Indigo(16)

She shook the thought away. It went easily, slipping out of her attention—as if its appearance had been perfunctory, and not some sweet function of nostalgia.

There was no time for any reverie, much less nostalgia. All the faithful were assembled; that was what the door meant when it clanged like that. No one else would be allowed in, and no one wanted out except for the kids who never asked to be there in the first place.

She slinked around the door, holding the gloom tight around her and praying it would hide her. She wasn’t praying to anyone in particular. She never prayed to anyone in particular. Except … whom had the monks prayed to? She couldn’t remember. Buddhists, they must’ve been. Something like that? She’d studied with them for years, so why couldn’t she remember? What a stupid thing to forget.

Let it go, she commanded herself. It wasn’t important. Luis was important. Wiping the Children of Phonos off the face of the earth, that was important. Nothing else.

Closer she came, drawn by the voices now hushed, now quivering with excitement. She flowed toward them, as near as she dared. Soon, only a thin corridor wall separated her from the cultists and their shuffling feet, their giddy whispers.

She reached her senses out through the shadows and felt the shape of the room where they had gathered—a large, open space with a loft above, overlooking the warehouse floor. Easing into darkness, she rose upward, pushed herself through the unseen spaces until she emerged high overhead. She perched on an oversize I-beam and glowered down at the ceremony about to begin.

The Phonoi were dressed too fancy for folding metal chairs, but they sat upon them anyway, in three shallow rows—twenty-five eager believers by Indigo’s count—all facing an empty lectern in front of a table covered with a black cloth.

Footsteps rang out, amplified by the cavernous space and the poured-cement floors, gritty with dust and grime. Along with the footsteps came a tall woman wearing white.

Her dress was not quite frilly enough to be called a gown, Indigo could see that. Her shoes were white, glistening patent leather that cost a month of Nora’s rent. Hell, the woman’s hair was nearly white—that washed-out blond sometimes called platinum until an old lady wears it, and then you call it silver.

The woman stepped up to the lectern with a burgundy-lipstick smile.

No one fidgeted anymore. No feet tapped, and no one even cleared a throat or cracked a knuckle.

This had to be the high priestess, or so Indigo concluded. She wasn’t fully versed in the hierarchy of the cult and its clandestine ways, but what else would you call a woman like that? She’d hushed a crowd with only a smile and a lectern. She was deaconess, not acolyte. She was power, and that power was as dark as her clothing was bright.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the priestess purred. Her voice was unexpectedly low. It sounded educated and confident, with a whiff of money around the edges. “I’m so glad you all could be here. We need everyone’s support.”

Indigo’s first impulse was to leap down off the I-beam like freaking Batman and smash the woman to the ground. She restrained herself, but barely. Come to think of it, hadn’t Batman developed his ninja-style skills at a monastery, too?

She rubbed her eyes and rolled her shoulders, forcing herself to concentrate on the scene below.

“I regret to confirm what most of you have suspected—our previous efforts were met with failure. Not perfect failure,” she corrected, raising one finely manicured finger. “For we are absolutely making progress. The demon is awakening, and remembering himself. He will rise to join us soon, but we must show him the way. Not in a single ceremony, brief and rushed as we’ve tried before. No, not like that.”

The faithful bowed their heads and murmured fervent agreement.

“He will take his rightful place, and we will help him. We will serve him.” She reached back to the table behind her and seized the black cloth by a corner—yanking it free.

Indigo gritted her teeth to keep from gasping. The cloth didn’t cover a table at all—it concealed a large box, some kind of shipping crate by the looks of it. Inside the crate, bleeding and bound, was a naked boy. Cuts crisscrossed his skin in whorls and lines, but if they were letters or signs, she couldn’t read them from so far away. She watched him long enough to tell that he was breathing.

He was breathing. It wasn’t her imagination. She had made it in time.

She trembled with anger, crushing her hands into fists so hard that her nails left gouges in her palms.

The priestess gazed down at the boy with a look that was positively fawning, for all that she must’ve been the one who did this to him. “All hail and bless the first of three, this bleeding gift.”

The first of three, Indigo thought. Did that mean they hadn’t taken the other two sacrifices yet, or only that they weren’t to be executed today?

“All praise to our great Father, whom we would see freed from his prison and loosed upon the world. We will finish what began a dozen years ago. We will atone for our failings.”

“The hell you will,” Indigo growled, just loud enough that a few of the seated worshippers caught her words.

She drew the shadows together until they were dense and heavy, and she shaped them into something like a shield, thick enough to crush. Solid enough to kill.

She shoved it off the beam—plummeting down behind it.

Three or four of the Phonoi looked up in time to see the thunderous black circle fall from the ceiling and crash through the assembly. The weight of the shadows and the velocity of Indigo’s temper crushed three cultists on impact and badly injured another. She felt their bones shatter, and she heard their skulls pop and leak.