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.