Indigo(68)

She saw something in his lap. An old-fashioned video-camera cassette, the size of a cigarette lighter. He held it palm out, as if for her to see.

Indigo took the cassette. Perhaps video of her, her younger self being prepared for ritual death.

“Just one more corpse,” Indigo said. “This is what happens around me.”

“Not forever,” Selene said. “Come on, we should go. There’s more I need to tell you, and if all goes well, we can get the beast out of you.”

“I … can’t hear him anymore. Damastes. Yet I know he’s still there.”

Selene smiled. The expression did not suit her. “You’ll learn to control him. He’s fooled you into thinking he’s in charge, but he needs you an awful lot more than he’s letting on.”

“I don’t want him to need me.”

“Let’s go. The Androktasiai will be looking for us. They want Damastes dead, and they think killing you will do that.”

“And won’t it?”

“I don’t think that’s something we want to find out.”

Indigo took one more look at O’Hagan’s body. Perhaps seeing her had given him the courage to do what he’d been trying. She liked to think it was guilt that finally pushed him over the edge.

But she remembered the way he’d looked into her eyes, seeking something deeper. Seeking Damastes.

Yet hadn’t there been something else there, too? When he’d realized who she was, hadn’t there been a moment of sadness, or even … wonder? Hadn’t she seen a glimmer of human tenderness in his eyes?

The fear of Damastes had allowed Matt O’Hagan to take his own life. Indigo felt certain of that. But those other emotions in the man were a mystery, and they gnawed at her. She thought perhaps the tape might hold answers, but for the first time—as O’Hagan’s eyes lingered in her memory—she wasn’t sure she wanted the truth anymore.





14

“Damastes is not the only murder god.”

They’d grabbed another cab, and the women talked in low voices, their heads as close as two lovers’, so the driver couldn’t overhear or read their lips in the rearview mirror. Now that Nora had Damastes bottled up, at least for the time being, she’d demanded the truth about the Androktasiai and why they were so desperate to kill Selene.

Nora had frowned at Selene’s answer. “I figured. But so what?”

“He’s also not the only one that’s present on this plane.”

“What?”

“That’s part of the terrible truth the Androktasiai would kill me to silence. They are meant to stand against the murder gods—they serve honorable death, remember. But they have been corrupted, controlled, by one of darker gods they fight to destroy. Their mission has been twisted into fanaticism for evil ends. I don’t know exactly when it happened or how, but they have come under the influence of Caedis—one of Damastes’s sister murder gods and a rival to his power. She’s clever. She’s managed to keep the Sisters of Righteous Slaughter from believing what I know to be true, that she rides one of them as Damastes would ride you. She goads them to kill me, and to destroy Damastes, not for the salvation of humanity, but for its doom.”

Nora had felt the shadows ripple beneath her skin. “The murder of a murder god … that’s gotta be some kind of super power-up.”

Selene had given a bitter chuckle. “The Androktasiai believe they must kill you to kill Damastes, though I have some doubts it will be that simple. Or that the power will simply return to the void if they succeed.”

Nora had sat back in her seat, scowling.

“Don’t dwell on it,” Selene had chided. “You’ll lose your mental balance and the demon can push up again. The idea is to keep Damastes in the dark—literally. Here, let me show you some tricks for holding him there. First, remember two things: power is never destroyed, only recycled; and you must balance need and effort or you can’t keep the demon on his leash. Place your fingertips together and imagine the flow of shadows like an endless circle through your body.”

“But the shadows—” Nora had started to object. Didn’t she share her power with Damastes? Could darkness really hold him?

“Don’t believe the demon’s lies—uncertainty weakens you. Shadows have no allegiance—just as bricks don’t care about the mason who builds the wall. Own your power. Once he’s contained, it takes less effort to hold him there, and the shadows are still yours to command. Balance need and effort. Keep the cycle flowing.”

Now they sat on rickety chairs in a darkened storage room. The cassette Nora had taken from O’Hagan’s dead hand had been obsolete and bloodstained, but it fit in the old video-editing machine and it ran. The quality was lousy, but it would do.

On-screen, the light of candles and fire lent an ominous gleam to the blade, anointed with oil and flecked with ash. Nora’s stomach lurched as she watched the video of her own intended murder twelve years earlier and struggled to keep Damastes in the darkness. She’d been holding him for a while and she was tired.

“Don’t let him out during this,” Selene whispered. “If you feel him rising to the surface, say so—he mustn’t know what we know.”

Nora couldn’t spare the concentration to speak. She nodded and kept her fingertips pressed together—she nearly had the knack of doing it without the physical prompt, but not quite yet. For now, Nora-who-was-Indigo held the murder god in check and stared at the dusty old CRT.