Indigo(98)

“I am alive again!”

“Nooooo!” screamed Selene, breaking free of her shock and impelled by horror. She shoved a Phonoi killer aside and hurled herself at Damastes, a knife held in two hands as she sought to plunge it into the murder god’s heart.

Damastes swatted her aside.

As if she were nothing.

The spiked back of his hand tore through Selene’s flesh, and the strength of his arm flung her thirty feet through the air. Nora screamed as Selene crashed down out of sight behind the heaped dead.

Damastes turned toward Nora.

“Thank you,” thundered the god.

His laughter broke the world.





19

Pain.

Inside, outside, it didn’t matter. Her body hurt. Her heart hurt. Her soul hurt, an aching, sucking wound where the shadows should have been. She had been their prison and their prisoner for so long, so long, and now—

Now they were loose, running wild and rampant, and there was so much blood, so many broken bodies, and Selene was dead and everything was lost and the child—the child—

The children were still alive. She had done this, she had opened this terrible wound, unleashed this impossible beast upon the world, for the sake of the children. This was her fault. This was her crime, her sin, her unforgivable transgression, and unless she found a way to make it worthwhile—unless she saved the children—she might as well have let the slaughter nuns have her. She might as well have died on that first altar, the dagger to her heart, because she’d done what the men who’d killed the children had wanted all along, she had unleashed the end of days, she had broken the world, and for what? For what?

For the children. Without them, she had done it all for nothing, and so she had done it for them.

Pain singing hosannas to every twitch, every thought, Nora pulled herself to her feet. It took … forever. It took no time at all. Dully, through the agony of her own body, she heard the roars of Damastes. He was doing what he did best: he was making murder. In his hands—claws—in his grasp, it was an art form, like a painting, or a song played on an impossible instrument. The Phonoi assassins weren’t having a great day.

No one was having a great day. Great days were no longer on the menu.

Fuck the menu, said a small voice at the back of her mind, sharp and sardonic and a little sweet, as if it understood what she was going through, even though it couldn’t help. I’m going to order à la carte. Who’s with me?

Shelby wasn’t real. Shelby had never been real. But that meant Shelby was the better part of Nora, maybe the best part of her. The girl she would have been if she hadn’t had a murderer for a mother and a cultist for a father, if she hadn’t been promised to a murder god, if she had been allowed to grow up, instead of just getting older one day and one death at a time.

If she couldn’t do this for herself, she could do it for Anastasia Edwards. She could do it for Andel Edwards. She could do it for Shelby.

“Fuck the menu,” Nora agreed, in a voice that was virtually a sigh, and broke into a run.

The pain stayed behind, in the place where hero had become human. Everything was running. Everything was screaming. There was no time, there was no time to stop and see who was screaming, there was no time for anything but running as if her life depended on it. Because it did. Her life, and Anastasia’s life, and everyone’s life, they all depended on how quickly she could run.

Nora understood running. Indigo’s powers came from Damastes, fueled by shadow and demonic magic, but the physicality behind those powers had always come from Nora. When she punched, her knuckles were the ones that got bruised. When she kicked, her toes were the ones that got broken. And when she ran, when she leaped across the rooftops of the city like the comic-book chimera Damastes had worked so hard to turn her into, her legs were the ones powering the whole thing.

She might not have shadow powers or magic or a giant-ass sword—she would really have appreciated a giant-ass sword right about then—but she could run.

She ran straight for the altar, where Anastasia was struggling against her remaining bonds, tears running down her face and snot hanging in ropy strings from her nose. The girl looked so young, because she was so young, and she should never have been forced into this position. She should have been thinking middle-school thoughts, not wondering whether her brother was going to slice out her heart and offer it to a murder god.

A murder god who, while he would happily have bathed in the blood of the world, had no interest in the blood of this particular girl. He didn’t want to be bound to the Phonoi. He didn’t want to be bound to—

“Forget something?” taunted Rafe, positioning himself so that he was between Anastasia and the running Nora. He was scarcely on the other side of his wards, a twisted delight in his eyes. Damastes was still cutting an unstoppable swath through the guards, rending and slicing without hesitation. Rafe didn’t seem to care. He was safe inside his own protections.

That was how he had always been, Nora realized, her heartbeat speeding up from the mixture of adrenaline and rage. Her pain had been entirely forgotten, replaced by the need to justify her choices, to make the things she had done for the sake of her soul worthwhile. Rafe, and the people like him, had always been willing to let the world drown in a sea of its own blood as long as he could be sure of being safe.

“This is for my father,” Nora snarled, and threw a hard right hook through his magical barrier. His nose broke against her fingers with a satisfyingly squishy sensation. It was one of the best things she had ever felt. She hauled back to do it again.