Dominion: Zoë Martinique Investigation, Book 6 (35 page)

"This is getting ridiculous. So where
did they go?"

"Dunno. Ah." He motioned for me to
follow him. "But I came to get you because you have a
visitor."

I followed him to the
public den area on the other side of the entranceway. I was a bit
surprised to see Constable Mae Theotokos standing by the desk. She
gave me a warm smile and offered me her hand. "It
iz
a pleasure to
see
joo
again,
yes?"

I shook her hand. Warm and strong. And
very alive. "Yes, nice to see you as well. Where's your
partner?"

"He is still arguing with
your local law enforcement over
zee
details of former Detective Frasier." Her
expression darkened. "I am very sorry. I know he was a dear friend
of yours."

My eyes burned with instant tears, and
I turned to brush at them. "Yes. He was. Very much. So…" I glanced
at Manuel who was still hanging at the door. "Why are you
here?"

Constable Theotokos looked at the door
as well, and I gave Manuel a "shoo" gesture. He nodded and shut the
door. Theotokos reached into her pocket and pulled out a small,
plastic evidence bag. When she held it up, I gasped.

The Banishing Eidolon, the
one my father had given to me, still in the silver setting. "This
was found around his neck. I don't believe it
iz
important enough to be held in
evidence for years when as a memento it should be with
joo
."

I took the bag with shaking hands. It
still had blood on it, splattered across the stone and silver.
"Thank you."

"None needed. Also," she added,
pulling a sealed envelope from her coat pocket and handing it to
me, "I was told to give this to you. But you are not to open it for
twenty-four hours."

I took the envelope, too, and looked
at it. It had my full name typed on the front. "Who is this
from?"

"I don't know. It was on my temporary
desk. The instructions not to open it are on the back."

I flipped it over. And yeah, typed in
small type was the sentence, "Do not open for twenty-four hours
after delivery."

Weird.

"I have a plane to catch," Theotokos
said, and she offered me her hand again. "I wish you all the luck
in the world, Zoë. There are a lot of people counting on
you."

Her accent had disappeared.

I shook her hand and puzzled over that
declaration. "Excuse me?"

"Don't worry. One day this
will all make sense,
oui
?" She moved past me to the door
and walked out. I looked at the envelope and the stone, and
panicked again for a few seconds. This was the stone Umayma wanted
so she could banish Inanna.

I suggest you securely
hide both of those. Perhaps a box here, in the House?

Sounded like a good idea to me. Then
no one could find it on me. But was this the right place to create
the box? I left the office, and slipped past the parlor and down
the hall to the den, the place where TC first told me what Rhonda
had done to Dags.

It still looked the same—like some
gentlemen's club. I expected to see old fat cats in expensive suits
drinking cognac in small snifters when I went in. I figured this
was a good place to make a small box and decided on a place between
the two largest bookshelves. Right in the corner, where very few
people ever went.

I concentrated on the space in front
of me, moved it to the side just as I used to move my body, and
watched as a small square opened in the air. I shoved the letter
inside and then the bag with the stone—and then I reached in and
took the letter back out.

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 their 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.