Indigo(72)
“No!”
Pandemonium and flame stir the shadows outside the ring of altar candlelight as Stella plunges the knife down—
Matt lunges forward and swings the candelabra one more time, smashes it across Stella’s shoulders, sweeping her away.
Stella screams in fury and pain as she falls behind the altar.
The view rocks, slips, falls …
And only static reigns. Then nothing.
*
It took five minutes of stopping and starting for Nora to get a single clear frame of it, and the squirming of the shadows deep inside her confirmed the idea in her mind: This was something important, something that she’d seen no sign of at the warehouse where Luis Gallardo had died. She pointed at the golden circle-and-wings that contained living darkness. “I’ve seen that before.”
Nora and Selene leaned close to the screen to look at the gleaming shape. The circle wasn’t empty as it had been the first time—the darkness at the center emanated from a glittering dark object that spun like a tiny gyroscope.
“I found that at Charlotte’s house,” said Nora. “But it didn’t have the thing in the middle. I’ve seen the circle-and-wings on the hilts of those knives the Phonoi use, but this one’s like a pendant—no blade.”
“Death’s Wings and the Circle of the Eternal Void,” Selene said. “The Phonoi adopted the symbols and merged them. That spinning stone is an ombrikos—a shadow lodestone. Hung in the symbolic circle, it spins and opens a sort of hole between the realm of shadow and death, and the world of light and life. Call it a Void Portal.”
“That hasn’t showed up in any other ritual that I’ve seen traces of. Could that be how—or why—Damastes was pulled into me and trapped when I wasn’t killed?”
“Yes. And it might send him straight back into the void, too. But we need both parts.”
“Well, I have no idea where the whatsit—the shadow lodestone?—is, but we’ve got keys to both the Edwards house and Rafe’s place. I saw the pendant last in Charlotte’s desk drawer, but the Edwards house will be too full of FBI and cops waiting for a call from the ‘kidnapper’ for us to walk right in and take it—though I could go by myself.”
“I’d rather that we stay together for now. So, let’s start with Rafe Bogdani. He wasn’t at the original ritual—”
“I noticed.” Nora frowned. “But that means he may not know how it all went bad.”
“No, and that may help us if we’re forced to disrupt the new ritual rather than stop it before it happens. In addition, Rafe may not know about Charlotte having the Death’s Wings pendant. Though if he does, he may have taken it as well as the Edwards children.”
“I’m not sure about that. If he’s got them, he most likely took the kids from wherever Graham Edwards stashed them, not from their house. I’m finding it hard to believe that Graham would have willingly handed them over to Rafe. That man’s got a lot of dirty secrets, and I’m sure we can find something we could use against him at his place.”
Selene gave a wolfish smile. “With pleasure. It’ll give you something else to concentrate on before the demon pushes his way to the surface again.”
Nora’s momentary glee dampened. “I knew I couldn’t keep him down forever.”
“It won’t be as bad as before. Just hold on until we’re someplace where he won’t learn anything he can use against us. Then he can rage as much as you can stand.”
Nora ejected the cassette and put it into a file box labeled “Mount St. Helens Lava Dome 2005,” sure it was safe from prying eyes in the files of such a nonevent.
Nora locked the storage room and they headed for the elevators by way of the main office. Nora could hear her coworkers talking and working and the usual clack of keyboards and the whir of printers, but the sound was weirdly distant. As she stepped into the bullpen with Selene on her left, something flickered at the edge of her vision and she spun, crouching automatically to avoid a blow to the head as a frisson ran up her spine.
Selene whirled to place her back to Nora’s—to Indigo’s—as she drew her blades. Indigo whipped her head up.
Like Florence, only worse: the women in tunics blocked the aisle ahead and closed in from behind, blades drawn, while Nora’s coworkers chatted and typed on obliviously. One of the staffers tripped as an Androktasiai swept past her. Indigo reached for shadows to pull the woman aside before her head could strike the corner of a bulky old copier. But in the buzzing, pervasive fluorescent light of the office, the shadows huddled under furniture and drew forth as thin streams that barely shifted the woman, who stumbled and hit her shoulder. The woman’s shout of pain and surprise drew others, unsuspecting, toward the impending fight.
The slaughter nuns did not come gently in ones and twos, but launched forward, offering no quarter and giving no kind of a damn if the NYChronicle staff got in the way.
“It’s the influence of Caedis,” Selene muttered, poised for battle. “They no longer care about the collateral damage they may cause.”
“Shit.”
15
Indigo watched as the slaughter nuns fanned out. NYChronicle staffers started to rise in alarm, voices erupting in an anxious chatter. They couldn’t see Indigo, but the Androktasiai were visible now. They were stealthy, even mystical, but they could not fold shadows around themselves. They could not remain invisible forever.