Indigo stared at the golden object. It seemed as cloaked in shadow as she was herself, beckoning her closer to it, to touch it, take it. Deep inside, Nora squirmed, but the part of her that was Indigo was ascendant now and leaned closer. The emblem, on a chain, was of pair of stylized, down-sweeping wings with a circle resting above them, endless and somehow filled with shadow. Big for a pendant, but what else could it be? It had an odor—an aura almost—faint, grim, like burned flesh and running blood. She reached for it.
The psychic weight of the old brownstone had been so oppressive, but now its strong current seemed to flex and shift against her, as if something had immersed itself into that current with her, disturbing its flow. Indigo whipped around, flicking the drawer closed. She expected to find someone else in the room, but all she saw was a light on the security panel. Someone was home, but who? Not Killer Priestess Charlotte, that’s for sure.
The front door slammed hard enough to be heard upstairs, and then the ARMED indicator blinked off. Indigo left the emblem behind and slipped shadow to shadow until she came to the stair landing. She gathered the gloom around her and gazed down into the ground-floor entryway.
The man in the foyer growled and flung his keys onto the hall table. They rattled against an antique bowl as he shrugged out of his overcoat and threw that aside, too, with the same angry disdain.
“Son of a bitch,” he spat, and stalked out of view. From this angle, Indigo couldn’t make him out him well enough to compare him to the photo she’d seen, but he had to be Charlotte’s husband, Graham Edwards.
Where are the kids?
Indigo drifted down the staircase to an ebon patch beside a longcase clock that was probably older than the house. She drew closer to the swinging brass pendulum as it slowly ticked … ticked … Glassware chimed nearby and Indigo looked toward it. Graham had gone to a sideboard in the dining room and made himself a drink. He had to be over fifty, tall, and handsome in the sleek, groomed way of rich men, his body trim from the constant attention of expensive trainers and displayed by the art of even-more-expensive tailors. He swallowed about half of the contents of his glass in a gulp and started to refill it. Well, that’s not a handsome habit, though I’d drink, too, if I were married to that bitch.
The doorbell rang. Graham flinched, then slammed his heavy crystal tumbler down and stalked to the door. Indigo drew the cloak of darkness closer around her, easing into the gloomy corner created as Graham opened the carved front door. Inches away from him. Close enough to hear his breathing.
He was silent a moment, then: “What the fuck do you want?”
“Why, yes, it really is a lovely evening, isn’t it?”
Indigo couldn’t see the sarcastic man, but his voice seemed familiar.
“I said, ‘What do you want?’” Graham held on to the door, issuing no invitation.
“I need to speak to Charlotte. About the blessed event.”
“What, you and my wife don’t talk while you’re fucking?” Graham shouted.
The other man scoffed, “Oh, grow up, Edwards.” He moved into the house and pushed against Graham’s chest with one hand. “It’s circle business.”
Graham recoiled from the man’s touch, backing up until he could rest one unsteady hand on the hall table as the other man turned to close the door. This one was younger, slimmer, casual in a hipster sort of way that wasn’t totally obnoxious. If he noticed the unnatural darkness in that gloomy corner, he gave no sign. Indigo studied the scruffy beard first and then the brown eyes, and realized she knew him.
The connection jolted her. The stairs at Heath and Bailey. Maidali Ortiz’s death scene, the memorial. What was his name…? Rafe! Rafe Bogdani—no wonder the dead cultist’s name had rung a bell—he had to be related. Brother, maybe? Holy shit. This guy had been Maidali’s teacher! He’d stood there laying on the guilt with those doe eyes.…
Nora had thought his eyes warm and sad, but at the moment Rafe Bogdani’s expression was anything but.
“Charlotte’s not here,” Graham said through clenched teeth.
“I guessed that. I’ll settle for the list.”
“You’re missing the point. I haven’t seen her since Sunday.”
“From what she said, the two of you had quite a dustup.”
Graham barked a hollow laugh. “A ‘dustup’? Is that what she called it? A fucking ‘dustup’? She wanted to use our own children for—”
Rafe held up a hand. “I know, Graham. And I understand why you’re furious. I understand why you sent them away—”
“Damn right I sent them away!”
“—but the thing is, I asked her to wait for me to return. I was three thousand miles away on Sunday, and Charlotte chose to go ahead without me. I spoke to her after that fight you had and she told me you’d … shall we say, withdrawn from our circle. That you weren’t going to attend the rite.”
“Of course I refused to attend, knowing what she planned!” Graham snapped. “I took my children and got them out of town. I’ve only just—”
“Yes, yes … we’ve both only just come home, haven’t we? But the thing is, I’ve been back in New York an hour and cannot find hide nor hair of Charlotte, or any of the other members of the inner circle. I’ve made phone calls, but this is my first house call. Before I continued my search, I thought I would make absolutely certain you don’t know what’s gone wrong.”
“With your plans for the so-called blessed event? I couldn’t care less.”
Rafe stepped in close. Graham stiffened, as if remembering that he really ought to be afraid of the other man. Rafe inhaled deeply, as if drawing in Graham’s scent and studying it, as if he could learn something from that smell.
“All right,” Rafe relented. “Fine. But I want the list.”
“I don’t have it. And I won’t have you rummaging through my wife’s things without her consent. Get it from Winston.” Graham’s posture was stiff and he groped along the table edge as if he were searching for protection.
Rafe’s eyes narrowed until they gleamed like chips of dirty ice. He closed the gap between them and stared into Graham’s face. “You’re weak, Edwards. You’re not worthy. That’s why I’m the one in Charlotte’s bed, not you. No matter what asinine excuse you make for yourself.”
Graham’s lip twisted with revulsion, and he took a sudden step away from the hall table. He held a blocky, black automatic in the hand that had moved so nervously. He wasn’t nervous now. Graham swung the gun up and pointed it at Rafe’s face. “Get out.”
Rafe chuckled and stepped back. “You have no problem living with the fruits of assassination, extortion, and trafficking, but this suddenly makes you grow a spine—”
Graham shoved the muzzle into Rafe’s left eye. “Get. Out.” Graham’s voice had gone silky cold. “Or I’ll put a bullet through your head and make somebody very happy.”
Rafe spread his arms, still chuckling, and walked backward to the door. “Fine. I’m going. I’ll see you at the event. You will be there, my friend. You can’t step away from the circle. You know how this goes.” Rafe’s gaze passed over Indigo in her shadows as he reached to open the door. He frowned for a moment, but that vanished as he stepped outside the doorway and turned back to Graham. Rafe grinned. “Give my love to the kids—especially that adorable daughter of yours.”
Graham slammed the door in Rafe’s face and spat, “Smug, twisted little motherfucker.” Graham rearmed the perimeter alarm and turned away, still muttering to himself about Rafe Bogdani and the “bloody blessed event.”
Blessed event, Indigo echoed. It’s gotta be whatever these sick bastards have in mind for the other two kids Bullington mentioned. And from the sound of it, Charlotte Edwards had offered up her own offspring for the ritual. Her husband might be an evil son of a bitch, but at least he had balked at that.
She toyed with staying and seeing what she could get out of Graham, but it seemed more likely Rafe had the information she wanted. Before she left, Indigo tucked Charlotte Edwards’s keys into an ornamental box on a bedside table. She couldn’t be caught carrying them, but she might need them again if she could figure out what they unlocked. I guess Nora will have to “run into” Rafe—ever so coincidentally, of course.
She left Graham Edwards alone with his bottle and his gun and hoped he’d blow his own brains out—saving her the trouble of coming back. Indigo reached for the deepest shadows outside the brownstone, felt the pathways available to her, and sensed the shifting night come alive at her touch. She stepped from the apartment onto those dark paths and reappeared on the street, following Rafe. He didn’t head across the park on foot toward Winston’s co-op, but toward the nearest subway station.
Perfect.
From patch to patch, she slipped along behind him and down into the station, coming to rest in the murky gray space behind the stairs. She watched Rafe pace on the subway platform until his train pulled in. Once he’d stepped aboard, she hurtled forward, out of the darkness, shedding her shadows, shedding Indigo.
Nora darted through the gap just ahead of the closing doors. They groaned shut as she tumbled into him, saying, “Sorry, sorry, ohmigod, I’m so sorry.…”
Rafe caught her, holding on for maybe a second longer than a gentleman should have before he set her back on her feet. He frowned, while the shadows in the corners of the car reached toward them, trembling. A darker feeling inside her twisted, pulling away while the rest of the shade seemed to want the opposite. The shifting patches inside the train car behaved as if they had more than one master. It made Nora queasy, and Indigo curious. She stood still, blinking as if surprised.
Rafe gave her one of the sweet smiles he’d used at the memorial. “Don’t I know you? Sorry, that sounds totally creepy, doesn’t it? But I’d swear—”
“Oh. Yeah.” For a moment it was a struggle for her to sound like innocent Nora and not like someone who knew Rafe Bogdani had been banging the Queen of the Kid Killers. She shook off the weird feeling that her shadows were divided, then dropped her gaze as if the memory of their first meeting hurt. The only hurt she was feeling was the restraint of not whacking the dirtbag right here and now.
“Maidali Ortiz. We met at the procession for her.”
“Right!” He snapped his fingers. “Shelby … Coughlin. Right?”
Nora repressed a shudder. Damn it. I gave him Shelby’s name. Fuck. Now they’ll come after her for sure if I don’t play this right. And Sam … “That’s right. Look, I know I may have seemed insensitive at the time—”
“You and half of New York.” She glanced up. He’d let his smile cool, but it wasn’t gone yet. “I understand the impulse.”
“No, no. I … wasn’t quite honest with you. See, I contribute to a news blog and I wanted some pics for the memorial page—the guys can be such pricks about that stuff, so I said I’d do it. I was trying to be discreet. Respectful. I guess I screwed that up.”
Being disingenuous chafed. What she really wanted to do was smash in the bastard’s face, then drag him into darkness, cutting and tearing into him with shadow knives and needles until he started screaming, begging to tell her about the “blessed event.”
But not yet. Not yet.
“It’s still haunting me, to be honest.”
“Yeah, I can’t seem to let go of it either,” Rafe said, looking at the floor as the train rattled on. Yeah, you’d better look away. “It’s really ruined the way I feel about the city. People talk about the crime and the violence, but they don’t live here and it’s not really like that. Or I thought it wasn’t. I mean, if something like this can happen to a sweet kid like Maidali, what sort of monsters are we?”
Just the question I want to ask you, Teach. She let the silence clatter along with the sway and rush of the subway car for a while. He started to raise his head again, pulling in a breath to speak, and she beat him to it. “Hey—” she started, as he said, “Look—”
They both faked embarrassed laughs and argued who should talk first. Nora took the lead. “So … I was wondering if I could buy you a drink. To apologize. Y’know.”
Rafe gave a bullshit boyish smile, but she knew he didn’t buy her excuse for a hot second, so he plainly had an agenda of his own. “I was going to ask you the same thing. Some friends of mine hang out at a jazz club a couple of stops away—it’d be pretty mellow this time of night. If you’re okay with that.”
Oh, yeah, she was fine with that. They’d stroll along and she’d wait for some place dark.…
They made stupid conversation until Rafe looked up and said, “This is it!”
They exited the train together and he led the way up to the street.
The neighborhood at the edge of El Barrio was rougher than the one they’d come from—but pretty much every neighborhood was rougher than the Upper East Side, one way or another. Rafe offered her his arm—as if this were some kind of date—and they started walking east. A couple of old buildings under renovation stood on their left, ringed with construction scaffolds and those plastic slides for skipping rubble down into the industrial Dumpsters below. A lonely neon sign clung to a railing across the alley from the reno site, flickering an unsteady arrow toward a basement entrance. “There it is,” Rafe said.
“… There?” Totally Nora, that hesitation. From within, Indigo stifled her. “Well … okay.”
As they started into the alley, puzzle pieces clicked into place in her head. This street, this block—another address from Marshall Winston’s real estate paperwork. Rafe Bogdani hadn’t brought her here on a date.
Eyes narrowed, she turned toward him, but as she did, the shadows began to undulate around them, a nest of snakes at war with itself. Some of those serpents looked darker than the rest—hell, they felt darker—and for a moment Nora could only focus on the twisting, writhing, warring shadows. What the hell—
Rafe yanked her sideways into a pitch-black staircase on the renovation side. His eyes flashed, pinpoint flares of white. Nora cried out, and for half a moment she felt Indigo inside her, trying to take over. They were one and the same person—she’d created Indigo as a separate identity in her mind to make it easier for her to keep her two worlds apart—but now she felt power there, down in the dark. Power, hunger, even malice. In that half a moment, she fought Indigo and paid for that hesitation when Rafe smacked her forehead against the blackened basement door.
“No!” Nora shouted, sagging dramatically.
Quiet, Indigo said inside her. I’ll make him pay for that. Right after he tells me what I want to know about the other kids and whatever the cult is planning for them. Just be still for now. I am the power. I am the shadow. He’s nothing but scum.
Her mind whirled. This was her own internal voice, or the part of her that she’d ascribed to Indigo. It came from her own mind. A fractured mind, yes, but her own. The power she’d felt, the grasping hunger that had reached up from the darkness within, that had felt like something else.
Rafe unlocked the door and dragged her into a gloom-shrouded small space, a small antechamber that led to a larger room beyond. The darkness yearned toward her. Toward Nora or Indigo? There shouldn’t have been a difference.
Indigo, she told herself. I’m Indigo.
I am.
In the murk she could see every detail. Shelves and a desk. Lamps unlit. A doorway ahead, into that larger space. Through that open door her Shadow Sight picked out the gleam of golden sigils on the floor. The odors of dried blood, candle wax, human waste, and bitter, oily herbs filled her nose, nearly overpowering the building’s lingering old-age reek of ancient tobacco smoke and water damage.
“I heard you at the Edwards house just now,” she said as Nora. For that was how he saw her, wasn’t it? As Nora? “Searching for Charlotte and the rest of your circle of murdering fucks. Well, I know where you can find them. I—”
He flung her toward the shining symbols that formed a circle on the floor. Tendrils of true ebony shot up from those symbols and wove together to form an open cage, a pen to hold some type of shadow animal—and she knew which animal it would be.
Indigo came forth, twisted away from Rafe, and spun into the gloom. The disquieting blackness of those darker serpents seemed to reach for her, but she dove into the softer shades of familiar power. She knew she had to avoid falling into that hungry circle. Into that cage.
Rafe flicked a switch and a single light shone down from the low ceiling to spotlight the ritual circle. He scowled in frustration when he saw that circle was empty. Then he grinned and stepped into the ring himself, turning widdershins round and round, as if he were winding a spring tighter and tighter before unleashing it. Dark power crackled around him. Who the hell was this guy?
“So where are they? Charlotte and the others. There are half a dozen addresses I planned to search, but go ahead, save me the trouble.”
“They’re in hell,” she snarled. “Every last one of them. Dead as you’re about to be.”
He chuckled as he watched the shadows. “I knew you the moment I first touched you, there at the top of the stairs when we were both pretending we had come to grieve for a dead girl. If you hadn’t tracked me down, I’d have hunted for you eventually. Did you really think I was so stupid that I wouldn’t know you, Indigo? Me, of all people?”
Indigo wrapped a tendril of darkness around the lightbulb and crushed it.
“And who the fuck are you that I should be impressed?” she whispered, though by now of course she knew. Sorcerer. Magician. Not any ordinary cultist, that was clear.
She circled him clockwise from shadow to shadow and taunted him, hoping he would expose some vulnerability. “Child of Phonos?” she sneered. “I’ve killed dozens of your breed. Adulterer? Laughable. Betrayer and murderer of the children placed in your care? Only makes me itch to spill your blood sooner.”
“Then why don’t you?” Even in the renewed blackness, he still turned, looking for her.
Can he see in the dark, like me? Unlikely, but the thought gave her a qualm. He was too confident, and that circle only made him more so. And something was wrong with the darkness as well. As if it warred with itself, not a whole nest but two great snakes, twined together in battle.
“We’re alone here. I’m unarmed, unprotected, corporeal as dirt,” Rafe continued, as if they were just talking. As if they were friends. “Easy prey. Come get me.”
“Now you think I’m stupid?”
The seething darkness of that ritual cage made her nervous and she kept away from the shining symbols on the floor, certain they were vibrating. The air was charged, as if some force were building under the floor, in the walls.…
“Of course you are. After all, you’re standing in my lair now. My ritual circle.” His gaze seemed to light on her at last, and he stared in her direction with a wolf’s smile, as if the darkness could not hide her at all. “Only an idiot would walk willingly into a chamber like this.” He laughed. “So, yes. I think you’re the stupidest bitch I’ve ever met, Shelby. You want to spill my blood? Give it a try!”
Fury burned red and hot through her body, and the ugly shadows rushed to fill her. She did not stop them this time. “Fuck you.”
She surged toward the circle, forged sharpest ebony into a terrible spear, and flung her weapon.
No!
The voice crashed inside her head like thunder, even as it cut like a whisper. It wasn’t her own voice. Not Indigo. Not Nora. She felt the dark snakes of the sinister blackness twine around her, piercing deep as daggers. Fool!
Rafe swept his hands out, and the force that had resonated in the walls and floor shouted, bursting out from the circle of gleaming symbols, and reflecting her own weapon back at her! She dodged left, leaping for another pool of darkness, but the spear whipped past, slicing into her right shoulder. Indigo gasped in shock. Never! The shadows are mine! No one has ever—
A star of her own bright blood struck the floor and it rang! Rafe’s circle of shining symbols blazed into a wall of golden light, banishing every shade and shadow. Nora felt the icy darkness draw into her, racing to her core and binding her still and silent. She toppled across the burning line of sigils and they died down to a heatless glow.
Grinning, Rafe stepped over her so his feet rested on the brightness to either side, neither in the circle nor out of it. He closed his eyes a moment and laughed quietly, shaking his head as if the entire thing had been nothing but a joke. Then he knelt, straddling her. The position didn’t feel sexual as much as it felt as if she were a calf about to be branded.
“You need to learn to curb your temper,” Rafe said. “And not underestimate a guy whose family was casting blood magic eight hundred years before Mary whelped Jesus.” He’d slipped back into his kindly teacher persona, looking so harmless and sweet—and smug—that she wanted to kick him to death.
The blackness inside her strained against her skin as if she were too small a vessel to contain it, and she felt frozen, yet bursting with its incomprehensible movement. It was like a living thing that coiled and writhed and yearned to escape the confines of her body, but she couldn’t draw it forth, couldn’t use it. Indigo had been cut off from her power, unable even to reach it, as though a wall had been thrown up between herself and the shadows. But she could feel them, and when she began to sense the true immensity of the darkness of the void, she wondered why it had never simply smothered her.
“Guess what happens now?”
“You kill me,” she croaked, tasting the bitterness of those other shadows in her mouth like blood.
He looked shocked. “Oh, no, sweetheart.” He brushed her hair out of her face. “Now I keep you. This is where I keep all my pets. Until they’re needed somewhere else, that is. Of course, you will never leave, since this is it—if you know what I mean.”
“The missing kids,” Nora gasped, thinking of Sam’s investigation, all of those children abducted and dragged into human trafficking, into slavery. “Here?”
Her wounded shoulder ached and leaked onto the chilly cement floor, and her bruised forehead throbbed with the pounding of her pulse.
“Not all of them. Just the ones we need. Your ritual should have worked the first time, but someone screwed it up. This time, we’ll make sure. All around the world, all at once, one great, global ritual. It should be magnificent.” Rafe paused and cast a speculative glance over her. “Although with you here, I might not need Charlotte’s children. This is my ritual circle—mine. Maybe I can achieve my goals without the rest of them. Maybe I won’t even share the power that’s to come.”
Nora felt that foreign, unfamiliar darkness stretching itself through her, invading her. It reached out from inside her, twining into a shrieking maelstrom of power that thrummed below them, deep and black as eternal space.
Rafe frowned at her, thinking as he rubbed one finger along his lower lip. “Let’s test things … see how much control you have over the darkness inside you.”
He pinned her right wrist down inside the circle with one hand while he reached inside his jacket with the other. Rafe drew out a small dagger, golden bronze. The hilt’s crossbar formed stylized wings that swept down to guard his hand. A circle, endless and empty, surmounted the wings from which sprang the blade. A channel was carved down the center so her blood would flow into the circle, into the void. Like the emblem in Charlotte’s drawer. Like the one on the knife my mother—
He jabbed the blade toward her hand, as if to pin her flesh and bone to the circle. The darkness tore through Nora and Indigo together, bound them and ripped them, and the blackness that was neither shadow nor herselves bellowed, NO!—tearing through the screaming core of power under them as the knife came down …
… and carved a slit in the skin of reality.
Nora and Indigo plummeted.
Into the void.
Through nightmares of blood, death, and pain.
And out, into daylight.
* * *
Nora hit the ground at the speed of horror, and Indigo retreated deeper, huddled down inside, away from the brightness and rising heat of a dusty, pink-tinged morning. Cold blackness lay along Nora’s spine, drawing her like implacable arms into the west-facing shadow of a carved stone pillar. She caught her breath and stared around.
Broken ancient limestone tiles and lines of graceful Grecian pillars—the dusty ruins of a long-gone building. Deep-green plants peeped over the tumbled remains of a white-stone wall, and a bent old woman swathed in a shapeless black dress and head scarf stared at her from the depths of a face sun creased and withered to a walnut skull. This was no picturesque Victorian ruin, no clever construction erected on a knoll in Central Park. It was no place Nora had ever been before and certainly no place American. Where? How? Holy crap!
“Rafe, you asshole!” she screamed. “Where’d you send me?”
“Korkyra.” The voice came from her own mouth and it came from the darkness within, black and cold as death, but it was not hers. “And I have brought you.”