Indigo(40)
“Guess what happens now?”
“You kill me,” she croaked, tasting the bitterness of those other shadows in her mouth like blood.
He looked shocked. “Oh, no, sweetheart.” He brushed her hair out of her face. “Now I keep you. This is where I keep all my pets. Until they’re needed somewhere else, that is. Of course, you will never leave, since this is it—if you know what I mean.”
“The missing kids,” Nora gasped, thinking of Sam’s investigation, all of those children abducted and dragged into human trafficking, into slavery. “Here?”
Her wounded shoulder ached and leaked onto the chilly cement floor, and her bruised forehead throbbed with the pounding of her pulse.
“Not all of them. Just the ones we need. Your ritual should have worked the first time, but someone screwed it up. This time, we’ll make sure. All around the world, all at once, one great, global ritual. It should be magnificent.” Rafe paused and cast a speculative glance over her. “Although with you here, I might not need Charlotte’s children. This is my ritual circle—mine. Maybe I can achieve my goals without the rest of them. Maybe I won’t even share the power that’s to come.”
Nora felt that foreign, unfamiliar darkness stretching itself through her, invading her. It reached out from inside her, twining into a shrieking maelstrom of power that thrummed below them, deep and black as eternal space.
Rafe frowned at her, thinking as he rubbed one finger along his lower lip. “Let’s test things … see how much control you have over the darkness inside you.”
He pinned her right wrist down inside the circle with one hand while he reached inside his jacket with the other. Rafe drew out a small dagger, golden bronze. The hilt’s crossbar formed stylized wings that swept down to guard his hand. A circle, endless and empty, surmounted the wings from which sprang the blade. A channel was carved down the center so her blood would flow into the circle, into the void. Like the emblem in Charlotte’s drawer. Like the one on the knife my mother—
He jabbed the blade toward her hand, as if to pin her flesh and bone to the circle. The darkness tore through Nora and Indigo together, bound them and ripped them, and the blackness that was neither shadow nor herselves bellowed, NO!—tearing through the screaming core of power under them as the knife came down …
… and carved a slit in the skin of reality.
Nora and Indigo plummeted.
Into the void.
Through nightmares of blood, death, and pain.
And out, into daylight.
*
Nora hit the ground at the speed of horror, and Indigo retreated deeper, huddled down inside, away from the brightness and rising heat of a dusty, pink-tinged morning. Cold blackness lay along Nora’s spine, drawing her like implacable arms into the west-facing shadow of a carved stone pillar. She caught her breath and stared around.
Broken ancient limestone tiles and lines of graceful Grecian pillars—the dusty ruins of a long-gone building. Deep-green plants peeped over the tumbled remains of a white-stone wall, and a bent old woman swathed in a shapeless black dress and head scarf stared at her from the depths of a face sun creased and withered to a walnut skull. This was no picturesque Victorian ruin, no clever construction erected on a knoll in Central Park. It was no place Nora had ever been before and certainly no place American. Where? How? Holy crap!
“Rafe, you asshole!” she screamed. “Where’d you send me?”
“Korkyra.” The voice came from her own mouth and it came from the darkness within, black and cold as death, but it was not hers. “And I have brought you.”
8
Nora’s gaze shifted wildly, trying to take in everything at once. The sun was overwhelming, rising and lashing at her eyes as she tried to adjust to the unexpected glare.
She squinted and raised her hand to block the worst of the light. Inside her, Indigo shuddered.
No, Nora thought. She’s supposed to be the brave one.
Nora shook herself and shoved the thought aside. She and Indigo were the same person. She had to remember that, because now there was another voice in her head, speaking, demanding her attention. A thundering whisper inside her head that felt as if it came from deep inside her. From the shadows. From the black void at her core, where her power came from … the space within her that she had never understood.
But you never really tried to understand, she thought. When any sane person would have gone mad searching for answers, you didn’t even look. Why is that?
“Who are you?” she demanded, speaking inward, to that void.
The old woman above her muttered a quick prayer and crossed herself as she backed away.
Nora’s voice helped her clear her own head, but she realized she’d spoken too loudly, and as she looked around, she saw other people nearby, many of them staring at her. She stood in the middle of an area that had been roped off and nearly barricaded by heavy piles of freshly sorted dirt. Vases and fragments and columns were half-buried in the ground—some kind of archaeological dig. Nearby, two men with guns were looking her way. They wore uniforms, but didn’t strike her as police. Security guards, maybe. They didn’t look happy to see her.
Surrender to me, that dark voice commanded from the void inside her.
Nora shuddered and hugged herself tightly, a wave of revulsion flowing through her. It was really there—he, for she was certain the voice was male—was deep within her. His words made her insides rumble, shook her bones, thudded against her like loud music at a concert or fireworks exploding right overhead.