Nightmare Ink (17 page)

“Damn it,” Patty muttered. She pressed her thick fingertips to her cheekbones as if that could stop the quiver of her breath or the tears gathering on her false eyelashes. “I looked all over this city for you. I should have found you sooner than I did.”

Isa sucked in a breath. “I don’t understand.”

“I know. This is harder than I thought,” Patty said. “You know I wasn’t the only one searching for you, right?”

“Nathalie said she had dreams about me,” Isa said.

“And Ria had his boys beating the streets,” Patty said, an ironic and grim note in her tone leading Isa to believe that wasn’t just a figure of speech. “About three weeks after you vanished, he got some intel that led us to south Seattle.”

Isa’s eyebrows rose. “Patty.”

Whatever Patty heard in Isa’s voice made her pale and go dead still. She looked like a marble statue adorned in pink and purple.

“That night . . .” Neither one of them had to specify which night. How would Isa identify it? The night Zoog died? The night she was kidnapped? “You said something that got me thinking,” Isa said.

“You’re bad about that,” Patty noted, her tone muted.

“You know what police clean teams do.”

“And now I’ve said the word
intel
?” she finished. Her strained smile looked both pained and amused. “Not something you’d expect a whore to say?”

Isa flushed because Patty had hit on her exact thought and it sounded so judgmental said out loud. “Patty . . .”

Patty waved her silent.

Isa licked suddenly dry lips, wondering if she was destroying a relationship she didn’t know she’d valued. Even if she couldn’t define it. Maybe because she couldn’t.

“Look,” Patty said. “I’m a coward. It took me two weeks to work up the guts to even try looking for you.”

“You’re not afraid of anything,” Isa protested, frowning at the quaver in her voice.

Patty barked a gravelly laugh. “’Cause I stand on a street corner in this getup, screwing any guy who’ll have me? That’s not courage.”

It’s prison.

“It’s a cage,” Patty echoed the grim-sounding tattoo. She sounded grave. Sober in a way that made Isa’s heart curl in trepidation.

Where had a demon garnered so much insight? And what the hell had happened to Patty? Who and what had she been?

“I see the questions in your eyes, girl,” Patty said. “What I’m trying to work up to tell you is that whatever happened today to make you throw a freaking huge curse back at Daniel, I saw it. I won’t have been the only one. You know that’s dangerous. You think Daniel is your biggest problem. But you’re wrong.”

Patty had been miles away. How had she known that Isa’d done anything with magic at all? Isa stared, trying to see through the cake makeup to what might lie underneath, desperate to comprehend the sudden change in the prostitute she’d assumed she knew—that she’d taken for granted.

Murmur stared, too. Neither one of them took a breath for several seconds.

How many of the people in her life had she taken at face value? How foolish had she been?

Nothing is ever what it seems.

“Thanks,” Isa muttered.

Patty eyed her. “The Ink?”

Isa grimaced.

Patty nodded. “I can smell him. Sulfur. Leather. Male. Sexy. Too bad he’s attached to your package. I’d be all over both of you.”

That surprised a wan smile from Isa. She’d expected Murmur to recoil. He didn’t. He took greater possession of her eyesight and assessed Patty.

“Back off, lover boy,” Patty said. “Even if Isa were my type, I wouldn’t do that to her no matter how hard you hit on me.”

Murmur scowled.

“You said you looked for me,” Isa said, wresting back control of her mouth.

“And I should have done it from the second you were snatched,” Patty said, focusing on Ikylla in her lap. “I didn’t have the courage because the last time I used magic to look for someone, I choked. A little kid paid the price for it. My sister’s kid. A perfect little blond-haired, brown-eyed guy. He thought I walked on water.”

Isa closed her eyes at the throb of fresh pain underlying Patty’s pressed-so-flat voice.

“I figured I didn’t have any business messing around with trying to find you,” Patty went on. “Seattle PD had its best people on the case. But after three days, your trail went cold.”

Isa opened her eyes.

“I couldn’t stand to hear Nat talk about her dreams. I could see you too clearly. So I pulled my head out of my ass and gave looking for you a shot,” Patty said.

“I don’t understand. Look for me how?”

“Magic, Isa.”

Isa leaned in, intrigued. She’d never have pegged Patty as magic. Because she hadn’t bothered to look past the surface. Self-disgust rumbled through her. She shifted, discomforted by her sudden awareness of herself as willfully obtuse.

Delicious. You’re making destroying you so easy
.

Patty grinned and wagged a finger under her nose. “I’ve spent a long, hard time making damned sure you weren’t the only one to underestimate me.”

“Except that you got so good at it you underestimated yourself?” Isa said.

Patty’s grin died. “I guess so.”

“You were never a brick mason, were you?”

“Yes, I was. For the worst three weeks of my life,” she confided. “And I say that after whoring for nearly a decade. There’s manual labor, and then there’s manual labor.”

Patty waggled her fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows.

Murmur snorted.

Isa clapped a hand over her nose and mouth.

Patty chuckled. “You’re asking who I worked for that I know police clean teams, intel, and tracking. Not going to tell you. It’s enough for you to know that, lo, these many years ago at the advent of the age of magic and the passage of the Acts of Magic laws, certain people, few of them good, thought they’d take advantage of the new abilities cropping up among the populace.”

“They recruited you?”

“Far too mild a descriptor for how that went down. Shanghaied. Held prisoner. Totally a 1970s rock song. You go in. You never leave. I got off on the power trip at first. I was hot shit. They’d point me at a trail no one else could follow, and I got real high on the fact that I made tracing the magic look easy.

“They rewarded success,” Patty said, her voice muted. “I even had a partner. Thought I was in love. Thought he was, too. Until I refused to track an innocent little girl with the same kind of ability that I had. One they intended to ‘recruit’ the same way they had me.”

Isa tensed.

“Bastards came in and told Jimmy to pack. They took him. I never saw him again.”

“He was a plant?”

“Manipulative bastards.”

“My God, Patty,” Isa groaned. “How did you escape?”

“Not telling.”

“They’re looking for you? Still? You’re in hiding?”

“Best disguise ever, don’t you think?” she said. “You ever wonder why I set up shop outside Nightmare Ink?”

“I figured it’s where your customers know to find you.”

“That, too,” she said. “Steve’s trackers are diligent, hardworking officers. They just don’t have the juice to sort the background noise of the land and the city and the people who live here. They get tangled up in the strands.”

“You don’t.”

“I don’t. Didn’t. The more I tracked, the better I got. They took to calling me a magic bloodhound. You know those dogs have noses a thousand times better than ours? I won’t claim I’m that much better than Steve’s crew. I might have been, once upon a time. But that thing with Jimmy made me question my perception.

“I choked. Someone I loved died. I swore off it. But I can’t shake the jones for the magic, Ice. I shouldn’t have anything to do with it. That kind of thing is detectible and . . . the agency I’m warning you about wouldn’t hesitate to grab me again. Or you. You have the kind of juice they crave, Ice. They’d use you and me up without thinking anything of it.”

Murmur growled.

“You’re trying to scare me.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It’s working.”

“You throw off flashes of sunshine magic while you work unshielded by the studio in the basement,” she said. “Did you know?”

Isa sucked in a horrified breath. She’d been taught better than that.

“Don’t worry about Steve’s sniffers at the precinct,” Patty said. Contempt weighed down her tone. “They couldn’t find their own asses if they weren’t attached. You only have to worry about people like me.”

“And the ones you’re hiding from?”

“And them . . . Thing is, Ice, I shouldn’t be hanging out in front of your shop. It’s a tell, you know? But I need those sparks you throw. It reminds me that I’m not dead. It was pretty safe, because you were careful. Until today, you weren’t power tripping.”

“We walked into a trap,” Isa said.

“Yeah, I’m just saying that trap had more teeth than you think it did.”

Murmur lifted one of her eyebrows.

“That curse you threw at Daniel,” she said, “lit up the city’s aura like a fusion bomb. If he didn’t know where you were, he does now.”

A chill tremor shook Isa.

“Thing is, Ice, you’ve changed, and I’m not just talking about the tattoo,” Patty said. “Before this happened, you were in hiding, too, I think.”

Isa froze.

Murmur perked up, poised-to-strike.

“Hiding?” she echoed.

Patty smirked. “Please. I’m a professional at pretending to be what I’m not. You’ve always been so stingy with that warm sun, sage, and pine tree magic.”

Isa gaped, shaken that Patty had so accurately pegged how she experienced her magic.

“At least until Zoog.”

“You knew?” Isa breathed.

Patty met her eye, a sly grin on her face. “I not only knew you’d stopped pretending you had less magic than you do, Ice. I cheered.”

“We were in the studio,” Isa said. “You shouldn’t have felt . . .”

“Containment isn’t perfect,” Patty said. “I knew. I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one. And today . . .”

Patty’s eyes dilated as she studied Isa. Her expression tightened.

Murmur and Isa blinked in unison. Isa felt like her eyelids scraped closed and then opened over far more than her two eyeballs. Unpleasant. She cringed.

Patty stared at and through her, her gaze unfocused, a crease between her brows and a frown of concern on her pink lips.

Isa’s mouth went dry. “What the hell are you seeing when you look at me?” she rasped, then amended, “At us?”

Isa wanted to draw Patty into focus. She hadn’t been the object of someone else’s other sight since she’d been a child. It made her skin prickle in a way it hadn’t when she’d been a kid.

Patty’s gaze didn’t shift. If anything, her pupils dilated further. “Too much,” she said. “I see too much.” Patty closed her eyes and shifted her shoulders.

Isa’s creeping-skin sensation dwindled.

“That’s what I came to say,” Patty said. Her voice sounded drained of life. “Be careful what you throw out into the ether. Shield. Both of you.”

“I don’t mean to ego trip on the magic,” Isa said. “We’re having integration issues.”

Patty nodded, set Ikylla aside, and rose. “You’re a much bigger danger than you ever imagined you were. Each of you. In combination? You have the power to lay waste to so many lives.”

Murmur frowned.

“Yours,” Isa whispered, through the sudden terror clutching her chest.

“I’m not saying don’t do magic, Isa. I suspect your life depends on you doing it,” she grated, going to the door and shoving her feet into her shoes. “Get control. If you don’t, the people I’ve warned you about will come sniffing around. I won’t go back if they find me, Ice.”

Isa shivered.

Patty plunked the apartment keys on the half wall and left.

For the first time, her nightmares that night included Murmur. In the dream, they fled from faceless men in suits. Sometimes Isa ran alone. Sometimes Murmur ran beside her. When she thought they’d evaded them, all but one of the pursuers morphed from human into hounds, baying as they followed the firefly glitter of the magic she couldn’t hide. The single man remaining followed the hounds, cold light shining from him as silver-white wings tore through his suit.

Murmur surged and rolled within her. His shadowy rage and loathing spurred her dream self to run faster.

The hounds overwhelmed them.

And she was confined, encased in something far too small and rapidly shrinking. Bones snapped. The prison reshaped her natural form, breaking off pieces, constricting around her like a starving reptile. No matter how she fought, no matter how she shrieked, she couldn’t escape. She was trapped, imprisoned for eternity.

It took Nathalie and both animals to wake her.

Shaking, breathing like she’d run a long way, Nathalie collapsed to her knees beside the couch when Isa opened her eyes and shut her mouth.

“You were both screaming,” she breathed. “If you wanted me to get up at five o’clock in the morning, why didn’t you just say so?”

Isa sat up and blew out a shaky breath. “Sorry. Go on back to bed.”

“What about you?”

“I think we’d rather work than revisit that dream.”

Murmur said nothing.

Nathalie plugged in the laptop Steve had left and turned it on. “How’re you going to manage with your hands?”

“I healed the breaks.”

“Whoa.”

Isa shrugged. “No more cutting the cuffs off my sweatshirts.”

“Roger.” Nathalie saluted, grinning. She gestured at the animals. “Come on, you two.”

Gus, sleepy-eyed, oozed off the sofa and padded into the bedroom in Nathalie’s wake. Ikylla burrowed into the blankets on the couch.

Murmur edged into sharing her eyesight as she opened the files Steve had left for her and started adding fuel to the fire of nightmare by studying dead bodies.

At eight, Steve let himself into the apartment. At the sound of the key in the lock, Gus appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, head down and hackles up.

“Hey,” Steve said when he saw Isa at the table.

Gus bounced, his caution gone like it had never existed. Steve didn’t acknowledge the dog’s enthusiastic dance of greeting.

Isa rose.

“Isa.” Something in his tone bumped her heart into a faster pace. “I need you to take a ride with me,” he said. He’d pressed his expression to hard neutral and wouldn’t meet her searching gaze. “Bring Gus.”

Time to look for her prison.

She’d known she’d have to do this, and she’d dreaded it. But faced with the way Steve treated her as if she’d become a fragile shell, she discovered a limit to fear. Anger opened inside her skin and bones like a razor-edged flower.

The thing on her skin stirred, spreading out as if her ire warmed him like a lizard basking in the middle of the road.

She pictured him squished into the concrete by an eighteen-wheeler.

“Come on, then,” Isa ordered. She sounded sharper than she intended. Spurred by Murmur’s nasty laugh, she tamped down anger. No giving him any further avenue into her psyche.

Steve grimaced before he wiped his features clear, as if she’d confirmed his worst fears with her display of temper. Could he have any notion what had fueled it? How could he if she didn’t tell him?

“Steve. Daniel banked on me being breakable,” she said. “He hasn’t broken me yet. I think that proves I’m stronger than you think.”

He knows you can’t hold out against me.

She clenched her teeth because she couldn’t clench a fist.

Steve blanched. He opened his mouth. Closed it. His gaze turned inward as if looking over his recent words and actions.

Gus, deflated by Steve’s lack of greeting, pressed against Isa’s legs for reassurance. She leaned down and stroked the dog’s ears with her palms. He grinned up at her. The simple expression eased a tightly held place inside her chest.

“Want to go for a ride, handsome?”

Gus bounced and turned an excited circle. He darted to where his leash hung, plopped his butt down on the floor, and whined.

“Let me get my shoes and coat.”

Steve radiated distress, even as he impersonated a granite statue in the entry.

Gus followed Isa’s every step as if afraid she’d change her mind about taking him. Isa struggled into the new button-down sweater Nathalie had brought. After her dreams, Isa gathered Nathalie couldn’t bear the thought of pullovers any more than Isa could, not after Daniel cut the last one from her body. She tugged on a pair of sneakers that fastened with Velcro, found Ikylla still nesting in the covers of her pallet on the sofa, and spent a moment petting her.

“I’ll be back by suppertime,” Isa promised as Ikylla purred and awarded her a slow blink of acknowledgment. “Come on, silly dog.”

Steve clipped on Gus’s leash and slid the loop over Isa’s right hand to her wrist. “I don’t mean to treat you like you’re fragile, Isa. I’m sorry if . . . I don’t like asking you to do this.”

She wasn’t looking forward to it, either. “Thanks.”

Pressing his lips tight, Steve marched out of the apartment, waited for her to follow, and then closed and locked the door.

Gus stayed at her heel, notably not bouncing any longer.

The first tendril of queasy fear hooked barbs into her gut.

Satisfaction bled from the tattoo, feeding the fear so that it spread, stabbing ice with every claw hold it established.

Isa would not give in. If she wanted to survive, she couldn’t afford to surrender.

Gus blinked up at her, uncertainty in his brown eyes and in his drooping tail. No matter how she’d hoped his mindless enthusiasm would pull her down the stairs, he’d clearly sensed something wasn’t right.

She felt the creature looking out of her eyes at her precious little tripod dog. Measuring. Calculating. Oily, smoky rage exploded through her. She snarled, shoved Murmur out of her awareness, and slammed the door against him.

Gus cowered.

Prickles raked the backs of her eyes, and the breath she drew shook. She dropped to her knees and opened her arms. “I’m so—oof—”

Before Isa could get the apology out, the dog threw himself against her chest, licking a single tear from her cheek.

“—sorry, Augustus. Come on. Let’s do this.”

She rose, wiping dog spit from her face with her sleeve.

He tugged on the leash, propelling her down the stairs to where Steve opened the door to let them out on the street. They got into his car. Steve swiveled his laptop toward her and unlocked the screen. A photo came up.

Gus insisted on sitting in her lap. Isa had to lean around him for a closer look at the photo. “Another Ink death?”

“I’m hoping you can tell me. Happened last night. Known gang member. Hit the arrow key to page through the photos,” he said. “Adam Oldman did the Ink five years ago. This one is notable because, if I read it right, that tattoo was in the process of coming off when this guy died.”

Murmur clamored into her eyes.

Gus twisted his head around to stare at her and grumble.

She bit the inside of her lip to squelch Murmur’s answering growl.

“I see it,” Isa said. “What killed him?”

“Don’t know yet. Toxicology will take time, but so far, every single report has come back clean on the deaths you’re looking at for me,” Steve said.

“So what’s killing these people? In all of the files you gave me, the victims had Live Ink, but only one or two showed any tattoo stress from what I could see.”

“The ME reports are still coming in. I’ve got three hearts that exploded and two strokes. The rest look like run-of-the-mill heart failure except for the fact that they look like they’ve been beaten. Bruising, muscle tears, broken bones—”

Her hands twitched.

“Happened all at once, at or near the time of death,” Steve said.

“Hard deaths, then.”

Steve drove into downtown, then out the other side.

“Does that mean anything?” he asked.

“I wish I knew,” Isa said aloud before turning her attention inward to Murmur. “Does this mean anything to you?”

The tattoo pulled back and eyed her reflection in the computer screen.

Odd sensation, someone else giving her the hairy eyeball with her own eyes.

Daniel.

She sucked in a sharp breath. Could Daniel be involved in so many deaths? How? And why? She had no reason to trust Murmur, though he had it in for Daniel as much as she did.

More.

Doubtful. Still. The bonus of knowing too much about Daniel was that if his magic had been involved in the deaths, she should be able to detect it. She needed verification. She needed— “I need to see the body.”

Steve slanted a quick glance her way. “Why?”

“I’d like to look for evidence of magical attack,” she said. “That doesn’t translate through photos.”

“Okay,” he said. “We might be able to work something out. After we’ve done what we came to do. How soon?”

“Within seventy-two hours of death,” she said.

“You know something.”

“We don’t know anything yet. We have a theory,” she corrected.

Murmur twitched.

Steve threw a suspicious glance at her. “We?”

“We. There’s a small chance someone is trying to summon the Ink off of these people,” Isa said. “If that’s what’s happening, I should be able to see the remnants of the spell. Have one of your people look, too, if you want. I just don’t understand why someone would try to pull Ink from someone.”

“To see if they could?” Steve said.

Goose bumps rose on her arms. That’s what the rumors had said about Daniel and the man he’d killed with Live Ink.

Murmur twitched.

The buildings turned from glassy office high-rises to single-story hulks of corrugated, rusting metal, crumbling concrete, and looming freight doors, tight shut against the chill south wind.

They finally pulled into a gravel-strewn parking lot under a low metal bridge. Isa had no clue which one. Deep, wide potholes pockmarked the lot. Trucks passing on the bridge above them made the car shudder.

“This is where they found me?” she asked.

Still gripping the steering wheel as if he couldn’t face what he’d asked her to do, either, Steve jumped.

A patrol car pulled in beside them. Backup?

“Yes,” Steve said, lifting his chin. “Beside the abutment on the far side.”

She stared out the windshield at the shadowed spot he’d indicated.

Funny. She’d expected to recognize something. Anything.

She didn’t.

Steve came around to open her door. Gus hopped out, and then danced around on his toes. He tossed her a reproachful look. He didn’t approve of the gravel. She eased out of the car and discovered that she wasn’t willing to close off her escape route by shutting the car door.

A pair of uniformed police officers sat in the patrol car. Isa didn’t recognize either of them, but the driver, a woman with short salt-and-pepper hair, rolled down her window and nodded. She eased back into her seat as if settling in for a nap.

Broken glass and litter crunched under Isa’s sneakers along with the gravel. She leaned down to pick up the dog. He sidled out of reach and grumbled.

“If you get cut, I won’t hesitate to take you to the vet,” Isa told him.

The threat of a trip to the vet usually cowed him. Not this time. He eyed her, but stayed out of reach.

“Fine.” She straightened, and the pair of them picked their way across the gravel, skirting muddy pools filling the potholes. All of them bore the rainbow sheen of oil, even with the sun hiding behind the clouds.

Isa turned a circle, relieved that she couldn’t identify the sullen industrial landscape. She didn’t want to remember.

But she did want Daniel caught.

Time to hunt,
Murmur growled. He gathered his intention at her center of gravity and shoved.

Isa staggered a few steps, tugging Gus in her wake. “Stop it. Tell me what you’ve got.”

The picture of Daniel, his entrails steaming at his feet, popped into sharp focus in her mind’s eye. Black storm clouds of bloodlust rolled through her.

“Crystal clear,” she muttered.

Murmur struck out with a claw, slicing open the memories she’d so carefully repressed. Images and impressions flooded her. Inside the confines of her skull, a raven called. Cold metal held one of her feet while sharp stones lacerated her knees and forearms.

“Train tracks,” she said.

Yes.

One excavated memory at a time, they traced a path through weed-strewn lots, around warehouses, across pitted streets, sneaking up on the place she least wanted to face. Steve’s footsteps followed in her wake. The rumble of the idling police cruiser and the crunch of tires on gravel trailed them. Her tiny store of courage melted.

She stopped in front of a squat, single-story building. A faint sound like the scales of a snake dragging across sandstone alerted her to the fact that she’d found the place. Her breath went shallow, and her pulse did an unpleasant swoop up.

Once upon a time, the cinder block building had been white. Untold ages of rain dragging soot out of the surrounding environment had turned the building the color of the solid mass of gray clouds overhead. Streaks of filth tracked the walls, following the painted seams between the blocks. The ancient paint had been breached in gouges and chunks. Green slime grew in abundance.

A set of bare concrete steps, bound on either side by corroding metal handrails, led to the banded metal door. One of the handrails had rusted through, and the stairs sat lower on the right than on the left giving the facade a quizzical, why-have-you-abandoned-me expression. Only the pristine metal door suggested that looks deceived.

Her heart bounced off the inside of her ribs. “This is it,” she whispered, not trusting her voice. She shoved her twisted, suddenly aching hands in her coat pockets to hide the fact that they were shaking.

Steve whirled on the patrol car. “I want everything available on this address. Now.”