Indigo(5)

“Sorry,” she mumbled, swiping her thumb across the screen to answer. “Hey, Raj. What’s news?”

Nora listened, feeling the blood drain from her face as she turned toward Shelby. When the call ended, Nora sat for a few seconds with the phone in her hand, staring at its screen as if the phone itself had upset her.

“Hey.” Shelby nudged Nora’s knee. “What’s happening? What did she want?”

Sadness had welled up inside Nora, but now anger rose to replace it, burning all the sorrow out of her. Despite all the lights in the apartment she could feel the shadows pulsing, reacting to her emotions, ready to lash out at her command.

“They found another one. A thirteen-year-old girl, six blocks from the stairs where the bastard dumped Maidali.”

“Oh, no,” Shelby said quietly. She exhaled, and all of the bright humor and enthusiasm left her with that one breath. “You’ve got to go. Cover the story.”

Nora stood, appetite forgotten. “Yeah.”

But the time had come to stop worrying about covering the story. Whatever it took, she intended to bring the story to an end.

*

Outside in the dark, she wasn’t Nora anymore.

Night had fallen on her little block of Seventy-Fourth Street. The leaves still rustled overhead, but without the daylight the sound might not have been the wind at all. The higher branches might have been infested with inhuman things with sharp teeth, the rustling the sound of their moving lower or simply shuddering with the nearness of prey. She had faced such things before, so she knew all too well that such thoughts were not paranoia but wisdom.

The possibility did not frighten her. Not this other woman, the one Nora became when she allowed herself to melt into the blue-black shadows. Indigo, she called herself then. Indigo, now.

Three doors down from her apartment, in a deep patch of shadow where the wan yellow streetlights could not reach, she inhaled a cleansing breath and reached out her hands to summon the darkness. It wrapped itself around her, cleaving to her body and flowing outward, a cloak of shadows. To the naked eye it would have looked like an actual cloak, woven of fabric the color of night. Her face was hidden by a hood, and the darkness moved to keep her features obscured.

With a gesture she summoned the shadows closer and fed them so they blotted out all the light around her and wrapped her in a dusky cocoon. An image formed in her mind, a memory from that morning—the stairs where Maidali’s body had been found, where the streetlamps were always broken. She reached out into the shadows and then stepped through …

… and emerged on that staircase in Kingsbridge.

A kid in a red hoodie dodged to his left on the way down the steps, unconsciously avoiding the deeper patch that had gathered around Indigo. She watched him go by, saw him shudder as he felt her presence without ever peering into the depths of her shadows. He hurried down toward Bailey Avenue as if he feared the darkness might follow.

Ascending to the top of the stairs, she stared for a moment at the graffitied mailbox and the detritus of mourning that still lay piled around its feet. All that remained of Maidali Ortiz were memories. The same could be said of Corinna Dewar and Tomas Soares, and the child who had been found dead in Kingsbridge tonight. The desire to find the killer felt a little like vengeance, but Indigo knew she could do nothing for Tomas or Corinna or Maidali. What she did now, she did for the child who would otherwise be next.

Rajitha had given her an address, and now she glanced around, refreshing her memory. Far up the road a white box truck sat at the curb, silent and abandoned. The shape of the truck blocked out the illumination of the streetlight behind it, throwing a strange geometry of shadow onto the pavement. With merely a thought she stepped from one patch to the next, flowed from the small shadow beside the mailbox to the one cast by that truck, a block and a half away.

In the same fashion she continued through the neighborhood, slipping from gloom to gloom, until she emerged in a patch of airless black in the service alley behind an elementary school. Grass grew up through cracks in the pavement, and the Dumpster was rimmed with rust. Blue lights flashed at either end of the alley, throwing pale ghosts against the back wall of the school and the high fence behind it. The police cars were silent, the officers guarding the crime scene just waiting by their vehicles, and Indigo knew that the detectives had not yet arrived. Except for her, only two people were in the alley, and one of them was dead.

A single police officer had been posted to guard this new body until the detectives and the crime-scene techs arrived. Tall and broad-shouldered, he must have been in his midtwenties but had a sweetness to his face that made him look younger. A good cop, though, or the others on-site would not have posted him here. They trusted that he was smart enough not to contaminate the scene by touching anything he shouldn’t.

The dead girl lay on her side, wrapped in a blanket. One arm was flung over her head as if she’d just gone to sleep in the alley behind the school. Thirteen years old, according to Raj, which must mean that the police had already identified her. Or had Raj made assumptions? The detectives hadn’t even arrived yet, but if a girl of this age and description had been reported missing, both the cops and Raj might have leaped to conclusions.

Nora needed a closer look.

Indigo stepped out from behind the Dumpster, some of the shadows trailing after her.

“What’s your name?” she asked quietly.

The big, baby-faced cop whipped around. His hand dropped to the butt of his pistol, but he froze when he saw her.