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?”