Indigo(51)

Now that she had it, at the most inconvenient time possible, she didn’t want it anymore.

The most inconvenient—Sam and Shelby. She was looking for Sam and Shelby. They needed her. Injured or not, she was their best chance of survival.

And if Sam finds out you’re Indigo? The voice was hers, she was almost sure of that. Her own fears and misgivings lacked the poisonous poetry of Damastes. When she spoke in her own head—as everyone did, as normal people did—she used her own voice, her own inflections, and her own utter lack of murderous intent.

She felt sure that she could tell Shelby the truth and Shelby would love her anyway. But how much of the truth? If she only confessed she was Indigo, Shelby would love her for it. Even Sam—Sam, who thought Indigo some kind of superhero vigilante, who practically worshipped her—would still love her.

But what if she told them the whole truth?

They’ll leave you. All that you love will be taken from you.

But they would be alive to make that decision.

Nora straightened, blinking again as the shadows seemed to clear a little. It wasn’t as much of a surprise as it should perhaps have been when this change in perspective made it clear that this was her hallway, her apartment building, her home.

It was tempting to walk to her own door, to check on the degree of damage done by her fight with the slaughter nun—and more, to check on the Assholes. They had to have been terrified by all the noise and commotion. She paused. Noise. They hadn’t been subtle about their fight. How come none of the neighbors had called the police yet? Why was the hall so quiet? She remembered the fight in Florence, the way none of the people at the outdoor café had even noticed them—some bit of magic that slaughter nun had managed. The bitch had done the same thing here, she felt sure. And how had the bitch even gotten here?

None of that mattered if Nora hadn’t gotten here in time. If she’d already failed to save Sam and Shelby—if she’d yanked herself out of the dark for nothing—then there was no reason to stay. But if she hadn’t failed them yet, she was going to if she didn’t move.

She moved.

Haltingly at first, then with increasing speed, she stumbled down the hall toward the stairs. She didn’t know where her phone was. Shelby, if she was alive, would have a phone, and she could use it to call Sam. She could make sure that they were both fine, and then she could …

Well, collapse for the better part of a year, if it were up to her. But it wasn’t likely to be up to her, and it wasn’t safe to stay around them anymore. Not with murder nuns and cultists on her trail and a demon inside her.

The thought of everything that wanted to kill her paradoxically made her feel stronger, as if she could go up against the entire world by refusing to fall down and die. She gathered speed, going from a walk to an uneven jog to an outright run. The shadows were back in full force by the time she reached the stairs, and she was briefly tempted to leap through them, letting them transport her to Shelby’s floor.

No. That would use power she didn’t have to spare right now, especially if she was about to face a cult full of people bent on killing the only friends she had left in the world.

She took the stairs two and three at a time, surprisingly feeling the muscles in her thighs burn from this mundane activity. She forced herself to keep going. It was annoying that being a superpowered killing machine didn’t come with basic physical fitness, but whatever. She could hit the gym later, if she miraculously lived that long.

Shelby’s hall was exactly as it had always been, save for one new addition—Sam, standing outside Shelby’s door, one hand raised, as if he had just been knocking.

Sam, alive and checking on Shelby, as Nora had asked. She felt like Scrooge on Christmas morning—she wasn’t too late. He hadn’t noticed her arrival, and for a second she braced herself against the wall with one hand, the other hand pressed over her heart, catching her breath. Elated. Then he knocked on the door again.

“Come on, Shelby. I’m a friend of Nora’s,” Sam called, not quite shouting, but raising his voice enough for it to carry into the apartment. “If you’re home, you need to open the door.”

“Coming!” shouted Shelby’s voice.

The door opened. Sam straightened, a look of pure confusion on his face. Nora shoved herself away from the wall, started toward them. Something was—

The fist hit Sam squarely in the chin, knocking him backward, away from the door. He staggered until he hit the wall and crumpled. Shelby screamed.

Nora flickered. One moment she was herself, running as fast as she could toward her friends, and the next she was Indigo, diving into the narrow band of shadow created by her own foot. It was like turning herself into a pretzel, twisting inward in a way that made her stomach lurch, but it worked. She went from the hallway to the interior of Shelby’s apartment in the blink of an eye, appearing behind her friend.

The color of the apartment was almost a shock, it was so bright, seeming to snap into place in an instant as she materialized. There was no time to dwell on the ache in her retinas. Shelby was still screaming, and the Phonoi assassin behind her was raising his knife to silence her. Reflection was for later. For now, Indigo needed to act.

She thrust her hands out in front of her, sending waves of shadow to wrap around the cultist and squeeze until his screams drowned out Shelby’s. Indigo flung him to the side, hearing him hit the wall with a satisfying crunch. When he fell, he smashed a decorative end table that she remembered helping Shelby lug home from a swap meet downtown. Indigo felt a sharp pang of guilt. Being near her was like being too close to a tornado. One way or another, everything wound up getting smashed.