I set the way-back machine to scour, and looked for something that was odd. But then—everything up until the whole blue-fire-trying-to-eat-me moment. And before that—
Wait. No. I wasn’t able to OOB before that. Which was why I had resorted to magic. When exactly was it that I noticed I couldn’t—
“I blacked out before.”
Rhonda sat forward. “When?”
“I was helping Jemmy put a delivery away. This was maybe . . . a week ago or so. I thought it was low blood sugar. I tried going OOB the next day, and that’s when it all started. And then it all just faded away.”
Dags said, “But you didn’t come into contact with anything? A stone or an amulet? A new ghost? Or maybe even a book?”
I shook my head. “Nothing I can remember.” His mention of a book made me think about what he’d said earlier. “Why did you say you were a book?”
That got a rise out of Rhonda. She almost slammed my computer (hey!) on the coffee table and stood up. “You told her?”
“I didn’t tell her what happened. Not yet.”
“I forbid you to tell her, Darren. That is not something she needs to know.”
Her tone and her clutched hands brought him to his feet. He threw the cloth with the poultice on the table. “I think she does. She’s my friend, and at least I”—he pointed to his chest—“do not plan on lying to her or hiding the truth.”
Oops.
Man, you could hear Whoville go poo in the silence that comment brought. I could almost see the static electricity surrounding Rhonda’s entire body. In fact, I was expecting Dags to erupt in flames at any minute.
The basement door came open. “No. No white box down there. Though I did find quite an assortment of spiders, roaches, and a lot of boxes with jars of things I just don’t want to know the names of—” He rounded the corner and stopped and stared at Rhonda and Dags. He looked at me and I shrugged. Hey, I’m not special anymore. You dah man. You handle it.
“Okay, kiddies,” Joe said as he took a step forward and held out his hands. “It’s time for us all to get together.”
“No,” Rhonda said. “He’s going to tell Zoë about what happened.”
Joe looked confused. “Okay—lots been hap’n, dearie. Which hap’n?”
She pointed back to Dags.
Joe appeared to get it. “Oh. Yeah. So. Why are you getting all scary hoodoo on him? I think Zoë should know too.”
Rhonda rounded that look on Joe, and he smartly took a step back with an inaudible whoa. “Why?”
Dags cleared his throat, and she looked back at him. “You’re not in control of things this time, Rhonda.”
Okay. That was it. And though I would have loved to have stuck around and seen the battle of the stares, I went up to Joe, and whispered, “Let’s talk upstairs in Mom’s room,” and moved out of the room.
20
MY mom’s room isn’t like what many people expect. Rhonda said it best once, that when she finally got to see Nona’s room, she was shocked at how normal it was. Most people think it would be more like some room full of velvet, peacock feathers, beads, and crystal balls on the dresser. The walls would be draped in fabric and the floor covered in Indian rugs.
Nope. Not Mom.
Mom had the most normal room in the house—I say most normal because I still thought the headless lamp in my room was a Halloween decoration. Mom had always been careful at what she spent her sparse money on over the years. And her bedroom was indeed her pride and joy.
But it wasn’t full of gitchie goomies or velvet, and not even a crystal ball. Her bed was an antique sleigh-style bed she’d found in McDonough, Georgia, at the antique market. She’d fixed it up herself and restained it. And her sheets and duvet were a matching set with a high thread count, all handpicked in a burgundy print.
The dresser was another period piece—and don’t ask me what period ’cause I don’t know. I buy Rooms-to-Go, prefabricated and easy to just set up from a big, square box. Doll furniture.
The dresser was always clean, with a single jewelry box on top of it that my dad made when they first got married. She said he was good with wood like that, and she loved the box. Kept it with her all the time. Pictures in carefully chosen frames—from cheap to expensive—flanked that box. Images of me at different stages of my life from toddler to tweener.
Happy times with my mom. Always happy pictures of Mom, and me.
In the corner of the room stood an armoire, another piece she’d taken a long time to pick out. My memories centered around being dragged from antique store to antique store, being bored, as Mom looked at countless pieces. This one was made of sassafras wood with a pearl grain finish. It was big, and boxy, and so Nona.
The walls were painted a soft, warm olive, and the floors were covered in rugs, but they were Oriental ones, not Indian.
That’s how I remembered the room, but that wasn’t what we walked into.
The floor was completely covered in stuff. I could make out papers, handwritten, as well as all her jewelry strewn from one end of the room to the other. The armoire was open and the clothes piled on the floor. One of the doors was leaning from one hinge, the others ripped out at the nails.
The bed was a disheveled mess—with pillows torn apart and stuffing—polyester not feathers, Mom was allergic to feathers—decorating everything like beige snow. The mattress was askew, as if someone had looked between it and the box spring.
The drawers were all pulled out and her things piled here and there.
And in the center of the mess was the shell, cracked and broken, of the jewelry box. It lay in a stomped-on wreck amid glass from the now-destroyed picture frames on the floor. My mind reeled when I saw it.
They’d done a serious killing job on the jewelry box. All my dad’s handwork was now just a busted mess of thin wood. And Mom’s jewelry was hidden amid the glass and papers.
I wouldn’t really call myself a crybaby, but for the past month I’d found myself oozing tears at the sound of a sneeze. And seeing my mom’s things destroyed like this—her life ransacked—all because of me—
I didn’t realize I was on the floor with the broken box in my hand until I sensed someone warm beside me, his arms around me from behind. I thought for a fleeting minute it was Daniel—that Joe had gotten hold of him about the break-in and that he’d come to comfort me.
Common sense is a cruel being, and I realized it was Joe trying to get me to stop touching things. Evidently the house had been broken into and the room ransacked. I needed to stop contaminating the scene while he called it in.
But I pulled away from him and held up the jewelry box as he shifted from behind me to my right. “My dad made this, and someone broke it.”
He took it from me—and in that instant light flared from his hands. Both of them. I blinked at the intense glow, then refocused on Joe holding the box in both hands, the wood between the glow. “What the hell?”
“There’s something in the box,” he said, just as Dags and Rhonda entered the room.
“Are Tim and Steve in here too?”
“Yeah, Tim’s right beside us.”
Oh, this just sucks, me not being able to hear or see them.
“Joe,” I said. “What do you mean there’s something in the box?”
He turned the box in his hands (what was left of the box), his eyes intense. “There’s something inside of it.”
“Inside?” I said. “There isn’t any inside. There’s nothing left of it but a frame.”
“To the physical plane, yeah.” Dags smiled as he knelt down beside us. “But not so much in the astral.”
Huh? I didn’t get it at first—but then Rhonda was on the floor next to us, her knees crunching into glass as well. “You mean the box is multidimensional?”
“Exactly.”
“I didn’t know Dad could make a multidimensional box,” I said, and stared at it. “I guess I need to be Wraith to see the other side?”
“Actually you’d n
eed to be OOB to see it, and access it. Though I can sense it, I can’t stick my hand in there and retrieve it.” He looked to my left and focused on something. I glanced over but saw nothing.
Then Dags looked back to me. “Steve said neither he nor Tim can access it either, but they can see it.”
“What is it?” Joe asked. “An Eidolon?”
“Shhh . . . What, Steve?” Rhonda said, and I guessed that Tim had been talking over him.
Everyone was silent as they listened to Steve. And suddenly I realized how awkward Rhonda must have felt when I was having all those conversations with other people who could hear me and she couldn’t. I felt bad suddenly, and a little bit impatient. “What?” I said.
Rhonda looked at me. I was amazed again at how different she looked, but then again how much older she seemed. “Steve said it’s a key. A physical, metal key lodged in the astral plane.”
“A key?” I looked at Rhonda. “Why would Mom stick a key in the astral plane?”
Rhonda ran a hand through her choppy hair, a sure sign of frustration for Miss Orly. “To be honest—that key might not have been put there by Nona.”
“Who else?” Joe said.
Rhonda took in a deep breath and released it quickly before speaking—and she looked right at me. “Adiran Martinique.”
DAGS and I were in the botanica as before while Joe called in a few favors. He didn’t want to officially report a burglary—because we had no idea when the room had been touched. I hadn’t gone in there since Mom disappeared. Jemmy had—but she wasn’t answering her phone.
It was getting late, and I wanted to sleep. But I wasn’t sure I could, so I was pacing. I was no closer to getting my mom’s soul back into her body. The only solutions I could come up with seemed impossible now—with no Eidolons and me just simply a normal person.
There was also an unbelievable core dump rattling around in my head. So Rhonda and everyone says I’m an Irin, or used to be. I’m that way because my dad died before I was conceived. I could evidently talk to ghosts as a child—those memories were coming back now. And then I couldn’t and completely forgot about it—or blocked it out, as Dags suggested. For some reason Dags and I shared a dream. TC was overshadowing Cooper and probably having the joyride of his life.
And Dags was a book. I still needed that story.
I rubbed my face with my hand. I was going to need some serious help getting to sleep that night. I looked at the fire, which was little more than embers. I had no idea where Rhonda had gone. I’d put the piece of the jewelry box in my room, into the attic crawl space for safekeeping.
“Zoë,” Dags began as he stood in the middle of the room and I paced in front of the fireplace. “Why was Bobby wanting you to look into the box?”
I sighed. “Because he said there was something in there my dad made for me.”
“Did he say what?”
“Not that I remember. He just said it was important and I needed to see it.” At that moment, all the memories of Bobby abruptly dropped on my head like a house, as if I’d somehow opened a locked door. The afternoons spent in my room, in the backyard, Mom wanting me to go out and play with other kids, take up sports, get out of the house, and me not wanting to go too far away from the children on the street who couldn’t leave their houses.
Ghost children.
“Dags . . . I used to play with ghost kids. All the time. It was nothing to me.” I looked at him. “Why did I forget that? I used to go OOB all the time . . . and we’d play on the roof. They were all over the neighborhood where we lived in Seattle, and then in Portland. Bobby was in the house in Portland . . . and he hated it when I had to do homework.”
“Zoë, what was the last memory you have?”
I stopped and looked at Dags, and suddenly he didn’t seem so small anymore. In fact, he seemed larger-than-life. His eyes were an intense gray, but his expression was kind. I didn’t see many kind expressions these days. “Last memory?”
“What was the last memory you had of the ghosts?”
“Bobby and me—going into the basement. He said something about that box.”
“Like in your dream?”
“Yeah, but I always thought it was a dream. Just a reccur ring nightmare. But I don’t ever remember Bobby going all evil and ugly like he did in that last dream.”
Dags said, “That’s because your subconscious didn’t want me in there and fought to get me out.”
“Neat trick there, Pancho. You gonna tell me how you did that? Like is it part of the new you?”
“I have no idea. But for now, I want you to try and remember that last memory in as much detail as you can. First off, why did you go looking for the box?”
I shut my eyes and felt Dags take my hands in his own. His were warm, and I offhandedly wondered if that was because he’d summoned his familiars or if he just naturally had really warm hands.
I did concentrate on the memory—a dream really—and I told Dags what I saw as it popped up. “I was in my room, doing homework . . . and Bobby wanted me to go downstairs to look in the box.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to—” The memory came back a bit at a time. It was like dumping a puzzle out on the floor and all the pieces were turned backward, showing just the cardboard, and I had to flip them over and start finding like images to put wholes together. “I had homework, and I wanted to write a romance. And Bobby seemed to always know what I was thinking. He told me—”
Something caught in my throat, and I squeezed my eyes tight. They burned with tears, and I didn’t want Dags to see—though he’d been through quite a lot with me since the debacle with the Society and L6.
“Keep going.”
“It’s just that—he said he’d seen pictures of my dad. And that he knew my dad loved me. He said—” I opened my eyes and looked at Dags. “He said my dad had made me a necklace.”
Dags’s eyes widened as well. “A necklace? He made you one?”
“That’s what Bobby said. And that it was in that box.” I shifted my weight where I knelt on the concrete floor and looked up at the metal shelves. “But it’s not here. The box isn’t in the basement.”
“Zoë, did you open the box back then? In the dream or in reality?”
“I—” But that’s where the memory ended, and in the dream I always woke up. “I saw a spider and hit my head. And then I always woke up.”
“So you don’t know if you ever really looked in the box?”
“No, but I do remember the box after that. It was always there, in the basement. And I remember seeing it here as well. I helped Mom move into this house—in fact, it was while I was moving stuff down here—including that box—that I first saw Tim and Steve. Though Mom insisted she’d seen them before she even bought it.” I smiled. “She would listen to them bicker about what color things should be, then she’d do just that and make them happy.”
“But you’d already started traveling out of your body by then?”
I nodded. My eyes burned again, and I thought of my mom. “I want my mom so bad, Darren.”
He looked very serious as he reached out and took me into his arms. We weren’t a perfect fit—I was still a little taller, but not by much when we were both barefoot. And it was good to have warm, human contact. “It’s all right, Zoë. We’ll get Nona back. I’m not letting this one go.”
He pulled away first but kept his hands on my arms, rubbing them up and down. I smiled at him and sniffed, very glad I wasn’t wearing makeup. “You okay?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Good. Now—when it comes to stones and your father’s previous line of work as a jeweler, it makes me think it might have been an Eidolon in the box—but the only Eidolon I know of that was never found was the blue one.”
I reached up and tucked a few stray hairs behind his ear. “You mean—you think my dad made me a necklace out of an Eidolon?”
He nodded. “Maybe. But how could such a stone benefit you?”
I searche
d his face. “What does the blue stone do? If it’s like the others, maybe it amplifies power or something.”
“That sounds right. Objects of foci can be used in both a forward and backward position. Meaning it can be used for the positive meaning and for the reverse meaning.” He smiled. “I never really use the word negative because it’s not that the effect is evil but just the opposite.”
“You sound like Rhonda.”
“I know.” Dags nodded. “But what’s the opposite of amplify?”
I knew this one! “Quieten?”
“I don’t mean to break up your little party in here—”
Joe stood at the foot of the stairs and put his hands on his hips. His expression was odd as he looked at us, then I realized Dags and I were still touching, standing face-to-face.
Dags and I immediately backed away from one another. “No, no, it’s okay—” he said, just as I said, “Don’t you ever knock?”
Joe smiled, but I noticed it did not meet his eyes. “I just got some disturbing news. Cooper’s been doing a bit of investigating on his own—which is why he says he’s been absent. And apparently after backtracking phone records, ATM, and miscellaneous surveillance as well as questioning neighbors—” He looked at me, then Dags, then back to me. “The last person to see all three of the victims, including Boo Baskins, was Detective Daniel Frasier.”
I was still stuck at “disturbing news”—Cooper had been doing investigating? Or was it TC? And if it was TC, what was he doing? Honestly reporting or filling in the blanks for his own ends?
And if it wasn’t TC—then where was he?
Then I registered exactly what Joe had said—it bounced around a little before completely settling. “Wait . . . you mean someone saw him with each person?”
“Yeah. Phone records also confirmed he’s been in contact with Randall Kemp and Francisco Rodriguez lately. And neighbors confirm seeing his car at Boo’s house—one of them took down the license plate. ATM footage has him with Randall before he kidnapped you, withdrawing money. And the bouncer over at Opera—”
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