Dark Time Read Free Page B

 
    "What because I fixed a guy's arm I tore off? Geez."  
    "No. Because the Society, and certain members of the APD think you killed Joe Halloran."  
    I stared at her. I searched her face to see if she was kidding. She had to be kidding. "You're…joking, right? You're not joking?"  
    "You've been missing. No one's seen you. Joe disappeared just after you did. You were found months later in his apartment with blood all over your clothes."  
    I came up off the bed—or I sat up as far as I could with all those wires and disks taped to my arms and chest. "That's not Joe's blood! Mom—that was all Inanna's doing. She was feeding all the time—"  
    "Because you gave up," TC said to my right.  
    I turned to see him standing near a door. The room was soft green and I recognized it—or I recognized the layout. I'd spent time in here myself, as well as with Dags often enough. I was in the Society's infirmary. Most likely under guard.  
    He came to the side of the bed. "Your heart can't take those guns anymore, Zoë. The organ's too weak. It hasn't healed properly. I'm assuming you're alive and walking because of what you are and what my sister is. If you were a normal woman—"
    "If I were a normal woman I wouldn't have torn a man's arm off." I knew my tone was sharp. But I was getting irritated because I did not like being accused of killing someone I cared about. "Let's get back to Joe. No one's seen him at all?"
    "I've tried scrying for him," Mom said. "And Azrael's tried sensing him. It's like he's not in this plane anymore. But he's not in a plane we can access."  
    "If…" I swallowed. "If he were dead, would you be able to sense him?"
    "Yes. It's not his physical body, but his spirit." TC crossed his arms over his chest. "But we have a newer problem. The Coterie."  
    I looked from him to mom. "The who?"  
    Mom took my hand in hers. "The Coterie are what the remaining Revenants call their high council meetings. They only call for a Coterie when there's a crisis. The last time one was called was when Sophia tried for the last time to rid the planes of her siblings."  
    A strange weight settled on my shoulder. I had this feeling they were about to tell me something I really didn't want to know. "So…why have they called another one? Is something wrong?" I pushed myself up into a sitting position, wires be damned.  
    Mom said, "Zoë, how much of the Dioscuri have you read?"  
    "Well not a lot. I mean I know bits and pieces of it. They're worried about those files your uncle wrote?"  
    "A prophecy he stumbled upon." TC cleared his throat. "For all I am and what I represent, I'm not really someone who believes in the hocus-pocus of my family's beginnings." TC pulled up a stool and sat down after unbuttoning his suit jacket. "You know about the two sisters? The twins?"  
    Oh wait yeah I'd read this. "Gaia and Lilith."  
    "Right. Gaia was the Seer, the one who saw the past and the future simultaneously. Before her death, Gaia told her sister Lilith that a powerful union between the Abysmal and the Ethereal would herald the cracking of the world and the rebirth of the betrayer."  
    I felt like there should be a dun-dun- duuuun at the end of that sentence. But it was missing the punch line. Mom and I exchanged glances and I finished pushing myself up so I was close to eye-level with him. "You wanna explain that to me? 'Cause I don't get it. Betrayer?"
    "That's the best word we have for the translation. It's all in Babylonian and Sumerian cuneiform and the only real scholars among us are Hermes and Inanna. And she refuses to take a look at the texts to back up what Hermes found." He shifted his position. "Given what they know, the leaders in the Coterie, also Umaymah and Hermes, believe they've identified two possible candidates that could fulfill this prophecy." TC pointed at her. "You. And Dags. You're both combinations of the two planes. The product of unions."  
    "What…does this mean?"  
    TC held up a finger.