Nightmare Ink (25 page)

Isa smiled, but it didn’t alleviate the weight pressing her diaphragm.

Rain spattered her face. A ragged gust of wind chased after the chilly droplets. Other pedestrians, a mix of couples, some with kids, some without, and groups of guys from the shipyards in grungy coveralls heading for a beer, competed for space on the narrow sidewalks around them.

“I hope it is Reno, then,” she said. “Maybe it’s warmer there.”

Troy turned a rueful eye at the clouds. “Yeah, ’cause who’d want to miss the three minutes of sunshine we had this morning? See you tomorrow.”

She walked Gus, and then fed him and Ikylla.

Opting for warmer clothes, Isa put on a silver long sleeve tee. It hugged her ribs. A black top painted with a silver and olive leaf pattern went over the top. The stuff she’d last carried in her pockets six or seven weeks ago still sat on her dresser: Loose change, her pocketknife, and a pebble she’d brought with her from the reservation so many years ago. She scooped it up and divvied it between her two front pockets and then grabbed her car key from the drawer of her nightstand.

Missing her beat-to-hell cowboy boots, she ditched the Velcro sneakers for a pair of lace-up hiking boots. After pulling on her raincoat, she locked the apartment, and jogged for her car parked in the alley behind her building.

Murmur said nothing, though she felt him watching as she coaxed the little burgundy import to start.

“It’s time we ran a rogue tattoo to ground,” she said.

Murmur opened his eyes inside hers and straightened her spine.
You have no means of dealing with it.

“With luck, we will tomorrow,” she said as she pulled into the street and turned toward Lake Washington. “I have to follow its trail before the magic fades or gets hopelessly muddied.”

You know where it is.
He pulled up the image of silver water and a line of trees.

“I think I may know where it’s hiding, yes. If it isn’t in the arboretum, we’ll probably pick up its trail there.”

In the dark your kind so fear?

“Do I feel afraid to you?”

He snorted and focused on her damp hands gripping the steering wheel.

Damn
.

She drove to the arboretum and pulled into one of the parking lots, put the car in neutral, and set the parking brake. Behind the broken clouds, the sky had gone black. Relaxing into her seat, she shielded, grounded, and then drew a slender column of magic up the center of her being.

Murmur matched her shield, then eased back inside as if making room for power to rise within the both of them.

They opened their magical eyes and surveyed the subtle, white shimmers surrounding every tree, shrub, and blade of grass in the park. Rivers of multihued energy flowed along the paths and sidewalks.

No sign of the dragon. Closing her eyes, she dismissed magic, and spent another several seconds grounding again.

Murmur didn’t.

“Magic and cars don’t mix,” she said. “I need all of my attention on this reality so I don’t drive into the lake or face-first into a tree trunk.”

He lifted an eyebrow, but he subsided, clearing her mundane vision.

They drove deeper into the park and repeated the process at the next parking lot.

Bright traces of green and gold led into the Japanese garden.

She dealt with getting out of the car and locking up while Murmur held onto the thread of magic sight.

Following the dragon’s signature led her past the cedar wood entry booth and to the moon gate barring the path. The night smelled of damp cedar and moss. The chill breath of the south wind shoved spatters of rain at her back and knocked newly budding tree branches together in a clatter. Light gleamed through the slates of the wooden gate, beckoning her.

She crept closer.

With a low groan, the gate swung open two feet. It banged against something on the other side and shuddered. A splintered section of wood revealed where the lock had been forced open. Someone was already in there.

Heart pounding, Isa edged through.

Is this wise?

“What? Trespassing? Knowing someone else is in here where a starving magical creature is hiding in possible ambush? What could go wrong?”

Not even I could repair the mess an Infernal would make of your corpse should Daniel send another against you.

Her memory flashed on the reeking maniac that had attacked them in the apartment when she’d come home from the hospital. Adrenaline burned her insides.

Taking an experimental sniff, she hesitated at the edge of the pallid glow cast by the Japanese lantern at the gate. No telltale stink. Why didn’t that reassure her?

Rain shimmered at the edge of light and dark. She forced herself out of the light into the forest of branches whispering as they clawed the sky.

A truck rumbled as it downshifted for the western high-rise on the floating bridge. Raindrops falling from the plant life plinked into a still pond to one side of the path. Somewhere ahead of her, a twig snapped with a crack she felt through her chest.

How stupid was it to keep going?

STOP.
Murmur seized her motor control in a tight, taloned fist and jerked her off the path.

Ice dumped into her veins. “Ow! Let go!”

No.

They shuffled down a slope, through rain-laden brush, to the underside of an arched bridge. Chill moisture soaked the legs of her pants and seeped into her socks. She shivered.

Murmur yanked her to a stop.
Look.

The dragon. Pale. Limp. Dying.

It curled under an enormous azalea. The wan glow of its fading magic illuminated the bottom flush of pink buds.

Something hot and tight gathered behind Isa’s solar plexus. It made her eyes sting.

A wave of horror unlocked Murmur’s grip on her.

That is not freedom
,
he growled. Hate—hot, dry, and raspy, like the dead skin shed by a snake—scraped her insides.

“No,” Isa agreed, fishing in her pocket for her jackknife. “That’s not freedom.”

Murmur went still and cautious as she flipped open the blade.

What are you doing
?
He fought for control of her hand when she set the chill metal against her wrist.

“It’s starving,” she said.

The tug of war—cut/don’t cut—in her muscles eased, but she didn’t immediately press her advantage. She waited for Murmur to sift through his initial burst of disbelief. He strove to lock away the surprise that glimmered through him, but they both knew there was no way to keep her from experiencing it. He was processing his emotions through her physical system. She was as much a captive of his feeling states as he was of hers.

You can’t afford to feed both of us,
he noted.
Your blood is mine
.

“What do you suggest?”

She didn’t protest when he grabbed control of her eyes in order to study the creature curled up on itself.

Put it out of its misery
.

Isa scowled. “No.”

It’s in pain
.

“I can fix that.”

You cannot go on feeding it. We’ll all die
.

“I have some reserve,” she countered.

You’d weaken us. For nothing.

“Help me.”

Do what
?

“Work out how to save it. To either find a way to preserve it in stasis or send it home where it can live rather than subsisting as a starving ghost.”

Another moment of absolute internal stillness.

You would force it out of this world
?

“Force?” She recoiled from the rage underpinning that word in his question. “The dragon might want to go home.”

If it doesn’t
?

“Then I need a solution for preserving it until I can tattoo it back onto a person.”

Is that possible
?

“I don’t know! If I could put it on someone, it would have the blood and the magic it needs to survive. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work.”

You have no memory of it ever being done.

“Just because it hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it can’t be. Look. We’re running out of time, and that creature is suffering.”

Irritation that wasn’t hers ground her teeth together. The muscles in her jaw flexed.

Feed it
,
he snapped.

She pressed the knife to her skin. The metal, warmed by contact with her pulse while she and Murmur had argued, parted her skin with a sensation like tissue paper splitting. Blood and magic welled up, spilled over. She took the last step toward the barely visible dragon.

Her blood gleamed orange in her magic sight, the red life force mingling with the amber of her power. As the first drops fell upon the prone dragon, she caught the shimmer of a darker shadow outlining the first droplet that splashed on the dragon’s etheric body.

Murmur’s magic. Had he meant to do that?

Yes.

“Thank you.”

Don’t thank me when you force me into this,
he retorted.

She let the comment go but couldn’t dodge the hollow burn he tucked like a bomb behind her breastbone.

At her feet, the dragon shifted. Its scales clinked against one another like crystal ringing.

The blood she’d dripped on the creature receded into the dragon’s form.

The dragon opened its eyes. Antennae—tendrils—hair, whatever adorned the creature’s head wavered as energy undulated down its long body. Isa could track the progress. Color brightened at the forefront of the wave. The heft of the dragon in this physical world weighed on her magic-augmented awareness.

Struck by the sheer beauty of the thing, she crouched down beside it. A sliver of hope lodged in her throat. Stupid. The creature had killed three men, and here she was trembling over rescuing it as if it were a lost and wounded kitten.

The dragon’s forked tongue darted out of its snout to wrap around her bloody wrist. The thin, insubstantial tickle acted like a siphon, directing the flow of blood directly into the dragon’s mouth.

From that touch, despair swarmed into her bloodstream.

If it hadn’t been hunting her before, by feeding it, she’d assured that it now would.

Could she use that? Lead the tattoo back to her containment studio with a trail of her blood? Could a rogue tattoo ride in a car?

Imaging all the ways her tentative plan could go horribly wrong, Isa eased upright, careful not to break the contact. The dragon’s head came up, following her wrist.

“Come on,” she urged aloud.

Tell it.

He nudged her out of her body.

Isa fell headlong into the etheric, terror chilling her bones. He had the power to exile her from her own body?

On the magic plane, green-gold magic feathered her face. She looked up into the dragon’s glittering yellow eyes.

Questions tinged with sorrow and longing poured into her mind.

“Come with me,” Isa whispered, around the flood of the dragon’s emotion. “We’ll find a way to make this better. I promise.”

A picture of Kelli Solvang popped into her head. Her heart sank. She closed her eyes in both worlds. It couldn’t erase the sight. Or the pain.

Murmur tugged on the line that connected her to her physical body.

“Come with me,” Isa repeated. “I won’t let you starve.”

The crystalline ring of scale on scale ushered her back to the cold night. Tears cooled on her cheeks, and her chest felt tight.

What is that?
Murmur said. He made no effort to evade the physical sensations. Isa thought she caught a hint of recognition in the shifting of his wings on her skin.

“Sadness,” she said. “The dragon doesn’t understand what’s happened. It asked for Kelli Solvang.”

It doesn’t comprehend death?

“Apparently not.” She took a step backward.

The dragon uncurled and undulated after her. Once they got up the bank to the trail, leading the creature to the gate took little time.

Isa edged out of the gate, trying not to leave any fingerprints or other traces of her trespass. Patty’s warning about those who’d use her if they could made Isa wish she could erase the puddle of magic she’d undoubtedly left under the bridge. And tweaked her sense of misgiving over Patty’s absence.

One insurmountable problem at a time.

She led the dragon toward her car.

The sense of another, active magical presence flattened the song of the wind in the trees. The hair at the back of her neck stirred.

As if it felt her uneasiness, the dragon released her, licking blood from its whiskers. The ooze from her wrist turned sticky, clotting. Saving her for later?

“
Bruja
, you are supposed to be a slave by now,” a familiar male voice said.

Snarling, Murmur and Isa spun.

Illuminated by a single streetlight, Bishop leaned against the car wearing a malicious grin. “Daniel—”

Rage exploded from somewhere deep in her gut. She closed the distance, cocked back, and slugged him. He blocked with his forearms. Blood darkened the sleeves of his light blue hoodie. He grunted and cursed.

Isa stumbled back. Her jackknife. She’d been so focused on the dragon, she’d forgotten she still held the blade.

With a cry somewhere between a jaguar’s roar and a crow’s cough, the dragon launched at the bleeding man.

Bishop screamed.

The dragon wrapped around him like a python and sank short, nubby fangs into one of Bishop’s bloody forearms.

“Get it off! Get it off!”

Murmur sneered.

Isa folded her jackknife, tucked it in her pocket, and then crossed her arms. “Oh, let me think . . . No.”

Where is Daniel?

Excellent question. Isa dreaded the answer.

Bishop’s cries climbed his vocal register.

Her appetite for vengeance congealed into a lead weight in her stomach. She summoned the power to shift into the etheric so she could talk the dragon down.

Leave it.

“It will kill him.”

Daniel’s creature? No loss.

Isa very carefully did not think of Murmur as Daniel’s. “He has Live Ink.”