Nora’s gaze shifted wildly, trying to take in everything at once. The sun was overwhelming, rising and lashing at her eyes as she tried to adjust to the unexpected glare.
She squinted and raised her hand to block the worst of the light. Inside her, Indigo shuddered.
No, Nora thought. She’s supposed to be the brave one.
Nora shook herself and shoved the thought aside. She and Indigo were the same person. She had to remember that, because now there was another voice in her head, speaking, demanding her attention. A thundering whisper inside her head that felt as if it came from deep inside her. From the shadows. From the black void at her core, where her power came from … the space within her that she had never understood.
But you never really tried to understand, she thought. When any sane person would have gone mad searching for answers, you didn’t even look. Why is that?
“Who are you?” she demanded, speaking inward, to that void.
The old woman above her muttered a quick prayer and crossed herself as she backed away.
Nora’s voice helped her clear her own head, but she realized she’d spoken too loudly, and as she looked around, she saw other people nearby, many of them staring at her. She stood in the middle of an area that had been roped off and nearly barricaded by heavy piles of freshly sorted dirt. Vases and fragments and columns were half-buried in the ground—some kind of archaeological dig. Nearby, two men with guns were looking her way. They wore uniforms, but didn’t strike her as police. Security guards, maybe. They didn’t look happy to see her.
Surrender to me, that dark voice commanded from the void inside her.
Nora shuddered and hugged herself tightly, a wave of revulsion flowing through her. It was really there—he, for she was certain the voice was male—was deep within her. His words made her insides rumble, shook her bones, thudded against her like loud music at a concert or fireworks exploding right overhead.
She wanted to be sick.
“Who are you?” she asked again, quieter now, wondering if she even needed to speak the words aloud for him to hear them.
As if in some twisted reply to her thoughts, that voice pushed upward and she felt her mouth open, lips forming words against her will. He spoke through her, but the voice was not her own.
I am Damastes. You have kept me locked away long enough. Now I will be free.
The words ripped through her and echoed and sent Nora staggering backward. A flicker of familiarity touched her mind. Had she heard the voice before, back when—
No! She didn’t have time for that.
Nora tried to move and felt the world tilt madly. Her legs refused to obey her commands and her arms shuddered. Her mouth pulled into a scowl on one side, as if she were some kind of human marionette and the voice of the void—this presence called Damastes—was pulling her strings.
Idiot girl, you’ve stepped into my home now. You stand in my temple, and here I will finally take control.
Pain lanced through her, forced her into a shuddering convulsion. There were more words, but she did not hear them so much as she felt them. Her body seized, twisting into a spasmodic arch even as she fell to the ground. The back of her skull slammed into the dirt and her left arm slapped a clay pot that rolled and shattered.
The armed men came for her then. Their faces were lost to her, their words incoherent shouts of alarm, but she understood their intent. She had trespassed where she was not allowed. They would punish her for that. She reached out her hands to draw the darkness to her, ready to become Indigo, to fight if she had to fight. But nothing happened. The guards slowed, moving warily now, and one of them drew his gun.
Indigo? she thought. Half in confusion and half in summons. Nora had created Indigo as a separate persona, someone who had the courage and fortitude to do things Nora might not otherwise have been able to endure, but she and Indigo were one and the same. They were. Which meant the power was her power.
So why could she not wield it now?
Nora tried to reach out to the nearby shadows, to draw a cloak of darkness around her—and she felt Damastes fight her from the void. Just as he’d pulled her strings, he held the reins of her power tightly.
You dare interfere with me? You, who hide in your own shadows and bury your own world beneath a mountain of lies? No more.
The words slammed into her, crushed her under their weight. The first of the guards reached her, grabbed at Nora’s arm, and then reeled back, screaming as Indigo lashed out. Shadows fluttered like hummingbirds and spilled from her flesh into his, cutting through his skin and muscles as they pulsed their way up to his shoulder.
Nora twisted and rolled, her body still fighting against every attempt she made at control. Her muscles jittered as if electrified, and her teeth clamped down hard enough she feared they might shatter.
Indigo screamed. Damastes roared.
A lurking presence from the deepest waters of her soul, he rose now like a tidal wave, dwarfing her, surely large enough to crush her. Nora felt herself dragged down inside herself, her mind trying to escape the presence of the great darkness that tore through her, seeking a way to break its bonds.
Set me free! the demon roared.
For what could it be other than a demon? The thought turned her blood to ice. If she’d had control over her body, she would have wept.
But how am I holding him? What am I doing to stop his escape?
She had no answer to that question, but it seemed Indigo might. A strange calm came over her, a confidence that had been inconceivable a moment before, and Nora knew then that Indigo had surfaced. Perhaps Indigo had no soul of her own, but she did have her own identity. Her own courage. Nora might call upon the darkness, caress and persuade it, but it was Indigo who had spent years mastering the shadows, turning them into her servants. Her weapons.
Nora jerked side to side, whipped her head around. Clawed at her own flesh. Fell to her knees and curled into a fetal ball. The guards shouted at her, both of them with their guns out. Others were shouting. Somewhere not far off, police sirens screamed. But the real battle was being waged inside her, a tug-of-war over the shadows of that internal void. Nora opened her mouth and two voices cried out, neither of them truly belonging to her. Indigo and Damastes fought, lashing at each other, those twin serpents of darkness twisting and diving, two shades of black. Nora lay on the ground and did her best to breathe.
The second guard shouted orders she could never hope to obey. In the space between heartbeats, she saw him begin to squeeze the trigger on his gun.
Nora saw him, but it was Indigo who reached out with a tendril of darkness and whipped at the guard, intending to knock him backward. That other presence, so large and potent, magnified the attack, pouring ebony rage out of the void and turning that tendril into a battering ram that shattered bone and pulped muscle. The guard sailed backward into a half-submerged column of stone with enough force to blast chunks of the ancient structure into the air.
What remained of him oozed down the column.
Nora froze, too stunned even to fight that inner war. Even Indigo was horrified.
A dark glee emanated from Damastes.
Nora stepped toward the ruined man, thinking that if she could reach him in time, it might be possible to save him.
He is beyond redemption. He is of no concern.
One good look at the meat that had been flayed from his bones and Nora knew Damastes was right. Though the man still had a pulse—easily seen as every heartbeat pumped another weak cascade of crimson from his shoulder—it was weak and fading. A thick halo of blood surrounded him.
The dying guard looked at her and spoke words that she could not understand.
Whatever he had said, Damastes responded, speaking with her lips. “Your death offers me strength. You die for a worthy cause.” Nora’s lips pulled into a cold smile that felt completely wrong. The curl of her mouth had a cruelty that was foreign to her.
Someone shouted and she managed to glance toward a half-ruined column, where the other guard had hidden himself. His gun still out, he seemed much more interested in barking fearful orders into a radio or cell phone than in confronting her now.
The other onlookers were gone, wisely fleeing for safety.
Greece, she thought. Is this Greece?
This was my home. The glories offered here in worship of me were grand things, indeed. Worthy. But greater glories will be mine when I am in control of your body, as I was meant to be.
Her eyes moved, but they did so without her intention. She saw the walls of the dig site, the half-ruined frescoes that showed fragmentary images of a vast black shape. One fresco depicted an army dying in a tide of blackness. Another showed some kind of ritual taking place in a temple that seemed to be the palm of a gigantic hand, complete with claws that nearly doubled the length of the fingers, towering above the worshippers within.
The voice of the void rose up, its deeper shadows beginning to fill her gut, her chest, reaching out to her extremities. Damastes flooding through her like an ancient, dreadful poison.
Indigo screamed and Nora’s body shuddered, vibrated as her other self fought Damastes’s control. Darkness rippled across Nora’s flesh like waves smashing into a rocky shoreline, and she groaned as her body collapsed again. Whether it was Indigo or that other presence she did not know, but the closest image on the wall—a winged shadow that cast lightning from its claws—shattered.
Nora tried to rise again and saw the police officers coming toward them. These were not rented guards. These were hardened men—soldiers perhaps, or police officers, what did she know of Greek uniforms?—and they approached with weapons drawn.
The needles of a Taser punched into Nora’s right forearm and the meat under her left breast.
The current ran into her body, raced through her, spreading faster even than the ebon poison of Damastes. Her vision blurred and her mouth let out three separate, distinctive screams as she flopped to the ground, incapable of any further motion, any real thought.
The world buzzed in an electrical storm and then silence reached out and dragged her under.
* * *
Her body still aching and buzzing from the pain of being hit by the cop’s Taser, Nora snapped back to consciousness in the back of a police van. Her wrists were bound behind her and she lay prone, seeing nothing but the padded walls of the van and the screen that let her view the backs of the heads of the two police officers up at the front of the vehicle.
Everything hurt.
She tried to summon Indigo, the darkness, to wrap herself in shadows and slip away, but nothing happened. The void within her—that well of blackness—was still there, but when she attempted to draw it to her, to influence it and muster some control, the void did not respond. She paused, expecting some backlash from the presence there, but seconds ticked by and she felt no sign of Damastes. His voice had fallen silent and whatever power he’d wielded to turn her into some kind of puppet before, it was gone. But so was her control of the shadows. Whatever Damastes had done to her, she was powerless.
Inside her was a silence that she had not felt since before her parents were shot.
No. Those were lies. However her parents had really died, her memories could not be trusted.
A fresh brand of panic swept through her. Handcuffed and locked in the back of the van, she realized she was truly a captive for the first time in her memory. She had always had the freedom to slip into a patch of nothing and fade away. Now, she was a prisoner. What if that cop back at the archaeological dig had died?
Of course he died, she thought, remembering his injuries.
Nora bit her lip and curled into a tighter ball as the van bounced over ruts in the road. Hot grief swept through her. She had killed a security guard, an innocent man who had been trying to secure the safety of the people at the dig. Trying to protect his city.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, and felt tears well in her eyes.
The cop behind the wheel glanced in the mirror and muttered something to his partner. Something, she was sure, about the killer they had handcuffed in the back.
A dreadful calm descended upon her. A strange surrender. She had not been in control of the shadows that had struck out and killed the security guard, but how could she have even begun to explain that? If any of them even believed their own eyes, or the testimony of witnesses, they would see her as a monster, a witch. To ask them to also believe she had been momentarily possessed by something even more monstrous …
Momentarily, she thought again, wondering how long Damastes had been lurking down there in the void within her. Recently, the shadows had been malevolent to her, as though they meant her harm. Had that been Damastes’s influence? Could he have been there all that time without her being aware of his presence? And if so … where was he now?
Nora wondered if he might still be in there, quiet now, perhaps in hiding. Or just waiting.
The van bounced through potholes and her head banged against the floor. The impact cleared her thoughts for a moment, broke her focus on Damastes long enough for her to remember the man responsible for her ending up here. Damastes might have had something to do with it—after all, he’d said that temple was his home, that people had worshipped him there—but it had started with that son of a bitch Rafe Bogdani. Magician or sorcerer or whatever the hell he was, if anyone had some kind of answers for her, it would be Rafe. The trouble would be in finding a way to get back home so she could beat those answers out of him.
The trouble will be in ever going anywhere again, she thought. Once you’re in a Greek prison, convicted of murder.
She needed her powers. Needed the shadows.
Nora mustered up the courage that she so often associated with her alter ego. Without the darkness, she didn’t feel as if she could be Indigo, even for a second, but she could tap into Indigo’s strength and determination. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply to calm herself, and looked into the void.
Damastes. Are you real? Are you here?
Nothing. Not even a twinge.
Her bones still ached from being hit by the Taser—maybe more than one—and for the first time she wondered if Damastes wasn’t hiding at all. Had his malignant presence been burned out of her by that Taser strike? She had done research on Tasers for several articles and understood the basics: current without amplitude. Ten volts with a thousand amps would kill a person. Ten thousand volts with no amps would shock a brain into a stupor as long as the current went on. It would hurt. It would paralyze, and as long as it wasn’t abused, it would usually cause little permanent harm.
If the voltage had quieted Damastes—and even, it seemed, Indigo—what did that mean? If they could be silenced by a few seconds of electricity coursing through her body, through her brain, were the voices ever really there at all? She wondered if they were just symptoms of some brain disorder.
Of course, a brain disorder couldn’t transport a body across thousands of miles and an ocean.
The silence inside her ought to have been comforting. Instead it was unsettling. Though she sometimes thought of Indigo as a separate entity, she knew better. But it was easier to put up a wall between her daytime self and her nighttime self. Indigo played in darkness and Nora preferred to stay where she could see the light. In some ways, Indigo was her best friend.
Ugh, how sad is that?
But the truth was that she didn’t have many friends and couldn’t stand the idea of having none.
She felt a flash of guilt then, unwanted, unwelcome, a quick reminder of how she’d treated—
Sam.
“No,” she whispered, as the dark presence rushed up from the void again. Damastes had returned.
Sam. Your mate. Your plaything. What is he to you? Does he know who you really are behind your shadows and lies?
Fingers of darkness pushed at her brain, dug through her consciousness, and Nora fought back as best she could, blocking those questing probes into her mind because they would surely find secrets she needed kept. She tried to escape from the black, cold mind that examined her, but it wasn’t easy and the effort had her body shaking and spasming again. Her limbs jittered and danced in a half dozen petit mal seizures.
“Get out of my head you freak!” her voice screeched, and her words slurred past teeth locked together and lips peeled back beyond her control.
You don’t know, do you? How perfect! How utterly delicious!
Damastes’s peals of laughter pounded through her skull and rocked her body even harder.
Oh, little Nora, how very foolish of you! You don’t understand anything at all!
“Leave me alone! Leave me the fuck alone!”
Nora tried again to summon her shadows. The cop in the passenger seat had turned and was staring nervously at her, and now she saw that the Taser was back in his hand. Flurries of ice cut through her stomach as panic started pulling at her mind. Without her shadows, what was she?
The shadows are not yours, little Nora. They are mine! I am as a god, and you are nothing but weak, human flesh.
Nora screamed and her body bucked, her legs kicking hard enough to knock one shoe completely off. Spittle flew from her too-dry lips and her eyes rolled back into her skull.
You’re nothing but a failed sacrifice. Your own parents offered you to me, a promise they failed to keep. You will die at my hands and I will make this miserable world my own.
“Go fuck yourself! You’re nothing!” Her voice sounded different, deeper, colder. The shadows in the back of the van coalesced, weaving around her, and she laughed. Indigo laughed.
Then she saw the guard push the Taser through the grate that separated the front of the van from the back and pull the trigger. The barbs hit her and voltage arced through her. Nora went rigid with the pain, bones on fire, and consciousness fled. In the last eye blink of awareness, she felt herself tumbling into the void.…
And then she was gone.
* * *
Her body ached everywhere, from her toes to the top of her head, with the sort of dull throbs that normally indicated she’d pushed herself too far when exercising the day before. Muscle strain, and possibly a few torn ligaments.
Petit mal seizures. Possibly grand mal. Was it her cousin Becky who’d had epilepsy? She frowned. Did she have a cousin Becky? There was someone named Becky, back in the days before her parents died.
Her arms were wrapped uncomfortably around her body.
Hard straps pinned her to a cold metal surface.
Nora opened her eyes and looked at a cracked plaster ceiling.
She lifted her head, despite the way the motion pulled at her neck muscles, and saw that she was strapped to a table and locked inside a straitjacket. Her head fell back and bounced on stainless steel, and she felt a groan merge with a laugh. There it was. She was crazy after all.
The memories came hammering at her mind and Nora recoiled. For a moment, as the Taser had shocked her for the second time, she had seen into the utterly vile core of Damastes. There was nothing human there, nothing redeeming within that endless blackness. The mind she’d accidentally touched was an endless chasm of loathsome urges and dark desires. No matter what else happened, Damastes could never be allowed to escape into the physical world.
You cannot keep me, little Nora.
“Watch me, you sick bastard.” Her voice was barely recognizable.
Nora looked more carefully around the room. Medical equipment was in the room—the cell?—but none of it was being used on her. She was here for the table, she suspected, and nothing else. The police wanted to make absolutely certain she didn’t have a chance to kill anyone else.
Please, kill more of them. Take their lives and offer me their essence. I might even let you retain some semblance of life in gratitude for your worship. I have been far too long without proper sustenance. Murder, little Nora, and feed me.
Murder. The word resonated. Her mind had been spinning ever since Rafe had attacked her in that basement, but now it all began to click together for her. Rafe Bogdani was some kind of magician and a high-ranking member of the Children of Phonos. The way he had talked to Graham Edwards, it was as if Rafe operated separately from the New York chapter of the cult. He certainly hadn’t sounded as if he answered to Charlotte Edwards, the local high priestess.
Graham had as good as said he was a member, but that he’d withdrawn when he learned that his wife intended to sacrifice their children to the gods of murder. Three children were to be killed as part of a ritual, not simultaneously but in some kind of specific, pertinent sequence. Luis Gallardo was meant to be the first, and though Indigo had interrupted the ritual, she hadn’t been in time to save him. Would his death count toward the rite? Would the murder gods consider it a proper sacrifice?
Indigo had killed every member of the New York chapter’s inner circle in that warehouse, but she knew that didn’t mean the chapter had been completely obliterated. There would be Phonoi assassins, at the very least, though she had no idea who would give them orders now that their high priestess was dead. Rafe Bogdani, perhaps. The man had real magic at his command, not the kind of dabbling that the Phonoi typically engaged in. Was he some kind of sorcerer-for-hire, or was he truly a part of the cult? She tried to recall his exact words, the things he’d said before she’d dropped through the shadows in the ritual circle of that basement, where he’d tried to kill her. Or capture her, or whatever he’d intended. Had he said anything that gave away the nature of his relationship to the Children of Phonos? She didn’t think so.
Maybe it’s over, she thought. Not her tussle with Rafe, which obviously required a rematch. But she wondered hopefully if killing the high priestess and the inner circle had torn the heart out of the cult, at least that chapter. Maybe Graham Edwards’s children were safe, now. Maybe whatever had been planned would never come to fruition.
She had so many enemies now, worst of all this evil cancer of a demon that had taken root inside her. It would have been nice to think that the Children of Phonos weren’t her problem anymore.
But that felt too easy.
The cult was global, and they worshipped the gods of murder. If she’d erased one cell, others would arrive to fill that void, particularly if they were involved in the somehow more mundane criminal horrors of human trafficking. And then there was Rafe. Whatever the magician had done to her in that basement before she’d been transported here, it had ended up with Damastes locked inside her. Or given him access to the dark void inside her.
“You’re one of the murder gods,” she whispered.
Damastes laughed inside her.
I have worshippers throughout the world. My followers are legion.
“I’ve met a few. They die easily enough.” Bravado.
Even now my followers seek to serve me. They seek to win my favor. They know what you refuse to know, that I will eventually climb free of you or seize complete control. A foolish mistake on the part of your parents and the high priestess that night. A miscast summoning, that is all you are. You were meant to be my offering, a promised body to climb into and take as my own.
Nora shook her head. Lies! Her parents would have never done anything of the sort. Her mom and dad loved her! Still, she felt the sting of tears at the corner of her eyes, unshed but threatening to fall.
A gathering of fools tried to claim my power as their own, and the end result is a trap, a gateway that was sealed with me halfway through it. That will change soon enough. I will bend you to my will or Bogdani will find a way to release me. His friends hoped to summon and enslave me, but only a fool would attempt that a second time. His only hope is to separate me from your flesh. Then perhaps I will allow him to serve me the way he and his cult wished me to serve them. Or I will kill him, and so many others.
Her thoughts were scattered in so many directions as she tried to pull all of these threads together.
“So I was meant to be, what, a vessel?”
A doorway, nothing more. But I am trapped on the threshold. I fought their summoning because they wished to bind me as their slave, like a genie they might use to make them rich or fetch them water or seduce reluctant lovers for them. I fought … and somehow, so did you. And in fighting … we became one.
Ice flowed through her, a cold, calculating hatred that soothed her and helped her focus. She could feel the shadows breathing in the corners and beneath the table. Rafe’s magic, the shock of being shifted thousands of miles in a moment, the tumorous presence of the demon in the void … something had stripped her of her powers, broken her ability to concentrate and to touch the dark. Now, for the first time since Damastes had tried to seize control of her, she felt that connection to the shadows again. They knew her. They yearned for her.
For Indigo.
“Rafe’s gonna die,” she said.
If he is loyal to me, he will live. If he ignores my commands, he will die. The same could be said of you, Nora Hesper. You, who have siphoned your power from me while I lay dormant within. But now I am awake … now that the Phonoi have been trying to summon and enslave me again, from afar. And the time has come for me to walk the world in this flesh.
She could feel the darkness hiding at the edges of her awareness as if trying to decide whom it should obey, Nora or Damastes. Now she called and the darkness fluttered, whispered closer to her.
“It’s my body. You’re nothing but a virus. Poison in my veins.”
And you are little more than a corpse too foolish to die. Oh, little Nora—
“Not Nora,” she said quietly. “Indigo.”
And what is Indigo? A mask on a frightened girl.
“Flesh and blood. Solid and alive, which is more than you can say. You need your precious sacrifices and your cult of killers! You need their worship. I need nothing and no one!”
To prove her point she ripped the darkness closer, wrapping herself in the reluctant shadows and slithering free from the restraints that tried to hold her. She could move through a keyhole; what possible chance did a straitjacket and leather straps have?
Are you so sure about that? Are you certain there is no one and nothing that you need?
Nora stood and felt her legs under her, once again hers to command. There were no seizures now. He blood pumped and her nerves sang and her fists clenched until she felt the crescents of her nails biting into soft skin.
Indigo sneered.
Nora asked, “What do you mean?”
Can you so easily live without Shelby or Sam? Even now Rafe watches Shelby’s domicile. Even now he waits for Sam to arrive, the better to kill them both without having to hunt either of them down. Give me free rein, surrender control of this body to me, and I will stop him.
“I’ll kill him. And then I’ll kill you.” The words were whispered from a cold throat, choked by rage. Her friends were half a world away and she wasn’t even certain how she’d gotten here. Rafe had done something to her with that ritual circle, used some kind of spell, but had he chosen this destination or had Damastes pulled her to his seat of power, to the place he’d once called home? One or both of them had broken the laws of physics, strained the ties of reality, and cast her a few thousand miles through the darkness. How the hell could she hope to match that task?
You are not powerful enough to save your friend, your lover, or yourself. Surrender to me, little Nora, and I will spare your friends. Offer yourself to me willingly and they will be safe.
Nora shook her head. She had seen inside of Damastes and knew better. He’d hunt them down and make them suffer to satisfy his petty need for revenge over whatever indignities he believed Nora had caused. More than that, she sensed he was still hiding something, some secret that he was holding close to his wretched heart, waiting to use against her when the time was right.
Indigo shook her head.
How had Rafe done it? Or had he done it at all? She traveled through shadows all the time, moved from place to place as if there were no distance in between. It had always been short distances, mostly to places she had already been or at least seen, but if Damastes had somehow dragged her to his home, she knew one thing—he had done it through the shadows. And if that was true, then she could surely find her way back.
All she required was a path.
She commanded the shadows and they obeyed. The light failed to fall in one corner, and as she stared, a patch of darkness grew there, deepening into a black, inky maelstrom that pulled at her. There, her pathway home.
Damastes seemed to fight her, but only for a moment before he stopped struggling. Nora thought it might be a bluff, a lie to make her think she was winning. Still, there was no choice. Sam needed her. Shelby needed her. And she needed the both of them.
Inside her, Damastes laughed. Go where you like, girl. Fight as long as you can. In the end, I will have my freedom. Before that day comes, I will make the ones you love suffer. I will feed on them as I fed on the souls of your—
Indigo shoved aside his voice and leaped into the darkness. The maelstrom longed for her, welcomed her, swallowed her. The shadows swaddled her and she heard the familiar whispers of the endless void, sounds and voices she would never be able to interpret. For a moment, memories seemed to flicker at the edges of her mind, but they meant nothing to her now. Only one thing mattered at that moment. She had to get to Sam and Shelby before it was too late. She had to.
Without them she had no reasons she could think of to live, save for revenge.