Nightmare Ink (27 page)

“As for you,” she said aloud to Murmur.

He lifted one of her eyebrows.

“You’re stuck with me insisting that everyone respect you as they respect me.”

Or don’t.

“Or don’t,” she agreed.

Steve ducked under the water, rinsing away the soap. She took the bar from him and washed.

The Ink snarled at her placid refusal to take his bait.

“Welcome to life on this plane. Not everyone is going to respect everyone else. Fact of life.”

You’re doing it wrong
.

That surprised another laugh from her.

Murmur started, then leaned into the mirth bubbling up within her. Satisfaction uncurled a black hand in her chest.

“I don’t think Internet memes and laughter were how he hoped this would end,” she said when Steve emerged from the spray and lifted an eyebrow.

In a featherlight caress, Steve trailed his fingertips up the centerline of her body. “He underestimates you. Same as Daniel. Most days, I think you underestimate you.”

Murmur swore.

Steve opened the slider and left the shower. She put the soap back in its holder and slid under the fall of hot water.

Murmur groaned and pulled away from her skin, giving her the impression that he’d maxed out on sensation. It hadn’t occurred to her that he’d have a price to pay for having infiltrated her senses to such an extent that he now felt what she did.

“Will you stay the night?”

Guilt raked her. Murmur flinched as if the emotion pricked him, too.

“I’d like to,” she said. “I can’t.”

Steve straightened and met her gaze. He’d almost managed to hide the hurt behind his carefully neutral mask.

She shut off the water. He held a towel open. Her heart turned over as she stepped into the dark blue terry cloth. The tattoo tried to sidle out of the way. Part of her regret seemed to pierce him. His wings twitched on her back.

Staring into Steve’s ouch-that-smarts-but-it’s-okay expression and captive audience to her Ink’s distaste for emotion, she wondered how she’d survive having two males to manage. Too late now. Murmur had forced her across some kind of threshold. No going back. Only forward.

“It’s just that I caught—”

Steve’s cell phone, still on the coffee table in the other room, went off. Swearing, Steve bolted to answer it. “Corvane.”

She rubbed her skin dry and then wrapped the towel around her to gather her damp clothes from the living room.

Steve, a blue towel wrapped around his waist, clutched his phone with knuckles that showed white.

“Say it again,” he rasped as she dressed.

“No. I’ll handle it,” he said. “Damn it, I said I’d handle it!”

His back still to her, Steve hung up, swore, and hurled the phone into the cushions of the couch.

Isa started.

“Anything you want to tell me?” he said, his voice flat.

Her heart bumped down her ribs. Guilty conscience supplied a picture of the dragon. She crossed her arms as if she could hold that back.

“Do I get a hint?” she asked.

He turned. He’d pressed his features as hard and cool as granite. “I’ve been ordered to arrest you.”

“What?”

Murmur thudded against the inside of her skull and against her too-tight skin. A desperate tremor of anger and denial clanged through her innards.

“Ow! Stop it!” she said to Murmur before lifting her chin to meet Steve’s eye. “What for?”

“Assault.”

Confusion pulled Murmur and her back a step. She frowned. “Really?”

Steve’s mask cracked. He chuckled. “Right. Hold that thought. I need pants.”

They dressed quickly, and Steve drove to the precinct and escorted Isa inside.

Wearing a perfect navy blue suit, Anne Macquarie intercepted them as Steve ushered Isa to an interview room. She’d pulled her blond hair into a tidy French twist.

Isa tried to wipe the wrinkles from her shirt.

It didn’t work.

“I wanted to sleep in my own bed, but no,” she said into her head.

Fuck off.

“That happened,” she told him. “You saw to it.”

Black discontent rolled through her like thunder.

“It is customary when you arrest someone, Detective, to handcuff them,” Anne snapped.

“Cuffing magic handlers after they’ve agreed to answer questions is a bad idea,” Steve retorted, pulling out a chair. “Isa? Will you have a seat?”

He sat down across from her while she counted the cameras and audio pickups in the room. Murmur eyed the only door.

“Did you search for the weapon?” Anne asked.

“This is ridiculous,” Steve said.

“What weapon?” Isa demanded.

“Turn out your pockets,” Anne said.

Isa wanted to tell her to get a search warrant. Instead she shrugged, half stood, and dumped her collection of junk across the tabletop.

Her jackknife spun in the middle of the cracked Formica.

Awareness thumped the center of her chest.

Murmur hissed.

Anne pounced, snatching the knife from the table. “If I test this, will I find blood?”

“Yes.”

She should have dumped the damned thing in Lake Washington.

“Whose?” Anne pressed.

“Mine. Bishop’s.”

“Bishop?” Steve said.

“Martin Lloyd Bishop III,” Anne said. “Found by security guards in the parking lot outside the Japanese garden at the arboretum. He’s been treated for superficial knife wounds. He’s on a psych hold. He claims you attacked him.”

Isa nodded.

Anne mirrored the motion. “Keeps babbling about a magic dragon trying to kill him.”

Hence the psych hold. Murmur and Isa smiled.

“Where is that monster?” Anne snapped.

“One’s on psych hold.” Isa so enjoyed saying that. “The other escaped.”

Murmur snickered.

“You’re lying.”

“Prove it.”

Steve covered her white-knuckled hands with one of his. “Isa, that thing killed three people.”

She snatched her hand out from beneath his. “It is not a thing! It’s alive. It has feelings and a soul!”

They stared at her. Anne. Steve.

Murmur, too. He crumpled in slow motion, as if she’d landed a mortal blow.

She caught in a shallow breath, forced herself to lean into the table, and blinked back the pressure behind her eyes. “Look. I went off on Bishop because he was the one in my shop the night of Zoog’s murder.”

Anne jerked back as if Isa’d slapped her.

Steve’s hand, still resting on the table where Isa’s hands had been, tightened into a fist. He nodded once when she lifted her gaze to his. “You can positively ID him?”

“Based on magical signature, yes.”

His expression hardened, and the warm light in his eyes cooled to something sharp and dangerous. “A few of my officers and I would like a word with him, then. Once you’re done interrogating him, Agent.”

He didn’t sound like he intended to wait for anything.

Anne tossed the knife back to the table top in a gesture of disgusted defeat. “We’re not done here.”

Her tone put Isa and Murmur on high alert.

“I found your birth family,” Anne said with a smirk. “And an outstanding murder charge.”

Isa froze.
Murder?

That’s what you’re hiding?
Murmur crowed. Midnight-hued delight kicked through the walls she’d erected to keep him, and her, isolated from her distant past.

Murder. She clenched shaking hands together.

“Bullshit,” Steve countered.

Anne stared at him. “Recuse yourself from this investigation, Detective. You don’t want me to file an ethics report.”

Steve’s smile turned cold. “Try it. My ethics report on you is ready to go. The only thing keeping it from Internal Affairs is the fact that I come into the office every morning.”

Anne snarled and jabbed a finger at Isa’s face. “Your girlfriend is a murderer, Corvane!”

“Yeah? And how old was she when this supposed murder took place?”

“Six,” Isa whispered.

Murmur ripped through the darkest recesses of her psyche, found the bubbling, gore-encrusted vat of repressed memory. Like an expert winemaker testing a rare vintage, he pulled the cork on everything she’d spent a lifetime pretending to forget.

“That’s a confession!” Anne said. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

Murmur tensed, and Isa’s heart rate took off. She couldn’t tell who the quiver of panic belonged to, him or her. Maybe both. The urge to fight her way out of the room clamped a fist around her chest.

“He wasn’t dead when I was dragged out into the desert and left to die,” she said.

Steve’s face reddened. Rage pressed lines into the corners of his mouth. “What?”

Isa glanced between the pair of the investigators.

Tell them,
Murmur commanded, the sticky ooze of her childhood memories sliding down his upturned hand
.

Her breath caught.

He had the key to her will because she’d do anything not to relive the past he so freely examined. Eyeing her from within, he obligingly closed the lid on the cauldron of seething memories.
Tell them.

Her heart quelled. He knew what had happened. He’d use it to his advantage. Eventually. Could she survive that?

“It isn’t your past,” she protested.

No. Neither is it something you should be ashamed of.

“I didn’t know about magic,” she said to Steve and Anne. “I don’t guess any of us did. My older cousin worked construction when he wasn’t tormenting me. One morning, I drew a picture of him falling from the scaffolding. The next day, it happened. He didn’t die.”

“He broke his neck?” Steve guessed.

“I assume,” she said. “Two days later, my mother found the picture. I only remember flashes from that point.”

Blowing out a shaky breath, she settled back in her chair and gave in to the impulse to cross her arms. “Ruth adopted me because she and one of the other Navajo elders, Joseph, found me drawing pictures in the sand near where my birth family had abandoned me in the desert.”

“Abandoned?” Steve echoed.

Two pairs of light-colored eyes—so different from the dark brown eyes and weathered faces she’d grown up with on the reservation—went round first. Then lines of fury on behalf of the child she’d been settled into their faces.

“Was that listed in the murder indictment, Agent Macquarie?” Steve snapped.

Anne bridled.

Isa closed her eyes and shut them out.

It wasn’t your fault,
Murmur said. He ripped open the gaping hole at her center—the place where every last shred of worthlessness lived, where her sense of forever being unwanted lurked, a tiny, shriveled parody of the child she’d been. The wound gushed acid into her body. It burned away every last ray of internal sunshine until she rang hollow, like a forgotten gourd desiccated in the desert sun until the seeds rattled around the inside.

Still.

A rattle was a thing of power. So, too, could she be. Even broken. Even unwanted. And maybe she could thwart Daniel before she died.

Stop.

He smoothed the cool of his dark magic against the inside of the shell of her. It eased the burn. It took him long seconds to cap the oily gush of worthlessness in which she’d been mired for so many years.

“How do you do that?” she asked, admiring his control over that portion of her. It should have terrified her, but she’d passed the point of no return. She was tired. She no longer believed that his freedom in this world would be the worst thing that could happen. Nor was her death.

It isn’t mine. It does not command me.

Like it did her. Like she allowed it to. Another failure to tally against her.

It is a lie
.

She wanted to believe him.

It was not your failing that created this wound. It was theirs.
He shoved a memory in front of her eyes. Two people.

Isa’s mother—her biological one, haggard, hair stringy and knotted, her body thick, her hands rough and swollen, and her eyes empty. Not at all the elegant, perfectly manicured woman Isa thought she’d remembered.

Confusion rocked her. How had she gotten that so wrong? What else had she remembered the way she’d wanted to rather than the way it had actually been?

The second person radiated rage and hatred. How could she know that? Then and now? The child her in the memory shrank from him, wouldn’t look at him, but the adult Isa knew him. Uncle Joe. She’d sensed no pain, not in him. Even though it was his son she’d crippled and ultimately killed. Not a hint of sorrow leaked from his giant hand grinding the bones of her smaller one as he dragged her through the rocks and sand with her mother shuffling beside her as if she walked in her sleep.

She didn’t look at Isa. Didn’t respond to her daughter’s shrill, hiccoughing screams of panic and pain.

The adult Isa recognized the signs Ruth had taught her—the lifeless eyes, the walk that suggested a puppet drawn along on strings.

Her mother had been witched.

And what she hadn’t known as a child became clear to her as an adult. Uncle Joe had been a Skinwalker—or some Anglo or Hispanic equivalent, because even now, with Murmur’s access to the parts of her memory she hadn’t known existed, Isa still didn’t know what she was or what her people had been.

Her left hand, the one her uncle grasped in the memory, throbbed and tingled, muscle memory waking to match the movie playing out in her brain. There had been magic, raging, terrifying, inimical magic, traveling from Uncle Joe’s right hand into her left.

She’d been under attack.

He tried to witch a child and couldn’t,
Murmur noted, shutting down the replay.
Your mother didn’t fight for you because she couldn’t
.

“She wouldn’t have anyway,” Isa countered.

That she was under magical control suggests otherwise
,
he said.

He had a point.

It wasn’t your lack of worth that made them abandon you
,
he insisted.
It was that your worth outshone his
.

Murmur’s assertion sank through the vision. It took a very long time to find a landing place within her.

Isa opened her eyes.

Steve and Anne stood nose to nose, red-faced, pointedly not yelling.

“My uncle wanted to destroy me because I had more magic than he did?” she whispered.

Murmur nodded her head.
As does Daniel.

She started. “I don’t have more magic—”

I came through him.
He shuddered with her body.
You do.

If he was right,
if
,
then Isa’s entire reality and knowledge of herself had been built on a lie.

A lie you told yourself,
he added as if she were too dense to grasp the source of her ongoing misery.
In your place, I’d have torn your cousin’s beating heart from his chest with my bare hands.

“Even as a child?”

Especially as a child. I was far less civilized.

That made her smile.

“I am so glad this amuses you,” Anne said. “I don’t have the luxury of deciding you can’t be prosecuted for a death two decades ago. You’ll stand trial in Arizona. And I live to see that smile slapped from your face in prison.”

Cutting across every aspect of Isa’s being, weariness caught up with her.

“Fuck off, Agent,” Isa said. “You’ve turned bad cop into a caricature.”

The woman launched at her. Murmur snatched control and threw an arm up to deflect the blow Anne had aimed at Isa’s jaw.

“Defense only! Defense only!” Isa shouted at him as they surged to her feet. The chair went over, and she stumbled backward in the face of Anne’s fury.

“Jesus Christ, Anne!” Steve bellowed. His chair slammed into the wall behind him. He bolted into action, grabbing Anne around the waist and hauling her away. “Are you insane? We’re under surveillance! Get out!”

Someone pounded on the door and opened it without awaiting a response. A round-faced, freckled man with red stubble on his head looked into the room, his brown eyes wide.

“The kid they found in the arboretum,” he said in a rush. “He’s bleeding. Dying. They don’t know why.”

Isa frowned. That meant something. Didn’t it?

Daniel.

Her brain kicked. Daniel. Eliminating someone who could finger him.

“Get Bishop to containment! Tell them now!” Isa yelled, peeling herself away from the wall. “It’s his Ink. He has a Live Tattoo.”

Tearing free from Steve’s grip, Anne swore.

“Make the call!” she ordered, then spun and pointed at Isa. “Can you stop it?”

“Only if we’re fast enough.”

Steve tucked an earpiece in and holstered his phone.

“Move it, Romanchzyk!” said Anne. “You, too, Corvane.”

Isa grabbed her coat from the floor, pulled it on, and sprinted after Anne’s fast disappearing heels.