Indigo(39)

“I heard you at the Edwards house just now,” she said as Nora. For that was how he saw her, wasn’t it? As Nora? “Searching for Charlotte and the rest of your circle of murdering fucks. Well, I know where you can find them. I—”

He flung her toward the shining symbols that formed a circle on the floor. Tendrils of true ebony shot up from those symbols and wove together to form an open cage, a pen to hold some type of shadow animal—and she knew which animal it would be.

Indigo came forth, twisted away from Rafe, and spun into the gloom. The disquieting blackness of those darker serpents seemed to reach for her, but she dove into the softer shades of familiar power. She knew she had to avoid falling into that hungry circle. Into that cage.

Rafe flicked a switch and a single light shone down from the low ceiling to spotlight the ritual circle. He scowled in frustration when he saw that circle was empty. Then he grinned and stepped into the ring himself, turning widdershins round and round, as if he were winding a spring tighter and tighter before unleashing it. Dark power crackled around him. Who the hell was this guy?

“So where are they? Charlotte and the others. There are half a dozen addresses I planned to search, but go ahead, save me the trouble.”

“They’re in hell,” she snarled. “Every last one of them. Dead as you’re about to be.”

He chuckled as he watched the shadows. “I knew you the moment I first touched you, there at the top of the stairs when we were both pretending we had come to grieve for a dead girl. If you hadn’t tracked me down, I’d have hunted for you eventually. Did you really think I was so stupid that I wouldn’t know you, Indigo? Me, of all people?”

Indigo wrapped a tendril of darkness around the lightbulb and crushed it.

“And who the fuck are you that I should be impressed?” she whispered, though by now of course she knew. Sorcerer. Magician. Not any ordinary cultist, that was clear.

She circled him clockwise from shadow to shadow and taunted him, hoping he would expose some vulnerability. “Child of Phonos?” she sneered. “I’ve killed dozens of your breed. Adulterer? Laughable. Betrayer and murderer of the children placed in your care? Only makes me itch to spill your blood sooner.”

“Then why don’t you?” Even in the renewed blackness, he still turned, looking for her.

Can he see in the dark, like me? Unlikely, but the thought gave her a qualm. He was too confident, and that circle only made him more so. And something was wrong with the darkness as well. As if it warred with itself, not a whole nest but two great snakes, twined together in battle.

“We’re alone here. I’m unarmed, unprotected, corporeal as dirt,” Rafe continued, as if they were just talking. As if they were friends. “Easy prey. Come get me.”

“Now you think I’m stupid?”

The seething darkness of that ritual cage made her nervous and she kept away from the shining symbols on the floor, certain they were vibrating. The air was charged, as if some force were building under the floor, in the walls.…

“Of course you are. After all, you’re standing in my lair now. My ritual circle.” His gaze seemed to light on her at last, and he stared in her direction with a wolf’s smile, as if the darkness could not hide her at all. “Only an idiot would walk willingly into a chamber like this.” He laughed. “So, yes. I think you’re the stupidest bitch I’ve ever met, Shelby. You want to spill my blood? Give it a try!”

Fury burned red and hot through her body, and the ugly shadows rushed to fill her. She did not stop them this time. “Fuck you.”

She surged toward the circle, forged sharpest ebony into a terrible spear, and flung her weapon.

No!

The voice crashed inside her head like thunder, even as it cut like a whisper. It wasn’t her own voice. Not Indigo. Not Nora. She felt the dark snakes of the sinister blackness twine around her, piercing deep as daggers. Fool!

Rafe swept his hands out, and the force that had resonated in the walls and floor shouted, bursting out from the circle of gleaming symbols, and reflecting her own weapon back at her! She dodged left, leaping for another pool of darkness, but the spear whipped past, slicing into her right shoulder. Indigo gasped in shock. Never! The shadows are mine! No one has ever—

A star of her own bright blood struck the floor and it rang! Rafe’s circle of shining symbols blazed into a wall of golden light, banishing every shade and shadow. Nora felt the icy darkness draw into her, racing to her core and binding her still and silent. She toppled across the burning line of sigils and they died down to a heatless glow.

Grinning, Rafe stepped over her so his feet rested on the brightness to either side, neither in the circle nor out of it. He closed his eyes a moment and laughed quietly, shaking his head as if the entire thing had been nothing but a joke. Then he knelt, straddling her. The position didn’t feel sexual as much as it felt as if she were a calf about to be branded.

“You need to learn to curb your temper,” Rafe said. “And not underestimate a guy whose family was casting blood magic eight hundred years before Mary whelped Jesus.” He’d slipped back into his kindly teacher persona, looking so harmless and sweet—and smug—that she wanted to kick him to death.

The blackness inside her strained against her skin as if she were too small a vessel to contain it, and she felt frozen, yet bursting with its incomprehensible movement. It was like a living thing that coiled and writhed and yearned to escape the confines of her body, but she couldn’t draw it forth, couldn’t use it. Indigo had been cut off from her power, unable even to reach it, as though a wall had been thrown up between herself and the shadows. But she could feel them, and when she began to sense the true immensity of the darkness of the void, she wondered why it had never simply smothered her.