Indigo(44)

You cannot keep me, little Nora.

“Watch me, you sick bastard.” Her voice was barely recognizable.

Nora looked more carefully around the room. Medical equipment was in the room—the cell?—but none of it was being used on her. She was here for the table, she suspected, and nothing else. The police wanted to make absolutely certain she didn’t have a chance to kill anyone else.

Please, kill more of them. Take their lives and offer me their essence. I might even let you retain some semblance of life in gratitude for your worship. I have been far too long without proper sustenance. Murder, little Nora, and feed me.

Murder. The word resonated. Her mind had been spinning ever since Rafe had attacked her in that basement, but now it all began to click together for her. Rafe Bogdani was some kind of magician and a high-ranking member of the Children of Phonos. The way he had talked to Graham Edwards, it was as if Rafe operated separately from the New York chapter of the cult. He certainly hadn’t sounded as if he answered to Charlotte Edwards, the local high priestess.

Graham had as good as said he was a member, but that he’d withdrawn when he learned that his wife intended to sacrifice their children to the gods of murder. Three children were to be killed as part of a ritual, not simultaneously but in some kind of specific, pertinent sequence. Luis Gallardo was meant to be the first, and though Indigo had interrupted the ritual, she hadn’t been in time to save him. Would his death count toward the rite? Would the murder gods consider it a proper sacrifice?

Indigo had killed every member of the New York chapter’s inner circle in that warehouse, but she knew that didn’t mean the chapter had been completely obliterated. There would be Phonoi assassins, at the very least, though she had no idea who would give them orders now that their high priestess was dead. Rafe Bogdani, perhaps. The man had real magic at his command, not the kind of dabbling that the Phonoi typically engaged in. Was he some kind of sorcerer-for-hire, or was he truly a part of the cult? She tried to recall his exact words, the things he’d said before she’d dropped through the shadows in the ritual circle of that basement, where he’d tried to kill her. Or capture her, or whatever he’d intended. Had he said anything that gave away the nature of his relationship to the Children of Phonos? She didn’t think so.

Maybe it’s over, she thought. Not her tussle with Rafe, which obviously required a rematch. But she wondered hopefully if killing the high priestess and the inner circle had torn the heart out of the cult, at least that chapter. Maybe Graham Edwards’s children were safe, now. Maybe whatever had been planned would never come to fruition.

She had so many enemies now, worst of all this evil cancer of a demon that had taken root inside her. It would have been nice to think that the Children of Phonos weren’t her problem anymore.

But that felt too easy.

The cult was global, and they worshipped the gods of murder. If she’d erased one cell, others would arrive to fill that void, particularly if they were involved in the somehow more mundane criminal horrors of human trafficking. And then there was Rafe. Whatever the magician had done to her in that basement before she’d been transported here, it had ended up with Damastes locked inside her. Or given him access to the dark void inside her.

“You’re one of the murder gods,” she whispered.

Damastes laughed inside her.

I have worshippers throughout the world. My followers are legion.

“I’ve met a few. They die easily enough.” Bravado.

Even now my followers seek to serve me. They seek to win my favor. They know what you refuse to know, that I will eventually climb free of you or seize complete control. A foolish mistake on the part of your parents and the high priestess that night. A miscast summoning, that is all you are. You were meant to be my offering, a promised body to climb into and take as my own.

Nora shook her head. Lies! Her parents would have never done anything of the sort. Her mom and dad loved her! Still, she felt the sting of tears at the corner of her eyes, unshed but threatening to fall.

A gathering of fools tried to claim my power as their own, and the end result is a trap, a gateway that was sealed with me halfway through it. That will change soon enough. I will bend you to my will or Bogdani will find a way to release me. His friends hoped to summon and enslave me, but only a fool would attempt that a second time. His only hope is to separate me from your flesh. Then perhaps I will allow him to serve me the way he and his cult wished me to serve them. Or I will kill him, and so many others.

Her thoughts were scattered in so many directions as she tried to pull all of these threads together.

“So I was meant to be, what, a vessel?”

A doorway, nothing more. But I am trapped on the threshold. I fought their summoning because they wished to bind me as their slave, like a genie they might use to make them rich or fetch them water or seduce reluctant lovers for them. I fought … and somehow, so did you. And in fighting … we became one.

Ice flowed through her, a cold, calculating hatred that soothed her and helped her focus. She could feel the shadows breathing in the corners and beneath the table. Rafe’s magic, the shock of being shifted thousands of miles in a moment, the tumorous presence of the demon in the void … something had stripped her of her powers, broken her ability to concentrate and to touch the dark. Now, for the first time since Damastes had tried to seize control of her, she felt that connection to the shadows again. They knew her. They yearned for her.