Dominion: Zoë Martinique Investigation, Book 6 (19 page)

I hadn't thought of that. Didn't want
to consider Rhonda was a victim in all of this. As a victim, she'd
deserve sympathy. And I just didn't have any for her.

"Where are the Eidolons?" I really
wasn't sure where they were. I'd seen all of them.

"You have one. The Summoning
Eidolon."

Ah, yes: The blue necklace my father
had left for me on the night he disappeared from my life. My mother
had kept it from me, and then used it to cast the spell to seal my
Irin abilities from me. The thought of that brought up her
admission for asking a guy to rape me and kill my boyfriend, so I
bristled and moved on. "I do have it. But it's put away in a safe
place."

"You don't need it?"

"No. That piece of jewelry took my
power away from me not long ago. Why in the hell would I want
anything to do with it now?" I pushed back from him, but didn't let
go as I looked up into his face. He didn't let go, either.
"Seriously?"

He nodded. "Good point. I'm not sure
that means it's really safe, though."

I made a face. "What is someone going
to do with that particular Eidolon? I mean, the others were,
what…?" And here I had to struggle a little to remember
them.

"There were five in all." Joe moved
his hands to my shoulders. "The red one is Destruction."

"Right. You had that one for a
while."

"Mmhm. Then there were the other two
that Bertram and Charolette used."

"Command and Possession."

"That's them." I paused. "I can sort
of understand why the Seraphim would go after the Possession,
Command, and Destruction. Those are like three of the four
Horsemen. But why take Mom's Eidolon? That stone's more like a
Mother Earth type of power, not something it could use against
Maureen."

Joe shrugged as he finally let go. I
shivered a little. I liked it when Joe was affectionate like that.
He wasn't that way often. He moved into the bathroom and flipped on
the light. "Geez, they even trashed that huge mirror in here. And
your bedroom." I continued standing in the middle of the hall. I
thought about heading down to the basement where Mom kept her
hoodoo, but I didn't want to go alone.

I was kinda spooked.

Me. The Wraith. And I was
afraid.

Joe came back out of the bathroom with
a funny look on his face. "What's wrong?"

"Well, you know that other room? The
one I sleep in sometimes?" He wrenched his thumb back at the
bathroom. "It wasn't touched."

"Maybe they didn't know it was
there?"

"Maybe…" Me licked his lips. "Let's
head down to the basement. I'm not really seeing anything missing,"
he said as he preceded me down.

"No, it's all smashed. Maybe that's
what they wanted to do? Make it all confusing-looking so no one
knows if something was stolen or not?"

Joe didn't answer as he moved through
the kitchen to the door leading to the basement in the kitchen. I
filed in behind him and grabbed one of his back belt loops as we
descended. He yanked on the string overhead as we went down, and
the light came on.

The mess was even more severe down
there. Every box and tub she'd had on the shelves were on the
floor, turned over, and its contents spilled out and stomped on.
Statues, books, trinkets I remembered from our different houses
across the states growing up. It'd all been down here, and the
asshole had destroyed all of it.

Then I saw the blood in the far corner
behind the stairs, and realized this was where Jemmy had found Mom.
I stood next to it and stared. Whatever it was had surprised her.
Otherwise, there was no other way for anything to get the jump on
Nona Martinique. The woman had eyes in the back of her
head.

I sure got caught enough growing up to
know they were real.

"There's a lot of salt scattered
about. I wonder if she'd been down here making a circle?" Joe moved
some boxes with his boot to get a better look at the
floor.

What caught my eye was the weird
semicircle of things on the floor around the bloody area. Unlike
everything else, they weren't touched, but what made them really
different than everything was the fact I'd never seen them before.
Most of the trashed stuff I recognized—pieces of my life all junked
together.

But these?

There was a small silver box, a
leather-bound diary, feathers, a small bottle of what might be
salt, a black-handled knife and—

"Holy shit."

I jumped at Joe's voice. He'd come to
stand beside me and now was looking down at the stuff. "You know
what this is?" I asked. A clinking noise made both of us sort of go
all fighter stance. Joe had his gun out and I shifted to Wraith in
an instant. Wings out, gun up as we stared at the pile of stuff.
Maybe something in all the piles of trash dislodged because we
stepped on something. After a few minutes of staring I looked back
at the semi-circle.

"Those are all Nona's ceremonial
things. Things she keeps in her Veil. I know this because I saw
them when she demonstrated the spell to me." Joe knelt down beside
them and held his hands over them, but didn't touch. To my
surprise, his fingers glowed with a soft light blue. "Yeah, it's
them. Looking at the circle…I'm thinking when she lost
consciousness, the Veil collapsed."

I knelt down beside him.

Something else made a noise behind us,
so I turned from the waist up and looked around again. God, I hoped
there weren't mice or rats down here. I might be a big, scary
oogie, but show me a rodent and I turn into
girly-bitch-diva–from-hell. "So…" I turned back around. "So does
that happen when you're asleep to? Does the Veil
collapse?"

"Sleep and unconsciousness aren't the
same thing. A sleeping person can still respond to loud noises—like
outside stimulus. An unconscious person can't—which is why a lot of
times people in comas or long term unconsciousness are intubated to
aid in breathing, because an unconscious person can't clear their
throat or cough. Nona's personal opinion was the unconscious brain
can't hold magic like a Veil while unconscious since it's too busy
making sure everything else is working…" He pointed at the floor.
"So it just shuts off all nonessentials and magic is one of
them."

"You think the thing that attacked her
knew that?"

"No. Otherwise this stuff would have
been picked through and smashed like the rest of it. I'm banking
Jemmy surprised it after it attacked Nona. Whatever or whoever it
is might not have seen the Veil collapse."

"Oh, wow…this is personal," Joe
said.

I looked at the box in his
hand. Inside, on a bed of silver satin, lay two gold rings. I
picked the larger of the two up and looked at it. On the inside was
engraved
To My Forever Love,
Adiran
.

It was a wedding band.

Joe picked up the smaller one and
tilted it. "To my forever love, Nona."

I put the ring back and wiped my hands
on my jeans. "She should have thrown those out."

Joe put the smaller one back in the
box, closed it, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. "Sorry, but
I'm putting these away. And her athame." He reached for the
knife.

Another noise behind me made me
turn—

And I froze.

The noise behind us was a
little louder this time. Joe leaned forward and picked up the
silver box as I pivoted on the balls of my feet, still down in a
crouch. I narrowed my eyes as I scanned the piles of stuff and the
tipped-over tubs. Some of the stuff was holiday decorations.
Christmas ornaments, parts of the fake tree, a few Halloween
plastic pumpkins, etc. Silver garland moved on one of the small
piles where it lay draped over my old plastic trick-or-treat
pumpkin. I had fond memories of that bucket, filled with candy and
massive trips to the dentist office. But fond memories or
not—garland wasn't supposed to be
moving
on it's own!

"Can't leave this out anywhere. I'd
hate to have it used for the wrong reason. You know these are
magical instruments. These knives are used to focus a witch's
power, not draw blood. And if it ever draws blood—"

"Joe—"

"—what?"

"—what did you say someone could use
mom's Eidolon for?"

"Well…" He shifted and slipped the
knife into his pocket as well. "Anything to do with
creation."

I put my hand on his arm because I was
seriously creeped out and about a hairsbreadth away from shifting.
"You mean, creating something like that?"

Joe turned. "Shit—"

Standing on the farthest pile was my
pumpkin bucket, only it looked like a possessed pumpkin bucket. The
silver garland had formed itself into arms out at its side, flexing
garland-made hands. The damn thing stood on a pair of red Christmas
candles, and riding inside of the thing, with its head poking out
of the top, sat one those battery-operated singing Santa
decorations. Only…Santa had a totally maniacal look in his eye and
the happy smiling jack-o'-lantern of my youth became Jack
Skellington.

It made an all-too-familiar growling
sound. One I'd heard several times while out training with
TC.

"Fuck…there's another one." Joe
hissed.

I shifted my gaze to the right as
several red-and-blue satin Christmas balls bunched together to form
a sort of peanut shape. Ribbon rolled off of several ribbon wheels
and wove itself into arms and legs. It picked up a pair of silver
scissors in one woven hand as a face formed from the torn-up pieces
of wrapping paper.

"I think I know what it's using the
Eidolon for," I said, and swallowed as Joe reached slowly for his
gun.

"Fetches," we said
together.

Chapter Nineteen

No time for an attack plan. The second
I shifted to Wraith, these two nasties launched at us like two Tim
Burton nightmares.

Of course, the one made out of my
childhood candy bucket came after me. The mouth of the thing moved
within the plastic of the container and grew…well, long plastic
teeth.

I carried memories of cutting myself
on those kinds of containers growing up, especially on those weird
little seam glitches. You know the ones that looked like human skin
tags? So if those cut pretty good, I could only image what
teeth-shaped plastic would feel like.

Ouch!

"Joe!" I yelled as I launched into the
air, although not far 'cause basements have low-hanging ceilings.
"What the hell? Is this what it's doing with the
Eidolon?"

"I….doubt it," He ducked as the
Christmas-ball-and-garland Fetch threw a garland lasso at his head.
Joe grabbed a mop and used the handle as both a shield and a sword.
One block, and then two, but as he blocked the second attempt, he
wrapped the garland around the mop handle and yanked. The Fetch
came off its creepy little legs and flew at Joe.

I grinned as my magic cop fired a
blast of blue-white light at the thing and it exploded in a shower
of Styrofoam balls and shredded green and red silk.

Cheering was what I wanted to do, but
I had an emergency of my own, since spooky–creepy-pumpkin-bucket
Fetch was trying to gnaw on my slippers. Although I was impressed
that the little dude was having a hard time, since my bunnies were
not amused by its antics. The right slipper grew seriously long
teeth, grabbed Pumpkin Bucket's hand, and flung him across the
room.

Yay!

Although…it was a little creepy to
have these things on my feet…. o.O

Joe and I exchanged a grin until a
noise behind me sent a slight chill down my spine. I turned in time
to see the Fetch Joe had been fighting re-form itself. I'd seen
Fetches create themselves from the materials around them—that's
what they did. But I'd never seen one re-form after being busted
apart. Even creepier, it replenished itself with the bits that were
broken when Joe struck it.

Once it finished, it looked like a
some weird, fucked-up, bashed-in Christmas-ball Picasso.

"Now
that's
probably what it's using the
Eidolon for—they're regenerating."

"Zoë! Behind you!"

The basement has shelves along the
back wall. And although all the boxes and tubs had been pulled off
and dumped, the shelves were bolted into the cinder block behind
them, thus still intact. Pumpkin Bucket recovered and climbed up on
top of the top shelf, and was about to jump down on my head—until a
blast of blue-white light came from the right side and nailed it
dead center.

I ducked as millions of shards of
plastic sailed through the air. Whoohoo! I turned to give Joe a
high five. He stumbled back—not tripping over anything—but like he
was off balance. I assumed it was that damned Veil making him dizzy
again. And he'd already cracked off a bunch of witchy power (don't
assume I understand it, 'cause I don't…but it's cool).

He really didn't look good. I realized
in that instant Joe hadn't slept in forty-eight hours. And he'd
already admitted to Mastiff he'd been having trouble sleeping to
begin with.