Dominion: Zoë Martinique Investigation, Book 6 (28 page)

Daniel Frasier was dead.

I'd watched his soul move on and
hadn't had the strength to touch him. Or say goodbye.

I had overheard from some of the
nurses and doctors—'cause, dude, they are the worst gossips
ever—that Detective Joe Halloran was in jail for hitting Detective
George Mastiff. Apparently the scruffy, attractive detective blamed
his partner for his former partner's death. Truth was, they weren't
releasing the identity of whose bullet killed him. Both Mastiff and
Carter had fired.

What did it matter?

Daniel was dead.

Dags was missing.

Mom was still in a coma.

My best friend—I didn't have a best
friend—

None of the Revenants had come to the
hospital and I didn't bother to ask why.

I chased my dad out of Mom's room.
Damned him to hell.

Jemmy left sometime during the night,
muttering something about a shower and food.

And me?

Well…

If there were a hell…I had found
it.

The door opened. I half-paid
attention, figuring it'd be another scrubs-clad someone to take
another sample or looking for where they'd left their
cell.

I was mildly surprised when an older,
almost handsome woman stepped in. She sort of reminded me of Alice,
one of the Familiars in Dags's palms. Until she shuffled closer.
Then I could see the tint of her skin was much darker, her eyes
were black, and her profile much more…oh, I don't
know…regal?

She resembled Umayma, Freyja's
Revenant. But this woman's thick dark hair was streaked with white
and gray, and her face was lined with a lot more wrinkles. She wore
scrubs with little bears on them and surgery booties on her feet.
She wasn't tall—probably came to my shoulders.

I watched her go to the bed and put
her hand through the railing.

Ah…ghost. Not a Shade, because I could
see color. An astral walker, maybe? Or the spirit of one of the
hospital's doctors?

"She looks bad," the woman said. Her
English was clipped with an accent. Her voice was a bit familiar.
"The doctors say she might not wake up."

She could see me. "Might be better for
her," I said. "Not having to survive in this world."

The woman smiled and turned her head
to look at me. "You don't really mean that, do you? When there are
so many of the dead that roam these halls, and the wish that is
most on their minds is the one who brings them back to
life."

I shrugged. "I stopped
listening."

"Ah…bitter one." She shuffled toward
me and, after a look around, sat down on the bench covering the air
unit under the window. The sky darkened again, and it drizzled
rain. A vast difference in the twenty-four hours since I was
admitted. After a moment she put her hands on her knees. "So, you
like wearing your hospital gown?"

Shrugging seemed to be the easiest
response. "Didn't feel like changing. If someone sees me like this,
they just think I'm a patient and they don't make me
leave."

"You are a patient, aren't you?" The
woman waited a few more minutes, and then, "My name's
Eshe."

Eh-shee. I watched her for a second.
"Zoë."

"Zoë…are you keeping
watch?"

"No. Maybe. Well…I guess someone has
to." I shifted in the chair, my bare feet hanging over the front
with my knees pulled up under my chin. "I'm not sure why I'm
here."

"Do you mean that literally…or
metaphysically?"

I fixed my narrowed gaze on her. "Why
are you here?"

"You mean right now?"

"Yeah."

"I'm here to see where your head's
at."

That was a weird answer. I chewed on
my lower lip. "What does that mean?"

"It means, are you just hanging around
here in this room because you're worried, or because you don't
care?"

"I do car.," I gave along,
shoulder-dropping sigh. "But it's just….that's the problem. I care
all the time. I act like I don't, but I do. I care about
everything."

"You cared more for Daniel than you
realized you did."

That made me look at her more closely.
"Who are you and how did you know about Daniel?"

"I knew Daniel Frasier. And I mourn
his passing, too. But he was a good man, Zoë. A damn good man." She
turned her entire body to face me. "And you can't let yourself
drown in self-loathing and pity because of all that's
happened."

"You knew him?" It was possible, I
guess. A nurse or doctor here would know the cops if they were in
and out on a regular basis. For all I could sense, she was just
Eshe, a disembodied spirit.

"Yes, I did. I knew him well and long
enough to know he never, not once, blamed you for what happened
with the Horror."

Okay, no doctor dead or alive should
know about that! I was up on my feet, standing on that chair in a
New York minute. I pointed down at her. "Who the hell are
you?"

"I'm Eshe. That is the truth." She
stood as well. Then there was a flash and a man stood in her place.
He was dressed like something out of the 1500s, and he bowed to me.
"I am Johann Georg Faust. That is the truth." Then she shifted
again and became another man, this one dressed much more recent,
maybe 1800s? (What? I used to work in clothing.) "I am Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe. That is the truth." She shifted again and
became a much younger woman, dressed in similar period clothing. "I
am Ulrike van Levetzow. That is the truth." Again she shifted into
a man in his mid-forties, only this one was dressed in modern
clothing. "I am James Wynne. That is the truth."

And then she became Daniel, standing
in front of me in all of his beauty. "And I am Daniel Frasier. That
is the truth." And then she shifted into a normal image of me. "And
I am Zoëtrope Adiran Martinique. And this is my present
truth."

I knew who she was.

"Inanna."

The image of me vanished and became
Eshe again.

"How are you doing that? I mean…we're
not in my head right now. We're here in the Physical
Plane."

"I noticed. But apparently while
bonded with you, I have the ability to manifest outside of the body
just as you can." She smiled at me. "And this beautiful soul was
the very first bonding I ever made."

"How long ago?"

"I'm not sure…1300s, maybe? I lived
with her for a very long time. We found each other by accident
after Sophia cast me out of the Abysmal Plane. I was little more
than a wondering Symbiont, fading away the longer I remained in the
Physical Plane. And then one day I heard her calling to me. A voice
wanting to live. I was in Cairo, but I didn't know it at the time.
And there I found her on a side street. She'd been stabbed and left
for dead. She was a healer and cared for homeless
children."

I slowly sat back down in that
convertible chair, dumbfounded. It had never dawned on me that
Inanna, a First Born, had had such a beginning. "So she survived
when she invited you in?"

"Yes. And we sought revenge on the
ones who nearly killed her." She gave me a sweet smile, which was
kinda freaky right after talking about revenge. 'Cause a Revenant
revenge usually involved blood in mass quantities. "I could
understand Eshe's need to destroy those who nearly killed her. I
had been the last of our family, besides Azrael, left in my
father's home. And when Sophia realized what I'd been doing,
writing that journal, then she made sure I no longer had a physical
body to write with."

I remembered that book. I also
remembered it being sucked inside of Dags. "So…when you were Eshe,
did you keep writing in it?"

"I had to find it first. And that took
a long time. That's when I found Faust."

"Now…you're not talking
about
the
Faust,
are you?"

She looked surprised. "You know of
him?"

"Like, the play? Faust?"

She laughed. "Johann Faust is not the
same man as the fictional character in Goethe's play. But I'm not
saying they weren't…inspired by the same First Born. You see,
Johann Faust was an alchemist and a magician, and he'd been the one
to find my book. So when I learned about him and met him, I found a
way to…" She hesitated. "He was my next host."

"What happened to Eshe?"

Inanna/Eshe looked away. "She was
killed. Mugged."

"In the same way before you saved
her?"

When she kept quiet for a while, I sat
forward. "Inanna?"

"I am not…you can ask my brother why
I'm not as well…thought-of in my family. That my choosing to stay
behind to take care of our father's last child was not looked upon
well. But I saw it as them abandoning him to save themselves when
she had them hunted down. I figured the best way to defeat her was
to do it from the inside."

I got that part. I'd read
her journal, or parts of it, before it was absorbed by the
Grimoire
. "Inanna, what
happened to Eshe, other than getting mugged?"

She swallowed. "I…I made Johann my
First and then I set…I set him and Eshe up to be
attacked."

Okay, wow, damn… I got it at that
second. And I understood why her family had always been a bit
standoffish when it came to Inanna. "You…you had your host
murdered, and your next one wounded so you could escape and he
could, or would, invite you in."

"Yes."

"Damn, that's fucking cold,
bitch."

"I am not proud of my actions. I just
wanted to get my book back."

"You could have just taken
it."

"And been caught with it? As a woman?
Zoë, you clearly do not understand what it was to be a woman so
long ago. It would be a long time before I chose a female again
because of the way they were treated. And as a man, I could elicit
punishment on men when I saw them mistreat women."

"Bitch, you are contradicting the hell
out of yourself. You talk about mistreatament and look what you did
to Eshe? But," Okay…I got it. I got it. Men bad, women good.
But…that made me wonder.. "Inanna, did you trick
Daniel?"

"No." She shook her head. "I,
uh…wasn't sure I knew what I could do. I fell in love with him when
I saw him, when I felt his strength, in his spirit. I saw what your
Horror did to him, how it changed him, wounded his soul." She
looked down. "I was honest with him with what he needed to
hear."

"You lied."

"No, I didn't lie. I told the crazy
part of him, the damaged part, that if he allowed me in, the voices
would stop and he would be at peace." She licked her lips. "And
that's what happened. Only, when Gabriel banished me…"

"I got that part. His crazy was free."
It was an insane part of him that had always lurked just beneath
her control during the few months she'd been bonded with
him.

"My point was, and is, Zoë, is that we
all make mistakes. We all…hurt the ones we don't want to hurt. And
we all have guilt. I have a metric shit-ton of it, as I've heard a
few kids around here say." Inanna/Eshe put her hands to her face.
"I'm not…I don't want you to give up. It's not going to be easy to
fix this last part…for us to do what Daniel wanted to do…but if we
can work together—"

"Do what Daniel wanted to do? He have
a different agenda other than getting Dags out of their
hands?"

"Yes. He did." Her dark eyes focused
on me. "While I took control and fixed a lot of things…for Daniel
when we got out of that hospital…he did a bit of research into my
memories. He found a lot of them that were part of the book, and he
found…what he thought was something that could reverse everything
that Rhonda did."

I opened my mouth, closed it, opened
it again. "I thought…I thought the page of his memories of me was
lost in the Abysmal Throne."

"Those are. But what this
spell could do is more of a…" she shrugged "…reboot. If given a
specific time, astral hour, and date, down to the very second of
the
Grimoire's
life, then it's possible to reset it back to that
time."

I sat forward, my hands gripping the
edge of the chair. "Are you…are you sure?"

"No, I'm not. It might wipe the whole
book, which, in my opinion, might not be a bad idea."

"What does that mean?"

"Meaning it would wipe the book. All
the spells in it would be gone. The book and its magical self would
still be fused to the Guardian's soul, which keeps him alive, but
all the spells would be gone."

"And his memories?"

"I don't know." She shrugged again. "I
don't know how that would effect him. I just know that all the
spells I wrote, all that were added to that book, would be gone. It
would cease to be an issue."

I wasn't sure I liked that scenario at
all. "Then you could basically wipe his entire memory
stick."

"Yes. Which was why Daniel was a bit
hesitant to bring it up. That, and there were two other
problems."