ordeal.
I searched for any other such profiles, even looking under the furniture, because I didn’t want Teresa or Okeyo to see theirs, but there didn’t appear to be any more printouts. As I straightened up, a glint from under the game table caught my eye.
A paperclip held a couple sheets of small notepad paper together. Eli’s name was written on the first one next to the word “Sap.” It was followed by “golem—unknown.” The second page had Laurent’s name next to his shifter status, though no mention of his Banim Shovavim powers.
The final name was mine. “BS” was next to it, underlined twice, like a threat.
Did this handwriting belong to Jason Maxwell, the man who ran the gambling end of this enterprise? Was the Consortium interested in my magic because they’d seen me kill that dybbuk or was something else at play?
I crumpled the papers in my fist, hastily shoving them into my pocket.
“Are we still in the game?” Emmett said.
“No, we’re not in a hidden space any longer,” Laurent said from the doorway.
“How do you know?” Eli said.
Laurent shrugged. “I can tell.”
I gnawed on a fingernail. If we were in the real world, I could get out of here. Maybe even get us all out, but that would mean…
