“Parker, enough with the cryptic shit. What did you see?”
“Ice.” He smiled, then a soft laugh overtook him. “Ice. First hell, in your infinite anger, then everything else.”
“Hell? You saw hell freeze over? Like literally?”
But it was too late. Time had bounced back with a thunderous roar. Parker said something else, but the rebound of time drowned it out.
“In or out,” the EMT said, oblivious. “Now.”
“Fine.” I rose and stepped down from the van.
The angel was gone. Artemis followed me out, and I called to Parker just before they closed the door, “Grant Guerin!”
He nodded, then disappeared.
I could only wrap my head around three words: What, the, and fuck.
I called Cookie on the way to the pediatrician’s place where Mrs. Foster worked as an office manager.
“So, you know how you go into a situation expecting one thing and something else comes along and blindsides you? Something you never saw coming?”
Which is the definition of blindside. “I do, actually. What happened?”
I relayed what happened in tremendous detail, telling her how Parker began worshiping me in the middle of a cross-examination, how he knew I was a god, how he believed I’d somehow managed to get his wife preggers which, oddly enough, I had. It was a whole transfer of mystical healing elements when I’d kissed him, but I wasn’t about to go around claiming I could help couples get pregnant. I’d have to change the name of my business to Davidson Investigations and Fertilization Clinic. Then I gave Cookie time to absorb it all.
After a few minutes, she asked, “Charley, what the hell did you do to that poor man?”
“Fuck if I know.” I was just as lost as the next person. “He called me a god eater. He said he saw seven become one.”
Artemis had hitched a ride. She was sticking her head out the window. The closed window. My closed window. She may have been incorporeal to the rest of the world, but to me she weighed about a thousand pounds. And driving with her in my lap was like trying to steer in a full-body cast. This could not be safe.
“Well, let’s think about it. He saw seven become one. That makes perfect sense. You are the descendent of the seven original gods from your dimension, right? Once all the other gods merged down to one, you were all that was left. You were the thirteenth.”
“Oh, right. I hadn’t thought of that. But I had nothing to do with their joining. Two gods merge to become one. To become stronger. And they just kept doing it until I was the only one left.”
“He called you a god eater?”
“Yes. What the hell is a god eater?”
“I don’t know. Sounds ominous.”
“I was going to say pretentious, but okay. Hey, I know. We should call Garrett. He’s our research and development guy. Maybe he’s come across something like this in his reading.”
When one looked at Garrett Swopes, research and development was so not the first thing that came to mind. He was more a combination of GI Joe and a Chippendales dancer. But he’d really gotten into the whole research gig. He could know something.
“I’ll get right on it.”
“You okay?”
“I will be just as soon as you figure out what’s going on with my husband.”
I loved it when Cookie called Ubie her husband. I was such a romantic. “You didn’t happen to come up with a reason for me to be visiting the office manager of a pediatrician’s practice, did you?”
“How much do you know about copiers?”
“Copiers?”
The young girl behind the desk took the tried-and-true attitude of sheer boredom and transformed it into an art form. She barely looked out of high school. Nobody mastered the epitome of boredom like a teenager. Sadly, as we aged, we lost the delicate intricacies of the skill set. It was rather like losing an ancient language or a potato soup recipe.
“Did you say copiers?” she asked again above the earsplitting screams of a surly toddler. I’d fought demons and malevolent gods and even Lucifer himself, and nothing terrified me more than an angry two-year-old.
“Yes. If I could just talk to your office manager —”
“We already have a copier.” She popped her gum and continued to stare.
I forced a smile. A plastic one I’d found on sale at a consignment store a few weeks back. “Yes, but you’ve never tried the Eureka Mighty Mite.”
“That’s a vacuum cleaner.”
“Or the CLS550.”
“That’s a Mercedes.”
Holy shit, she was good.
“Look, is the office manager in or not?”
After drawing in a long, deep breath that sucked most of the oxygen out of the room, she called out, “Eve!”
I froze in anticipation as Mrs. Foster, a.k.a. Reyes’s abductor, walked around a corner. Reyes had been right when we talked about them a few weeks ago. While Shawn Foster had light coloring to the extreme, Mrs. Foster had dark hair and eyes. She looked in her early fifties, her short hair curled and styled to perfection. Her crisp business suit and thick-heeled pumps perfectly matched. She looked about as much like a child abductor as I looked like, well, the grim reaper. But the moment her gaze landed on me, her emotions rocketed into overdrive.
She stopped short and stared a long moment before catching herself. “Can I help you?” she asked, walking forward.
Did she know who I was as well? Shawn Foster, her would-be son, had busted me casing their house. Had she done the same?
“Hi,” I said, offering her the same plastic smile I’d flashed her colleague. Thank goodness it was BPA-free. “I was wondering how happy you are with your copier.”