How was it her fault that Damastes wanted her? She hadn’t asked for this. She hadn’t been the one to join a cult or barter her soul to the gods of murder.
How was it her fault that the Phonoi wouldn’t leave her alone? Yes, she killed them when she found them, but they killed children. They made their perverse beliefs her problem when they left the bodies of innocents scattered in the streets like trash. That stupid nun should have realized that if anyone was killing in the name of righteousness, it was Nora.
Wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
And still she was falling. Nora scrabbled at the edges of her mind, trying to find the place where she ended and Indigo began. Something was important, even here. Something still mattered; something she had almost forgotten, except as a small, nagging need to act, to perform some unremembered task. Indigo would recall. They weren’t really different people—Nora wasn’t so far gone as to believe that they were—but she had been Indigo when she’d heard the bad thing, the important thing, and she wasn’t Indigo now.
Or maybe she was. Maybe this was what it was like to really be Indigo, no friends, no family, no …
Nora’s eyes snapped open, beholding only blackness. Friends. Friends.
Shelby and Sam were in danger. Damastes had as much as confirmed that Rafe was on his way to hurt them, and she had gotten sidelined by the murder nun and her sister, leaving her friends all alone. They didn’t know what was coming.
She was so tired. She was hurt, and she was exhausted, and if her powers were ever going to give out, this was the time. Maybe her power had never been to enter the shadows; maybe it had always been to leave them, and now that she was at the end of her rope, she was trapped, no way out.
But they needed her.
Please, she thought, and there was no more divide in her mind. There was no more Nora, no more Indigo, only her, only a woman who needed, more than anything, to save her friends.
She wrapped the shadows around herself, pulling them tight as a veil, and she was gone.
*
Transitioning back into the real world had never before felt so difficult. From the outside it might have looked easy, but for her, it was a struggle every inch of the way. There was nothing between reality and the shadows—they were the flip side of each other, connected and connecting and inextricably linked—and still she struggled through the morass before collapsing into the light.
Everything ached. Her wounds from the fight with the murder nun had traveled with her into shadow, but they had somehow been inconsequential there; the trials of the flesh mattered less in a place that was defined by the absence of light. Now that she was back in a place with physical laws, every bruise, abrasion, and cut felt as if it were being delivered all over again.
Panting, Nora used the wall to pull herself to her feet and looked dully around. The shadows seemed too heavy. She couldn’t see through them the way she should have been able to, so tired that even the most basic attributes of her power were unreliable.
There’s the answer, she thought, with a trace of wry bitterness. I can be normal. I just have to run myself into the ground to do it.
Into the ground—where was she? After the shadows had dumped her in Florence, she was less willing to trust her sense of direction. The unshifting shadows made it hard to tell exactly where she was. It was like having a whole layer of her vision stolen, replaced by … what? By what normal people saw. By what she had claimed to want for so long.
Now that she had it, at the most inconvenient time possible, she didn’t want it anymore.
The most inconvenient—Sam and Shelby. She was looking for Sam and Shelby. They needed her. Injured or not, she was their best chance of survival.
And if Sam finds out you’re Indigo? The voice was hers, she was almost sure of that. Her own fears and misgivings lacked the poisonous poetry of Damastes. When she spoke in her own head—as everyone did, as normal people did—she used her own voice, her own inflections, and her own utter lack of murderous intent.
She felt sure that she could tell Shelby the truth and Shelby would love her anyway. But how much of the truth? If she only confessed she was Indigo, Shelby would love her for it. Even Sam—Sam, who thought Indigo some kind of superhero vigilante, who practically worshipped her—would still love her.
But what if she told them the whole truth?
They’ll leave you. All that you love will be taken from you.
But they would be alive to make that decision.
Nora straightened, blinking again as the shadows seemed to clear a little. It wasn’t as much of a surprise as it should perhaps have been when this change in perspective made it clear that this was her hallway, her apartment building, her home.
It was tempting to walk to her own door, to check on the degree of damage done by her fight with the slaughter nun—and more, to check on the Assholes. They had to have been terrified by all the noise and commotion. She paused. Noise. They hadn’t been subtle about their fight. How come none of the neighbors had called the police yet? Why was the hall so quiet? She remembered the fight in Florence, the way none of the people at the outdoor café had even noticed them—some bit of magic that slaughter nun had managed. The bitch had done the same thing here, she felt sure. And how had the bitch even gotten here?
None of that mattered if Nora hadn’t gotten here in time. If she’d already failed to save Sam and Shelby—if she’d yanked herself out of the dark for nothing—then there was no reason to stay. But if she hadn’t failed them yet, she was going to if she didn’t move.
She moved.
Haltingly at first, then with increasing speed, she stumbled down the hall toward the stairs. She didn’t know where her phone was. Shelby, if she was alive, would have a phone, and she could use it to call Sam. She could make sure that they were both fine, and then she could …
Well, collapse for the better part of a year, if it were up to her. But it wasn’t likely to be up to her, and it wasn’t safe to stay around them anymore. Not with murder nuns and cultists on her trail and a demon inside her.
The thought of everything that wanted to kill her paradoxically made her feel stronger, as if she could go up against the entire world by refusing to fall down and die. She gathered speed, going from a walk to an uneven jog to an outright run. The shadows were back in full force by the time she reached the stairs, and she was briefly tempted to leap through them, letting them transport her to Shelby’s floor.
No. That would use power she didn’t have to spare right now, especially if she was about to face a cult full of people bent on killing the only friends she had left in the world.