Damastes was clearly delighted. “There you are, my sister! It is good to gaze upon your face, one last time before you die!” he said with Indigo’s voice.
Caedis blazed with her full and awful glory. “You first!” she shrieked, or growled, or some combination of these things. When she spoke through the mouth of the Androktasiai, she seemed to speak with the voice of dozens of lost souls at once.
She might actually be scarier than you, Indigo told her own demonic parasite.
He took it personally, but that was her intent. He launched Indigo’s body at his sister and brought the full weight of his rage and power against her—but Caedis was no slouch herself, and she mounted a vigorous defense.
Caedis peeled off some of the shadow armor Damastes had fashioned for himself and locked it around herself in an impenetrable cloak. Her brother raged at the theft and yanked back what he could. They wrestled and rolled, and Indigo lost track of who was holding what, and which one was controlling what patch of darkness.
She was getting dizzy, and she felt herself withdrawing farther inward as Damastes took more and more control of her body. It frightened her, and she struggled to get a grip on herself—any grip at all—but too much was occurring at once. She watched it all from the inside, feeling every wrenching jerk and every thudding blow … and she caught snatches of the world outside her own body that told her this was working.
So far as working went.
The three surviving and unharmed slaughter nuns gazed in horror at the chaos. One had a hand clapped over her mouth, and the other two were backing away, reconsidering everything they’d believed.
Selene slipped around the fray between the gods and approached her former sisters—hands out, blade tipped down in show of peace. “I told you,” she said softly, but firmly. “I told you, the order has been compromised. Now do you see?”
They nodded. One of them extended a hand. Selene took it and allowed the woman to pull her close.
Indigo couldn’t tell what they said. She was eyeballs deep in a battle over which she had virtually no control. Damastes wasn’t paying attention anymore—she might as well not have been there, for all the notice he gave her. While he wasn’t looking, while he raged against his sister, she felt around and worked her way back into her body. She pushed her memory of hands into her own hands, and her recollection of feet back down her legs.
She took a deep breath and sought to refill her own vessel with her own essence.
Damastes noticed.
Let go!
Not all the way, she insisted. You can’t be trusted to give the body back.
And you can’t be trusted to vanquish Caedis.
She pressed him anyway. I’m riding along. Don’t push me out.
Fine.
It was all the concession she was going to get, so she’d have to take it. Caedis whirled and charged, and Damastes rose to the challenge—pushing her back and shoving her into a wall so hard that she cracked it. Bricks clattered and fell along with mortar dust. Caedis shook her head, shook off the blow, and came again, and again.
But outside the circle of horror, Selene was working magic. She conferred with the remaining nuns, who were rattled beyond belief—but finding themselves, and finding understanding. Together they struggled backward and away. Selene was recovering. The nuns were firming their resolve, and eyeing the murder goddess who occupied their sister with less horror and more determination.
“Indigo!” Selene shouted. “Can you hear me in there?”
She fought Damastes for the right to respond and won with a garbled “Yes!”
“They understand!” Selene cried. “They’ll stand with us!”
Caedis’s attention slipped; she looked back to the women. “None of you understands anything!”
One replied with a betrayed, unhappy scowl, “We understand enough.”
The murder goddess swooped away from Damastes and Indigo, turning her back on them both. “I stalked this earth before the earliest generations of your kind! You will serve me and obey me!”
Damastes formed and gripped a sword of shadow. Maybe Caedis didn’t really think he’d do it, but Indigo thought it was more likely that Damastes didn’t really think she’d die—Indigo could hear some odd echo of mirth rattling around in their shared skull space. He leaped and swung, and in the short instant when Caedis was distracted by the nuns, he struck.
The Androktasiai’s head jumped, slipped loose of her neck, and rolled in a lumpy stumble until it stopped against the oversize boiler. It creaked, steamed, and hissed. The head went still.
The body still stood, but only for another few seconds. It folded in half and flopped backward, blood pouring and pooling, and then it was still, too.
“Is she … is she dead? Are they both dead?” Indigo asked aloud. Her voice was her own again. It startled her—she’d fully expected to hear it buzzing in her head, and for no one but Damastes to answer.
He did, in fact, answer. Not at all. But she’s gone for now, and I keep my word.
With that, he faded, climbing back into the box Indigo had built for him. He didn’t pull the lid back on top of himself, though. Indigo had to do that herself. As she shoved it back down and locked him out of her consciousness for the time being, she heard a muffled protest—but felt no real resistance. Indigo knew she couldn’t trust him, that if he’d kept his word, he must be playing a longer game, but for now she only felt relieved.
“Are you all right?” asked Selene, who did not look very all right herself.
“I’ll survive.” Or so Indigo assumed. Everything ached, and she was still bleeding from too many places to count, but she was on her feet—and that was something.
“Is it … is he…?” one of the sisters asked.
“He’s locked away. For now. He can’t hear us or see what’s going on.”
Selene assured them, “She’s been learning to control him.”
“Manage him,” Indigo argued. “That’s the best I can do, and now I’ve gone and made him a deal. He kept his end of the bargain, but I suspect he’s trying to lure me into a false sense of security.”
“He can’t be trusted,” Selene said with terrifying confidence.
“I know. But he did what I asked, and now he’s cut off again. So we have to move fast.”
“What do we do?” asked one of the other nuns. She was a study in confusion, both impossibly powerful and every bit as lost as a child.
Indigo took a deep breath and tried to think. The boiler ticked and the mortar dust still trickled, and the pipes overhead rattled and buzzed. “Selene, can we rely on these women? The ones who’ve been trying to murder us all this time?”
“Now that they know they’ve been manipulated, yes.”