“No. What?”
“They wake you up every hour or so, just to make certain there isn’t anything worse going on in your head.” He shrugged. “I don’t need worse. I have enough going on in there.”
“Like what?”
“Questions about your friend Shelby. Questions about you. Questions about why a bunch of pricks were trying to kill me and Shelby, and why Indigo came along at exactly the right time to save us.” The look Sam shot Nora was not one that said he had a rattled brain in his head. It was pure reporter.
“What about Shelby?”
“I went up right after you asked me, and I checked on her. I knocked on her door for a good ten minutes, and nothing. And because I was worried, I waited around, wondering if she’d show up. Nothing.”
“Sometimes people go out. I mean, I would have expected her home.”
“No. You were too worried about her, so I decided to look into it. I checked to see if I could get a phone number. I had her address, right? So I figured a number was easy, only there’s nothing about Shelby anywhere, Nora. Nothing.”
“What are you talking about?” A flurry of cold dread hit her stomach. She didn’t like the way this was going.
“There’s no power bill. No cable bill. No phone bill. No electricity bill. There’s nothing at all under the name Shelby Coughlin. I dug as deep as I could in a few hours, and near as I can figure there is no one named Shelby Coughlin in the whole borough.”
“That’s crazy. She’s my upstairs neighbor.”
“Actually, the crazy part was finding out who it is that’s actually paying for her apartment.” Sam sat up a bit straighter in his bed and frowned.
“Who?” Nora’s throat was dry. She had a sudden deep and irrational fear that it was Rafe Bogdani, or the slaughter nuns. Neither made any sense, but they were both haunting her life, and suddenly the one certainty she had in her world, her best friend, was not who she seemed.
“Her apartment is paid for through a trust fund set up in your name, Nora.” Sam’s eyes looked into hers. “It wasn’t too hard to track, but I wasn’t really expecting that one.”
“Sam, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never set up a trust fund, and if I had, I’d use it to pay my own bills before I’d worry about someone else’s.”
“That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no logic to it. But there it is. You’re paying her rent, and you have been since she moved into an apartment with no utility bills at all.”
“What the hell?”
“You tell me, Nora, and maybe we’ll both know.”
Nora thought back to her friend. Mostly it was Chinese food, beer, and old movies when they were hanging around together. What made no sense at all was that she had been in Shelby’s apartment a dozen times and had seen its lamps, the TV, the stereo, and the tasteful furniture. None of which were signs that no one was paying any utilities. Mostly they watched and ate in Nora’s place, but that was just because it was home and Nora preferred it. She tried to remember if she had ever had a meal or watched a show in Shelby’s place but couldn’t think of a single time.
Then again … her memories had proven spectacularly unreliable, hadn’t they?
“Sam, other than you, Shelby’s my best friend. But none of this—”
Nora’s eyes flew wide. Shelby knew about her and Indigo. A little while ago she’d been celebrating that fact, but now?
“What is it?”
“She knows.” The words were out before Nora could halt them. It was immediate and reflexive.
“Knows what?”
Nora stared at Sam. He was real. He was solid. He was something familiar, and nothing else was making sense. If what he said was true—and she never once doubted it—then who the hell was Shelby Coughlin? There was no way she could be some kind of spy for Rafe Bogdani or the Phonoi. They’d have tracked Nora by now. She’d be dead.
Nora paced to the window and looked out at the sun-splashed cityscape. Nothing she knew—nothing she believed in or thought she’d understood—seemed reliable anymore. Nothing but Sam. She needed a touchstone, something solid and true.
Nora swallowed hard.
“Sam,” she said, her back still toward him, “there’s something I have to tell you. I’m pretty sure you’re going to be angry with me for not telling you before, but I want you to try to see it from my point of view, and understand that there are a lot of reasons why I—”
“Hell, Nora, spit it out. If you’ve got some big secret that’ll help me make sense of all this, lay it on me.”
She went and sat on the bed beside him. Nora wasn’t used to feeling vulnerable, but she had nothing but questions and enemies now, and she desperately needed answers and a friend.
“I can’t lose you over this, Sam.”
He took her hand, gave her fingers a squeeze. “Nora. Talk to me.”
She locked eyes with him. “Sam … I’m her. I’m Indigo.”
For half a second, he seemed as if he might laugh, but they knew each other too well for him to read her eyes—read her face—and not see that she meant it.
“You can’t…” He frowned, wincing as if from the pain of his injuries. “Nora, with all you’ve been going through, and this bizarre crap with Shelby … I mean, are you sure you’re not having some kind of breakdown?”
He was good. His voice only went up a little in volume and maybe one octave.
Nora held up her hand and wrapped it in shadows. She watched his face as the darkness covered her hand, her arm, moved up to briefly cover her chest and face before she drew the inky night back into her skin.
“I’m Indigo. Always have been. I mean, since she showed up. You can guess why I never told you.”
“Well, holy shit,” he whispered, wincing again. He reached up and massaged his temple with two fingers. “You … Nora, you could have told me, y’know?”
“You were a little too focused on Indigo, and I wanted you to be focused on me. On Nora. Plus … what Indigo does is often pretty damned illegal, and I couldn’t drag you into that. Couldn’t compromise you. I didn’t tell anyone, Sam. Not ever.”
Long seconds ticked past as he studied her, letting it all sink in.
“Yeah. Okay,” he said at last. He looked past her, his eyes going soft. She knew the expression. She’d seen it a hundred times before when he got locked into solving a mystery in his head. He was thinking over all of the details, all of the stories he’d heard about Indigo and correlating that information with what he knew of Nora Hesper.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. I know.” She willed him to understand.
“So you know all about the cult? What’s true and what isn’t?”
She sat on the edge of his bed, her hand an inch from his, the rolling table holding his food pushing against her back. She nudged the table gently away, sighed, and then told him everything she knew about what had happened in her past and what was happening in the city and around the world that involved Indigo.
Sam nodded and listened.
*