Slipping from Indigo back to Nora after ensuring that the apartment was empty, she had thought sadly, Shelby used to live here. Before she could twist the knife of blame even deeper into her own guts, however, a voice she couldn’t help thinking of as Indigo’s—harder and more pragmatic than her own—rebuked her sharply.
No, she didn’t. Shelby didn’t exist, except when I needed her to. She was merely my sounding board, my conscience, my pick-me-up. She had no independent life of her own, and therefore no personality and no thoughts, aside from the ones I gave to her.
And yet, and yet …
“Why are we here?” one of the slaughter nuns—Megaira—asked, looking around suspiciously. She was stocky and dark haired, pretty but pugnacious, and her smoky voice was shot through with an accent that Nora guessed was Spanish, or perhaps Portuguese.
“We’re here to rest,” Nora said. Her body felt pummeled, like tenderized steak. She looked at the dusty bare floorboards stretching in front of her and thought that if she allowed herself to lie down on one of them and close her eyes, even for a moment, she would sleep for a week.
The other slaughter nun, Xanthe, who was younger, taller, and slimmer than Megaira, and whose paler face was smeared with blood from cuts on her forehead and lip, flashed Nora a surprised look. “There’s no time to rest. We can’t rest until—”
“We can’t go rushing in without a plan,” Nora snapped. “If the Phonoi assassins don’t cut us to ribbons, Rafe Bogdani will. All he has to do to stop us is raise a hand. We’ve got to think of a way to bring him down without giving him the chance to use his power.”
Xanthe flushed and looked at Nora sullenly.
But Selene was nodding. “Nora is right, sisters. There are only three of us now. If we’re going to defeat Bogdani and his rabble—”
“We will,” growled Megaira.
“—then we need to use stealth and guile. We need to hit them before they even know we’ve hit them.”
“How?” Xanthe asked.
All at once Nora was struck by a wave of dizziness and swayed on her feet. Inside her, she sensed Damastes’s pleasure at her weakness, sensed him flexing his muscles—or maybe that was her own paranoia.
“Can we sit down?” she said. “I’ve had a rough few days, and I can’t see things getting any easier in the short term.”
Without waiting for a response, she shuffled into what had been Shelby’s main room—She’d had the sofa here, that nice glass lamp over there, a bookcase over there, stuffed with books on design and fashion—and slumped down, her back against the wall. The gloom and emptiness of the place seemed to press in on her. Suddenly she felt Shelby’s absence like an oppressive, insistent ache.
Selene lowered herself to the dusty floor beside Nora, and Xanthe and Megaira sat cross-legged in front of her, their faces grim.
“You were saying we have to hit them before they even know we’ve hit them,” Megaira said.
“What of it?” said Selene.
“Well, there’s only one way I can think of doing that, of making sure we wipe the lot of them out.”
“Which is?” asked Xanthe, though she looked as though she already knew the answer.
“We turn ourselves into human bombs. We sneak in, unobserved, and then when we get close enough”—Megaira balled her hands into fists, then spread her fingers—“boom!”
“Suicide bombers?” said Nora, appalled.
“Why not?” Megaira’s whole stance was challenging, aggressive. “I’m prepared to die for what I believe in. Aren’t you?”
Sidestepping the question, Nora asked, “What about the children? And don’t use the phrase collateral damage.”
“We get them out first. Or you do. Using … him.” Megaira screwed up her face, as though at a bad smell. “The powers he gave you.”
Nora might have argued that Damastes was not her benefactor, and that her powers were not a gift he had bestowed on her like a kindly uncle … but she was too tired to argue semantics. Instead she said, “If we get the children out, you’ll have no need to blow yourselves up.”
“This ritual may be our best chance to wipe out so many of our enemies in one go. We have to take it.”
“But I can’t allow you to wipe yourselves out.” Thinking of the murder golem, Nora almost told them there might be a better way, but then she bit back on the words, unwilling to discuss the possibility until she had had more time to think about it.
Megaira sneered. “You can’t allow? Who are you to dictate our destinies?”
More gently Selene said, “My sister has a point, Nora. We fought for too long for the wrong reasons, and now our order has been decimated. If we get the opportunity to redress the balance, to make a final glorious strike at the hearts of our enemies, then we should take it.”
Nora shrugged and slumped back. She could see where the sisters were coming from. But she had seen so much carnage these past few days—some of which she had meted out herself—that she was now sickened by it, or at least sickened that she had got used to the idea of life as a disposable commodity.
No, it more than sickened her; it scared her. She was scared not only that she was harboring thoughts that seemed to bring her closer to Damastes’s philosophy, but also by the knowledge that her own life was viewed by her enemies as a worthless inconvenience. Put bluntly, to Rafe and the Children of Phonos she was little more than packaging. She was simply a vessel containing a great evil they intended to release and claim as their own, which, if given the opportunity, they would tear open and cast aside as casually as if she were the paper around a Christmas present.
What made that knowledge even worse was her awareness that the demon inside her knew it, too. If she was packaging to the Children of Phonos, then to Damastes she was simply a prison from which he wished to escape. All that concerned him was that he achieve his freedom, instead of simply swapping one prison for another.
The more her own thoughts swamped her, the more the debate among her companions over tactics, over how best to make their final stand against the Children of Phonos, seemed to recede from her. Nora lowered her head, closed her eyes, and let the voices of Selene and the others become an echoing blur. All at once she felt an overwhelming need for something good to cling to. Something to reassure her that life wasn’t all violence and pain and self-centered viciousness.
She needed to know that somewhere in the world was a place she could find love and comfort if she needed it; that somewhere was someone who cared about her. The harsh fact was that she had only ever had two real friends in her life—and one of those had turned out to be imaginary.
That still left one, though. One whose importance she had underestimated until now. Switching effortlessly back into Indigo (and trying not to think about what that might mean), she opened her eyes a crack and sought out the nearest shadow.