“Please…,” the sniveling man said.
Indigo punched him. He snapped back in the armchair, blood spewing from his nose, and she felt Damastes revel in the violence.
Which was exactly what she wanted. Bloodthirsty and wanton, he let his guard down. She gathered everything she had—the determination, the anger, the sense that real life was passing her by and leaving her with this haunted existence—and smothered it down upon the murder god. In her mind she did as Selene had suggested, imagined her flesh a prison for him, then imagined a cell down inside the prison, deep and small and without windows or doors.
He screamed in rage, but his voice seemed to fade, and he did not fight back.
Indigo stood panting over O’Hagan, and she hated the terror in his eyes. She feared that it mirrored her own.
“Yes!” Selene shouted. “You did it! You—”
“Damastes wants him dead. Not because it’s one more body, but him, in particular.”
“Of course. This excuse for a human, and anyone else we can find from your list, might be able to help you.”
“Because they were there when this was done to me.” Indigo frowned. She couldn’t remember O’Hagan being at the ritual, but he’d still played his part as Uncle Theo, making himself a fragment of her life even after destroying it.
He was looking back and forth between the two women, not sure which of them he ought to fear the most. Indigo could not feel sorry for him.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I was told to. Your mother herself told me to, and I went through with some of it, the worst of it, but when it came time to finish, I…” He was crying, and Indigo considered punching him again.
“The worst of what?” Selene asked.
O’Hagan nodded toward the hallway. “In there.”
Oh, no, Indigo thought. That stench. Rot and death, and obviously not his own. She was suddenly certain that the Edwards children had been taken and murdered after all, not hidden by their father, but kidnapped and slaughtered by Rafe Bogdani to throw her off his scent. While she’d been searching for them—certain that they would form the end of a ritual to drag Damastes fully into the world—Bogdani had created another method to fulfill his ambitions.
Selene obviously thought so, too. She went first, and Indigo was close behind, considering leaping through shadows but knowing the terrible truth was only a few human steps away.
She pushed into the bedroom behind Selene, eager to see, desperate not to. The stink in there was far worse, and Indigo’s eyes watered from the stench and what it meant.
It was not a child lying dead on the bed.
Stark, red memories assaulted her, making the fear in this apartment seem stale.
Nora’s being held down on the table with a person grasping each limb, and even though she squirms and thrashes, she can’t break free. That’s the greatest terror. She is helpless, and the woman approaching the table—
(Altar, they have me on an altar, and there’s smoke and something else in the air around me, like the promise of horrors to come)
—can afford to take her time. She, too, is chanting, and holding aloft a knife whose polished sheen will soon be marred with Nora’s blood.
Indigo staggered a little at the memory. The woman’s face was clear in her mind for the first time ever, a memory made solid.
Now that woman lay dead on the bed. Selene moved in for a closer inspection, but Indigo hesitated. A hole was in the woman’s chest, perhaps from a shotgun blast. She’d been dead for a couple of days. Long enough for blood to coagulate and harden, flies to gather, and for the stench of rot to fill the room.
“Oh, no,” Indigo said, and even as she turned back toward the living room, she heard the shotgun sing.
She was there in time to see the gun slip from O’Hagan’s hands and strike the floor. Smoke hung in the air. His brains, blood, and scraps of scalp and hair decorated the ceiling and wall, dripping.
His mouth hung open, the shadow inside deep and filled with the ghosts of the dead.
She saw something in his lap. An old-fashioned video-camera cassette, the size of a cigarette lighter. He held it palm out, as if for her to see.
Indigo took the cassette. Perhaps video of her, her younger self being prepared for ritual death.
“Just one more corpse,” Indigo said. “This is what happens around me.”
“Not forever,” Selene said. “Come on, we should go. There’s more I need to tell you, and if all goes well, we can get the beast out of you.”
“I … can’t hear him anymore. Damastes. Yet I know he’s still there.”
Selene smiled. The expression did not suit her. “You’ll learn to control him. He’s fooled you into thinking he’s in charge, but he needs you an awful lot more than he’s letting on.”
“I don’t want him to need me.”
“Let’s go. The Androktasiai will be looking for us. They want Damastes dead, and they think killing you will do that.”
“And won’t it?”
“I don’t think that’s something we want to find out.”
Indigo took one more look at O’Hagan’s body. Perhaps seeing her had given him the courage to do what he’d been trying. She liked to think it was guilt that finally pushed him over the edge.
But she remembered the way he’d looked into her eyes, seeking something deeper. Seeking Damastes.
Yet hadn’t there been something else there, too? When he’d realized who she was, hadn’t there been a moment of sadness, or even … wonder? Hadn’t she seen a glimmer of human tenderness in his eyes?
The fear of Damastes had allowed Matt O’Hagan to take his own life. Indigo felt certain of that. But those other emotions in the man were a mystery, and they gnawed at her. She thought perhaps the tape might hold answers, but for the first time—as O’Hagan’s eyes lingered in her memory—she wasn’t sure she wanted the truth anymore.
14
“Damastes is not the only murder god.”
They’d grabbed another cab, and the women talked in low voices, their heads as close as two lovers’, so the driver couldn’t overhear or read their lips in the rearview mirror. Now that Nora had Damastes bottled up, at least for the time being, she’d demanded the truth about the Androktasiai and why they were so desperate to kill Selene.
Nora had frowned at Selene’s answer. “I figured. But so what?”
“He’s also not the only one that’s present on this plane.”
“What?”