Holidays are Hell

But Zoe had stopped listening. She closed her eyes, and let the images come, fast and furious, as Olivia's airy voice faded to the background.

Nurse Nancy shutting the door on a grieving couple who'd just «lost» their adopted daughter. Dennis and Andie.

The same nurse warding off a handshake, just as Zoe would've done.

A couple anticipating the long-awaited arrival of their daughter, though, strangely, they hadn't yet agreed on a name.

Zoe dove for her briefcase, fumbling for the papers inside. Typed neatly at the top of the page: McCormick, Dennis and Andria.

Signed below: McCormick, Dave and Andie. Zoe was slow—stupidly inattentive—but she was suddenly catching up fast.

We're having the child moved…

"Oh, my God."

She lurched forward and grabbed at the door, Olivia's questioning alarm spiraling out behind her in the wide, deserted lobby. Midnight, Zoe thought, doing a mental head slap. A perfect time to snatch a child. She took the stairs two at a time, her briefcase banging awkwardly against her hip, her breath echoing in the stairwell.

"Nurse Nancy," Zoe said, slapping her palm on the counter in front of a tired-eyed nurse she'd never seen before. "Where is she?"

The nurse blinked up at her. "Who?"

Zoe cursed, and reached across the Formica counter. It wouldn't take much to create a distraction in a hospital. Just a false a code 99 raising the alarm that some other patient had crashed. She wondered briefly what ploy the Shadows had used.

"Excuse me! What do you think you're—"

No chart. Ignoring the nurse, she raced for the nursery.

"Ma'am! You need to sign in!"

Zoe skidded around the corner. God, but they'd had their roles down pat.

The baby was gone. Zoe squeezed her eyes shut, and lowered her head to the glass window. There was no Nurse Nancy. No couple named Dave and Andie. If she'd been thinking straight, if she hadn't been so damned close to the situation, she might have noted the small things: the name slip, the way the nurse's nostrils had flared at Zoe's slip of emotion, the couple's forced surface emotions. She'd have seen all of it then as clearly as she saw it now. "Ma'am, are you all right?"

No, Zoe thought, pushing the other woman aside to charge back down the hall. And neither was her granddaughter.

Chapter 2

In the car on the way to the address scrawled across the discharge papers, Zoe tried to figure out how the Shadows had found out about the baby. She was certain they couldn't scent out the power, the Light, on Joanna. If Zoe had withheld even a smidgen of her own personal chi, then maybe, but she hadn't. She'd given it all up, and the very fact that she hadn't scented any of them assured her of that. But they'd taken the baby, and that couldn't be coincidence. So how had they known?

The only thing Zoe could be absolutely certain of was that the Shadows hadn't known who she really was. Otherwise she'd be on her knees in front of their leader right now, begging for her life. Paying for her past.

Zoe shuddered at the thought of the Tulpa, then resolutely pushed his image away. She needed to concentrate on the task at hand, follow the Shadows' trail one step at a time, and go from there. But when she pulled her car to a stop she didn't even need to look at the FOR SALE sign on the lawn to know the house was empty. She yanked her cell phone from her jacket pocket, a slim new model she'd bought on the street and called the number listed at the top of her papers Out of service. She then had the operator give her the number to the Sheep Mountain facility, where they told her no baby by the name of McCormick had been admitted that evening. Zoe was disappointed but not surprised. Both sides of the Zodiac force—Shadow and Light—had private facilities with their own medical staff. It kept mortal physicians and officials from being suspicious or curious when the body count rose, and often acted as a place of respite for injured agents until the next splitting dawn or dusk, when the veil between their two parallel worlds lifted, and they could pass easily into a different, safe, and alternate reality.

So Zoe had no way of finding out where the enemy agents had taken the baby, and even if she had she'd be hard pressed to take on even one of them in her… condition. Mortals were deplorably weak.

But, she thought, biting her lip, there was one place she could go… one person she could turn to for help. She'd sworn never to see or call upon him again, but if she could catch him before sun-up, she might be able to convince him to help her. Because if he ever really knew her—if he had ever truly loved her—he'd recognize her even beneath her mortal disguise and without the power that had made her his equal.

And if he refused? asked an unwelcomed voice inside of her, a bitter reminder of what she'd done. Then her lineage, and the legacy of the Archer, ended with her, and she'd sacrificed it all for nothing. Including her children. Including, she thought, pulling from the curb, his love.