Indigo(67)

“I can help you,” Selene said. Her eyes had grown wider with the realization that she might soon be fighting for her life, Indigo saw. “But you also have to help yourself!”

Her, slowly, with blunter blades.

“Use his powers against him, because he’ll understand them. He’ll feel the shadows close around him.”

“Please…” O’Hagan was pleading, and Indigo saw that she’d rested one shadow blade on his shoulder. A gash had opened across his neck from its subtle touch. One twitch of her arm and his head would roll from his body, a red fountain blooming from his severed neck—

Oh, yes! Damastes said, trying to surge forward even more. For one terrible moment Indigo believed that he had the power to break away from her, and she wondered what the murder god would look like in all his unbridled glory.

“I won’t let you,” she muttered.

“Yes!” Selene said. “Fight! Use your own power, your humanity, to turn the darkness against him! You are his prison, now build his cell, small and deep!”

Kill … blood … feed me!

“No.” Indigo heaved the blades away from O’Hagan’s neck and they shattered in the light, shadow shards scattering across the room and impacting walls and floor. They left dark scars that slowly faded away.

“Please…,” the sniveling man said.

Indigo punched him. He snapped back in the armchair, blood spewing from his nose, and she felt Damastes revel in the violence.

Which was exactly what she wanted. Bloodthirsty and wanton, he let his guard down. She gathered everything she had—the determination, the anger, the sense that real life was passing her by and leaving her with this haunted existence—and smothered it down upon the murder god. In her mind she did as Selene had suggested, imagined her flesh a prison for him, then imagined a cell down inside the prison, deep and small and without windows or doors.

He screamed in rage, but his voice seemed to fade, and he did not fight back.

Indigo stood panting over O’Hagan, and she hated the terror in his eyes. She feared that it mirrored her own.

“Yes!” Selene shouted. “You did it! You—”

“Damastes wants him dead. Not because it’s one more body, but him, in particular.”

“Of course. This excuse for a human, and anyone else we can find from your list, might be able to help you.”

“Because they were there when this was done to me.” Indigo frowned. She couldn’t remember O’Hagan being at the ritual, but he’d still played his part as Uncle Theo, making himself a fragment of her life even after destroying it.

He was looking back and forth between the two women, not sure which of them he ought to fear the most. Indigo could not feel sorry for him.

“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I was told to. Your mother herself told me to, and I went through with some of it, the worst of it, but when it came time to finish, I…” He was crying, and Indigo considered punching him again.

“The worst of what?” Selene asked.

O’Hagan nodded toward the hallway. “In there.”

Oh, no, Indigo thought. That stench. Rot and death, and obviously not his own. She was suddenly certain that the Edwards children had been taken and murdered after all, not hidden by their father, but kidnapped and slaughtered by Rafe Bogdani to throw her off his scent. While she’d been searching for them—certain that they would form the end of a ritual to drag Damastes fully into the world—Bogdani had created another method to fulfill his ambitions.

Selene obviously thought so, too. She went first, and Indigo was close behind, considering leaping through shadows but knowing the terrible truth was only a few human steps away.

She pushed into the bedroom behind Selene, eager to see, desperate not to. The stink in there was far worse, and Indigo’s eyes watered from the stench and what it meant.

It was not a child lying dead on the bed.

Stark, red memories assaulted her, making the fear in this apartment seem stale.

Nora’s being held down on the table with a person grasping each limb, and even though she squirms and thrashes, she can’t break free. That’s the greatest terror. She is helpless, and the woman approaching the table—

(Altar, they have me on an altar, and there’s smoke and something else in the air around me, like the promise of horrors to come)

—can afford to take her time. She, too, is chanting, and holding aloft a knife whose polished sheen will soon be marred with Nora’s blood.

Indigo staggered a little at the memory. The woman’s face was clear in her mind for the first time ever, a memory made solid.

Now that woman lay dead on the bed. Selene moved in for a closer inspection, but Indigo hesitated. A hole was in the woman’s chest, perhaps from a shotgun blast. She’d been dead for a couple of days. Long enough for blood to coagulate and harden, flies to gather, and for the stench of rot to fill the room.

“Oh, no,” Indigo said, and even as she turned back toward the living room, she heard the shotgun sing.

She was there in time to see the gun slip from O’Hagan’s hands and strike the floor. Smoke hung in the air. His brains, blood, and scraps of scalp and hair decorated the ceiling and wall, dripping.

His mouth hung open, the shadow inside deep and filled with the ghosts of the dead.