As the maiden darted in, Indigo parried and spun, but her own countercut was blocked. In the claustrophobic closeness of that studio, she half turned the way she’d come and tried to thrust under the maiden’s guard, met steel, and both weapons slithered off. The steel knife trailed sparks, but flecks of darkness flew from Indigo’s shadow dagger. Indigo darted sideways, catching a one-two attack on her knives, locked them in place, and kicked the woman. She aimed for stomach, caught her thigh, but drove her back anyway. Indigo lunged forward, pressing the attack with a swirl of chops and stabs, forcing the maiden to give ground, forcing her into a purely defensive battle. They locked weapons again as they crashed backward against the dresser, and this time both women kicked out. Knee met knee and they rebounded, each of them momentarily lamed by the force of their collision.
Indigo leaped high but slashed downward and in, and her shadow knife opened a long red line from the maiden’s elbow to deltoid, seeding the air with wet droplets like scattered rubies. The maiden grunted, impressed and angry, and countered with a jab that sent her dagger point skittering across Indigo’s ribs. Shadow cloak and flesh parted as new pain detonated in Indigo’s side, but she ate the pain, used it as fuel, forced herself to close in. The motion deepened the cut, but it gave Indigo the advantage of angle, and she chopped the maiden across the face with her forearm, then checked the movement and slashed backward. Another gash spilled open, this time from ear to jawline.
The maiden did not cry out, but instead head-butted Indigo and then tried to stab her as she reeled back. But Indigo brought up her shadow cloak and whipped it around the stabbing arm. Then she kicked under it, twisting her body to bring her heel up to crunch into the cartilage beneath the woman’s kneecap. Indigo could hear bone creak and tissue rip.
The maiden hurled herself forward, using the collapse of her leg to pitch her weight against Indigo and drive her against the arm of the sofa. The padded arm punched Indigo hard in the hip, and then they were falling over it, crashing onto the sofa, twisting even as they sprang back up in the air, stabbing and hissing and grappling. They fell hard onto the floor, crashed against the legs of the coffee table. One of the shadow knives went flying away, dissolving the moment it left Indigo’s hand. The other was knotted in the fist of the arm that had wound the cloak around the maiden’s arm. That left Indigo one hand free, and she had to whip it up and block the downward stab of the maiden’s sword. She parried it with all of her strength, crunching the woman’s wrist against the coffee table. Once, again, and again until the nerves yielded and the blade fell away.
Then, still tethered together by the cloak, the women lay on the floor on their hips, each trying to strike with their free hands and kick with knees and feet. The fight was savage, ugly.
The woman could fight. This was not like battling a cultist. Here was a woman who, despite her apparent age, was at the height of her physical powers and equally highly skilled with weapons and empty hands.
Yet so was Indigo. She fought with skills that she knew she had never earned. Techniques of karate, jujitsu, boxing, kung fu … moves that Nora had never studied. Fighting arts whose skills should have come from some phase of preparation for a life as a superhero, but which Indigo now knew had darker origins.
She fought with the masterful skills of the world’s most dangerous being: Damastes, demon of murder.
Each block was followed by a killing blow, and when these were blocked, the hand reshaped itself and sought a new ingress to something that would break or bleed. It was as if Indigo’s body was truly a living weapon and she was its passenger. It was beautiful to witness—and in a way both Nora and Indigo stood apart and watched the fight with the fascination of Romans at the Circus. But it was also brutal and terrifying because both aspects of her, the woman and the hero, knew that this was what Damastes wanted of her.
To be a weapon of destruction. To be the blade that would allow him to spill blood over and over and over again …
To be the evil thing that this warrior nun believed her to be.
The horror of it, the disgust of it, suddenly rose up like a great black snake in Indigo’s mind. It swelled in her chest and then burst from her as a scream so sudden, so loud, so impossible, that it splintered windows and picture frames. Cracks whipsawed down the walls and dust coughed upward from between the floorboards. The force of it lifted the women and flung them apart. Indigo hurled the maiden against the chair tucked into the writing desk, and chair and desk blew apart.
Indigo felt herself tottering on the edge of total, bottomless blackness. She raised her head, and it felt heavy and broken and wrong. Through eyes that were filled with bloody tears, she looked across the room to where the maiden of slaughter lay, lips parted, eyes open, head canted strangely on a loose and rubbery neck.
This slaughter nun was dead.
Indigo tried to speak, to say something, to take back all of this.
She blinked once and all she saw now were fireflies burning in the air of her room.
She blinked again and then saw nothing.
Indigo fell backward into the darkness, and there was nothing to catch her fall. And so she fell down, down, down …
10
Alice in her rabbit hole could not have fallen any farther, or with any less regard for what was real and what was fiction. A world peopled by talking flowers and handyman lizards didn’t seem any less likely than a world where she could have done—where anyone could have done—what she had.…
Shadows she could understand.
Shadows were ordinary, shadows were safe, shadows were hers. Even with Damastes clawing at her mind like a rat scrabbling at a pipe, the shadows belonged to her. Nothing in the shadows could scream a world to pieces. She wasn’t a banshee, to wail death to the living. So how …
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
Everything matters, murmured a voice, and for the first time she couldn’t say whether it belonged to her or to Damastes. She was falling, down, down, down, until nothing existed but the shadows and the fall.
She could fight it, but to what end? As long as she kept falling, she didn’t have to think about any of this. She could let herself go, relaxing into the comforting arms of gravity, which was only an echo of itself here in the darkness; it pulled her down, but it would never pull her all the way to the ground. She could fall forever, a perpetual motion machine of one, and nothing else would matter.
It was tempting—so tempting—and she was so tired. She didn’t think she’d ever before been this tired in her life. The exhaustion ran all the way down to her bones, curling around them like smoke, making her feel fragile and thin, like a glass sculpture of herself.
Her powers should have come with an instruction manual. Better yet, they should have come with an actual teacher, not the half-remembered lie of one, someone who could actually understand what she was capable of and explain it to her so that she would know.
The place where Nora ended and Indigo began (or was it the other way around?) was raw. It rubbed against itself, and that small pain was enough to keep her from surrendering completely to the fall.