The universe was indifferent and ignored her pleas.
Indigo turned to Damastes and caught the monster’s eye. She saw him stare into her. She saw him come to a higher or deeper understanding of what she was going to do. The monster’s face clouded for a moment with doubt, then a wild joy flared in his eyes.
Damastes smashed away one of the Phonoi and roared again. “Yes!” he bellowed.
Indigo closed her eyes.
I’m scared, she thought.
I know, said her own inner voice.
Now that voice was not a blend of Indigo and Nora. Now that voice was only Nora’s. Cold. Strong.
Apart.
Indigo thought about the girl who was going to die. She thought about all of the murdered children. She thought about all of the children—and the adults—who would die once this ceremony reached its conclusion. The world would drown in blood.
What then did hers matter?
Indigo licked her lips. “Please…,” she whispered, then let go of the shadows that defined her. They bled from her, dripped from her, pooled around her. It was like having her skin peeled off because it was not merely her Indigo self. It was all of her shadow.
Every.
Last.
Bit.
Nora knelt there in a lake of darkness and slowly collapsed forward, bowing her head to the floor as the darkness lapped like water around her.
“Go,” she said, and for that last moment the spoken voice was both hers and Indigo’s.
She felt the darkness move, recoiling from the power of the ward, moving backward, and as it retreated from Rafe’s spell, the darkness became stronger. The outer edges of the pool became whole again, regaining its strength as it disentangled from the complexity of the ward spell. Only the slightest tether remained between her and her shadow self. The ritual that had merged her with Damastes all those years ago made it impossible for her to divest herself of that last trace of the darkness, so she felt it when the shadows flowed, felt it along that thin, thin thread. Her darkness rose up in a wall of shadows, and Nora half turned to see it, and for a moment she wanted to crawl toward it and reclaim it.
She did not.
That would only put her back in the same place, and that place was on the crumbling edge of the abyss.
The shadows deserted her, rushing away from her with such force that it stretched that thin thread almost to the breaking point. It hurt so bad. Not physically but all the way down to the center of her soul. It was like having her heart cut out. She could feel so much of herself go with it. Power and confidence, hope and …
The sound behind her was unbearably loud and indescribable. It hit everyone and everything in the chamber like a shock wave, knocking combatants apart and tearing chunks of masonry from the wall. Pieces of the ceiling crashed down on the Phonoi. On the altar one of the leather straps holding Anastasia broke, and she rolled partly away as the dagger plunged down, the blade biting deep into the stone instead.
Graham Edwards and his son stopped fighting. Rafe stopped laughing. Everyone turned toward the thing that now stood in the center of the room.
Nora looked, too, and with horror she saw the last of her shadow melt into the rippling flesh of the god of murder. Damastes seemed to swell with it, his skin stretching outward as he grew and grew, towering into a giant nearly a dozen feet tall. His legs were like stone columns—human in shape but so heavily muscled they were freakish. His torso was manlike, but the scales had grown back, and on each separate plate was a hooked barb that was as dark and sharp as the claw of a cat. Thousands of these appeared all over him, as if the shadow within him wanted to rend and tear with every possible angle of contact. Damastes’s arms grew long and powerful, with broad hands covered with longer spikes. A wreath of spikes grew out like a collar below the jutting chin, and above that was a face as strangely beautiful as the rest of him was hideous. It was like the face of a statue of Adonis, god of beauty, and yet this was a terrible beauty.
Nora knew that she now beheld something she had never before seen. Not in its true form. This was Damastes, the god of murder, in the full flush of his power.
When he spoke, it was in a voice of thunder.
“I am alive again!”
“Nooooo!” screamed Selene, breaking free of her shock and impelled by horror. She shoved a Phonoi killer aside and hurled herself at Damastes, a knife held in two hands as she sought to plunge it into the murder god’s heart.
Damastes swatted her aside.
As if she were nothing.
The spiked back of his hand tore through Selene’s flesh, and the strength of his arm flung her thirty feet through the air. Nora screamed as Selene crashed down out of sight behind the heaped dead.
Damastes turned toward Nora.
“Thank you,” thundered the god.
His laughter broke the world.
19
Pain.
Inside, outside, it didn’t matter. Her body hurt. Her heart hurt. Her soul hurt, an aching, sucking wound where the shadows should have been. She had been their prison and their prisoner for so long, so long, and now—
Now they were loose, running wild and rampant, and there was so much blood, so many broken bodies, and Selene was dead and everything was lost and the child—the child—
The children were still alive. She had done this, she had opened this terrible wound, unleashed this impossible beast upon the world, for the sake of the children. This was her fault. This was her crime, her sin, her unforgivable transgression, and unless she found a way to make it worthwhile—unless she saved the children—she might as well have let the slaughter nuns have her. She might as well have died on that first altar, the dagger to her heart, because she’d done what the men who’d killed the children had wanted all along, she had unleashed the end of days, she had broken the world, and for what? For what?
For the children. Without them, she had done it all for nothing, and so she had done it for them.
Pain singing hosannas to every twitch, every thought, Nora pulled herself to her feet. It took … forever. It took no time at all. Dully, through the agony of her own body, she heard the roars of Damastes. He was doing what he did best: he was making murder. In his hands—claws—in his grasp, it was an art form, like a painting, or a song played on an impossible instrument. The Phonoi assassins weren’t having a great day.
No one was having a great day. Great days were no longer on the menu.
Fuck the menu, said a small voice at the back of her mind, sharp and sardonic and a little sweet, as if it understood what she was going through, even though it couldn’t help. I’m going to order à la carte. Who’s with me?