“Well, for what they do have”—I glanced back at the morgue door—“it’s enough.”
Rhonda was at my side. “Can you help her? Mialani? Lex was so convinced you could.”
I didn’t meet her eyes. Rhonda had an uncanny way of telling when I was lying. Me to her? Not so much. I’m more the gullible type. “I think she’d like to believe I could—but what I touched—” I held out my hand. The ends of my fingers still tingled at the memory—the feel of that body’s insides. Usually, there wasn’t any feel. But it was more like she’d been stuffed with radioactive Jell-O.
Ew.
Joe waved at us, then signed,
“So what’s the game plan?”
I looked at Rhonda. I wasn’t the boss. Didn’t think I ever was.
She sighed. “I told Lex I’d do what I could to look up any mention of this First Born ritual in the Society’s texts. Zoë—you read anything in the Dioscuri notes?”
“Nope,” I said. “But then—I’m only like—” I held up my left hand and indicated a small amount. “This much through it. But I can skip around, see if there is.”
Joe held up a hand before reaching into his shirt pocket for his small notepad and a pen. He scribbled something down and handed it to Rhonda.
Why was I suddenly put out that he handed it to her and not me?
Rhonda looked sharply at Joe. “You sure?”
Joe shrugged and signed,
“Why not?”
“Why not what?” I said.
“Joe suggests we get hold of Dags.” She paused, and I made the hugest effort to keep my jaw closed. “He has a wealth of knowledge in that Grimoire—and he might have something there that could help us figure out this ritual—or the symbols.”
Uh-huh. I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at Joe. Bring Dags in. Right. Because you know your girlfriend has the hots for him. Smart man.
Not so much.
I shrugged. “Might. You think he’ll help us?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
I blinked. “You talked to him?” My thoughts ran straight to the letter Dags had left me before his disappearing act out of Atlanta again. His confession of love. To me.
“I talk to him all the time.”
Uh . . . s’cuse me? My gaze snapped back to her. “You do? You spy on him, and you talk to him? What’d he say? What’s he been doing? Why hasn’t he—”
I almost said it. Almost confessed I’d called him on my own. Called him several times over the past month. Left messages with questions. But he’d never called me back.
Joe touched my shoulder and frowned at me.
Zoë—Rhonda has Dags watched because he’s carrying something very dangerous inside of him. And she talks to him all the time because
—he shrugged—
he works for her.
I gaped at him.
He frowned.
Didn’t Rhonda tell you? Dags McConnell is an employee of the Society of Ishmael. She’s his boss.
5
I
absolutely freak’n hate surprises. Which is kinda funny given I tend to live my life through trapdoors.
But there it was—again—another surprise. Another tidbit of news that I was ignorant of. Dags was working for the Society—and he’d been in contact with Rhonda.
Not me. Not the one he’d slept with.
Oh no.
Rhonda.
Not that that instance meant anything. No. I was over that. A moment of weakness. I mean, come on—with the way things had gone with Daniel, my libido had been starving for attention. And I was sure it would’ve been better sex with Daniel.
Sex is sex.
Right?
Uh-huh. If that were true, why did I feel so damned bad all of a sudden?
Driving back to Nona’s, I was quiet. Which—given the return of my voice a month ago—was an odd thing. And I felt Rhonda sometimes glance over at me. I knew Tim was there, still in the car. We’d given him the 411 on what’d happened inside after he berated me for not taking his rock in. Well, sorry. Sue me. I had a whole bunch of other things on the brain, you know? Like . . .
Why the hell did it bother me that Dags had talked to Rhonda and not me?
And why the hell—
“—didn’t you tell me you’d been talking to him this whole month while he never answered or returned my phone calls.”
Silence.
That’s when I realized I’d finished my thought aloud.
Fuck.
Awkward.
I glanced at Rhonda. She was stiff and white-knuckled, her gaze fixed on Ponce.
What do I say?
“Zoë—” Rhonda began, as we neared the left turn onto Moreland Avenue that would take us into Little Five Points. “When Dags agreed to work for the Society—it wasn’t really a request. It was—” She pursed her lips. “It was a demand. A condition.”
I was narrowing my eyes at her suspiciously. If there was one thing about Rhonda—she was full of all sorts of land mines. And I’d blasted my ass on a few of them these past few months. “Care to elaborate on that?”
“You understand what I mean when I say that Dags is carrying something very important. Right?”
Ya.
“And you understand that this something important is, in essence, keeping him alive.”
Ya.
“And you know that there are members of the Society who have concerns about a guy so young—infused with all the spells and powers—whose very soul is split between the Abysmal and the Ethereal. I.e. Alice and Maureen.”
Uh . . . ya . . .
“But did you know that over half of the council within the Society voted to destroy Dags—to retrieve the Grimoire in order to keep it safe?”
Uh . . . ya . . . no.
“I didn’t even know you had a council in the Society.”
She glanced at me with that
are you nuts
look she’d been giving me a lot lately. “Yeah . . . you don’t think that I like
own
the Society of Ishmael, do you? That I’m the numero uno grand mucketymuck?”
Funny . . . I think I actually mentally called her that once.
Ah!
Mental note:
Rhonda is not the grand high mucketymuck.
Uh . . .
Addendum to mental note:
find out who is.
I waited for the rest of the story. “So . . . and?”
She stopped at the light to the left of the Vortex and I got the craving for good hamburgers. But it was still too early. Only 8:30 A.M. Though the streets down here were already getting crowded with people. Working or not working, Little Five was always alive. “So and—I’m really only a figurehead. Having been the niece of one of the founding members of the Society. And because I have a personal relationship with the Wraith.”
Awwww . . .
“And I own the controlling financial interest in the Society.”
“It has money?”
“Loads of it. And my uncle made sure the older—” She clammed up quickly and looked around as if those very older people could pop out of the air. But then again, in my story, they could. “The more power-hungry members of the group couldn’t gain access to it. Oh, they’re not as bad as that, Zoë. Close your mouth.”
“You make it sound like Congress versus the White House.”
“Well, in a way it is. My uncle had to deal with this on a daily basis, but he also had to deal with people like Bonville and Rodriguez—and thankfully those assholes are dead.”
Hear! Hear! I’d been present when Rodriguez exploded. Oh happy day! “But the monster grew another head?”
She laughed at that. “Yeah, it did. The council is made up of seven individuals—each of them having had something to do with your great-uncle’s first experiments. Like working in the lab, or being there hands on. All of them live in different states. There are seven members to prevent deadlocking. No tie votes.”
“Is that a good idea?” Tim said from the back.
“Dunno.” Rhonda shrugged as the light turned green, and she waited for the slowpoke in front of us to move so she could turn right onto Euclid. I looked past the cars to the left, where Moreland continued on, and saw the Zesto’s sign.
Mmm . . . a milk shake sounds good. And they have the best.
“It’s kept them moving all these years. And my uncle was good at keeping them corralled. Though it has been the cause of Machiavellian machinations of biblical proportions at times.” She laughed.
Tim laughed.
I didn’t get it. What’s a Machiavellian? Was it like the Merovingian in the second
Matrix
movie?
“So what exactly was the problem?” Tim asked.
“Well, fear mostly.” Rhonda turned the Beetle into the back driveway of Mom’s shop/house. That’s when we noticed Mastiff’s car. Joe was already here as well. The boy must’ve done warp two to get here before us. Rhonda ain’t no slow driver. She parked it and released her belt. “It’s like this.” She half turned in her seat as I unfastened my own belt. “Dags ended up with the power they’d all wanted—especially once it was known that the Bonville Grimoire was indeed the original Cruorem’s bible. All those old spells, incantations, stories, histories—very important stuff. Hell, it was in that book I learned how to create a Veil.” And to demonstrate, she held up her right hand—and it disappeared in the air between us.
Seconds later, she pulled it out but was clutching an umbrella. Demonstration over, she tucked it back into the invisible Veil.
“Oh, so it’s like having a Clarke Belt surrounding you all the time?” Tim said.
Oh, I know that!
Clarke Belt was the name given to the area that surrounded the planet that allowed geostationary orbit.
Named after some writer or scientist named Clarke.
And something to do with Sri Lanka.
Wow . . . I really needed to organize the junk folder in my head.
Rhonda was smiling. “You could say that. But—when it came down to it—it wasn’t that they really saw Dags as a threat. I mean, they kept him locked up at the mansion for a week examining him after it happened—and they determined he wasn’t possessed. It’s just that he had the power, and they didn’t.”
As we got out of the car, the Georgia June thick air hit me in the face. Instantly, I was coated in a thin layer of sweat. God, if there was one thing I hated, it was the Southern heat. Like moving through soup. Even at eight in the morning. And it was just gonna get hotter by the time August got here.
Meh.
Tim vanished—and who could blame him. It was cooler on the other side. Not this thick. I grabbed up the rock and shut the door before scooting up to Rhonda as we neared the back porch. “Wait . . .”
She stopped at the lower step and looked up at me. “Huh?”
“You said—” I licked my lips. The hair under my ponytail was already sticking to my neck. At this rate I was gonna need another shower. I was already walking in that dream state of no sleep. “You said they kept Dags at the mansion? Like . . . as a prisoner?”
She looked sad. “Almost. Honestly, Zoë, I didn’t know what the asswipes were doing in the beginning. They snatched him out of the hospital after we got him away from Rodriguez—and he wasn’t used to the changes his body went through.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. Cicadas buzzed from the brush nearby between Mom’s home and Jemmy’s. “What do you mean?”
“Well”—she shook her head—“when they took him from the hospital—he defended himself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He made one of the members disappear.”
!!!
Oh. My. God.
There was so much I didn’t know then about what that boy had gone through. From being branded by the Cruorem as a Guardian, to having the Familiars sealed in his palms, to Rhonda fusing the Grimoire to his very soul. And yet—when I’d seen him again that night, I’d nearly barbecued the house doing magic—
The softness he’d shown me. The care and the kind words. It was like none of what he’d gone through mattered. If any of his experiences left scars, he kept them on the inside, never bringing attention to them. “What—what did he do with that member? What happened?”
“They’re vague about it—” Rhonda looked irritated. “I had to scry to see for myself. And what I saw was unforgivable.”
I waited. Then leaned forward. “Care to share it with me?”
She balled her hands into fists, her backpack on her left shoulder. Her skin looked even paler in the June morning light, and I couldn’t see her eyes through the shades. “They came into his hospital room—six of them. One of them had a syringe ready. But Dags woke up—” She gritted her teeth. “He opened his mouth to say something, and one of them slapped a pillow over his face as the others held him down. They were going to shoot him full of something—but then the syringe and the one holding it vanished.”
I blinked. “Just . . . poof?”
“Yeah. Poof. It freaked them out. They ran out of there, and Dags managed to catch his breath and call Joe. We came and got him, then the council called and demanded he be brought in for examination. Bastards. Joe stayed with him, you know. Didn’t leave them alone with him.”
“Joe did?”
She nodded and looked at me. “There was one thing—”
And I never discovered what that one thing was as the back door opened, and Joe and Mastiff walked out.
Mastiff was a tall man—Joe’s height. With a medium build and close-cropped hair, his dark skin was smooth in the sunlight. I always thought of him as a young Denzel Washington. Same bright beautiful smile. Only this Denzel knew about the bad things.
Hell—he’d been shot by one. Daniel Frasier.
We looked up at them as Nona came out to stand to their left. “You two need to get in here for this. We have a problem.”
Rhonda and I looked at each other. “We do?” I asked.
Mastiff nodded and looked at me. His suit was impeccable— down to the starched white collar. An opposite to Joe’s more mountain-man casual. “Especially you, Zoë.” He sighed. “Daniel Frasier disappeared from the Mt. Sounder mental facility in Maryland three days ago. He was spotted in town last night, asking about you.”
I blinked. Daniel . . . escaped from a mental hospital?