Indigo(38)

Nora repressed a shudder. Damn it. I gave him Shelby’s name. Fuck. Now they’ll come after her for sure if I don’t play this right. And Sam … “That’s right. Look, I know I may have seemed insensitive at the time—”

“You and half of New York.” She glanced up. He’d let his smile cool, but it wasn’t gone yet. “I understand the impulse.”

“No, no. I … wasn’t quite honest with you. See, I contribute to a news blog and I wanted some pics for the memorial page—the guys can be such pricks about that stuff, so I said I’d do it. I was trying to be discreet. Respectful. I guess I screwed that up.”

Being disingenuous chafed. What she really wanted to do was smash in the bastard’s face, then drag him into darkness, cutting and tearing into him with shadow knives and needles until he started screaming, begging to tell her about the “blessed event.”

But not yet. Not yet.

“It’s still haunting me, to be honest.”

“Yeah, I can’t seem to let go of it either,” Rafe said, looking at the floor as the train rattled on. Yeah, you’d better look away. “It’s really ruined the way I feel about the city. People talk about the crime and the violence, but they don’t live here and it’s not really like that. Or I thought it wasn’t. I mean, if something like this can happen to a sweet kid like Maidali, what sort of monsters are we?”

Just the question I want to ask you, Teach. She let the silence clatter along with the sway and rush of the subway car for a while. He started to raise his head again, pulling in a breath to speak, and she beat him to it. “Hey—” she started, as he said, “Look—”

They both faked embarrassed laughs and argued who should talk first. Nora took the lead. “So … I was wondering if I could buy you a drink. To apologize. Y’know.”

Rafe gave a bullshit boyish smile, but she knew he didn’t buy her excuse for a hot second, so he plainly had an agenda of his own. “I was going to ask you the same thing. Some friends of mine hang out at a jazz club a couple of stops away—it’d be pretty mellow this time of night. If you’re okay with that.”

Oh, yeah, she was fine with that. They’d stroll along and she’d wait for some place dark.…

They made stupid conversation until Rafe looked up and said, “This is it!”

They exited the train together and he led the way up to the street.

The neighborhood at the edge of El Barrio was rougher than the one they’d come from—but pretty much every neighborhood was rougher than the Upper East Side, one way or another. Rafe offered her his arm—as if this were some kind of date—and they started walking east. A couple of old buildings under renovation stood on their left, ringed with construction scaffolds and those plastic slides for skipping rubble down into the industrial Dumpsters below. A lonely neon sign clung to a railing across the alley from the reno site, flickering an unsteady arrow toward a basement entrance. “There it is,” Rafe said.

“… There?” Totally Nora, that hesitation. From within, Indigo stifled her. “Well … okay.”

As they started into the alley, puzzle pieces clicked into place in her head. This street, this block—another address from Marshall Winston’s real estate paperwork. Rafe Bogdani hadn’t brought her here on a date.

Eyes narrowed, she turned toward him, but as she did, the shadows began to undulate around them, a nest of snakes at war with itself. Some of those serpents looked darker than the rest—hell, they felt darker—and for a moment Nora could only focus on the twisting, writhing, warring shadows. What the hell—

Rafe yanked her sideways into a pitch-black staircase on the renovation side. His eyes flashed, pinpoint flares of white. Nora cried out, and for half a moment she felt Indigo inside her, trying to take over. They were one and the same person—she’d created Indigo as a separate identity in her mind to make it easier for her to keep her two worlds apart—but now she felt power there, down in the dark. Power, hunger, even malice. In that half a moment, she fought Indigo and paid for that hesitation when Rafe smacked her forehead against the blackened basement door.

“No!” Nora shouted, sagging dramatically.

Quiet, Indigo said inside her. I’ll make him pay for that. Right after he tells me what I want to know about the other kids and whatever the cult is planning for them. Just be still for now. I am the power. I am the shadow. He’s nothing but scum.

Her mind whirled. This was her own internal voice, or the part of her that she’d ascribed to Indigo. It came from her own mind. A fractured mind, yes, but her own. The power she’d felt, the grasping hunger that had reached up from the darkness within, that had felt like something else.

Rafe unlocked the door and dragged her into a gloom-shrouded small space, a small antechamber that led to a larger room beyond. The darkness yearned toward her. Toward Nora or Indigo? There shouldn’t have been a difference.

Indigo, she told herself. I’m Indigo.

I am.

In the murk she could see every detail. Shelves and a desk. Lamps unlit. A doorway ahead, into that larger space. Through that open door her Shadow Sight picked out the gleam of golden sigils on the floor. The odors of dried blood, candle wax, human waste, and bitter, oily herbs filled her nose, nearly overpowering the building’s lingering old-age reek of ancient tobacco smoke and water damage.