“That’s part of the terrible truth the Androktasiai would kill me to silence. They are meant to stand against the murder gods—they serve honorable death, remember. But they have been corrupted, controlled, by one of darker gods they fight to destroy. Their mission has been twisted into fanaticism for evil ends. I don’t know exactly when it happened or how, but they have come under the influence of Caedis—one of Damastes’s sister murder gods and a rival to his power. She’s clever. She’s managed to keep the Sisters of Righteous Slaughter from believing what I know to be true, that she rides one of them as Damastes would ride you. She goads them to kill me, and to destroy Damastes, not for the salvation of humanity, but for its doom.”
Nora had felt the shadows ripple beneath her skin. “The murder of a murder god … that’s gotta be some kind of super power-up.”
Selene had given a bitter chuckle. “The Androktasiai believe they must kill you to kill Damastes, though I have some doubts it will be that simple. Or that the power will simply return to the void if they succeed.”
Nora had sat back in her seat, scowling.
“Don’t dwell on it,” Selene had chided. “You’ll lose your mental balance and the demon can push up again. The idea is to keep Damastes in the dark—literally. Here, let me show you some tricks for holding him there. First, remember two things: power is never destroyed, only recycled; and you must balance need and effort or you can’t keep the demon on his leash. Place your fingertips together and imagine the flow of shadows like an endless circle through your body.”
“But the shadows—” Nora had started to object. Didn’t she share her power with Damastes? Could darkness really hold him?
“Don’t believe the demon’s lies—uncertainty weakens you. Shadows have no allegiance—just as bricks don’t care about the mason who builds the wall. Own your power. Once he’s contained, it takes less effort to hold him there, and the shadows are still yours to command. Balance need and effort. Keep the cycle flowing.”
Now they sat on rickety chairs in a darkened storage room. The cassette Nora had taken from O’Hagan’s dead hand had been obsolete and bloodstained, but it fit in the old video-editing machine and it ran. The quality was lousy, but it would do.
On-screen, the light of candles and fire lent an ominous gleam to the blade, anointed with oil and flecked with ash. Nora’s stomach lurched as she watched the video of her own intended murder twelve years earlier and struggled to keep Damastes in the darkness. She’d been holding him for a while and she was tired.
“Don’t let him out during this,” Selene whispered. “If you feel him rising to the surface, say so—he mustn’t know what we know.”
Nora couldn’t spare the concentration to speak. She nodded and kept her fingertips pressed together—she nearly had the knack of doing it without the physical prompt, but not quite yet. For now, Nora-who-was-Indigo held the murder god in check and stared at the dusty old CRT.
Nora’s younger self lay naked on the altar, her body covered in strange designs painted in blood, and some strange powder that sparkled like black diamond dust. What is that crap? Did they drug me? Why didn’t I keep fighting? A woman stood beside the altar with her back to the camera, watching as then-younger Charlotte Edwards placed something shiny on Nora’s forehead where a series of lines all came together. The object—it seemed familiar, but the video was too dark and damaged for it to be clear in such a fleeting shot—didn’t lie flat, but stood proud by a half inch or so, and something flashed and spun at its heart. The lines on young Nora’s body pulsed with darkness that seemed to flow toward the thing.
Charlotte’s lips moved, her voice growing stronger as she continued. The language was completely foreign to Nora, but the sound raised every hair on her body and sent a twisting nausea through her gut. Selene frowned and leaned closer to the screen.
Young Nora’s eyes flashed open, pupils wide and black from side to side. Charlotte continued chanting, holding out the knife and touching the point to the outstretched hand of the other woman. All the flames seemed to bow down and flicker for a moment. Then Charlotte touched the same blood-tipped blade to Nora’s forehead, just above the flashing, shining object.
The girl on the altar convulsed. Her body rose like a bridge, only head and heels still in contact with the stone. Nora’s present body jerked in sympathy, and she felt a sharp pain in her head and the surge of Damastes within her.
“Selene!” she gasped as the scene and the sound went on and on.
On the screen, a shiver and a ripple of motion started in the darkened ritual room. Noise swelled like a small wave moving through the cultists and toward the altar. A man was pushing his way up from the darkness near the floor, struggling against the chanting people.
“No!” the man shouted. “You can’t—Stella, no!”
A couple clutched the man by his arms and hauled on them as if they would tear him limb from limb, their eyes shining like those of beasts reflecting the firelight.
Selene shoved past Nora, reaching for the editing machine’s power button.
The man threw himself sideways. He lashed out with his feet against the closest captor, seeming not to care if he fell, so long as he took them down, too. His violent action freed one of his arms and he flailed as he fell. His foot connected with one cultist’s knee. The three went to the floor together and vanished from sight for a moment. A cracking sound, like a tree bough snapping in a storm, broke through the chanting for an instant and the man rose back to his feet, lurching forward again.
“Nora!”
Then, like that girl on the tiny editing screen, Nora seized, her body wrenching backward without her control and knocking Selene aside. The darkness within her ripped apart, tore into multiple shades of shadow and death that clashed and tore at one another as the demon fought to free itself of her control. Damastes surged against her barriers like a million frozen quills.
Teeth clenched, she let the heat of her fury pour toward his chilly fingers that scrabbled at her mind and body as the sound from the video whirled her into the memory of that night. Her body was rigid, but her eyes were still riveted to the screen and her mind was still her own. She pushed Damastes down inside as she had before—as she had then—felt him falter.…
The rest of the chanting people surged toward the man, seeming to bury him in the press of their bodies. The two women beside the altar ignored it all. Charlotte nodded to the other woman with a smile and a graceful motion of her hand. “Go on,” Charlotte murmured, then turned toward the struggle that inched closer and closer.
Selene scrambled up, jumped over Nora’s rigid body to pass her and get to the machine’s controls.
The woman with the knife continued her own turn the other way, toward the camera, toward the altar, where the younger Nora convulsed and thrashed, teeth clenched, foam and blood running from the corners of her lips. The woman’s eyes were dark and hollow as she muttered under her breath, walking calmly closer, raising the gleaming, oiled blade.…