Geist

www.caldwellpress.com

www.phaedraweldon.com

www.zoemartinique.com

Copyright © 2011 by Phaedra Weldon

Cover Art
Design By Trapdoor

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

Books In The Zoë Martinique Series

Wraith

Out Of The Dark

Spectre

Phantasm

Revenant

Beyond The Door 

Geist

To my husband and daughter for supporting me in my decision to finish the books no matter what. You could have given up on me, but you didn't. 

To my mom and her unbelievable gardening stamina in the Southern Atlanta heat! Without her, I'd have never found my back yard again. 

To Michael Romano and his incredible love for story. Dude, you have been an inspiration to me and to my enjoyment of Second Life. 

To the Oregon Writers Network, for without you and Kris and Dean, there would be no Abysmal Universe in this world. 

And to my father, 

Dream the Dream Within, Daddy. 

I miss you.

People are fragile. 

We love, we laugh, we crave intimacy, and we blossom in relationships. 

But these same things can also break our hearts, and thus, we die. 

My father—a man I barely remembered since he disappeared when I was four—broke my heart. He betrayed his wife. And the funny thing about him? 

He's what you might call—in some circles—an
Angel
. 

Just goes to prove...we don't always know what we know. 

Where I Stand

(The Story So Far)

My name is Zoë Adiran Martinique and I am a Wraith. 

I am also the Phantasm. I rule over the Abysmal Plane.

It's not as cool as it sounds. 

Especially not in my present condition. The last time I looked, I was folded up in a fetal position slowly floating around in what appeared to be a giant egg made of murky green glass.  This is actually the epicenter of the Abysmal Plane. 

Some people call this Hell. The Abysmal, I mean.

I am the nexus; the central point which all things within this plane turn around. And after nearly four months like this, I still don't have a damn clue what that means. 

How did I get here? Ask my father. It was his idea. Apparently having his daughter in the Phantasm's seat was supposed to make it easier for the Ethereal Plane to control the borders between the
Outer Planes
, the Ethereal and the Abysmal; and the
Inner Planes
, the Physical, the Mental, and the Astral. 

Only—things didn't quite work out the way he'd hoped. 

Newp. 

Wasn't gonna happen. 

Cause what do you get when you take a twenty-something, hot on the heels of love and sex with a beautiful man who loves her back and lock her away from him? Not to mention fuck him up enough so that he can't come after her? 

You get one pissed off daughter who is
not
going to cooperate. And what ticks my father and those other damn Ethereals off the most? Something they can't control. And by setting me up as the Phantasm, they really
couldn't
touch me. 

It works the same way in reverse. No Abysmal creature, including myself, can touch the Seraphim, the one that sits in the throne of the Ethereal plane.

They gave me a "grace period" so that I could acclimate to being the-center-of-all-things. That's how they worded it. Not true. I was one half of this nightmare called the Outer Planes.  I was the center of the Abysmal Plane. And somewhere in the Ethereal side there was an egg like mine, and inside of it was the Seraphim. 

I wondered if it had a prisoner trapped inside like me. Sealed away from home. Growing more and more bitter. 

Every now and then I would get a visit from the Ethereals in a theater that surrounded my throne. That's what they called it; a throne. It's a damn egg two sizes bigger than me for crying out loud. They would all sit around me in their damn white suits and stereotypical pristine wings and stare at me like some sort of plaything on display. Everywhere I turned I could see them through the murky glass. I pounded on the walls, yelled at them, screamed at them. I demanded they let me out. 

All I got in reply was, "Seal the borders and we'll talk." 

What they got back from me was, "Screw you." 

That's when the same schmuck, dressed in an iridescent gray suit, would come up onstage where my prison floated and remind me about the greater good and how I needed to cooperate and be a gracious girl for the honor my dad had bestowed on me. 

Honor, huh? So where was my father then? How come he never attended these functions? 

I raised the middle finger of my right hand. 

Childish I know, but can you blame me? 

Every time they came I demanded to see my father. And every time they left me alone without another word. 

Days would pass. And no one would come. 

I slept a lot. Actually it felt more like I was drifting. Floating in space and just...nothing. And it was quiet. 

So. Damned. Quiet. 

When I would wake up and see the theater outside of my prison, I realized that this was a nightmare I couldn't wake from. So I did what any normal twenty something Wraith in my shoes would do. I got angry. I banged on the glass. I kicked at it. I yelled and screamed for my dad. Be he never came.

He never was the sort to show up when I needed him.  

They came over and over again. I felt like one of those display eggs. 

Wraith—by Fabergé. 

Shit
. 

I knew I was falling into a heavy depression. 

As the time passed, I did notice a repeating visitor. He looked like he belonged in the Abysmal—cast of shadow and ash—but he had the feel of an Ethereal. What I mean is...he didn't feel kin to me. He had the same odd intenseness my dad had. That soft outer glow that Ethereals seemed to generate. 

And yet, there seemed to be a shadow around him.

He was small. I thought he was a kid at first, until one time he came up on the stage when no one else was around and stood just outside the glass.  I straightened up as best as I could and made faces at him. That's when I noticed
his
face. He looked—ordinary. Like a store mannequin. Nothing except the frame work and skin with little characterization. 

It was just after that visit I started dreaming about the others. My friends.

And thinking...
Sophia
, the First Born
(child of the first Phantasm) they'd put in this thing before me, learned to travel
outside
of it's walls. Somehow she'd either moved outside of it mentally, or maybe astrally.

Sophia learned to manipulate the planes to her will. She'd commanded all sorts of creatures to manipulate people and things in the Physical plane, spy on those in the Mental and Ethereal. She had been the one to put bounties on the heads of her siblings, forcing them to bond with physical creatures where they could hide from their sister's wrath. She'd even trapped her youngest brother, Azrael (also known to me as T.C., Trench Coat and Archer) into obeying a symbiont-controlled human named Reverend Rollins.

It was true Sophia had been one of the children of the original Phantasm, created out of the abysmic essence itself, which put her even closer to the stuff of this plane. But I was an Irin—the offspring of a human and an Ethereal—and Irins were supposed to be able to slip between the borders of all planes as Guardians. So it seemed reasonable to me that I could do the same as a First Born. 

Right? 

And before any of this I could slip (shed?) my mortal coil so easy, and moved outside of my body. But now every time I tried to leave my body, I failed. 

But then the dreams became more real. 

I would see them. My family and friends.  Joe, Rhonda, Mom, Daniel, Jason—all going on about their lives. Working, talking, eating, laughing.

But where was Dags? I never saw Dags. 

And then it happened and I was a ghost that no one could see, floating around them. I yelled at Rhonda, and then at mom.
Where was Dags? 

I saw Daniel—and was amazed at his transformation in my absence. He'd always been handsome. Tall and lean, with beautiful blue eyes and brown hair. He wore glasses when we first met. But now his new preternatural eyes no longer needed them. He had bonded with a First Born, one of Sophia's siblings, Inanna, and become a Revenant. A vampire. 

Joe—he was always Joe. Tall, lanky, spiky black hair, insufferable smirk. All thereJoe was human, but was also a witch. I remembered the moment he kissed me—and I got that feeling all over again, of happy thoughts that reached my toes. Though we started out as friends we'd never moved beyond that. And I wasn't sure I wanted too.  

Rhonda—who never seemed to age and looked sad all the time. She wielded a power I knew I'd never understand. Dags had been tortured, beaten, and then shot in the chest. Dags should have died. 

But she'd slipped an entire
Grimoire,
an ancient, magical tome into is astral body. She had physically fused his soul with a book of spells, and he lived. What I didn't know and was afraid to ask, was it the book that kept him alive, or the magic inside of it? 

And Jason. He was a Revenant like Daniel. But he'd been with his First Born, Mephistopheles, much longer. Jason was someone I respected. And someone I was a little bit scared of. Mephistopheles was as one of Sophia's siblings she'd driven inside of mankind's physical body. This First Born, or Revenant as they called themselves after they bonded (because they were revenants of their former selves), had reveled in being physical. I got the impression he'd had more hosts than any of the others. And with age came power, command over the Physical. That and—

—well, Jason dated my mother long before I was born. 

Ew...mental shiver. 

And Dags...

Dags was broken when he was finally revealed to me. I found him sitting in bed, propped up by pillows. His head was tilted to the side, his incredible gray eyes staring straight ahead, hands folded in his lap. He never moved. If he hadn't of blinked now and then, he would have resembled an oversized doll. 

Something was wrong with him. I heard the others saying the
Grimoire
inside if him was messed up—missing pages. 

I tried to scream at my mom, at Joe and Rhonda and Daniel—
What happened to him? Why aren't you fixing him?! 

WHY HAVEN'T YOU COME TO RESCUE ME!?

I listened to them talk (for what seemed like hours?). I heard about a war brewing between the Outer Planes; about the Ethereals toying with events in the Physical Plane. It was my first time out of the egg—and I didn't want to go back. 

I wanted answers. The Society of Ishmael had Dags. This Society was something started by my great-uncle Domas. He'd been a parapsychologist and delved deeply into proving the existence of the multiple layers of the universe as well as the beings that dwelled there. He'd been successful in creating Travelers, humans who could go out of body and travel through the planes and report their findings back to him. 

But he'd been betrayed, his lab destroyed, and three of his subjects lost their physical bodies in the explosion and fire. One of his partners started the Society of Ishmael in order to carry on his work and protect the notes he'd collected from his findings. These were called the Dioscuri Files. 

The last man to run the Society of Ishamel had been March Knowles, a public figure in government, as well as Rhonda's uncle. Now the Society was hers—after I killed Knowles. 

They were particular interested in me, and in Dags. Me because I'd become a Wraith, and Dags—

Well, he had an extraordinarily powerful book inside of him. They were a bit more than concerned. With him in this condition, and me out of the picture, it was easy now to keep him under their thumb.