“Get this,” Sam said. “The kids’ weird names? At a quick glance at one of those baby-name Web sites online, Anastasia means ‘resurrection,’ and Andel means ‘God’s messenger.’”
“That’s unsettling.” Indigo thought of Rafe Bogdani getting possession of those children, and she shuddered. She wouldn’t leave an earthworm in the care of Bogdani, especially if the earthworm had something Bogdani wanted.
Such as a life to sacrificed.
“I have to go,” she said abruptly.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m visiting Symes. He’s here in this hospital.”
“How do you know?”
I brought him here. Through the shadows.
She shrugged. “I heard the nurses talking about it.”
“They may not let you in.”
Indigo smiled. “They can’t stop me.”
She found the right floor on the directory, but when she got off the elevator, she was confronted by a nurses’ station at the hub of a wheel of intensive-care rooms. The rooms didn’t have conventional walls, just plate glass, so the nurses could keep an eye on their patients. Light curtains could be drawn across the glass, though, probably to allow the patients some privacy when they were being bathed.
Indigo scanned the people in the rooms. She had never visited an ICU before. For the first time, she realized what a desperate place this was. And how bright. She could not find a single shadow.
At first her eyes passed over Hugh Symes without recognition. The detective was propped up, unconscious or asleep, and he’d clearly had surgery. There were tubes and bandages, wires running to machines. Sitting outside the room was a police officer. At Symes’s bedside stood a handsome woman in her forties, who looked down at Symes with mingled despair and pleading. Indigo could see the woman’s mouth was moving. She was talking to Symes, though she didn’t get any response that Indigo could detect. The woman patted Symes’s hand and left the room, pausing to chat with the cop on duty, who’d pulled up a chair to flank the door.
Indigo had been intent on speaking to Symes. She’d wanted to thank him. She’d wanted to be sure he was going to recover. Though not true allies, they had saved each other’s life. Symes had stopped Mayhew from killing Indigo. And Indigo had gotten him to the hospital faster than any ambulance, giving him the best survival chance he’d had.
“Can I help you?” a sharp voice said.
Indigo started and looked down at the short woman standing in front of her. She ought to have been in the shadows, but this woman had seen her. Somehow, in a moment of distraction, she’d become Nora again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to gather some composure. “I think I got off at the wrong floor. I’m looking for Pediatrics.”
Short Nurse didn’t believe her for a second. “Not here,” she said crisply. “Please get on the elevator and go to third floor, if you want Pediatrics.”
“Thanks.” Nora punched the elevator button. Short Nurse made it clear that she was going to wait until Nora got inside, so the minute the door pinged open, she stepped aboard. She nodded and smiled at the nurse, who did not nod and smile back.
Nora wanted to go home and go to sleep. She wanted to wake up to the life she’d had before. But Indigo knew that was never going to happen.
As she made her way out of the hospital, she decided to return to the Edwards house. She would interrogate Graham Edwards, determine if his children had really been kidnapped or if he’d trumped up the story to explain his kids’ absence so Rafe Bogdani wouldn’t go after them. She could avoid wasting time if she knew the truth.
It was midafternoon, and shadows were to be found. In an alley a block from the hospital she saw a slice of darkness to the side of a green Dumpster, and she made for it like a homing pigeon. She wanted to feel she was moving forward again, something Indigo did well.
She flowed through the shadow world until she emerged in the Edwards backyard. It had never before been so easy, so painless, to travel. And all I had to do for it was kill my best friend. But that was a Nora idea, and Indigo banished it.
She focused on the questions she’d ask Graham Edwards. And while she was in the house, she’d retrieve the keys she’d taken from Charlotte Edwards’s corpse. It had occurred to Indigo that since the keys hadn’t unlocked the Edwards house, maybe they opened Rafe Bogdani’s apartment. After all, Charlotte had been having an affair with the magician. Or wizard. Or whatever he called himself.
As she went up the steps to the kitchen door, she extended her senses into the house, but she could not feel the presence of another human inside. Maybe she would wait for Edwards’s return, or maybe she’d get the keys from the ornamental box and start searching for Bogdani’s apartment.
Having a plan felt good. She flowed in through the keyhole as she had before. This time it was easier, less frightening.
She took shape in the middle of the kitchen …
Just in time to catch a blow to the jaw.
Indigo staggered back, which was involuntary but fortunate. The swipe of a knife barely missed her throat.
She hit the kitchen door and righted herself, ducked to avoid another knife, and turned her own hands into blades of darkness. The ability to see in the dark gave her a slight advantage, because no matter how they’d been disguised from her detection, these were human beings. They weren’t all women, which meant they were Phonoi assassins. She swung her blade across the arm of a man, who screamed and fell, clutching at the flayed meat of his biceps. That left four more, and they were skilled.
After the events of the morning with Symes and Mayhew, Indigo was not in any condition to win a fight of this intensity. She wanted to flow out of the keyhole as she’d come in, but the Phonoi were on her every second. All of her attention had to be focused on parrying, thrusting, dodging.
Finally, to her relief, she managed a well-timed stab that took out another assailant. But that still left three, and they were fresher than she was.
Indigo found her back pressed against the door again, and she launched a twisting side kick at the man in front of her. The kick took him in the chest and knocked him flailing backward across the floor … into the arms of a new arrival, a woman who hadn’t been there a moment before. This new arrival caught the man and twisted his neck with an audible, nasty crack. He collapsed on the floor like a bag of rice.
The face was familiar: Selene, the nut job who’d attacked Indigo on the subway steps.
Selene was here. But this time, it appeared, she was on Indigo’s side.
Having an ally gave Indigo a surge of strength, and she cut the throat of another man who’d turned to stare at this new twist of events. Indigo had mustered her last reserve of strength, so she was grateful that Selene, still only another shadow in the gloom of the kitchen, dispatched the last Phonoi with another neck-breaking twist.