Nightmare Ink (23 page)

This biology makes no sense.

The wind stirred, bringing the pungent, dead-fish reek of low tide and carrying away the momentary heat. She and Murmur shivered.

Gus snapped to attention, tags ringing, and tugged on the leash. South. Apparently, the dog had a date with a nap in Isa’s bedclothes. She’d let him have his nap, after they stopped at the art store on Market Street and picked up a paper press. For the day, soon, she hoped, when one of her experiments didn’t destroy the magic in her Live Ink.

Isa lugged the boxed paper press to Nightmare Ink, where Troy already sat at the computer.

“Ordering flat ink,” he said as he rose. “Going down to the studio?”

“Please.”

“No problem. Hand over the box,” he said. “You’re not going down those steps with that.”

“Why is it okay for you to?”

He tucked the press beneath one arm. “Free hand for the railing.”

“You win,” she said as he unlocked the basement door. “I’ve been thinking. Call your friend. I like your repainting idea. The more color, the better.”

Troy grinned. “We can accommodate.”

He followed her into the basement, set the box on her workbench, and unpacked the press before leaving the studio. He closed the door on his way out.

After waiting until his footsteps thudded up the stairs, she fumbled for one of the needles she kept in her workbench drawers for injecting ink when an application called for it. It took two tries to get the cap off.

Murmur swam into her vision as she stabbed her left index finger and squeezed a drop of blood in to each of the vials. She had to stab two more fingers to finish all twelve.

“Okay,” she said. She drew in power. So did Murmur.

They opened their magic eyes.

The vials glimmered. Sunlight and shadow. Their magic, intertwined. Did it mean anything that his hadn’t yet overpowered hers?

The first drop of Live Ink she added to one of the vials floated on the surface for a moment. The magic flared and then winked out.

Her heart fell.

Murmur cursed.

She didn’t have the courage to watch each vial fail individually. So she focused on getting Ink into the samples and then on capping the crystal bottle holding the Ink.

Look.
He tugged her attention back to the worktable.

She swept her magic sight over the experiment. Nine vials were dead, all light and life extinguished.

Three gleamed. One in particular had brightened.

Smug satisfaction uncurled within Murmur and spilled over into her chest.

“Okay,” Isa said. “Okay. Sage, blood, and a ‘define the confines of the world’ spell. What do you think? Do we try pressing a batch of that into actual paper?”

Murmur hesitated, pulling back as if to study her. Was he not accustomed to having his opinion consulted? He nodded her head once.

It took another pricked finger and a lot of cursing to get the paper slurry into the press. Her hands couldn’t manage the screw particularly well, and she had to stop to walk off Murmur’s growing irritation as well as the pressure of her own impatience.

How long?
he demanded when she finally took down her circle and opened the studio door.

“Overnight should do it.”

“Isa!”

She heard the masculine shout before she heard the shop door slam open upstairs. The bell on the handle clanged.

She charged up the stairs two at a time.

Nathalie had a pair of girls filling out piercing consent forms at the desk—or they had been. They’d spun and pressed against the steel and glass counter.

Ria and one of his henchmen supported a limp, sweating young man between them. They dragged him into the shop.

“Emanuel,” Ria panted. “His Ink . . .”

“Downstairs,” Isa ordered, holding open the door for their passage.

Nathalie scrambled around the reception desk. She closed and locked the basement door behind them.

With much cursing, in English and in Spanish, the two conscious men managed to maneuver their semiconscious friend down the narrow steps.

She flicked the lights back on in the containment studio, activated the security cameras, and then strode inside to sweep a drape over the recliner.

They followed.

“Right here,” Isa instructed. “How long has this been going on?”

“Since midnight,” Ria said, guiding his friend to sit in the recliner.

“Where’s the tattoo?”

“Chest.”

“Shirt off,” she said, dragging her equipment cart close. Pain lanced through her left hand when she tried to unlock her ink cabinet. Gritting her teeth, she forced her hands to turn the key.

“How old is the Ink?” she demanded.

An ache settled into her left wrist and fingers as she reached for her bottle of binding ink.

No
.

Her hands froze. Murmur, fighting for control of her body.

“His Ink will kill him,” she snapped internally.

So you’ll kill his Ink?

“If he dies, they both die!”

No.

Isa bit out a curse, spun away from the cart, and stood.

Ria watched her, his black eyes assessing. “You didn’t hear anything I said.”

“No,” she admitted. “Tell me again. And do me a favor. Down in that cabinet I unlocked, there’s a bottle of ink sitting by itself off to one side. Can you get that out for me? Don’t touch the wooden box.”

Rage not her own burned her blood and throat. It tasted like bitter sulfur.

The wiry young man studied her for a moment, his expression dead. She couldn’t see the thought cross his immobile face, but she could almost hear him wondering whether she’d lost her edge after being kidnapped and held by Daniel.

“Sure,” he said, crossing to the cart and squatting down to peer inside the cabinet. “Emanuel’s had the Ink for a week.”

Was that regret in his tone? Had he already decided she’d outlived her usefulness to him and his gang?

Emanuel moaned.

She turned her attention to him.

Muttering to Emanuel in Spanish, the man who’d helped Ria drag Emanuel into the shop pulled Emanuel’s shirt off over his head.

Isa flipped on the overhead work light and peered at the ice phoenix tattoo writhing on the young man’s chest.

Murmur crowded into her eyesight, looking at the tattoo with her.

No blood yet. Good.

“He’s had this a week?” she said. “Integration should be nearly complete. What happened last night?”

“Nothing,” the burly young man holding Emanuel’s shirt snapped.

Isa swung her head to pin Ria with a glare. He’d gotten her binding ink to the top of her cart. He met her too-crowded gaze. Interest piqued in his eyes.

“They went to a rave,” he said.

“Drugs?” she said. “What a stupid thing to do.”

His burly friend went off in rapid-fire Spanish.

“Shut up, Hector,” Ria commanded.

Isa shivered at his tone. So did Hector.

“You want to survive Live Ink, you don’t lie to Ice,” Ria said. “Drugs mess with your head. They mess with your Ink. Emanuel knows this.”

She heard what he left unsaid—that Emanuel would have one hell of a price to pay if he lived through this.

“Who did the Ink?” she demanded.

“Adam Oldman. In Portland.”

She nodded and without thinking, reached for her bottle of binding ink.

NO.

Her body froze in mid-reach.

“Damn it!” she snapped aloud. “Stop it! I can save at least one life here!”

Hector started and shot an uncertain glance at Ria.

Emanuel moaned again.

Ria stared at her, that assessing light in his eyes again. It felt like a gun trained on her, waiting for the right moment to fire. She should be so lucky.

Fix it.
Murmur nudged her brain.

The memory of repairing Zoog’s Ink rolled over and fell open before her eyes.

“Fix what? The tattoo isn’t broken! This is a clear case of Emanuel screwing up integration!”

Then he pays the price. Not the Ink.

“How do you suggest he pay the price?” she demanded. “I can’t save the Ink without saving Emanuel.”

Stark, blank refusal to budge.

She snarled and turned her attention to Ria and jerked her chin at Hector. “Get him out of here. Close the door, and then put your back against the wall. You carrying?”

“Out,” Ria snapped at Hector before answering her. “Yes.”

He followed Hector to the door, closed it after him, and then turned in place to lift an eyebrow at her.

“This is on record,” she said. “Video and audio. You know I’m having trouble with my Live Ink.”

“Sí.”

“If this goes bad, if you see me start to bleed, it means he’s coming off,” she said. “Shoot us if that happens. Heart shot. Not head. You have to put a bullet through the Ink as well as me.”

Without a word, Ria reached into his coat and pulled out his 9mm Glock. He flicked the safety off.

Murmur snarled.

“No more interfering,” she snapped at him and commanded her hand to complete the reach for her binding ink.

She couldn’t move.

“Do you want them both to die?” she shrilled.

Fix it.

“I can’t fix what isn’t broken!”

You don’t know.

She opened her mouth to argue with that as she glanced at Emanuel to assess his condition. Unchanged.

She couldn’t argue with Murmur. Not on that point. He was right.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll look. But I’m telling you what I’ll find. This can’t be saved.”

No response. No letup of the acrid, black anger in her throat and gut.

“Let me go so I can cast a circle,” she snapped.

Her arm fell to her side.

She’d learned at the start of the paper experiments that her hands couldn’t manage a lighter. So she’d brought a box of safety matches down. It still took four tries to light the candles.

Isa cast her circle, leaving Ria and the table holding her paper experiments outside of the line. She didn’t have to warn him to stay put. As she drew her circle to miss him, she felt more than saw him shudder.

“I’m going to examine Emanuel’s Ink,” she told Ria.

“Your Ink’s not going to let you bind this, is it?” Ria said.

“It’s a point of contention.”

“You’ve never let one of mine die,” he noted.

“And I don’t intend to start now.”

“Bueno.”

It took every ounce of will she had to get a pair of extra-large gloves pulled on. Pain knifed repeatedly through her left hand. Hadn’t she healed those breaks? It shouldn’t hurt. Not like Daniel was still snapping her bones while she worked.

She kicked her stool into place beside Emanuel and sat down.

“My hand on your arm,” she said to him. “I’m going to look at your tattoo and see what we can do to help the both of you. Take a deep breath. Relax.”

Wait. The tattoo,
Murmur rasped.

She glanced at the phoenix straining against Emanuel’s skin, as if some external force tugged at it. Welts outlined the tattoo, stress marks radiating out in dried blood circles, like a bull’s-eye of skin and blood.

The sight felt familiar.

Murmur nudged her magic eye open.

They started.

Magic that shouldn’t be able to penetrate her studio pierced the tattoo. The discordant jangle of red and yellow, shaped like a hook, pulled as if the Ink were a prize fish to be reeled in.

In one voice, they growled.

Daniel is summoning Live Ink off of its hosts.

“Why?” Isa demanded.

Murmur shook her head.
Kill it.

Emanuel met her gaze. His fingers convulsed on the arms of the chair. Sweat beaded on his face and chest.

Shoring up her shield, Isa set her left hand on Emanuel’s wrist. Bone shifted in the hand she’d so clumsily healed. Pins stabbed from her fingers all the way up to her shoulder.

She called magic. To do what needed to be done, she’d have to channel more power than she’d handled since leaving the reservation.

An initial bloom of amber woke at her core, enough to fortify her shield. Then hurt slashed her hands. She lost her grip, and the feed of magic winked out.

She gritted her teeth. Apparently, six weeks of having her hands systematically broken every time she mobilized magic was an efficient way to inhibit her use of it. Had that been one of Daniel’s goals? If he wanted her dead, the victim of her Ink, why bother to divorce her from her store of magic like this?

Isa shifted her shoulders to break up tension and planted her feet flat on the floor. Drawing a deep breath, she closed her eyes and focused on shutting out everything but the ebb and flow of power at her core.

Ask for my help.

She didn’t bother answering. He was a distraction, something to be blocked out if she wanted to do her job. Besides, she already knew how asking for his help would work out. Just like it had last time, with him laughing and slamming the door on her.

Even with Daniel’s spell before them, his anticipation wound tight around her gut. He looked forward to luring her into wanting something, needing something from him that he could then deny her.

If she intended to save Emanuel, she couldn’t play the game.

Not now.

“You want Daniel’s magic squashed and the tattoo saved,” she said. “You decide.”

She dipped down into the river of her magic, took hold of a part of it, and rose back up into her body, pulling the tendril of power with her.

It resisted.

Fucking get over yourself and do your job. Or do you mean to let Daniel win?
he snapped inside the echo chamber of her internal landscape.

Where she didn’t want him. Panic tightened her grip on her magic.

Power surged unbidden into her core. Too dark. Shadowed amber. Smoky. Not her own. It rose until it threatened to choke her.

Scrambling for control, she released her hold on the flood and switched gears to contain the wave, to shape it to her purpose. She flinched at the staccato fractals of jet shooting through her golden energy.

Reaching out with a tendril of power, she nudged Emanuel’s tattoo, shifting the three of them—her, Murmur, and the phoenix—into the otherworld.

Murmur elbowed her to one side again, forcing his way into the use of her etheric sight.

The ice phoenix shrieked and spun on her, wings batting and gleaming claws poised to strike.

“We’re here to help,” Isa said. Her voice rasped into the studio and echoed into the etheric.

As one, she and Murmur reached out etheric hands. His longer, taloned ones showed in shadowed overlay of hers. She extracted the hook spell from the phoenix while Murmur healed the magical puncture wounds.