Indigo(63)

After the events of the morning with Symes and Mayhew, Indigo was not in any condition to win a fight of this intensity. She wanted to flow out of the keyhole as she’d come in, but the Phonoi were on her every second. All of her attention had to be focused on parrying, thrusting, dodging.

Finally, to her relief, she managed a well-timed stab that took out another assailant. But that still left three, and they were fresher than she was.

Indigo found her back pressed against the door again, and she launched a twisting side kick at the man in front of her. The kick took him in the chest and knocked him flailing backward across the floor … into the arms of a new arrival, a woman who hadn’t been there a moment before. This new arrival caught the man and twisted his neck with an audible, nasty crack. He collapsed on the floor like a bag of rice.

The face was familiar: Selene, the nut job who’d attacked Indigo on the subway steps.

Selene was here. But this time, it appeared, she was on Indigo’s side.

Having an ally gave Indigo a surge of strength, and she cut the throat of another man who’d turned to stare at this new twist of events. Indigo had mustered her last reserve of strength, so she was grateful that Selene, still only another shadow in the gloom of the kitchen, dispatched the last Phonoi with another neck-breaking twist.

Indigo let herself slide to the floor and sit with her back pressed against the door. She took a few moments to catch her breath. Her heart rate gradually slowed to normal, and at last she didn’t feel like a scared rabbit.

“Thanks,” she said finally. “I don’t know what changed your mind about me, and I hope you’re not going to pick up the job they started.”

Selene laughed. “If I’d wanted you dead, I would have let them wear you out before I took over. It would have saved me some trouble.”

“I guess you’ll tell me why you helped.”

“If you’ll tell me why you pulled such a foolish move, coming back here.”

Indigo didn’t even try to deny that she shouldn’t have revisited the Edwards house. “I wanted to question him. He says his kids were kidnapped, and I want to know if that’s true or if he’s keeping them hidden from Rafe Bogdani. Their mother promised Rafe he could sacrifice them.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, I wanted to retrieve some keys.”

“What do these keys unlock?”

“I don’t know. But I figure if Charlotte Edwards had them, the keys must open something interesting.”

Selene thought for a moment, her expression unreadable. “You and I need to go somewhere and have a heart-to-heart,” she said finally.

“About this?” Indigo waved her hand at the corpses.

“Not our problem, are they?”

“I guess not.” Indigo felt better immediately. Exhausted, she accepted Selene’s hand to rise from the floor.

“So go get these keys. And then we’ll find a safe place to have a conversation. You need to tell me what happened in New York today, and I need to explain why I helped you. It’s a story you’ll find interesting, I promise you.”





13

They had to keep moving. Selene wanted a safe place to sit and talk, but Nora knew that the moment she paused, she’d be out for the count. She was beyond exhausted, both physically and mentally, and she felt hopelessly carried along on a tsunami of events, borne aloft by chaos and conflict. At present she was barely swimming with the flow. If she paused to catch her breath, she would be subsumed and drowned.

Blotted from existence, just like Shelby.

I’m in control, she thought in Indigo’s voice. I’m steering things from here on in. As long as she kept believing that, maybe she could keep the exhaustion and desperation at bay.

Of course, she wasn’t the only one listening to those thoughts. She felt him there, deep and dark, and Damastes’s sly confidence chipped away at her resolve.

“So talk,” Nora said.

“We need to find somewhere safe,” Selene said. “There’s too much to say, too much for you to learn.”

“Nowhere’s safe. Does any of this look safe to you?” They’d left the Edwards place ten minutes earlier and were now walking along a New York street, cars parked at the curb, others passing on the road, pedestrians strolling alone or chatting in groups. Nora hoped that Selene saw the same dangers she did—the windows, the parked cars, the alleys, the countless places that could hide people who wished them harm.

The memories of blood on the sidewalk. The echoes of screams, long lost beneath the sounds of the everyday, yet still reverberating through these concrete canyons for those willing to listen long and hard enough.

“No,” Selene said. “Not safe.”

“So we keep moving. There are places I have to go.”

“Bogdani’s apartment?”

Nora had found the keys she sought in the Edwards house and pocketed them. “Soon. But not yet.”

“Good. You need to be much stronger before you face him. You need to control the thing you have inside you.”

Control? Nora’s surprised thought was in harmony with the same word whispered by Damastes.

“There are ways and means,” Selene said. “There’s more going on here than you know.”

“Tell me about it,” Nora quipped.