Indigo(12)
She flowed across the room, snatching the gun from Bullington’s hand and knocking him aside. In the far corner she plucked open a fuse box and tore out several fuses. Beside the box was a burglar alarm. She quickly disabled it.
She turned around and saw Bullington struggling for the door. He tripped in his own mess, sprawling in an avalanche of musty fast-food wrappers and faded papers. Indigo was on him in a second, and her shadows swallowed his screams.
“You know who I am.”
Bullington squirmed beneath her, head twisted to one side and eyes squeezed closed. He had to have heard of Indigo. If he was involved with the Children, he would be all too aware of the things she’d done. Maybe he had been expecting this meeting for some time. If that was the case, she saw no reason to disappoint him.
She breathed in deeply, then out again slowly. As she exhaled, the darkness spread, enveloping the writhing, petrified man, drowning him in eternal black nothing.
Indigo kept it that way for a few breaths, then stood and stepped back, taking the shadows with her.
Bullington scrambled to his feet and staggered away, gasping, sobbing like a child. He stumbled against his desk, trying not to take his eyes off the shadow-clad figure before him. She denied the sunlight slanting through broken blinds on his windows. If the sad room had contained any shred of hope or optimism, she would have swallowed it all.
“The Children of Phonos. I need to find them.”
Bullington’s eyes went wide. He shook his head and drooled.
“You’re afraid of them?”
He nodded.
“Scared of what they’ll do to you if you tell me about them?”
The nodding became more enthusiastic.
“Imagine what I’ll do to you if you don’t.” The threat hung in the air, working on the lawyer as he fought to catch his breath. He slumped slowly onto the desk, deflating, his shoulders shaking as he silently sobbed.
Indigo flowed forward and slapped him, rocking his head to one side. She ran her hand behind his ear, then turned his head in the other direction, checking that ear, too. There were no sigils, no signs of the cult.
“You think they’d welcome me?” he whispered. All his defiance was gone. Now he only sounded sad and pathetic.
“Tell me what they’re doing.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll show you the darkness again and leave you there.”
He breathed heavily, weighing options. He was not brave. “Another sacrifice. Three victims this time.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Bullington shrugged.
“Why three? And where?”
He stared directly at her, and for the first time she felt some grudging respect. Few people could gaze into such darkness without seeing all their own ugliness glaring back.
“Castle Hill. A warehouse on the point.”
She nodded and started to turn, thinking, her mind racing forward to the horrors the cultists were planning. “Do they already have the children they need for the ritual?”
Only in the last instant did she realize her mistake. He could stare at her like that, no longer fearing for his life and sanity, because he had nothing left to live for. He’d already decided on that.
Bullington shoved himself back across his desk, pivoted, and leaped at the nearest window. The blinds broke, the window smashed.
Indigo reached out with a tendril of shadows and missed grabbing hold of his flailing foot by inches. As she heard the impact from below, the squealing brakes, the screams, she gathered herself and probed outward for a safe place.
As ever, the shadows took her there.
3
Safe was relative.
The shadows deposited Indigo in an alley behind her own building, where two guys were arguing over money. One of them had a gun. She felt it more than she saw it, a concentrated heaviness in the darkness, a weight hanging on the man’s belt—where the firearm’s cold metal had grown warm against his belly. She wondered if he’d yelped when he jammed it there in the first place, cold steel connecting with skin. She wondered if he’d felt stupid for the uncomfortable macho gesture.
She wondered, but she didn’t care. And she didn’t intervene.
Indigo had bigger problems than two day-drunk assholes with a gambling disagreement; she had a cult with plans to take three more children and perform three more sacrifices, probably sooner rather than later. She withdrew again, dragging the early-morning shadows fast behind her—and leaving a chilly breeze in her wake.
The men stopped arguing and shivered. Nervously, they glanced back and forth, from corner to corner—and agreed with bobbing heads that, yes, they could finish the conversation someplace else.
Good, Indigo thought as she retreated farther into the alley’s piss-smelling depths. Go argue under someone else’s window.
She debated her options, but she debated them swiftly. If the Children of Phonos hadn’t already gathered their intended sacrifices, it wouldn’t take them long to scare up another victim, or two, or three.
With this unhappy thought in mind, she closed her eyes. With a quick twist of the gloom, she arrived home, de-cloaking with speed enough to scatter the Assholes.
“Sorry, guys,” she mumbled to the cats, jerking herself free of the murk and letting it evaporate. Gossamer tendrils of the unreal stuff floated ceiling-ward, reeled backward, and coiled in the corners. A small wisp clung to her ankle. She kicked it loose and staggered into the living area, feeling shaky and short of breath … feeling as if she’d awakened too fast from a dream that was too awful to recall.