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.”
8
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.