Revenant (34 page)

Father to daughter.

Daughter to parent.

Wraith to Angel.

“Hi, Daddy.” My voice was small, and I choked back a tear.

His features never really came into focus. Only his shape, and his height. And his smell. I had always remembered his smell.

“Is this how you remember me?” he said in a soft voice.

I sniffed. Nodded. “It was so long ago. When you left. I—I don’t have any—”

He raised a hand, and that came into focus. “There are no memories for me to draw from, Zoë. I’m sad inside to know this is all I left you.”

Tears pooled in my eyes.

“Sshhh . . .” he said. “Don’t cry. I still watch over you when I can. And as you are now is how you look stripped of the Abysmal taint that poisoned you.”

I had never considered myself poisoned. Not really. I mean, I knew, in a way, I was. I sniffed again. “Why are you here?”

“Because we cannot let this go on, Zoë. This ridiculous war between the family of Samael. For too long, Sophia has run amuck, and we have done nothing. She has created havoc and must be removed.”

I kind of understood him. If I hadn’t read that book, I wouldn’t have gotten any of it. “The Revenants—”

“Need our help. And yet they will not ask for it. Only one brave soul has ventured forth to beg for guidance. Even now, he bears great torment at the hands of the Phantasm’s minion.”

I couldn’t think of—“You mean Jason? Mephistopheles?”
Ohm . . . huh?
“I don’t . . .”

“What Sophia wants more than anything is power, Zoë. And she believes that the ultimate spell, the ultimate annihilation, can be achieved by removing that pesky book from the Guardian. But we like it there. And we want it to stay. So we’ve taken the precaution of protecting that book with our own defense. Sophia is unaware of our agent, but that is to be expected. She isn’t the brightest to wear the title.”

So . . . Dags was safe. For now.

“Now, what she wants is the book you hid in the maze. And what her opposite wants is the spell. These two will clash, and it will take Revenant and Seraphim soldiers alike to dispel her power when she gets it.”

“But she’s not getting it,” I said, switching the Phantasm’s gender, which was getting confusing. “I won’t give it to her.”

“True love, Zoë. There is nothing better. I had that love with your mother. And I still do.” He smiled. And I realized he did. Because it was him that saved her from the Abysmal, and kept her soul safe until Rhonda could take it and put it back.

This wasn’t making any sense. “I don’t get it.”

“Destiny, Zoë. Love is what keeps you Ethereal in your soul.”

And he was gone.

Just like that.

My body ached as it twisted and changed, and I fell forward on my knees. I could hear Rhonda, and Nick and Mom coming up behind me. And when I felt my mother’s arms, I buried my face in her shoulder and cried. Oh God, I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe.

“What is it?” Nick asked softly outside of my wall of pain.

“That was the first time she’s actually seen her father since she was four,” Mom said. “And she couldn’t see his face.”

 

 

 

AFTER
a long, hot shower at Rhonda’s, I stood in front of the mirror. So many people say this is the worst way to explain how you look. Well, I’m sorry. But a mirror is exactly how I know how I look. And at that moment, I looked like baked shit.

My hair had gotten long . . . too long. I wanted to cut it. Cut it all off. I could see it peeking from behind my hip. Wet. Dripping on the brain-stabbingly white tile of the palatial bathroom. I’d wiped an area of the mirror off with my hand . . . and I was still foggy. But I could see me.

Me.

Me as human. I was still the Latina tomboy I’d always been. Never painted her nails, or bothered with jewelry as a child. And when I was old enough to notice boys, apparently it’d been too late. They all saw me as Zoë. Their best friend. The one with the crazy mom. To see me now . . . the long, thick white streak from my temple the only color I could make out.

My light brown eyes. Dad had called them his topaz jewels. Down to my upturned nose. Other kids called it a ski slope. To my permanently smirking mouth. Mom called it attitude. It was me. And then I looked down at my left wrist, at the golden pattern of Azrael’s touch.

Azrael. It felt odd to call him that. I would always know him as TC. The Archer.

I released the hold I kept on this shape and turned. I watched as my skin mottled, my eyes grew black, and my hair spread out from my head in an electric fan, like thin, dark eels searching through the sea of air. My nails sharpened, and my body remained the same shape. But the skin . . .

The skin wasn’t my own.

I could remember this shape.

I could remember my first house.

I could remember my last birthday party.

I could remember Daniel’s kiss on my lips.

And I could remember Dags’s body against my own.

But I could not . . . couldn’t . . . remember my father’s face.

Tears streamed down my face again. The Wraith is crying. Thunder sounded from somewhere, heralding the night. And I watched as huge, broken, and ripped bat wings with bony joints spread out from behind me.

I thought of my dad’s pure white light and compared it to my darkness.

I was a monster.

Someone knocked at my door. “Zoë?”

It was Mom.

I sniffed. “It’s open.”

And I let her see me like this. Nude and exposed. She stood in the doorway as it opened and smiled at me, her expression so lovingly hers. “You can’t scare me, you know. I’m your mother.”

“I scare myself.”

She came to stand beside me. We both peered in the mirror as she wiped more of the condensation away. “I scare myself too, sometimes. The things I think. Or what I do. But, that’s a part of living. Perfectly natural.”

I pointed at my reflection. “That isn’t natural. It’s . . . hideous.”

“No, it’s beautiful.” And she hugged me, careful to avoid the points of my wings. “Because it’s uniquely you. I always knew you’d grow up to be a badass. I just didn’t know how big a one. Or what kind.”

I smiled and released this part of me. I was so surprised at the ease with which I was able to do so, almost as easy as it had become to shed my skin. “I’m not a badass.”

“Oh yes, you are. Think about it. You’ve got the biggest bully on the playground afraid of you.”

“And that’s right?” I turned to her, not caring that I was naked. This woman had changed my diapers, for goodness’ sake. “That I should force her to hurt my friends and family just because she’s afraid?”

“No,” Mom said, and put her hands on my shoulders. They were warm, those hands. And full of love. “But because another acts out of fear doesn’t mean you blame yourself. You choose to help those in need. Think of the one that fears you the most and try to imagine what would ease their fear.”

“Oblivion?”

“No, I think you can come up with something better than that.” She squeezed my shoulders and moved to the rack beside the door. Retrieving a white robe, she handed it to me and grabbed the brush from the table. I sat in the chair to my right as she brushed the tangles away.

“Mom . . .”

“Mmm?”

“When you go . . . will I be able to remember your face?”

I watched her reflection above my head. Her expression faltered. “Not as clearly as you remember it now. Zoë, don’t dwell so much on not being able to remember your father’s face. Or the fact that you saw him that way. Angels—tend to shape themselves out of the memories of those they wish to speak to. He wasn’t there for solid memories to mature in your mind. It’s not a failure on your part, and your dad realizes that.”

I kinda knew this. Really. And I’m not usually melodramatic. Never have been. But geez . . . maybe I was due for it.

“Man trouble?”

I looked at Mom’s reflection. “Daniel gave me the gun.”

She stopped brushing and looked at me in the mirror. “Daniel?”

I nodded. “He was in the woods and gave me the gun. Told me to use it on Joe to knock out the demon. I think it was him that shot Joe to begin with.” I launched into an explanation of what had happened when Joe and I had gone outside to talk.

Afterward, she sighed. “Well, I should have known something was wrong with him when he refused one of my crab cakes.”

A sin!

“But there’s something else, Mom,” I said, and looked at her reflection. “Daniel’s hosting a Revenant.”

Now that stopped her cold. She moved to stand in front of me. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. That was him that day when someone was in the house. Jason sensed it was Inanna—one of the First Borns. She’s joined with Daniel now. I could hear her—she was the one that told me she would help us. That’s her journal—the smaller one.” And then it was time to fess up on the book and what I’d read.

Not long after that, when I was dressed, Mom called all the players together for a meeting in the library, and again I told what I knew. Me, Rhonda, Mom, Jemmy, Nick, Gunter, and three of the Revenants. The others had been told to go to their lairs and prepare.

Yes, Rhonda had said
lairs
.

The Revenants were Loki, Erishkegal, and Dagda.

Rhonda rubbed at her cheek. “Now I’m all confused.”

I raised my hand. “Me first.”

Erishkegal spoke softly. “I—I didn’t realize that Sophia had—”

“I don’t believe any of us knew,” Dagda said as he sighed. “We were all living our lives in this world, fighting to adjust to this shared existence. Sophia told me there was a great enemy looking for us, and that enemy had created a spell that would obliterate us from the Akashic records.”

All of them nodded. They had all been told the same thing.

Sophia had worked her magic well.

“So the Phantasm in power is actually our oldest sister.” He snorted. “Just great. What a bitch.”

I nodded. “That she is. The spell we’re all looking for wasn’t created by her to get rid of the Revenants—or by this mystery Phantasm that you all believed destroyed your father—it was created by the first Phantasm, your father, Samael, to obliterate his soul so that his daughter wouldn’t have him for sport.”

“So who performed the spell on Samael?” Dagda asked.

I shook my head. “I guess Inanna did. My God, this is all so confusing.”

Jemmy—who I’d completely forgotten about—sat forward from her perch in the chair at Rhonda’s desk. “Not so confusing. Not really.”

We all looked at her to find out what the hell it was she meant. We all sought enlightenment on this.

“It’s like any other story of familial behavior. A grieving father can’t give his first born love—and so she gets all nasty and pouty. He has a lot of other children in order to ease his loneliness, but that doesn’t work either. Then one day pouty nasty child decides she wants to be the Phantasm, the ultimate power. She tricks all the others to lock themselves in boxes because a big baddie is a comin’. They do this, so they don’t see what she did. But the father knew and created a male child to hide away with his only remaining faithful daughter. He writes this big mojo spell and gives it to the daughter—” Jemmy held up a finger. “She’s supposed to obliterate her father—destroy him utterly so that the pouty child don’t take him. But honestly, can any of you actually believe she would do such a thing?”

I thought of my own father. “No, I couldn’t. I mean I might—”

Rhonda hit jackpot the same time I did. “Oh my God—she
changed
it!”

Jemmy nodded at Rhonda. “Don’t you all see? There was no way this child was going to destroy her father. So she made it look like she had. Now, if you performed this ritual on a living body, I’m sure you might get the same results as she got on Lex.”

Jason had said Yamato wasn’t really gone. They’d all agreed. But no one knew where she was.

Dagda snapped his fingers. “Oh, I think I have it. Sophia had part of the spell, but not all of it, so she’s been experimenting until she could find it.”

“And my guess is she did,” Jemmy said. “She found it in the Grimoire inside of Dags. But it’s still not the spell she wants. Otherwise, why possess Joe? Why come here in a physical form?”

“Well, the rituals on us have to be done physically,” Loki said as he tapped a black fingernail to his chin. He looked like Rhonda’s brother today. Black tee shirt, jeans, high-tops, and lots of gaskets on his wrists. Silver on his fingers. “So he has an agent here doing this for him.”

“The detective?” Gunter said.

“No,” I barked at him. “Daniel’s not involved.”

“How can you be so sure?” Gunter said, his eyebrows flying up onto his forehead. “You know something?”

I turned and looked at him. “Do I have to come over there and bitch-slap you?”

There were chuckles all around, especially from Loki.

“Daniel has nothing to do with this.” I hadn’t told them about him. Or about Inanna. That wasn’t for me to say. “Inanna changed the spell, she saved her father’s soul, and tricked her sister. But I’m willing to guess the original spell—”

“What is it, Zoë?” Rhonda said.

I looked at Rhonda. “The original spell.” I held up my left hand, exposing my wrist. “I know where it is!”

IT
all made sense now as I ran through the maze to the center, where I’d hidden the book. The sun was just cresting the trees as dawn came, but the fifteen-foot-high hedges kept the sun away as I navigated, having memorized the path from when I’d stood out on the balcony. In the center of that maze was a fountain with benches. I’d stashed the book in a paper sack beneath one of those benches.