Nora wanted to argue, but she couldn’t fight the truth. Instead, she ate her kung pao shrimp and listened to Shelby detail every hour of her day, from the aggravating old-school condescension of her boss at the fashion-design company where she worked, to the constant efforts of her ex-boyfriend to get back into her good graces. Twenty-five-year-old Shelby had too much ambition to let either man get in her way, but somehow she couldn’t help letting them under her skin.
They shared their frustrations over the building’s unreliable hot-water heater and the landlord’s delays in getting it repaired. Shelby lived on the top floor—the fifth—and had taken to showering right before bed, when the hot water was less likely to run out so quickly. But as Nora chimed in, she found her friend studying her a little more intently than usual and stopped midsentence.
“What?”
“I read your piece about the girl’s memorial today. You doing all right?”
Nora dished some more rice onto her plate, letting it soak up some of the spicy kung pao sauce. She picked up her beer bottle and held it. “I’ll be okay when they catch whoever’s doing it.”
Shelby took a swig of her own beer and looked around the room. “You’ve got a lot of lights on in here. All the lights, really. I noticed it right off, but didn’t want to ask.”
“And now that you’ve had half a beer, you’re ready to ask?”
“Something like that.”
Nora glanced around and saw that Shelby was right. Without even realizing it, as night had fallen, Nora had turned on every light in the apartment, including the little buzzing fluorescent bar above the kitchen sink and the string of white Christmas lights that stayed stapled above her picture window year-round.
“Just keeping the darkness at bay, I guess.”
“Well then, I’m glad I’m here.”
“Me, too.” Nora was tempted to say more, but how could she explain without revealing at least some of her secrets? If she tried, she knew she’d end up spilling the whole story. She trusted Shelby, but the woman was so intent on helping that Nora feared what she might do with the truth. Eventually, it would get her hurt.
Nora couldn’t have that, so she kept her concerns to herself.
She didn’t explain that the shadows were starting to worry her, that whenever she wasn’t exerting her control over them, she could not escape the feeling that they bore her some profound ill will.
A buzzing sound made her jump, and she felt foolish when she realized it was only the vibration of her cell against the coffee table. Swallowing a mouthful of food, she reached for the phone. Shelby and the cats gave her an array of reproachful looks, but she glanced at the screen and saw that it was Rajitha Perera, her editor at NYChronicle.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, swiping her thumb across the screen to answer. “Hey, Raj. What’s news?”
Nora listened, feeling the blood drain from her face as she turned toward Shelby. When the call ended, Nora sat for a few seconds with the phone in her hand, staring at its screen as if the phone itself had upset her.
“Hey.” Shelby nudged Nora’s knee. “What’s happening? What did she want?”
Sadness had welled up inside Nora, but now anger rose to replace it, burning all the sorrow out of her. Despite all the lights in the apartment she could feel the shadows pulsing, reacting to her emotions, ready to lash out at her command.
“They found another one. A thirteen-year-old girl, six blocks from the stairs where the bastard dumped Maidali.”
“Oh, no,” Shelby said quietly. She exhaled, and all of the bright humor and enthusiasm left her with that one breath. “You’ve got to go. Cover the story.”
Nora stood, appetite forgotten. “Yeah.”
But the time had come to stop worrying about covering the story. Whatever it took, she intended to bring the story to an end.
*
Outside in the dark, she wasn’t Nora anymore.
Night had fallen on her little block of Seventy-Fourth Street. The leaves still rustled overhead, but without the daylight the sound might not have been the wind at all. The higher branches might have been infested with inhuman things with sharp teeth, the rustling the sound of their moving lower or simply shuddering with the nearness of prey. She had faced such things before, so she knew all too well that such thoughts were not paranoia but wisdom.
The possibility did not frighten her. Not this other woman, the one Nora became when she allowed herself to melt into the blue-black shadows. Indigo, she called herself then. Indigo, now.
Three doors down from her apartment, in a deep patch of shadow where the wan yellow streetlights could not reach, she inhaled a cleansing breath and reached out her hands to summon the darkness. It wrapped itself around her, cleaving to her body and flowing outward, a cloak of shadows. To the naked eye it would have looked like an actual cloak, woven of fabric the color of night. Her face was hidden by a hood, and the darkness moved to keep her features obscured.
With a gesture she summoned the shadows closer and fed them so they blotted out all the light around her and wrapped her in a dusky cocoon. An image formed in her mind, a memory from that morning—the stairs where Maidali’s body had been found, where the streetlamps were always broken. She reached out into the shadows and then stepped through …
… and emerged on that staircase in Kingsbridge.
A kid in a red hoodie dodged to his left on the way down the steps, unconsciously avoiding the deeper patch that had gathered around Indigo. She watched him go by, saw him shudder as he felt her presence without ever peering into the depths of her shadows. He hurried down toward Bailey Avenue as if he feared the darkness might follow.
Ascending to the top of the stairs, she stared for a moment at the graffitied mailbox and the detritus of mourning that still lay piled around its feet. All that remained of Maidali Ortiz were memories. The same could be said of Corinna Dewar and Tomas Soares, and the child who had been found dead in Kingsbridge tonight. The desire to find the killer felt a little like vengeance, but Indigo knew she could do nothing for Tomas or Corinna or Maidali. What she did now, she did for the child who would otherwise be next.
Rajitha had given her an address, and now she glanced around, refreshing her memory. Far up the road a white box truck sat at the curb, silent and abandoned. The shape of the truck blocked out the illumination of the streetlight behind it, throwing a strange geometry of shadow onto the pavement. With merely a thought she stepped from one patch to the next, flowed from the small shadow beside the mailbox to the one cast by that truck, a block and a half away.