Fucking chaos.
She needed to clear her head, needed to find somewhere to breathe and pull her thoughts together, lay the puzzle pieces out and see how they fit together the way that Nora did as an investigative journalist. Right now she needed to be Nora more than she needed to be Indigo.
And it wasn’t Indigo that Sam needed.
She scrambled to her feet and ran for him. “Sam, are you all right? Where’s Shelby?”
“Nora?” He turned to face her, and no fear or suspicion was in his face, only dawning relief at the sight of her, as if he hadn’t been allowing himself to wonder whether she was all right. He started to stand—and stopped, pressing a hand to his forehead. “Ow,” he said weakly.
“Don’t get up.” She ran to him, dropping to her knee by his side. “Are you all right? What happened?”
Lying to him hurt, in the wake of the lies that had been told to her. He deserved the truth. But if she told him she was Indigo, he would know that she wasn’t safe—that she wasn’t real, not in any meaningful sense. Her entire past was a lie, and that meant that Nora was a lie, because a person was only the sum of what the person knew and remembered.
Sam was true. Shelby was true. Everything else was a beautiful lie created by someone else, someone who had not had her best interests at heart.
“Indigo,” he said, turning to look straight at her.
Her heart gave a painful lurch.
He wasn’t done. “She appeared out of nowhere, just as your friend opened her apartment door. The whole place was filled with shadows. I think—I think she attacked me.”
No! No, that isn’t what happened at all! Nora wanted to yell, to tell him that he didn’t understand what he had seen. She couldn’t do it. For now, her secret needed to stay hidden, even from him.
“Shelby’s okay?” she asked.
“I only saw her for a second, but she seemed fine.” He pressed a hand against his head again. “Jeez. I need medical help, Nora. I think I might have a concussion.”
“Shelby has an ice pack.” Nora stood, running for the apartment door.
It wasn’t locked. Nora let herself in and closed the door behind her. Shelby had been waiting for her, stood staring at her. The wrecked furniture remained, but like the corpse in the corridor, the dead assassins were gone. Even their blood had vanished.
“Well?” Shelby demanded. “This is fucking magic, right?”
“I know you have questions. You can be damn sure I have some, but right now I need your first-aid kit.”
The sound of sirens split the air. Someone had heard the commotion, called the cops. Nora froze.
Shelby didn’t. “You should go. I’ll take care of Sam, but maybe now’s not the time for you to be answering questions from cops.”
“Make sure he’s okay. Promise me he’ll be okay.”
“I promise. Now go. You can meet up with Sam at the hospital. Put yourself as far as possible from the scene of the crime.”
Nora nodded. “All right. But whatever happens, do not let the cops go into my apartment. I don’t think they’ll have any reason to, but if it looks like they might, find some way to put them off.”
“Why—”
“Later. All of the answers, I promise.” Nora ran for the nearest shadow. Sam might wonder where she’d gone, but he’d had some head trauma. She could talk her way around it. As for Shelby, Nora no longer cared what her friend saw. Shelby knew. Part of Nora was elated to have someone she didn’t have to hide herself from.
She dove into a patch of darkness and was gone.
11
Nora slipped through the shadows into her apartment for a moment, checking to see if everything was as it had been before she left. Yes, the body was still there.
That, at least, she could easily enough fix. There was no way to hide the signs of a struggle, but the corpse …
Guilt ran through her and sent swarms of icy butterflies through her stomach, freezing her guts.
Just one shadow, that was all it would take. Fortunately the room was full of them. She opened the shadowpath under the dead slaughter nun’s body and watched it sink into the blackness. In seconds the corpse was gone, lost to the blackness beyond the shadows.
She heard the Assholes hissing from behind curtains and beneath furniture, reacting to the presence of Indigo as they so often did. She was too tired to think of much of anything, but their presence was another layer of guilt. How many times could she terrify the little shits before they never trusted her again?
Swaying on her feet, she fought the crushing exhaustion that had finally begun to catch up with her. She couldn’t stay in her apartment right now, didn’t want to deal with the police if they showed up, so she stumbled into darkness again. The shadowpaths were so familiar, so comforting, but she could feel Damastes there with her, and somehow she seemed closer to him in the dark, so she emerged again on a rooftop across from her apartment building. The pool of deeper shadow beneath a water tower hid her well, and there she collapsed. Sleep had not been a part of her plan, but weariness seized her. Nora wrapped herself within a cocoon of darkness and dropped into a heavy slumber.
*
When she woke, hours later, her first thoughts were of Sam. The shadowpaths were easy enough to follow now that her mind had finally been allowed to relax from the constant state of danger. The sun was well up and the morning was progressing. Indigo emerged behind the shelter of a bus stop, half a block from the hospital, and divested herself of the cloak of darkness. Nora took stock of her appearance. Her clothes were wrinkled, yes, but she smoothed the front of her coat, pushed her fingers through her magenta-streaked hair, and she was good to go.
Three minutes at the reception desk got her Sam’s room number. Five more in the hospital cafeteria got her a large coffee that tasted like strained swamp water but had enough caffeine to make her eyes twitch. Just what the doctor ordered.
Sam was sitting up in his bed and picking at what had probably been breakfast sometime in the past. His fork had pushed the bits and pieces around until nothing recognizable was left. Another bed was in the room but at present it was empty. He’d won the dubious honor of sleeping alone in a double room.
“Sam?”
He looked up from the ruination of his food and offered her an expression that warred between an exhausted smile and a frown. “I was wondering where you’d gotten to. Are you okay?”
“I’m not the one in a hospital bed. Are you all right?”
“Finally got to see Indigo in action, but it was sort of a bummer. Mostly I sat on the floor and tried to remember my own name.”
“Shelby told me. How bad is it? Are they keeping you?” Guilt rumbled through Nora. Or maybe it was hunger. She’d managed coffee but had forgotten to eat anything, and it had been a long while since her last meal.
“I have a concussion.” He shrugged. “Mostly I’m good, but they’re keeping me a little longer to make sure my skull doesn’t implode. Know what the worst part of a concussion is?”