“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.
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.”
Empty prattling! This vessel is mine!
“Fuck you, demon,” Nora muttered, slamming the lid back down on Damastes, putting him back into that cell in the prison of her flesh. It wouldn’t hold forever, but it would keep long enough for her to get back on her feet and make the next move. She lay against the dirty linoleum floor, panting. “I’ve got him, Selene. I’m okay.”
Selene stared into Nora’s eyes a moment, searching for a sign of Damastes, perhaps. Selene sat back on her heels, apparently satisfied, but she was holding tight to her own knife. “Is he—?”
“Back in his box for now. Still in the dark.” Nora pulled herself up. “That—my mother … was going to sacrifice me.”
“Hmm … I suspected the ritual used on you was different from those practiced more recently.”
“Yeah, none of the kids—none of the recent victims were related to any of the names on the list. Not like me. Holy crap … those were my parents!”
“Yes.” Selene looked puzzled by Nora’s outburst.
“No. I don’t mean back then—though all that’s disgusting and freaky, too. The dead woman in O’Hagan’s apartment was my mother! And he—‘Uncle Theo,’ Matt O’Hagan—Christ! They were never even married … yet another fucking lie. He was my father! They were alive all this time! Did he really try to save me? How? Why didn’t the cult find me sooner? Why are my memories so … fucked-up?”
Clutching her head in pain and confusion, Nora collapsed into a rickety chair. She remembered the cemetery, but now she knew it had been empty, shrouded in night, as O’Hagan—her father, damn it!—had spirited her away from the crumbling old chapel where the ritual had taken place. There had been no funeral, no mourners. Only the ruin of the ritual and their escape into a cleaner darkness.
Her father had defied the cult—why? For love? That was some twisted kind of affection. He’d muttered into her ear as he’d carried her away. All the words he’d said—that her parents were dead, the assurances that she would be taken care of—those hadn’t been comforting words. They were her personal catechism in the Church of Indigo:
Who are you? Indigo. Where do you come from? Humanity’s darkest shadows. What became of your parents? Murdered by a mugger. How did you become as you are? Shaped by adversity, trained by monks in high Tibetan mountains, tempered in righteous anger.
Strands in the tapestry of lies. More false memories, woven from bits of horrible truth. To keep her safe. But there were still holes in her past where memory stopped short and only blackness held sway.
Somehow, O’Hagan must have stayed with the cult to keep her safe. To keep her mother safe, as well? Had he realized that letting a murder god loose upon the world could only lead to ultimate destruction? That Nora was the gateway that must never be used or replicated? She shuddered and felt the shadows within roll in her chest, almost like chuckling.
Selene sat down beside Nora again and took her hands, forcing the younger woman to turn toward her. “We have little time. If O’Hagan and his victim were who you say, it casts new light on the ritual that was used on you and what the Phonoi must be planning—”
“You mean what Rafe Bogdani is planning,” Nora spat. “He talked about taking the power for himself, that the original ritual was screwed up and that pissed him off. That old ritual’s got to be some kind of clue.”
Nora frowned at the floor as wild thoughts fell into place in her head. “My parents … the missing Edwards kids … Rafe’s going to re-create the original ritual as he thinks it should have gone. That requires the sacrifice of a child—or children—by their own parents! My parents are dead, Charlotte’s dead, but Graham’s not. Rafe—” She had to stop and swallow down bile. “Whatever he had O’Hagan do to my mother must have been a way to salvage or extend the original ritual.”
Nora closed her eyes and tried to remember what her—what the corpse had looked like, how it had been mutilated. If she thought of it as just a body, the roiling nausea and horror were a little easier to stand. Think! What damage had the body sustained? Ripped open from sternum to groin, a bloody red cavity, going black and brown as the blood coagulated, rippling with the movement of maggots—
Nora clapped her hand over her mouth and breathed through her nose. She caught a whiff of old paper and dust that clung to her hand from moving boxes and cleaning off the editing machine. Ordinary, decent odors of files, work, dull, dry fact. Thank God.
Nora got hold of herself. “Did you get a better look? Have you any idea what he did to her?”
“I couldn’t really say. There were symbols on her flesh and organs missing, but in that pesthole … It wasn’t anything I’ve ever seen before.”
“Damn it. That’s no help. Whatever Rafe had planned, O’Hagan—my father—killed himself to stop it.” It hadn’t been terror at the end … no. That was a relief. “They were hiding in plain sight.”
Selene made a sour face. “No. He was her guard.”
Nora scowled at her. “What?”
“Didn’t you notice? There were drugs in the room—strong antipsychotics, opiates, depressants, and others. She was kept medicated. Given what we’ve seen on that tape, I wouldn’t doubt she was dangerously insane. Whatever Rafe Bogdani had demanded of O’Hagan, it was a way to control you—their daughter.”
“Well, it’s not fucking working.”
“That could be why Rafe’s now bent on using Graham Edwards’s children—with or without his cooperation. He’s going back to the original ritual.”
“We have to find them. We have to—” Nora made herself slow down. She took another deep breath and pressed her fingers together again, testing the shadow walls she’d ringed around Damastes. He lay like a cold stone inside her, quiet for now, but waiting for another chance, another slip.… But for now, she had him. “Let’s watch the video again. No sound this time. I know there’s something there that O’Hagan wanted me to see.” She couldn’t think of him as her father—or even as “Uncle Theo”—and she wasn’t sure what she ought to feel aside from horrified and angry. But she could work with that.
* * *
The girl struggles at first as they lead her into the room—the details are lost in shadow but for a pillar here, a bit of wall there, as a small fire and a scattering of fat candles in iron candelabra flicker as if floating in darkness. Only an incomplete ring of candles around the altar creates a well-defined aura of illumination. The view swivels to follow the progress of the chanting people who accompany two women in white to the altar dais—and the girl. The camera dwells on her, like an unclean gaze.
With each step, the girl seems to grow weaker, sleepier perhaps. Or hopeless. Her expression moves from fear to submission to emptiness, until the small procession stops beside the candles that illuminate the altar. The older woman—Charlotte—steps into the circle through the gap in the candles. The younger of the two women in white—Nora’s mother, Stella—removes the girl’s thin robe from her shoulders to reveal the lines of blood already decorating her body. Facing the other woman, Stella speaks.
“I give my daughter, Nora, flesh of my flesh, to the service of our great master. For the glorification of Damastes, was she born. For the embodiment of the god, I give her of my own free will, asking nothing for myself.”
“Your sacrifice is acceptable. For your gift, you shall be the favored of Damastes,” Charlotte replies.
Stella bows her head with a solemn smile. Young Nora shivers and makes a frightened small sound, but gives only token resistance as her mother steps into the circle and pulls her along. Nora stumbles as she crosses the line.
Charlotte closes the circle by lighting the final candle, and the light within makes the darkness without deeper, as if the blackness oozes directly from hell. The other members of the procession spread around the altar, still muttering their strange chant. As they pass the camera, a moment’s light illuminates each face—the faces of those who will die in a warehouse years hence, and of the few who will escape. Each expression ecstatic but one: Matt O’Hagan’s, which is pale and cast down. Then he passes into the gloom, just one of the dim shapes that ring the bright altar.
The girl is pushed up onto the altar and made to lie supine. Now she gives no resistance, her eyes dim, unfocused, her body pliant and still while the high priestess and her acolyte draw the last of the incantations and sigils on her flesh in gleaming black powder. The girl seems asleep.…
The chanting rises as Charlotte anoints the knife and hands it to Stella, rises again as the high priestess brings forth a shining object: golden wings surmounting an endless circle filled with a spinning darkness that both draws and repels the eye. Stare too long and the darkness stares back. The shining thing is laid on the girl’s forehead while Charlotte speaks words that quiver on the air and make the shadows squirm like a maggot-rich corpse.
The girl’s eyes flash open, pupils wide and black from side to side.
Charlotte accepts the knife, given by Stella and blooded on her hand. The flames bow down. Charlotte touched the bloodstained blade’s tip to the girl’s forehead—
The girl seizes, bowing upward.
The outer shadows stir and shiver, a single voice threading out of tune through the chanting of the assembled cultists. Matt O’Hagan struggles forward.
“No! You can’t—Stella, no!”
The chanting goes on, never breaking, even as the nearest pair of worshippers turn to grab the man as if they would rend him apart. Their eyes shine in the dark.
Matt struggles violently, lashes out, kicks, and falls, then rises again on the sound of bones breaking, and the chanting finally falters.
“Nora!”
The girl convulses, thrashes against the altar top, foam beginning to drip from the corners of her mouth as her lips pull back in a rictus.
The women at the altar ignore everything but their ritual. Charlotte hands the knife to Stella and smiles, motioning her forward. “Go on.” Then she turns to see the cause of the commotion behind them.
Stella turns toward the camera, toward the girl on the altar—her daughter, sacrifice to Damastes. She steps forward, raising the knife on high, murmuring strange words with the soft expression of a mother singing a lullaby.…
Behind her, Matt swings one of the iron candelabra, clearing a path to the altar as Charlotte steps toward him. He kicks over the candles and swipes at Charlotte, knocking her down.
Flames lick across the ground and spread, climbing every loose fold of fabric they touch. All voices but Stella’s give way to screams and chaos.
Stella holds the knife above her daughter’s chest, staring into the flashing darkness at the heart of the golden object that rests on Nora’s forehead. No amount of thrashing, no amount of tears, blood, or spit that run from her has dislodged it from the girl’s skin.
“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.”