Alice in her rabbit hole could not have fallen any farther, or with any less regard for what was real and what was fiction. A world peopled by talking flowers and handyman lizards didn’t seem any less likely than a world where she could have done—where anyone could have done—what she had.…
Shadows she could understand.
Shadows were ordinary, shadows were safe, shadows were hers. Even with Damastes clawing at her mind like a rat scrabbling at a pipe, the shadows belonged to her. Nothing in the shadows could scream a world to pieces. She wasn’t a banshee, to wail death to the living. So how …
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
Everything matters, murmured a voice, and for the first time she couldn’t say whether it belonged to her or to Damastes. She was falling, down, down, down, until nothing existed but the shadows and the fall.
She could fight it, but to what end? As long as she kept falling, she didn’t have to think about any of this. She could let herself go, relaxing into the comforting arms of gravity, which was only an echo of itself here in the darkness; it pulled her down, but it would never pull her all the way to the ground. She could fall forever, a perpetual motion machine of one, and nothing else would matter.
It was tempting—so tempting—and she was so tired. She didn’t think she’d ever before been this tired in her life. The exhaustion ran all the way down to her bones, curling around them like smoke, making her feel fragile and thin, like a glass sculpture of herself.
Her powers should have come with an instruction manual. Better yet, they should have come with an actual teacher, not the half-remembered lie of one, someone who could actually understand what she was capable of and explain it to her so that she would know.
The place where Nora ended and Indigo began (or was it the other way around?) was raw. It rubbed against itself, and that small pain was enough to keep her from surrendering completely to the fall.
How was it her fault that Damastes wanted her? She hadn’t asked for this. She hadn’t been the one to join a cult or barter her soul to the gods of murder.
How was it her fault that the Phonoi wouldn’t leave her alone? Yes, she killed them when she found them, but they killed children. They made their perverse beliefs her problem when they left the bodies of innocents scattered in the streets like trash. That stupid nun should have realized that if anyone was killing in the name of righteousness, it was Nora.
Wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
And still she was falling. Nora scrabbled at the edges of her mind, trying to find the place where she ended and Indigo began. Something was important, even here. Something still mattered; something she had almost forgotten, except as a small, nagging need to act, to perform some unremembered task. Indigo would recall. They weren’t really different people—Nora wasn’t so far gone as to believe that they were—but she had been Indigo when she’d heard the bad thing, the important thing, and she wasn’t Indigo now.
Or maybe she was. Maybe this was what it was like to really be Indigo, no friends, no family, no …
Nora’s eyes snapped open, beholding only blackness. Friends. Friends.
Shelby and Sam were in danger. Damastes had as much as confirmed that Rafe was on his way to hurt them, and she had gotten sidelined by the murder nun and her sister, leaving her friends all alone. They didn’t know what was coming.
She was so tired. She was hurt, and she was exhausted, and if her powers were ever going to give out, this was the time. Maybe her power had never been to enter the shadows; maybe it had always been to leave them, and now that she was at the end of her rope, she was trapped, no way out.
But they needed her.
Please, she thought, and there was no more divide in her mind. There was no more Nora, no more Indigo, only her, only a woman who needed, more than anything, to save her friends.
She wrapped the shadows around herself, pulling them tight as a veil, and she was gone.
* * *
Transitioning back into the real world had never before felt so difficult. From the outside it might have looked easy, but for her, it was a struggle every inch of the way. There was nothing between reality and the shadows—they were the flip side of each other, connected and connecting and inextricably linked—and still she struggled through the morass before collapsing into the light.
Everything ached. Her wounds from the fight with the murder nun had traveled with her into shadow, but they had somehow been inconsequential there; the trials of the flesh mattered less in a place that was defined by the absence of light. Now that she was back in a place with physical laws, every bruise, abrasion, and cut felt as if it were being delivered all over again.
Panting, Nora used the wall to pull herself to her feet and looked dully around. The shadows seemed too heavy. She couldn’t see through them the way she should have been able to, so tired that even the most basic attributes of her power were unreliable.
There’s the answer, she thought, with a trace of wry bitterness. I can be normal. I just have to run myself into the ground to do it.
Into the ground—where was she? After the shadows had dumped her in Florence, she was less willing to trust her sense of direction. The unshifting shadows made it hard to tell exactly where she was. It was like having a whole layer of her vision stolen, replaced by … what? By what normal people saw. By what she had claimed to want for so long.
Now that she had it, at the most inconvenient time possible, she didn’t want it anymore.
The most inconvenient—Sam and Shelby. She was looking for Sam and Shelby. They needed her. Injured or not, she was their best chance of survival.
And if Sam finds out you’re Indigo? The voice was hers, she was almost sure of that. Her own fears and misgivings lacked the poisonous poetry of Damastes. When she spoke in her own head—as everyone did, as normal people did—she used her own voice, her own inflections, and her own utter lack of murderous intent.
She felt sure that she could tell Shelby the truth and Shelby would love her anyway. But how much of the truth? If she only confessed she was Indigo, Shelby would love her for it. Even Sam—Sam, who thought Indigo some kind of superhero vigilante, who practically worshipped her—would still love her.
But what if she told them the whole truth?
They’ll leave you. All that you love will be taken from you.
But they would be alive to make that decision.
Nora straightened, blinking again as the shadows seemed to clear a little. It wasn’t as much of a surprise as it should perhaps have been when this change in perspective made it clear that this was her hallway, her apartment building, her home.
It was tempting to walk to her own door, to check on the degree of damage done by her fight with the slaughter nun—and more, to check on the Assholes. They had to have been terrified by all the noise and commotion. She paused. Noise. They hadn’t been subtle about their fight. How come none of the neighbors had called the police yet? Why was the hall so quiet? She remembered the fight in Florence, the way none of the people at the outdoor café had even noticed them—some bit of magic that slaughter nun had managed. The bitch had done the same thing here, she felt sure. And how had the bitch even gotten here?
None of that mattered if Nora hadn’t gotten here in time. If she’d already failed to save Sam and Shelby—if she’d yanked herself out of the dark for nothing—then there was no reason to stay. But if she hadn’t failed them yet, she was going to if she didn’t move.
She moved.
Haltingly at first, then with increasing speed, she stumbled down the hall toward the stairs. She didn’t know where her phone was. Shelby, if she was alive, would have a phone, and she could use it to call Sam. She could make sure that they were both fine, and then she could …
Well, collapse for the better part of a year, if it were up to her. But it wasn’t likely to be up to her, and it wasn’t safe to stay around them anymore. Not with murder nuns and cultists on her trail and a demon inside her.
The thought of everything that wanted to kill her paradoxically made her feel stronger, as if she could go up against the entire world by refusing to fall down and die. She gathered speed, going from a walk to an uneven jog to an outright run. The shadows were back in full force by the time she reached the stairs, and she was briefly tempted to leap through them, letting them transport her to Shelby’s floor.
No. That would use power she didn’t have to spare right now, especially if she was about to face a cult full of people bent on killing the only friends she had left in the world.
She took the stairs two and three at a time, surprisingly feeling the muscles in her thighs burn from this mundane activity. She forced herself to keep going. It was annoying that being a superpowered killing machine didn’t come with basic physical fitness, but whatever. She could hit the gym later, if she miraculously lived that long.
Shelby’s hall was exactly as it had always been, save for one new addition—Sam, standing outside Shelby’s door, one hand raised, as if he had just been knocking.
Sam, alive and checking on Shelby, as Nora had asked. She felt like Scrooge on Christmas morning—she wasn’t too late. He hadn’t noticed her arrival, and for a second she braced herself against the wall with one hand, the other hand pressed over her heart, catching her breath. Elated. Then he knocked on the door again.
“Come on, Shelby. I’m a friend of Nora’s,” Sam called, not quite shouting, but raising his voice enough for it to carry into the apartment. “If you’re home, you need to open the door.”
“Coming!” shouted Shelby’s voice.
The door opened. Sam straightened, a look of pure confusion on his face. Nora shoved herself away from the wall, started toward them. Something was—
The fist hit Sam squarely in the chin, knocking him backward, away from the door. He staggered until he hit the wall and crumpled. Shelby screamed.
Nora flickered. One moment she was herself, running as fast as she could toward her friends, and the next she was Indigo, diving into the narrow band of shadow created by her own foot. It was like turning herself into a pretzel, twisting inward in a way that made her stomach lurch, but it worked. She went from the hallway to the interior of Shelby’s apartment in the blink of an eye, appearing behind her friend.
The color of the apartment was almost a shock, it was so bright, seeming to snap into place in an instant as she materialized. There was no time to dwell on the ache in her retinas. Shelby was still screaming, and the Phonoi assassin behind her was raising his knife to silence her. Reflection was for later. For now, Indigo needed to act.
She thrust her hands out in front of her, sending waves of shadow to wrap around the cultist and squeeze until his screams drowned out Shelby’s. Indigo flung him to the side, hearing him hit the wall with a satisfying crunch. When he fell, he smashed a decorative end table that she remembered helping Shelby lug home from a swap meet downtown. Indigo felt a sharp pang of guilt. Being near her was like being too close to a tornado. One way or another, everything wound up getting smashed.
A man grabbed her from the side, yanking her off-balance. She hadn’t even seen him there. Another came at her from the other side. This time, she was more prepared. She grabbed the arm that held her, using it to brace herself as she kicked at the second man, landing a blow to his gut. He staggered backward, and she called the shadows, bringing them raining down on both of her attackers.
“Indigo! Watch out!” Shelby sounded strangely far away.
Indigo ducked, flowing down into the shadows and reappearing a few feet behind her original position. The fourth assassin stumbled as his attempt to stab her landed on empty air. Shelby stepped up and smashed a vase over his head.
It was a silly, cliché note, like something out of a children’s movie. But it worked. The man wobbled, his eyes rolling back in his head, and collapsed to the floor. Indigo raised her head, meeting Shelby’s eyes. Shelby quirked a smile and tossed the remains of her shattered vase aside.
“Very cool.”
“Behind you!” said Indigo, and shoved Shelby aside with a sweep of her arm before hitting the last assassin full in the face with a blast of shadow. He staggered into the hallway, hitting the wall next to Sam …
Who was awake on the hallway floor and staring at Indigo in wide-eyed dismay.
Shit.
Indigo froze, not sure what to do. Shelby rushed over and slammed the door, cutting off Sam’s view. Leaving him out in the hall with a dead Phonoi assassin.
“Run,” Shelby whispered loudly. “Get yourself—back to yourself, and come back, but right now, run.”
Indigo’s eyes went wide in surprise. Shelby recognized her. Somehow, she knew that Indigo and Nora were one and the same.
Reeling from this epiphany, Indigo glanced at the dead assassins, the four cultists scattered around Shelby’s apartment in pools of blood and the wreckage of furniture. For the moment, Shelby was out of danger.
Indigo dropped into the floor, into the silence of the shadows beneath their feet. The world fell away.
* * *
Once again, she was falling, and once again, she didn’t know what to do about it. Shelby knew she was Indigo, and Sam had seen … something. She’d been Nora when she stopped to catch her breath, but she’d been Indigo when she appeared in the apartment, and Indigo when she joined in the fight. Shelby had never called her by the name Nora. Maybe he hadn’t realized it was her.
This falling thing was getting old. It used to be that when she slipped into shadow, she slipped right back out again, arriving at her destination without any time passing between entry and exit. Now …
She tried to feel for the purpose that would allow her to move back into the real world. She couldn’t find it.
You’re weakening, little one, rumbled the voice of Damastes. You’ll give in soon enough. Why not give in now?
I will never give in to you, she thought. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to.
But you already listen to me. I told you that your friends were in danger and you moved to protect them. I told you that Rafe would wait until they were together, and you raced to beat him to their door. I told you everything you needed to know. You followed my lead. Damastes’s voice dropped to a purr, low and thrumming and dangerous. See how well we work together? I can tell you where to go. I can tell you who to kill. I can remove all question from your life and give you the freedom to act as you see fit, to do as you see fit, to live as you see fit. And you can keep your friends. Doesn’t that make it more tempting to give in?
No, she thought fiercely, and yes her heart whispered, and Nora grabbed the shadows around her and disappeared, leaving behind the nothingness, and the distant, aching echo of Damastes laughing as if he were the only source of laughter in all the universe. In all the world.
* * *
Nora toppled out of shadow and back into the hallway outside Shelby’s apartment. As she came out of her crouch, she could see Sam slumped against the wall across from Shelby’s door, his hands braced flat against the floor and his eyes wide. He hadn’t seen her appear. She was almost certain of that.
The body of the assassin was gone. Indigo had no idea how that was possible. She also had no idea if these two attacks were connected. While she’d been trying to shadow-walk back from Greece to New York, the murder nun had somehow managed to drag her right out of the shadowpaths, landing her in Italy. Then when she’d escaped, one of her same order—that sisterhood of slaughter maidens, the Androk-somethings—had been waiting in Nora’ apartment to ambush her. And minutes later, as she was approaching Shelby’s apartment and Sam was knocking on the door, Phonoi assassins tried to kill Sam?
Fucking chaos.
She needed to clear her head, needed to find somewhere to breathe and pull her thoughts together, lay the puzzle pieces out and see how they fit together the way that Nora did as an investigative journalist. Right now she needed to be Nora more than she needed to be Indigo.
And it wasn’t Indigo that Sam needed.
She scrambled to her feet and ran for him. “Sam, are you all right? Where’s Shelby?”
“Nora?” He turned to face her, and no fear or suspicion was in his face, only dawning relief at the sight of her, as if he hadn’t been allowing himself to wonder whether she was all right. He started to stand—and stopped, pressing a hand to his forehead. “Ow,” he said weakly.
“Don’t get up.” She ran to him, dropping to her knee by his side. “Are you all right? What happened?”
Lying to him hurt, in the wake of the lies that had been told to her. He deserved the truth. But if she told him she was Indigo, he would know that she wasn’t safe—that she wasn’t real, not in any meaningful sense. Her entire past was a lie, and that meant that Nora was a lie, because a person was only the sum of what the person knew and remembered.
Sam was true. Shelby was true. Everything else was a beautiful lie created by someone else, someone who had not had her best interests at heart.
“Indigo,” he said, turning to look straight at her.
Her heart gave a painful lurch.
He wasn’t done. “She appeared out of nowhere, just as your friend opened her apartment door. The whole place was filled with shadows. I think—I think she attacked me.”
No! No, that isn’t what happened at all! Nora wanted to yell, to tell him that he didn’t understand what he had seen. She couldn’t do it. For now, her secret needed to stay hidden, even from him.
“Shelby’s okay?” she asked.
“I only saw her for a second, but she seemed fine.” He pressed a hand against his head again. “Jeez. I need medical help, Nora. I think I might have a concussion.”
“Shelby has an ice pack.” Nora stood, running for the apartment door.
It wasn’t locked. Nora let herself in and closed the door behind her. Shelby had been waiting for her, stood staring at her. The wrecked furniture remained, but like the corpse in the corridor, the dead assassins were gone. Even their blood had vanished.
“Well?” Shelby demanded. “This is fucking magic, right?”
“I know you have questions. You can be damn sure I have some, but right now I need your first-aid kit.”
The sound of sirens split the air. Someone had heard the commotion, called the cops. Nora froze.
Shelby didn’t. “You should go. I’ll take care of Sam, but maybe now’s not the time for you to be answering questions from cops.”
“Make sure he’s okay. Promise me he’ll be okay.”
“I promise. Now go. You can meet up with Sam at the hospital. Put yourself as far as possible from the scene of the crime.”
Nora nodded. “All right. But whatever happens, do not let the cops go into my apartment. I don’t think they’ll have any reason to, but if it looks like they might, find some way to put them off.”
“Why—”
“Later. All of the answers, I promise.” Nora ran for the nearest shadow. Sam might wonder where she’d gone, but he’d had some head trauma. She could talk her way around it. As for Shelby, Nora no longer cared what her friend saw. Shelby knew. Part of Nora was elated to have someone she didn’t have to hide herself from.
She dove into a patch of darkness and was gone.