Indigo(55)

“Hell, Nora, spit it out. If you’ve got some big secret that’ll help me make sense of all this, lay it on me.”

She went and sat on the bed beside him. Nora wasn’t used to feeling vulnerable, but she had nothing but questions and enemies now, and she desperately needed answers and a friend.

“I can’t lose you over this, Sam.”

He took her hand, gave her fingers a squeeze. “Nora. Talk to me.”

She locked eyes with him. “Sam … I’m her. I’m Indigo.”

For half a second, he seemed as if he might laugh, but they knew each other too well for him to read her eyes—read her face—and not see that she meant it.

“You can’t…” He frowned, wincing as if from the pain of his injuries. “Nora, with all you’ve been going through, and this bizarre crap with Shelby … I mean, are you sure you’re not having some kind of breakdown?”

He was good. His voice only went up a little in volume and maybe one octave.

Nora held up her hand and wrapped it in shadows. She watched his face as the darkness covered her hand, her arm, moved up to briefly cover her chest and face before she drew the inky night back into her skin.

“I’m Indigo. Always have been. I mean, since she showed up. You can guess why I never told you.”

“Well, holy shit,” he whispered, wincing again. He reached up and massaged his temple with two fingers. “You … Nora, you could have told me, y’know?”

“You were a little too focused on Indigo, and I wanted you to be focused on me. On Nora. Plus … what Indigo does is often pretty damned illegal, and I couldn’t drag you into that. Couldn’t compromise you. I didn’t tell anyone, Sam. Not ever.”

Long seconds ticked past as he studied her, letting it all sink in.

“Yeah. Okay,” he said at last. He looked past her, his eyes going soft. She knew the expression. She’d seen it a hundred times before when he got locked into solving a mystery in his head. He was thinking over all of the details, all of the stories he’d heard about Indigo and correlating that information with what he knew of Nora Hesper.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. I know.” She willed him to understand.

“So you know all about the cult? What’s true and what isn’t?”

She sat on the edge of his bed, her hand an inch from his, the rolling table holding his food pushing against her back. She nudged the table gently away, sighed, and then told him everything she knew about what had happened in her past and what was happening in the city and around the world that involved Indigo.

Sam nodded and listened.

*

A short time later, after the story had been told, Sam nodded a final time. “Okay. So where do we go from here?”

“I’m not sure. I mean. I need to talk to Shelby, obviously—”

“Carefully.”

“Yes, carefully. But that’s not even my first concern. I need to—” She stopped herself and her hands patted at her shirt. “The list of names. The one I told you about.”

“From when you broke into Marshall’s place.”

Nora’s fingers pulled the folded sheet of paper she’d taken from Marshall Winston’s apartment. “These are all members of the cult. Most of them are dead now.”

Her voice just then was softer. It was one thing to confess to being Indigo, but another entirely to realize that meant she was also confessing to killing people. Bad people, yes, but still, murder was murder and she was placing monumental trust in Sam.

He took the paper and looked it over carefully. Concussed or not, his mind seemed to be working fine. “I know some of these names, I think. I have to go home and check my files, but I’m pretty sure they tie into some of my cases on missing kids and trafficking.”

“The last couple of days, it’s been pointing that way. Plus the Phonoi are skeezy. I can see them trafficking in kids to pay their bills. Anyway, I have a lot more notes. I’ll get them to you when you get out of the hospital.”

“What about your investigation?”

“Right now, I have bigger problems. I’m going to need you to handle the research if you can, Sam. I think it’s obvious your investigation and mine at least cross paths. But there are things I can look into as Indigo that I really can’t touch as Nora. And right now, being Nora isn’t the safest thing in any event. They’ve been to my apartment. One of them was waiting for me when I got home.”

“Was that a Phonoi? Or one of these … slaughter nuns? The Andro-whatever?”

“See? This is my life right now.” She shook her head. “Slaughter nun at my place. Phonoi at Shelby’s.”

Sam nodded and then froze for a moment, wincing as he waited out a wave of nausea. “I didn’t even like bed spins when I was a partyer.”

“Do I need to call someone?”

“No. I just have to remember I’ve got a concussion.” He smiled to make light of it, but Nora felt a wave of guilt again. “So I’ll look into those names. And I’ll let you know what I find.”

Nora was about to volunteer to wait until he was ready for a ride home when the door to the hospital room opened. Any positive feelings she’d been fostering were destroyed as Detectives Symes and Mayhew walked across the threshold. Mayhew was a perfect vision of health, as always, while her partner, if anything, looked sicker than ever.