Indigo(69)
Nora’s younger self lay naked on the altar, her body covered in strange designs painted in blood, and some strange powder that sparkled like black diamond dust. What is that crap? Did they drug me? Why didn’t I keep fighting? A woman stood beside the altar with her back to the camera, watching as then-younger Charlotte Edwards placed something shiny on Nora’s forehead where a series of lines all came together. The object—it seemed familiar, but the video was too dark and damaged for it to be clear in such a fleeting shot—didn’t lie flat, but stood proud by a half inch or so, and something flashed and spun at its heart. The lines on young Nora’s body pulsed with darkness that seemed to flow toward the thing.
Charlotte’s lips moved, her voice growing stronger as she continued. The language was completely foreign to Nora, but the sound raised every hair on her body and sent a twisting nausea through her gut. Selene frowned and leaned closer to the screen.
Young Nora’s eyes flashed open, pupils wide and black from side to side. Charlotte continued chanting, holding out the knife and touching the point to the outstretched hand of the other woman. All the flames seemed to bow down and flicker for a moment. Then Charlotte touched the same blood-tipped blade to Nora’s forehead, just above the flashing, shining object.
The girl on the altar convulsed. Her body rose like a bridge, only head and heels still in contact with the stone. Nora’s present body jerked in sympathy, and she felt a sharp pain in her head and the surge of Damastes within her.
“Selene!” she gasped as the scene and the sound went on and on.
On the screen, a shiver and a ripple of motion started in the darkened ritual room. Noise swelled like a small wave moving through the cultists and toward the altar. A man was pushing his way up from the darkness near the floor, struggling against the chanting people.
“No!” the man shouted. “You can’t—Stella, no!”
A couple clutched the man by his arms and hauled on them as if they would tear him limb from limb, their eyes shining like those of beasts reflecting the firelight.
Selene shoved past Nora, reaching for the editing machine’s power button.
The man threw himself sideways. He lashed out with his feet against the closest captor, seeming not to care if he fell, so long as he took them down, too. His violent action freed one of his arms and he flailed as he fell. His foot connected with one cultist’s knee. The three went to the floor together and vanished from sight for a moment. A cracking sound, like a tree bough snapping in a storm, broke through the chanting for an instant and the man rose back to his feet, lurching forward again.
“Nora!”
Then, like that girl on the tiny editing screen, Nora seized, her body wrenching backward without her control and knocking Selene aside. The darkness within her ripped apart, tore into multiple shades of shadow and death that clashed and tore at one another as the demon fought to free itself of her control. Damastes surged against her barriers like a million frozen quills.
Teeth clenched, she let the heat of her fury pour toward his chilly fingers that scrabbled at her mind and body as the sound from the video whirled her into the memory of that night. Her body was rigid, but her eyes were still riveted to the screen and her mind was still her own. She pushed Damastes down inside as she had before—as she had then—felt him falter.…
The rest of the chanting people surged toward the man, seeming to bury him in the press of their bodies. The two women beside the altar ignored it all. Charlotte nodded to the other woman with a smile and a graceful motion of her hand. “Go on,” Charlotte murmured, then turned toward the struggle that inched closer and closer.
Selene scrambled up, jumped over Nora’s rigid body to pass her and get to the machine’s controls.
The woman with the knife continued her own turn the other way, toward the camera, toward the altar, where the younger Nora convulsed and thrashed, teeth clenched, foam and blood running from the corners of her lips. The woman’s eyes were dark and hollow as she muttered under her breath, walking calmly closer, raising the gleaming, oiled blade.…
A flame spurted upward from the darkness and the massed bodies behind the altar, and the man rose up against the sudden light, swinging one of the thick iron candelabra, knocking Charlotte and the cultists aside and then lunging to grab the woman with the knife as the blade came down—
The black snakes within shook present Nora and pitched her to the floor of the tiny room. Mother! No! Nora’s body was locked rigid, but her mind was wild with fragments of memory. That was her mother about to stab her through the heart. Her father—no! No, he wasn’t, it was “Uncle Theo” …
Selene slammed down on the power button, but for a moment the images, like ghosts, remained.
You cannot hold me—why waste your strength? Bow, little Nora, and I will be merciful.
Then the CRT darkened, the scene shrinking and vanishing into a small white dot even as Selene spun and dropped to the floor to grab onto Nora’s thrashing body. But the instant the sound died, Nora went limp, stunned by the sudden, violent reversals of control. Her hold on Damastes loosened. The shadows inside her ripped apart and thrashed against each other.
Damastes’s voice thundered in Nora’s head and echoed from her mouth. You cannot bind me, witch. Blind me, silence me awhile—it matters not. I will be free! And I will gorge on your screams while I tear you apart!
Selene pushed her face next to Nora’s and crooned, “Think of the shadow, the cycle. Drive him down, wall him up in the endless dark. Your power is his prison, his prison is your power.”