Nightmare Ink (14 page)

Why could she know so keenly what he did or didn’t comprehend? Was it by virtue of the fact that he processed everything through her biology?

Guilt stung her. Sure. He’d been acting like her definition of asshole, but did he deserve the definition he understood?

“No,” she amended. “I don’t know your name. It’s up to you to tell me what it is.”

He didn’t answer.

Still unable to move, she finally registered that Gus had fallen silent. She didn’t hear Nathalie on her cell anymore, either. Fear slid a chilly knife between her ribs.

Had there been another one of the things? Was it out there slicing Nathalie and the dog to bloody ribbons? Or had Nat bled out after cutting herself on vase glass when she’d fallen?

The Ink released her.

She stumbled.

Infernals cannot coexist.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

These creatures come from my plane. My world.

“If there’s more than one where you come from, they can coexist.”

In my world, they are a formidable army. But they cannot coexist in your simple world.

Meaning now that Ikylla had destroyed one, another of the little monsters could come hunting Isa?

The crunch of a footfall brought her around to face the archway between the kitchen and living room.

Nathalie, dripping flowers and water, cell phone clutched in her left hand, limped into the kitchen, her boots crushing the multicolored litter of glass. Her already ripped jeans bore a new slice above her right knee. A thin line of blood welled up between the edges of the denim.

She snatched a butcher knife from the kitchen block with a shaking right hand. “Is it dead?”

Ikylla, her breathing noisy, growled and sidled around to face them when Isa turned to her and crept closer.

“I think so,” Isa breathed. “Good girl, Ikylla. We’ve got to get her off of it. She’s bleeding.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Are you and Gus okay?”

“Yeah. I told him to stay. I shouldn’t be, but I’m fine.”

“You’re limping and bleeding.”

“Twisted an ankle, and that thing scratched me when it came past.”

“Not cut by breaking glass?”

“No . . . Steve’s on his way.”

“Thanks.”

“I don’t see any obvious injuries on Ikylla, warrior princess,” Nathalie said.

It was true. That Isa didn’t see any visible injury along her slime-speckled back, sides, or head didn’t reassure her, however. It left her vulnerable belly.

“Good job, Ikylla,” she crooned, taking the risk of crouching down before her.

She reached a bandaged hand out to her still furious cat. As far as she could tell, her tattoo had retreated. His presence had dwindled as if he’d sunk out of her awareness. A single shadowy thread remained, sharing her eyesight. If he knew what this thing was, she wouldn’t blind him by shutting him out of the use of her eyes. She was getting used to the twinge of headache.

One of Ikylla’s ears twitched and reset to a point slightly higher on her head.

“My God, that thing reeks. You’ll never get the smell out of here,” Nathalie muttered.

“Good girl, Ikylla. You are so brave. Look at you. What a righteous kill,” Isa murmured to the cat. “It’s dead, sweetie. You killed it. Can you let go? Let go and let me make sure my brave hunter is okay.”

She sounded like an idiot.

But Ikylla seemed to listen. Her slime-smeared fur settled into place. Her gold-green gaze flicked to Isa’s face. Nose wrinkled in disgust, she worked her jaws, biting down harder.

Something crunched in the corpse’s neck. Isa swallowed a surge of nausea.

Her cat released the dead thing and, moving as if everything hurt, backed off. She flopped to her side on the linoleum, panting.

Blood smeared her white belly.

“Oh, my God. Ikylla,” Nathalie breathed. The butcher knife clattered to the floor. So did Nathalie’s cell.

“Whoa!” Isa said, glancing over her shoulder at Nathalie’s wan face. “Sit down and breathe! She’s okay. It’s not enough blood to be serious. If you pass out, I’ll make Steve call an ambulance.”

Grabbing the back of one of the chairs at the table, Nathalie bent at the waist and sucked in a gulp of polluted air.

Isa heard sirens. Lots of them. Sounded like Steve had brought half the force.

“You wouldn’t dare,” she rasped.

“Don’t try me.”

“Some piercing artist,” Nathalie grumbled as the color came back to her face. “Sorry.”

“It’s different when it’s someone you love.”

“Hell, yeah,” she said. “Can you tell where the blood’s coming from?”

Ikylla had regained her breath. She picked up a white-gloved paw and began licking her toes. She hissed. Taste? Pain? Or both?

“Nothing I can see on her belly,” she said. “Not with her fur caked like that.”

“I think it’s that paw,” Nathalie offered. “And here comes the cavalry.”

“Help me get Ikylla to the bathroom?”

“You’re going to risk your life giving the cat a bath?”

Isa smiled at her feline. “She saved our lives. I won’t risk hers to whatever that crap is all over her fur. Besides. After facing that thing? I feel . . .”

“Filthy?” Nathalie finished. “Yeah.”

Boots crashed up the stairs. The windows rattled as they approached.

“Come on.” Nathalie hooked her hands beneath Isa’s upper arms and lifted.

The front door slammed open.

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary! What is that smell?” a young man’s voice protested.

“Secure the premises!” Steve commanded.

“In the kitchen,” Nathalie called. “You can relax. It’s dead.”

“What’s dead?” Steve demanded from behind them, as if he’d teleported into the room with a blur of blue uniforms behind him. “What the hell happened, and what is that?”

Nathalie recounted the events while Isa coaxed the cat into letting her pick her up. She should be able to do that if she balanced the weight on the splints and not on her hands. Right?

When Nat mentioned the flowers outside the front door, Steve interrupted, “Roses? What roses? There’s nothing outside the door.”

Isa shuddered.

Of course it was gone. The arrangement could have been traced.

The Ink hissed through her teeth.

“You didn’t see anyone?” Steve demanded.

“Someone was out there?” Nathalie squeaked.

“Damn it. Foster!” Steve bellowed. “Hallway, stairs, and landing! We had a perp who took away evidence.”

“On it!” a woman’s voice responded.

“Isa . . .” Steve began.

“Got to take care of Ikylla,” she said.

“I’ll do it,” Nathalie countered, holding out her hands as if Isa would consent to give up her cat.

“No.”

“You’re not supposed to get your bandages wet.”

“Screw the bandages,” Isa retorted.

“Damn it, Isa. Your hands won’t articulate enough to wash her.”

You can’t even wash yourself.

Anger at being ganged up on from inside and out—never mind that Nat had no way of knowing that had happened—turned Isa’s spine to solid cast iron.

“No.”

Nathalie’s hands dropped to her sides. Her shoulders drooped.

“You’re going to have to trust someone, sometime,” she noted, turning away. Her voice sounded flat. Hurt. If she’d had a tail, it would have been tucked between her legs.

“It’s
my
job,” Isa said.

“I love her, too!” Nathalie yelled, spinning back to glare with watery eyes.

Conscience bitch-slapped Isa. Her eyes burned.

The tattoo jerked back from the physical sensation as if he’d been stabbed in a kidney.

“I know,” she said. “We’ll both do it. I’ll hold her. You scrub.”

Nathalie blinked. The tears in her eyes evaporated. “Deal.”

Ikylla didn’t want to be held, but Isa at least had the domesticated version of her feline lounging on the kitchen floor rather than the deadly predator who’d taken down something none of them could—or wanted—to identify.

She hugged the stinking, filthy cat to her chest. Ikylla was trembling. Steve lifted Isa to her feet.

“Render first aid to the hero,” he said, walking them to the bathroom, “while I get—who? the coroner? a zookeeper?—down here to retrieve that corpse.”

“It’s magical,” Isa said. “Daniel sent it.”

Steve cursed. “You do Live Ink. Since when have you been able to see other people’s markers?”

Since before she’d even known what magic was? Not that she intended to admit to that.

“His markers,” she corrected. “Since my life depends on it.”

Gus whined from the sofa as she left the kitchen.

“Come on, then,” she said.

Nathalie ran a hot, shallow bath.

Gus planted his butt beside the tub to stand guard.

Isa climbed fully clothed into the water that came up to her hips when she sat down and lowered the cat into the water. Ikylla squirmed and yowled once just to prove she protested getting her fur wet, but then she dug the claws of her left forepaw into Isa’s right thigh. Her trembling intensified.

Nathalie’s eyes widened. “What happened to your sweatshirt?” she asked, dumping shampoo into her palm and rubbing it into the cat.

Isa glanced down. The front of her sweatshirt hung in ribbons.

“She didn’t do that.” Nat dipped her chin to indicate the soapy cat.

“No.”

“The gremlin?”

Isa blinked. “You weren’t even born when that movie came out.”

“Like you were?”

Nathalie shampooed the filth from Ikylla’s coat. To Isa’s relief, the slime dissolved.

Ikylla relaxed into the process, and Isa suspected she was happy to not have to lick her fur clean. She seemed oblivious to the fact that they examined her for injuries as they washed her. Isa saw nothing to account for the blood until Nathalie soaped Ikylla’s right foreleg and paw.

The cat tensed, claws from three feet digging into Isa’s skin. She hollered the feline equivalent of “Ouch!” and tried to use Isa’s thighs as her claw-powered launching pads.

Somehow, Isa clung to the slippery cat. “I’m sorry, baby girl. I’m sorry. Easy.”

Gus jumped to his feet and poked his nose at them.

“She’s okay,” Isa assured him. She heard the weariness in her voice, felt it in the quiver of her muscles. “We’re all going to be okay.”

“Damn,” Nathalie said as she used a plastic cup to rinse the soap and goo from Ikylla’s fur. “It’s bleeding again. Ice, I think she tore the claw out. Can’t get a solid look at it. I think we’d better call the vet.”

“I wonder if she’d make a house call. Run some more water, and give Ikylla another rinse. I don’t want any residue on her when she starts licking herself dry.”

“I hear that.” Nathalie pulled the plug, let the grungy, stinking water drain, and then refilled the tub.

They finished up Ikylla’s bath under Gus’s watchful eye.

Nathalie yanked a blue towel off the towel rack, draped it across her chest and reached for the exhausted, wet cat. “Come on, girlfriend. You are looking and smelling much better. Come to Auntie Nat. We’ll get you warm and dry.”

“A washcloth will take care of her face and head,” Isa said, as Nathalie disengaged Ikylla’s claws from Isa’s clothes and shifted the cat into her grasp.

“Tell you what,” Nathalie said, swaddling the tabby like a baby and putting her back into Isa’s arms. “Hold on to the warrior princess.”

She opened the bathroom door and slipped out, closing the door behind her.

Isa brought her knees up and held the bundle of feline and towel against her chest and thighs. She soaked the bandages of her right hand and used the wet gauze to stroke the rest of the slime from Ikylla’s head and ears.

The cat watched her face, the pupils of her eyes over dilated. Her body shuddered every so often as Isa held her. Pain? Or something else?

“Is this poison?” she asked internally.

A snort of derision made it clear he wouldn’t bother answering. Intellectually, she knew her fear was in his best interest. Therefore, he had reason to lie rather than assuage her fears by telling her it wasn’t.

He sneered.
How would I know what’s poison to this cat of yours?

Sure, he was having a dig at her. But it didn’t make what he’d said any less true. A chill walked down her spine.

“I need you to be okay, baby girl,” she murmured to Ikylla and kissed her damp head.

The cat awarded her an offended huff of breath.

The door opened a crack. Nathalie sidled through an opening just big enough for her body. “Steve’s calling the vet.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem,” Nat said, grinning. “I might have suggested that a Seattle police officer requesting a house call might help.”

Ikylla, as if she’d recovered her strength now that she was clean, or maybe because Isa’d waxed sentimental on her, stiffened and struggled to escape.

Nathalie took her and freed the cat from the towel.

Gus stood up with his front paws against the bathroom counter where Ikylla took up position. He poked his nose at her. She touched her nose to his forehead.

“What?” Nathalie asked him. “You two have a mutual protection pact? Or are you jealous that Ikylla whipped that thing’s ass while you bravely barked at it from the sofa?” She pulled the plug on the rapidly cooling bath. “Time to get you clean and into something a little less revealing.”

Isa snorted.

Between them, they got her undressed.

“You’ll be happier with a shower so we can get your hair washed,” Nathalie said, “but you’re going to have to let me in there with you.”

Isa froze at the prospect of having anyone that physically close.

Had Daniel meant to condition her to equate anyone within arm’s reach with pain?

The Ink trickled into her awareness, keenly interested in what had pushed so automatic a quiver through her.

“You can’t wash your hair,” Nathalie went on as if Isa needed a recitation of everything she couldn’t do. “And you look like you’re about to drop. We can’t have you falling, Ice. Steve made me promise.”

“Straight guys are so predictable.”

Nathalie grinned and shook her head. “He wishes. But even if you said you loved me and couldn’t live without me, I wouldn’t take you up on it while you were three shades of pale. So let me scrub the dried up gunk off of you before we find out that shit’s poisonous or something.”

She turned on the tap, adjusted the water temperature, and pulled the diverter to activate the shower. The first blast of spray took Isa’s breath with cold, but it heated up, and she turned to let the warm fall of water beat her shoulders.

Nathalie closed the shower curtain.

The tattoo rose up against the inside of her skin.

What is that?

“I’m taking a shower. It’s water.”

He groaned. Pleasure flooded her, not quite arousing, but intense and foreign.

She started.

The shower curtain rattled. She thought it was Nathalie, but a reddish-brown snout pushed in between the wall and the shower curtain.

“My very own peeping Augustus,” she said when his brown eyes met hers.

“Wow,” Nathalie said as she pulled open the curtain to climb in, still clothed. “And she thinks I’m the pervert.”

“I do not,” Isa protested. “This just isn’t. . . “

“What? Right? Decent?” Her neutral tone told Isa how much damage she could do if she wasn’t careful.

“Modest,” Isa corrected, hanging her head so the water ran down her face but she could still breathe.

Silence.

“Modest?” Nathalie repeated, stretching the word into arc of surprise. “Turn around.”

When Isa presented her back, Nathalie scrubbed soap into Isa’s hair.

“Privacy was a big deal where I grew up,” Isa said. “No communal bathing. It’s not you.”

“Thanks, I think.”

Suds and unspeakable brown ooze sluiced down her body and then the drain.

“Hand me the soap.”

Nat didn’t even protest.

The gauze did fine scrubbing her arms and legs, and she discovered that her right fingers would bend at least a little. She dropped the soap a lot.

He didn’t say anything, but she sensed the tattoo’s bewilderment, even if she couldn’t comprehend the source of it. The water on her skin entranced him. He seemed drunk on the sensation.

Nathalie applied a washcloth to Isa’s back, something that seemed to send the tattoo even further into his daze. It spilled over into her, urging her to subside into the ministration.

“Hold up,” Isa gasped. “This is wigging the Ink.”

Don’t stop.

“I stand corrected. He begs you not to stop.”

“Just my luck,” Nathalie said, “turning on a demon of the wrong sex.”

Isa smiled at the note of false resignation in her voice.

Nathalie held on to her elbow when Isa finally stepped out of the shower. She wanted to follow, but Isa waved her back with orders to scrub clean first. She wrapped towel around Isa’s shoulders before retreating into the water.

Isa expected her passenger to protest the end of the shower.

He didn’t. He was gone. Not in her head. Not sharing her sight.

Which meant the headache wrapped around her temples was entirely her own. Apparently, they’d exhausted the energy his healing in the ER had supplied.

Huddled in the towel, she sank to the floor.

Gus insinuated himself into the curve of her body where he lay down with a sigh.

Ikylla sat on the bathroom counter, her back to them, pointedly licking herself dry. Her wet fur bristled out in all directions.

Isa dozed with the sound of the spray in her ears and Augustus warm against her.

As sleep rose over her head, she heard the tattoo murmur,
My name was taken from me.

“I’m sorry.”

I don’t want your pity. I want your life.

“Freedom.”

Freedom,
he echoed with such a note of longing underpinning the word that it made her heart ache.
Surrender to me.

“Not today. And until I do, I need a name for you. How about Murmur, since it’s what you do?”

He bled shadows of confusion into her chest. He’d expected derision. Hate. His confusion sank with her into sleep, along with the whisper of
Surrender.

Then Nathalie, already wearing a pair of Isa’s sweats, was shaking her awake so she could pull yet another set of sweats—these with the cuffs cut off of the arms—onto her.

“Let’s get the bandages off your hands,” Nathalie said. “They’re soaked. I’ll ask Ikylla’s vet to wrap you up again after she’s seen to the princess.”

She unwrapped the gauze enshrouding Isa forearm to fingertip. Isa’s swollen, twisted hands looked dead. Pasty. Cold. Her pulse thumped.

At Nat’s call, Steve appeared in the doorway, his lips pressed tight and lines of worry creasing his forehead. He scooped Isa up as if she weighed nothing and carried her to the sofa despite her protest.

Judging from the jingling of tags, Gus followed.

Muted voices sounded in the kitchen. Shards of glass crunched beneath hard-soled shoes.

“Is the body gone?” Isa asked. “Or am I getting used to the stink?”

“Tagged, bagged, and downstairs,” Steve said, settling her on the couch and spreading her wet hair over the arm so it wouldn’t get caught beneath her. “It was the only way to get any work done without three quarters of my staff losing lunch.”

“The vet for Ikylla?”

“My officer went to pick her up.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, then held up a hand when she opened her mouth again. “Don’t even try to get rid of me. I’m staying. It’s not formal police protection. I need statements. And both of you need rest. Once she’s told me what happened, Nathalie’s taking the bed where I don’t have to check on her.”

“Or wake me every few hours to feed me,” Nat said, then yawned so hard her jaw popped. She retreated to the kitchen.

Steve and his officers had been busy. Most of the flowers and vases had vanished. Taken as evidence? Or simply trashed so they could work?