Nightmare Ink (10 page)

“Door.” Was that Spider Woman’s voice in her ears? Or her own?

She’d heard it said that the spirits rarely asked those who crossed into their realm to walk an easy path.

Determination bubbled up within her. She hadn’t called it.

Freedom
. The word whispered through her brain, pleading.

She forced her feet to carry her three shuffling steps. The wall against her shoulder gave way to cool metal.

She found a door handle. Bone shifted against bone when she touched her right hand to the lever doorknob. Isa yelped. Panting at the fiery stabs in the hand, she set her forearm to the lever and leaned into it.

The handle turned. The
click
of the latch opening resounded in her ears, echoing through her body. It sounded like a trap snapping shut.

The door swung outward, dumping her into a narrow, white hall. Stumbling, she hit the far wall with one shoulder but kept her feet. The tiny triumph buoyed her.

For a moment, she stared back through the door into her prison. It flickered. A twisted, alien landscape shimmered with red-tinged heat and malevolent intent. Hell. Or at least it looked so like the Christian description that she was comfortable labeling the vision. Not to mention how well it fit her feelings about that tiny room.

The vision flickered out. Sagebrush, sand, and the silhouette of Spider Woman urging her to escape emerged.

She blinked. The sight faded, leaving her with a confused impression of the otherworld superimposed on the prison.

She wouldn’t accept, couldn’t accept, equating the spirit world with the cage Daniel had put her in so he could reduce her to—what? A compliant slave? An animal?

Resolute, Isa turned. The hallway stretched away from her: uneven concrete floor, scarred white walls. Bare fluorescent bulbs in metal fixtures hung from a ceiling twice as high as the one in her room. Only every third light glowed.

She drew a deep breath. Old dust. Oil and chemical smells she couldn’t identify scraped the back of her throat.

Move.
A male voice echoing through her head. Whose?

She lurched down the hall.

The hallway fuzzed. A sharp, rapid rattle beside her shot her heart into her throat. Rattler. She froze. The rattlesnake’s preparing-to-strike buzz slowed to a lazier don’t-mess-with-me rhythm.

A diamondback made no sense. Not here. Was this a fear to be conquered? Or a warning of danger to be heeded?

“Sometimes,”
Isa heard Ruth say from within the confines of her memory,
“fears are a handicap. Other times, fears are a warning.”

“The trick,” she whispered, completing her mother’s thought out loud in the silent building, “is learning to know the difference.”

Isa sniffed. Beneath the stink of chemicals and oil, she caught a whiff of cold, clear air and the perfume of night. Was that possible? Could she smell a time of day?

She sidled closer to that shadowed door.

The rattle intensified.

“You aren’t real,” she murmured. “You’re the spirit manifestation of my fear. You have no power here.”

Clenching her fists was an automatic response meant to keep her from retreating. The muscles twitched in response, tightening around broken and partially healed bones. Razors slashed from her hands up, following the path of outraged nerves.

She wavered, eyes watering.

“I will not turn aside,” she gasped aloud. “This is my path. You will be happier beneath the sagebrush. Go.”

A wave of dizziness surged over her. She staggered.

The rattle spiked to double time.

Gritting her teeth, she fought to stay upright. In the otherworld, she could destroy the thing. A knife of magic, a surge of golden flame, either would do the job. But killing a rattlesnake was bad luck. She wondered if that only held true in her world or if it was an ill omen in the spirit world as well.

More to the point, she didn’t want to kill the snake, spirit or no. It was simply being what it was. Few people accepted venomous creatures for what they were. She knew that feeling. She wouldn’t kill it if she didn’t have to.

On the other side of the door, a crow called. The raucous caw scolded through both worlds, reverberating around her, slamming her back into a dimly lit hallway.

She still faced a door, though she couldn’t see whether the paint was flaking or the door rusting. Isa no longer heard the buzz of an angry snake.

Crossing her arms and the sheet over her chest as if she could hold her heart in place that way, she went to the door. From outside, the cackle of a crow reached her. She fell against the door. Terrible desperation fired through her, stretching out her too tight skin and bones. So close.

Freedom
, the other voice whispered from inside her mind.

She leaned on the lever door handle.

The door didn’t budge.

Her knees gave. She slid down the door. Chips and flakes of sharp-edged paint caught in her sheet, pulled her hair, and abraded her skin. The faint flame of hope she’d been nurturing winked out.

A stygian, unsettling tendril of strength wormed through her muscles and bones. Not hers. She couldn’t say how she knew, but she did.

Freedom
.

She jerked her head upright and opened her eyes.

It took a moment to realize she was looking at the bolt keeping the door locked. From this side. A shallow breath rushed out of her. It kindled the ember of hope, which flared until she thought she tasted wood smoke on her tongue.

Shaking, she reached up and, with one bloody, raw wrist, slid that bolt back. When she snagged her forearm on the handle and pushed, the door swung open.

Cold, night air washed over her. The chill sliced through muscle straight to bone. She didn’t care. She’d rather freeze to death than live in Daniel’s cage.

Agreement and a fierce roil of satisfaction made her breath tremble. She wasn’t alone inside her own skin anymore.

She didn’t have time to contemplate that.

Neither of them did.

She bolted through the opening on knees and forearms. The sheet and her snarled hair tangled around her. She emerged into the black of night. A pool of yellow light illuminated a circle outside the door. For a moment, the glow pulled the otherworld out of the background. The buckled and pitted concrete faded into sun-splashed pale sand, spindly sagebrush, and the gray path that looked remarkably like the broken concrete under her knees.

The flap of wings and a brush of icy wind against her left cheek drew her back into her body.

A crow landed beside her and clacked its beak. The bird tilted its head back and forth as if studying her.

“I’m not dead, yet,” she rasped, then had to suppress a hysterical giggle.

The black bird hopped closer and leaned forward. In a lightning-fast strike, it grabbed a tendril of her hair. It turned and hopped away, pulling.

“Hey,” Isa tried to say. An anemic grunt issued from her throat.

It tugged again.

“Ow!” No sound at all emerged that time.

Were all crows that strong? Or that big?

“My messenger will greet you,”
Spider Woman had said.

Not a crow then. Raven. In the city.

Isa could hear the song of the city now, the constant sigh of traffic rushing past in the distance, the whine of an airplane overhead.

She was outside, and she had a guide, whether real or imagined.

She climbed to her feet so Daniel wouldn’t catch her on her knees on the damned doorstep.

The bird let go and uttered a surprisingly tender caw.

A breeze stirred, bringing a putrid, cloying odor of rot. Trash? Corpses?

She disentangled her sheet. The thin fabric was streaked with dark smears of what she suspected was her blood, but it was the only protection she had. She refused to give it up. Ignoring pain, she tucked it under her arms once more.

As if the effort to stand had broken her eyes on some level, she saw two landscapes vying for her attention. Low, hulking buildings and darkness relieved by city lights bouncing orange off the belly of the low clouds in one; sun on desert and pale, bleached sky in the other.

She saw the raven in both.

It chattered, taking wing. It flew to a perch several feet away. It was either a sagging metal chain-link fence or the skeleton of a stunted, dead pinyon, but “follow me” was clear.

Shivering, Isa lurched across what felt like an endless expanse of rocky concrete. Puddles of icy water numbed her feet until she couldn’t tell what surface she trod.

When she reached the fence/pinyon skeleton, the raven clacked its beak and launched into the air. It landed on an enormous electrical box/sandstone boulder and urged her to follow with voice and beating wings.

She lost track of how many times they played follow-the-raven-leader. Isa tripped, landing on the big, sharp-edged stones of a railroad grade, her foot still hooked on one rusty metal rail of the track.

The pushes of strength from the
other
inside her skin had evaporated. So Isa crawled, her hair and sheet dragging through foul-smelling puddles.

The raven hopped in front of her as if afraid to leave her sight. When she paused in a vain attempt to catch her breath, the bird took up a strand of her filthy hair again and pulled.

Freedom,
the male voice sighed into her head.

Her strength failed, and she folded down to the ground. At least it was dry. Was she lying on sand? Or concrete?

How far had she gotten?

Far.

Why couldn’t she remember?

The raven shrieked.

Why
? the male voice in her head whispered.
Why debilitate you
?

“To break my spirit,” Isa murmured. “To break my will.”

So I could break you.

“And break free of me, yes.”

He intends for me to kill you.

“Yes.”

Release me.

“No.”

He didn’t break you. He couldn’t.

“Not like that.”

Black closed in, smothering them both.

***

A dog’s bark jolted Isa to awareness. She was horizontal, curled on her side. For one gut-twisting minute, she feared she’d dreamed her escape.

A cold, wet nose pressed into her neck.

Her eyesight couldn’t penetrate the hazy dream state of otherworld superimposed on postindustrial despair cityscape. Did she really recognize that dog’s moan of terrible relief and worry?

“Troy! Oki! Over here!” a female voice shouted. Nathalie.

Footsteps pounded closer. Sneakers on concrete and crunchy gravel. “Isa? Is that . . . holy shit. Troy! It’s her. Ria nailed it! And the animals! They knew. All this time, they knew where she was, and we wouldn’t listen.”

The footsteps stopped. Isa heard the clunk of kneecaps hitting the concrete before her. Nathalie burst into noisy sobs.

Isa saw her, not in this world but in the other. In her broken sight, a glitter of pale lavender fairy fire outlined Nathalie’s form.

More footsteps approached at a jog. The first was a watercolor wash of marigold orange magic. The second gleamed pale yellow, like warm starlight. Powerful magic.

Nathalie muffled her crying.

“Is she breathing?” a second female voice asked. Oki.

Of course she was, but Isa couldn’t summon the resources to say so.

She squinted both physical and magical eyes. The starlight belonged to Oki.
How?
A wet nose, frantic snuffles, and paw pokes drained the question from her head. She should reassure the owner of that wet nose. She wanted to.

“Shift over, Nat,” a man said.

“My God,” Nathalie said between hiccupping gulps for breath. “Her hands.”

“Fucking bastard. If Steve won’t kill him, I will,” the man rumbled.

Feet and layers of fabric shuffled at her back. Denim creaked. Something burning hot touched her cheek. As if no longer a part of her, the skin twitched like a pony’s hide shrugging off a fly.

“She’s freezing,” the man said. He unzipped fabric that sounded like the threads screamed when they rubbed against one another. More rustling, then something heavy and hot settled over her left shoulder. It smelled faintly of Old Spice aftershave.

Troy.

Isa heard the beep of a cell phone.

Another.

Three voices tangled in her awareness. Troy’s, Oki’s, and Nathalie’s.

Nathalie cried like someone who wanted to stop, but couldn’t.

“I need an ambulance,” Oki said.

“Steve?” Troy said, the name rushed, his tone urgent. “Get here.”

“Where the hell are we?” Oki demanded.

“Under an overpass,” Troy said. “No, I don’t know which one!”

The dog whined and licked Isa’s face.

Enfolded in the delicious warmth of Troy’s coat, she drifted, only half hearing Oki and Troy talking about her as if she weren’t lying at their feet. It felt familiar, being an object, familiar and terrifying. She couldn’t get her breath.

Fabric scraped across her right hand.

Pain shot through her. She croaked in protest.

“I can’t!” Oki cried. “It hurts her! Okay. Okay.”

Tentative fingers rested against her wrist.

“Oki’s on the phone with nine-one-one dispatch,” Troy said. “Track her phone. You’ll find us.”

“I can’t feel anything,” Oki said. “Yes, she’s breathing.”

Another nudge of desperate
escape
energy trickled into her chest.

Nerves twitched. Muscles tensed, as if to respond, but the impulse to action drained away as if the fiber of her being couldn’t contain it.

“There. I get a flutter. It’s not strong. Okay. Hang on, Ice,” Oki said. “I’m shifting the coat just a little bit. I’ll put it back, I swear.”

Isa shivered as Oki moved the jacket away from her throat.

Warm fingers pressed against her neck.

“Yes. Yes, there it is. Count? I don’t . . . Okay. Say when.”

“You got us? Yeah, yeah. We won’t hang up. Got that Oki? Don’t hang up!”

“Shut up! I’m trying to count! Damn it. It’s—I can’t tell! It’s fast. What? Yeah, I think she’s bleeding. It’s dark. Our flashlight gave up the ghost an hour ago.”

Sirens sounded in the distance.

“We can hear the ambulance! I’m not going to hang up.”

Freedom
. A forth voice pleaded from inside.

“Freedom,” Isa murmured internally, soothing the restless thrust of
get moving
energy that tried to shift her to her forearms and knees again. The impulse crept up her spine, urgent, terrified.

“Gus! C’mere, boy. Leave her alone,” the man said, his tone tender.

Gus? Her Gus? Definitely dreaming. Except, if she was, why couldn’t she open her eyes and arms to her dog?

“Troy?” she breathed.

“Hey, darlin’,” he said, “Good to hear your voice again. What up?”

“How long?”

“How long what, darlin’? How long have you been gone?”

Isa nodded, or at least she intended to. Warm, gray fog armed with clubs and razors enshrouded her. No relief there, but she couldn’t fight the downward slide into it.

“It’s the Ides of March, Isa. We’ve been looking for you for almost six weeks.”

Six weeks of her life lost. Her breath caught on an unexpected sob.

“No, no,” Troy crooned as if soothing an infant. “It’s okay. You’re okay now. Nat and Oki and I have been staying with Gus and Ikylla. They missed you, but they’re fine. Gus is right here. Ikylla’s waiting at home for you, all right?”

She choked on a sob.

“What’s wrong?” Nathalie gasped. “What’s happening?”

“Take it easy, Nat. She’s crying. She just doesn’t have any tears,” Troy said.

“It’s okay,” Oki said. “Nat’s got enough for both of them.”

“Not funny!” Nathalie snapped.

It was. And something about hearing the teasing made Isa feel suddenly, stupidly invincible. As if Daniel couldn’t or wouldn’t find and destroy her friends.

The creature tattooed on her skin shifted, jabbing her innards with some cutting bit of his psychic anatomy.

“Hang on,” Nathalie urged. “You hang on, Ice. We’re getting help. You’re safe now.”

She wasn’t safe. Not with Daniel’s creature etched into her skin and soul.

She wouldn’t ever be. Neither would they.