The pain was so bad it felt like dying. She felt ripped apart as she lay there under the unrelenting noonday sun. Through the tears in her eyes, Nora saw that the people eating at the café were oblivious to the fight. They talked and laughed and ate, and not one of them looked in her direction. As if none of this were real. As if none of it mattered. Not her life, not her death.
Then something obscured the sky, and Nora looked up to see the nun standing over her. The old woman’s face was calm, almost serene, confident in her complete dominance of the moment. Her shadow fell across Nora’s face. The nun reached into a pocket of her habit and drew a slim knife. The straight blade was four inches long and tapered to a thin stiletto point. Nora could see strange words and symbols etched into the metal.
“Slave of the Butcher,” said the woman in a voice that was almost gentle, “you tried to fight, you tried to do battle, and so I will accept you as opponent rather than victim. This is just. May the Gods have mercy on your soul. May your blood wash clean the stains of—”
And Nora dove into the shadows cast by her own killer.
*
Not dove.
No.
Fell.
The tiny patch of darkness was all Indigo needed. She tumbled into it as surely and certainly as if she’d rolled off a cliff. And in the falling, the battered, weak, and helpless Nora went away and in her place was Indigo.
The damage of the slap and the punch were gone. Or, perhaps, irrelevant. The weakness of ordinary humanity had been shucked.
Indigo summoned the winds of darkness and rode them far away from that place. Whoever this madwoman was, now was not the time to fight her. Indigo needed answers and time to think it all through. There had been no time to process the enormity of everything that had happened in the last …
How long? Hours? Days? She did not know.
How much of what Damastes had told her was the truth? How much of her own life was a lie? Where was the safe ground between those poles? If her powers came from a demon trapped with her, then what did that make her? Was she a slave, as the nun had said? Was she a monster? Could she even swear that all the blood she’d spilled was that of killers?
No. No. The Phonoi were evil. They were.
And this nun, this so-called maiden of slaughter, what was she really? She claimed to be different from Damastes because she was a worshipper of battlefield killing. Was that really different?
No, growled Damastes. Then he began to lecture her as if she were a stupid and stubborn schoolgirl. We are all killers. They are weak, though. They delude themselves with false justifications because they do not have the courage and insight to accept murder in all of its many and beautiful aspects. They—
“Shut. The. Fuck. Up,” snarled Indigo, and she threw her whole will against the demon.
Silence rang like a dark bell. She could feel its echoes in the beat of her own heart.
Up ahead the shadows seemed to swirl in a familiar way.
Home.
God. Home.
Indigo found the doorway in the darkness and stepped through into the shadows of her apartment. The shades were down, the morning sunlight blazing around their edges, and the room was bathed in a soft and soothing gloom. She staggered but caught herself, catching her balance by the closet door. She looked around. The coffee table was there, the desk, her TV. Her asshole cats. Everything.
And there, standing by the door, was the nun.
How the hell did she—
But, no. It wasn’t her at all. For a moment Indigo had been confused by the woman’s battle stance, but this intruder was someone else. Instead of the habit and wimple of a nun, this younger woman wore a simple tunic and a leather belt, from which hung the scabbards of a short knife and a sword. Her thick black hair had been pulled back and tied in a long braid.
The face and hair were different, but the clothes and weapons were identical to those of the psycho bitch who’d tried to kill her after her blackout, when she’d been approached by Sam at the NYChronicle offices and had taken off. But the woman’s stance was the same as that of the murder nun, which suggested that maybe they were all related, these bloodthirsty women. All slaughter maidens. The first one had attacked her and then vanished when she had a chance at the killing blow. This one didn’t look inclined to retreat.
“Welcome, whore of the Butcher,” the slaughter maiden said, her weapons gleaming and deadly in her hands.
“Look, sister,” said Indigo, trying to be reasonable in an unreasonable situation, “I don’t know what the hell your problem is, you and your sorority, but can we put a pin in it for now? Leave while you can. Last and only warning.”
The woman settled into a more fluid combat stance, sword and dagger loose in her hands, the tips of each weapon pointed toward Indigo. Everything about this killer’s posture spoke of a disheartening competence. Her knees were bent, weight on the balls of her feet, rear leg cocked to spring forward or sideways, body angled to present weapons but protect vulnerabilities, face calm and eyes sharp.
“Okay, so we’re doing this,” said Indigo with a sigh. “It’s on you then.”
Her hands were open, fingers splayed, and as she closed them into fists, she willed shadow knives to form. They became solid in her grip. Familiar. Comforting.
“Will you renounce your master and submit to the holy purity of my knife?” asked the slaughter maiden.
“Like I told the old version in Italy just now, Damastes is not my master. He’s trying to make me his victim, but he doesn’t own me.” Indigo hoped it didn’t sound as false or uncertain as it felt. “Second, eat me.”
The maiden smiled.
And attacked.
She was fast.
So fast.
Her blades sliced like silver fire through the shadows, faking high and low, jabbing, circling, slashing short and stabbing shallow. Beautiful in a way. Like a light show. Like a dance.
Nora would have died right there.
Nora would never have had a chance.
But the slaughter maiden was not fighting Nora. She was not fighting any ordinary human woman.
She fought Indigo.