Why did I have to wait to read this? Why not now? And who was going to know if I opened it now or later?
I'd just pushed my fingernail under one end of the glued flap when I heard a loud noise. I spun and looked around the room in time to see the door burst open and Manuel rush in. "Zoë! We have a message from Zacharel. There's this crazy chick named Tamera at the door—"
Tamera?
That was all I needed. "I'll be right there!"
He shut the door. I shoved the envelope back inside and closed the box before I ran out and down the hall. What the hell was Tamera doing delivering a message from Zacharel? Wasn't she supposed to be locked up in the hospital after trying to cleave Joe in half?
Everyone had piled outside of the main entrance. I pushed through to find Tamera in the center of the drive–through, and TC, Tel, and Manuel were blocking her from actually entering the place. Those black-ops-looking guys who'd attacked me were all over the place like a swarm. If she twitched, I was pretty sure they would fill her full of holes.
Or whatever it was their guns fired.
The minute she saw me, her eyes widened, and she pointed at me like Donald Sutherland at the end of that body-snatching movie. Only thing missing was the hissing noise. "You!"
I stood beside TC and made a face at her.
She was still dressed in the hospital gown. From the looks of her feet, she'd walked all the way from downtown to Alpharetta. But I knew that wasn't right. There was no way she could have done that.
Could she?
TC leaned in close to my ear. "Look at her other hand. It's bloody."
My gaze tracked down to her balled fist. It was bloody, all right. Still dripping it on the pristine white concrete. "What do you want, Tamera?" I asked, all bold-like. Although I wasn't feeling any of it.
"You. He wants you to give him the Eidolons in exchange for the cop's life." She lowered her hand.
I wasn't too surprised at the ransom demand. Manuel had pretty much prepared me for it. "Tamera, we—and especially me—do not have the other two Eidolons." I wasn't gonna say a thing about the Banishing one hidden in that box. I thought about Joe's stuff tucked into that one at Mom's and decided on the fly I needed to get that stuff and put it in this box. I didn't trust Mom's house for safety anymore.
"Then he dies, Ms. Martinique. He's of no use to my master except as a tool to force you to give him what he wants. If he does not get it, then he kills Detective Halloran."
"Then he loses his ace, doesn't he?" I wasn't a callous as I sounded. Inside, my heart beat against my chest. I felt Innana stirring and willed her to be still. I needed to concentrate.
"Doesn't matter. If the detective dies, my master will just find another ace and take them. He already knows the state your mother's in—it would take only a simple jolt to finish her off."
OkaynowIwaspissedoff. I shifted right there outside the house in front of everyone present. My skin shifted, my newly made clothing changed, and my wings snapped as they unfurled and I hovered just inches from the ground.
A lot of people who might not have seen me like this before gasped. A few were making "all right!" noises. The black ops spooks looked nervous—until Tel and Manuel stepped up to flank me. And from Tamera's reaction, I was pretty sure their First Borns were visible and scary.
I didn't see what made her back up until the ops and a whole bunch of other people moved back as well. I glanced back at TC—
—only he wasn't my Vin Diesel anymore.
Noooo. What stood in his place was a twenty-foot gargoyle—or that was the best description I could come up with. The top of his horned head brushed the top of the porch roof…and forget the hanging light. I think it got scared and jumped off the chain—and of course TC caught it in his mighty paw.
Wow. Let's blow out the theatrics there, Azrael the Giant!
I used this opportunity. "You tell Zacharel that he will not harm my mother. There are more there to defend her than he realizes." I knew my dad was with her.
Let's put in there that when it came to my opinion on my father over the past two days, it had shifted. Not from the Bad Guy column to the Good Guy column, but more into the What the Fuck Is He Doing? column. Which is where Joe usually stayed.
Tamera tilted her head as if she were listening to the voices in her noggin'. And given the company, I was pretty sure Zacharel was puppeting her. Interesting that he chose Tamera of all people, since she was once Joe's CI and Dags had apparently brought her back to life. She refocused on me. "You have until midnight to be bring him the Eidolons." She took a deep breath and stepped toward me.
The others moved, and I made a gesture to make sure they didn't stampede her. When she held out her bloody fist, I got a very bad feeling. I held out my own hand. That's when I realized the blood dripping from the hand wasn't from what she carried, but from a cut along her wrist.
She dropped something into my palm. It was light, cylindrical, and bloody. I stared at it for several seconds before I realized what it was—and recognized the all-too-familiar ring.
It was Joe's left-hand ring finger.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I laughed.
I felt my body return to its normal look, and I stood there in the driveway, Joe's severed finger in my hand, and I just…laughed.
And I couldn't stop laughing.
"Zoë?" TC was probably back to his more handsome look, since I doubted that voice came out of a gargoyle.
The black ops guy, the ass-hat extraordinaire who'd shot me—how long ago was it?—tried to clear everyone away. "All right, the show is over. We need everyone to get back inside, so that we can clear the premises and make sure there aren't any more threats on the property." He stood in front of me. "Christ, that's a finger," he said as he looked down at it.
No shit, asshole.
I looked up from the finger, still laughing, still unable to stop, and I stared at him.
He stupidly stared back at me. "Crazy bitch. Hey, Neal, come get this finger so we can get it inside to the lab."
And then, like an idiot, he tried to take the finger from me.
The world came to a grinding, earth-shattering halt in that second as he reached out to take the finger from my hand. My laughter stopped. The murmuring around me stopped. TC's voice telling me to calm down disappeared. Everything that had happened to me, from the moment I'd looked into Karl Gibbon's eyes and seen hatred personified, to the confused stare of non-recognition in Dags' eyes, to the dead stare in Daniel's, to the look of utter disrespect in this asshole's face, coalesced into a single thought.
No. More.
For over a year I'd lived and loved and moved and hidden and followed and fought behind a shadow of self-doubt. A shield I'd built around me so that no one could actually see the frightened, angry little girl I'd become. I'd depended on so many others to explain to me what I was, what I was going to become, and I'd patiently sifted through lies and truths to come to a place where I went through the motions of life.
And I told myself—no, I convinced myself—that this—whatever it was that I'd become—was here on this earth to protect those people I cared for. But over and over, they were getting hurt. They were losing their lives.
And worst for me, I was losing them.
What good was this power if I never really used it? The Seraphim wanted that damn book so he could control the universe. Zacharel wanted it so he could become the next Seraphim. Umayma wanted the Banishing Eidolon so she could rip Inanna from me.
"That was a First Choir power…"
Well, then. It was time to use it to my advantage and stop this shit.
Now.
And here we are back to that moment. And the asshole was going to take Joe's finger from me.
I still don't remember what it was I did, or how, but in the blink of an eye he was on the ground, screaming, his arm severed from his body. I was in the air clutching Joe's finger as hard as I could. People were screaming and a few of them had actually shot th
eir ghost guns at me.
And nothing happened.
Zoë, are you sure?
Inanna's voice sound like Daniel's in that moment, and for a second I felt him inside of me. His voice, and a multitude of others.
Yes. Tell the others I'm going to Mom's house. There's something I have to get there.
And then what do we do after that?
Isn't it obvious? I rose further into the air and looked down. That's when I saw my left slipper. It wasn't black anymore, but pure white, with teeth twice as long. I was Ethereal and I was Abysmal.
We save Joe and Dags.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
I somehow did that teleporting thing. One minute I was hovering above a very upset crowd of people with guns, and the next I hovered over my mother's house. I landed on the roof and then sieved down through the structure to the tea shop below.
I wasn't sure what was going to happen to it now. I didn't know if the Society would come after me for killing their ops leader. I didn't care. I looked around at the mess. This place had been Mom's dream, and she'd worked so very hard to make it come true.
As Wraith, I could see the box floating just above the rubble, right where I'd left it. I knelt down in front of it, reached in, and started pulling things out.
"Why did you come back here?"
I didn't jump at TC's voice. I knew he would follow me. He was behind me, and then he moved to kneel in front of me, the invisible box between us. "Because I want to get Joe's things from here—and I remembered there was something I shoved into this space that might be what I need."
"The Eidolons?"
"No, something else." I pulled the inane things out along with a box that looked a lot like the one my mom had had in her Veil. But hers had had her wedding rings in it. This box felt heavier and so I opened it.
Two familiar stones stared back at me. Command and Possession.
The Eidolons of choice.
So, Mom had had them all along, and she'd conveniently hidden them in Joe's Veil. Which made sense, since no one knew he had one. It was the perfect hiding place, until the wielder was unconscious and then everything fell out.
"Well, I'll be. Zacharel said he'd felt them nearby."
I nodded. "He wasn't lying. They were in a place he couldn't see."
"You knew these were here?"
After closing the lid, I pursed my lips. "No, I didn't. They weren't what I was hoping for." I plunged my hand back inside and pulled out several more things, until my fingers touched on something slick and plastic.
I'd remembered the piece of paper in the bag from before. I didn't know if it was maybe a precious love letter Joe wanted to preserve in plastic, or some police report he hadn't finished. When I pulled it from the box, I knew the moment I got a good look at it—this was a page from the Grimoire.
"Is that—"
"Yes." I opened the plastic and pulled the page from the bag. It was blank, just like all of them were until they were placed inside of the book. There was also a tear-like hole in the bottom right corner. "This is what Gabriel wants."
"Why does she want it?"
"TC." I held it up. "This is an active page from the Grimoire. Somehow Mom got a page out of it, and Gabriel knew that."
TC looked dumbfounded. "So?"
I felt Inanna's push and insistence to come forward, so I stepped back. But she didn't take control of my body—she slipped out and created a form of her own. It was Eshe again.
Her brother arched an eyebrow at her. "I think I remember that Revenant."
"You should. You tried to kill her." Eshe pointed to the paper. "Every page that's actually resided in the book has a resonance to it. Like the ones you took inside the Throne, remember? Even you had to resonate with the Throne in order to fully become the Phantasm."
"Yeeeah." He still looked dubious. "And this is one of those pages? What about that tear? Is that a problem?"
"I don't know," she said. "But having created most of the book, I know a spell that will reset the book to a previous version. All we have to do is write the spell in and give a specific date, and the book will revert. Everything Rhonda did to it will be erased. Also, any spells that were added after that date will disappear." She paused.
I frowned at her. TC noticed her hesitation "Inanna? What're you not telling us?"
She held the sheet in both hands. "I have no way of knowing what spells if any are already written on this page. It's a built in defense for the book—if a page is released the spell becomes invisible. The only way to see what's here is to have it near the Grimoire."
"So you don't know what it is you'll be writing over." I felt a bit apprehensive now. What if that page was kicked out because it had memories of me on it?
Eshe nodded. "The Grimoire will honor the spell and if placed in the beginning of the book, the page will take precedence over the other pages and their spells. But—whatever's already written here could still exist. Rolling the book time back won't affect this page."
"So what if what's on that page is bad?"
She looked at TC. "We have to take that chance if we want to reverse what Rhonda did."
"Wait—are you two saying you can return Dags' memories?" TC looked even more dubious. "With this page?"
"It's not really returning them, but rolling them back. Daniel was the one who found the memory in one of my old ones—the memory of this spell."
"Why didn't you say this before?" TC asked.
"Because we didn't have a page from the book," I interjected. "And you can bet Rhonda wasn't going to just give us one. But now that we have a page, it's possible to try."
"But if you use this page to do that—then you won't have a page to give to Gabriel." Understanding dawned on him, and he rubbed at his face. "Oh, damn, Zoë. Damn those fucking Cherubim. That's not fair. You can't choose between your foot and Dags's memories."
"Yes, I can. I can live without a foot, TC. It'll be hard, but I want him back. I need him back. I need—" and how do I say this? "—I need to know I'm loved."
"Oh, girl, you're so loved, there's no room for anything else. Your mom loves you, the Revenants love you—though they're not all that happy right now, and that's worrying me—Daniel loved you, Joe loves you, and I love you."
I gave him a warm smile. "I know you do. And I love you in ways I don't think I'll ever understand." Given our history, it was a rather long and sordid tale. And this wasn't an outcome I'd ever expected.
"And don't forget," TC went on, pointing to the page, "you'll get Maureen and Alice, too. It's like getting a threesome for the price of one."
Crap. Why did he have to say that? I felt a little bummed, but he was right. It was the same reason I couldn't bring myself to get involved with Daniel again, because I knew there was someone else in there looking out at me.
I reached inside the box and pulled out a couple of pens Joe'd had in his Veil. "Inanna, write the spell, and write the date before I was released from the Throne."
Eshe nodded and vanished. I stepped back so Inanna could take control of my physical body, and watched as she wrote the spell in a language I didn't think I'd ever understand. And then she wrote the date out in exact accuracy but I knew she wasn't finished. "You realize he won't remember any of this? Any of what's happened since."
That's fine, I told her.
"Question." TC held up a finger. "I understand you wanting the page to do this—to do this spell. But why does Gabriel want it? What can she or the Seraphim do with it?"
That was a seriously good question. Not one I had an answer to, so I let the siblings discuss.
"Azrael, everyone assumes the Seraphim wants the Grimoire to do what?"
"That's easy. He wants to use it to close the borders to the Abysmal Plane."
"How?"
TC frowned. "How what?"
"How does he plan on using the Grimoire like that? I never wrote spells that could control an entire inner plane. And as far as I know, there hasn't been an owner of that book�
��witch or wizard—who could create such a thing, either. The best the Grimoire can do is manipulate things in the Physical Plane."
The Phantasm scratched his chin. "I thought this Grimoire was the most dangerous weapon in existence."
"Well, it is—but only in the context you're viewing it in. The thing was never meant to adhere to a soul, and yet a witch was able to do that by manipulating and rewriting a spell she'd read in the book. Darren McConnell was never meant to be anything except a guy who could sometimes see ghosts. But again, a wizard—a term I use loosely when referring to Allard Bonville—was able to transform tattoos into portals in the palms of four poor victims, Mr. McConnell being one of them, then misread a spell from the Grimoire and managed to turn him into a Guardian—with a set of Familiars, I might add. Do you realize how rare that is?"
I looked at TC, my own thoughts spinning a million miles a minute. So Dags was never meant to be a Guardian or anything really magical. It'd all been done with the book.
"I'm not sure what point you're trying to make," TC said.
Inanna sighed as she finished writing on the page in odd symbols. "Changing the fabric of the Physical Plane with the book is what makes it dangerous. Yes, I'm sure a spell in the book can be manipulated to close the border between the Physical and the Abysmal Planes—which would achieve the Seraphim's goal.
"But," she went on, looking up from the page at TC, "the spell can then be reverse engineered to do the opposite. It's only a temporary patch. And as long as there's a Wraith—and a Guardian—then anything the Seraphim tries will fail."
I don't get it, I thought to both of them. I knew they could hear me. You make it sound like the only way to close the borders was to do what my dad had planned, or get rid of me and Dags.
TC leaned in close to Inanna. "You're going to have to use baby talk for me and the princess, sis. We're not getting your point."
Princess?
Dominion: Zoë Martinique Investigation, Book 6 Page 24