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?