Indigo(23)

“You think we’d let you on our team, Nora?” the dark-haired girl in front said. “We don’t care how good you are. You’d embarrass us, you and your Jesus-freak mommy.”

“Her mom’s not a Jesus freak,” another said. “She’s into some weird pagan shit, that’s what my dad says. He said I should stay away.”

“Which is exactly what we’re doing. Staying away … by not letting Freak-Nora on our team.”

“B-but I’m not like that. And I am good at it. Let me show—”

“Okay, girls. Let her show us. Someone, give her a ball.”

One of the girls pitched a ball at her. Then another whipped one at her head, and a third scrambled to retrieve the first, and soon they were pelting her from all sides, throwing the balls as hard as they could as Nora huddled on the floor, screaming for them to stop, screaming for someone to come and no one came and—

The memory snapped and she jolted up, still on the floor, tears streaming down her face, her whole body shaking, throat raw as the last strains of her screams reverberated around her.

“That’s not what happened. That’s not what happened at all.”

She huddled on the cold floor, hugging her knees to her chest, whispering the words over and over …





5

Nora slept, long and dreamless. But when she finally awoke, she did so with a gasp, as if someone had whispered to her in the dark. The first things she saw were the shadows, pressing in from all sides like a black-clad coterie of deathbed attendants stealing the air from the soon-to-be deceased.

She jerked upright and flailed, but caught only empty air. She panted, shivered. Looked around in confusion.

What was she afraid of? The darkness was her friend, the shadows her servants. So if it wasn’t the shadows that had unnerved her so badly, it must’ve been the memory—the one that’d hit her with such force in her old high school.

No, not a memory. That frightened, bullied girl hadn’t been her. It couldn’t have been.

Still shivering, she swung her legs over the side of her mattress. In the gloom, something slithered or scuttled across the wall to her left. She jerked her head in that direction, but saw only a solid mass of shadows.

What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she see into the blackness? She concentrated, made a psychic adjustment, and instantly the darkness was hers again—a protective cloak, a womb that enfolded and cradled her.

Still, the uneasiness remained … the recent and increasingly familiar sense that, for a moment, the darkness had not been her friend. Instead it had seemed like … what? Her enemy? No, but a cold and watchful presence perhaps. Sly. A keeper of secrets.

She shook her head. These were dark thoughts. Stupid thoughts. Clearly she was still rattled by what had happened earlier. The massacre. The cult priestess’s words. Her loss of control with Sam. The memory, vision, whatever, at the high school …

She needed to orient herself. Figure out what time it was.

She switched on the little floor lamp beside her mattress, ignoring the shadows that slunk away into the cracks and crevices like snakes or rats.

Her old-fashioned alarm clock, the one with the Mickey Mouse hands, read 6:45. Was that a.m. or p.m.?

She groped for her jeans, which lay in a rumpled heap on the floor of the loft with the rest of her clothes, and fished her cell out of the pocket. She blinked at the display: p.m.! She’d been asleep all day. Several noncommittal texts from Sam asked her what the hell was going on, but the ones that worried her were from her boss. Yesterday had been Sunday, so wandering in a daze all day hadn’t been an issue. But this was Monday, and Raj was not at all happy that Nora had been AWOL.

She didn’t remember arriving home, getting undressed, crawling into bed. She had no recollection of anything after the barrage of memories—not mine, those were not my memories—that had assailed her at the school.

There were a few voice mails as well, from Sam and Raj and from Casey Santiago, the fashion editor at NYChronicle, who’d become Nora’s closest work friend. She couldn’t face listening to any of them right now.

Crawling to the ladder in her underwear, she descended to the living room and looked around for the Assholes. The cats were nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or a bad one.

She padded to the picture window, clicking on lights as she went. If there’d been anyone out there, they’d have been treated to a view of her in her undies and tank top, a tantalizing glimpse through the mostly bare branches of the tall trees that stood sentinel along the street.

Nora started. Something was squatting on one of those branches, peering inside at her. It was a dark, hunched shape. Her heart quickened as she looked again, staring into the night-black tangle of branches. No, she had been mistaken. There was nothing.

She exhaled. Her own reflection was wan and sickly in the glass. Her hair was lank, her eyes dark hollows in her thin face. That thing in the tree—that thing she’d thought was there—had reminded her of something. In light of recent events she grasped at it almost gratefully, though the recollection was far from pleasant.

It was the night her parents had died.

She’d been nineteen. She and her parents had been celebrating something—a promotion for her father? Her memories of the night were somehow both vivid and hazy, certain details standing out with stark and unflinching clarity, others shrouded in a fog of forgetfulness.