She created two such blades now, angling them so they hovered like a pair of black smiles over her outstretched forearms. For a second her attention drifted as she wondered how the slaughter nuns would react to the next part of the ritual—then she forced the thought away, tried to make her mind go blank. This was the tricky part and she couldn’t afford any slip ups, couldn’t allow herself to be distracted. Trying not to hesitate, she used her mind to flick the blades down and across the tops of her forearms, then instantly refashioned them, morphing them into semicircular bowls, which now hovered under her outstretched arms, catching the blood that wept from those wounds.
Only when this tricky bit of reshaping was complete did she allow herself to register the pain. All at once the cuts sizzled, as though hot coals had been laid across them. When the bowls were full she drew gauzy wisps of shadow toward her and used them to cauterize the wounds. Then she drew the bowls of blood together, combining them into one. It always amused her when pop culture suggested people might slash open their palms for some kind of blood sacrifice. She might have cut muscle or tendon, making the hands useless in a fight. No, this was simpler and cleaner.
Damastes had told her that murder golems were sculpted from air and light, and now that she had donated the blood that would both imbue her creation with life and also bind it to her, she set about shaping her creature. Using her shadow power, she began to untangle the light from the darkness, going about the task by reducing the complexity of it within her mind, couching it in terms she could understand and deal with. She imagined the darkness and the light not as a blended and inchoate mass, but as separate and defined objects. In her mind’s eye the darkness became a thousand tiny black marbles and the light a thousand tiny white marbles, which at the moment were mixed in together, creating an overall impression of grayness. Once she started to pick them apart, however, to shift them to their opposite sides of the room, their differences would quickly become apparent.
With her mind she stared into the gloom, stared until her inner vision began to adjust. She had learned how to manipulate darkness and shadows, how to bend them to her will; now she simply needed to hone and adjust that skill. For the first time ever, she would be molding not only darkness but light, too—molding it and sealing it into a skin of blood and shadow.
Concentrating hard, and trying not to wonder whether she was up to the task, she began to sift the gloom with her mind and heard one of the slaughter nuns behind her—she thought it might have been Xanthe—gasp as the light and the dark started to separate, to flow in different directions. She pushed the blackness into the right-hand corner of the room, packing it in as tightly as she could, as though it were something solid and movable, like rubble. Within minutes the darkness there had deepened to such an extent that it had become impenetrable, the details of walls, floor, and ceiling no longer even partly visible.
The left-hand corner of the room, by contrast, grew increasingly sharper and brighter, as though the walls and the floor were glowing with their own inner luminescence. Soon that corner was so dazzling it masked the details of the room in an entirely different way, becoming a pure white sheen of brightness that was impossible to look upon.
Nora—or rather, Indigo—closed her eyes and looked into the light with her mind. She delved into its core, and once she had found it, she began to draw it out, to scoop it forth as a bear will scoop honey from the heart of a hive. Once again she felt her mind having to adjust in order to handle the elusive stuff; to picture the light not as something indefinable, lacking in substance, but as something warm and malleable, able to be manipulated—the clay of life.
Even as she drew the light out, she began shaping it with her mind, creating a form. At first it was a crude approximation of a human shape. Quickly, though, as her subconscious worked upon it, it began to acquire definition and detail.
Although she was the sculptress, even she was surprised, if not chastened, to realize that she recognized the form she was creating. Considering where they were, perhaps it was not so surprising, though it still unsettled her, still caused emotion to rush up through her and lodge hotly in her throat.
The murder golem looked just like Shelby. It was Shelby reborn. Unwittingly or not, Indigo had re-created Shelby as an angel, composed of dazzling light.
A little overcome, Indigo tried to alter the form, to bend it to a new shape, one that was less personal, that didn’t engender such emotion within her. But she couldn’t. Try as she might, Shelby was foremost in Indigo’s mind and so remained the dominant form. It was obscene to think of Damastes inhabiting the shell of the woman whom Nora had until recently thought of as her best friend, her greatest confidante. But it seemed she could do nothing about it. It was another twist of the knife she was going to have to live with.
When the murder golem was complete and stood before her in its skin of shimmering light, Indigo began to build a shell around it. Calling forth the bowl of darkness that was full of her blood, she brought the light being and the shadow bowl together. As soon as the darkness, saturated with her blood, touched the light being, it began to slither over its surface, to stretch out, to explore its new landscape with an almost obscene and fervid eagerness. Watching it was like watching a parasite engulfing and overwhelming a more vulnerable organism, or an aggressive cancer crowding out the healthy cells to which it had become attached.
In this instance, though, the healthy cells didn’t wither, they flourished. Shelby’s light form began not merely to darken, but to fill with color. Her cheeks flushed with health; her lips reddened and glistened; her eyes sparkled; her hair became lustrous.
Shaking with reaction, but compelled to complete the ritual, Indigo stepped forward and placed her hands on the Heykeli’s naked shoulders. They felt warm and solid, the skin soft and silky. Dutifully the Heykeli opened its mouth, its lips parting with a soft wet sound. Indigo hesitated for a second, then began to lean forward, looking into the murder golem’s eyes—into Shelby’s eyes.
Shelby—no, not Shelby; this thing was nothing but a construct, a robot waiting to be switched on—stared back at her guilelessly. Despite herself, Indigo found herself looking for a spark of recognition, a trace of her old friend.
She glanced over her shoulder at Selene and her sisters, who were still crouched against the wall, faces tense, clearly ready to pounce or flee should anything go wrong.
“Is it possible…,” Indigo said, then felt her voice falter. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Is it possible there’s … anything left of Shelby? I mean … I know I created her, but she was my friend. She had identity. And I mean … we’re all created by someone, aren’t we? We’re all of us the products of our … our parents.” She thought of her own parents, and her guts twisted sourly. “Or at least, by … our surroundings … our friends and the … the people we know.”
What was she asking here? She wasn’t sure. Did she think it possible that this … this thing she had created could really be Shelby reborn? Or did she honestly think that her old friend was still out there in the ether somewhere? Even that the murder golem could eventually become her new home?