Nightmare Ink (3 page)

“Are you saying they’re immortal?” Anne said.

“No. Live Ink hosts age; they just seem to do it in slow motion. The people studying Ink say it’s because Living Tattoos confer rapid healing,” Isa said. “If you have Ink, you don’t get sick. Not even common colds. Normal wear and tear on the human body doesn’t accumulate.”

Anne frowned. “Why not?”

“There are a lot of theories. Most focus on magic altering cellular structures in some subtle way. Frankly, most of it is over my head. And since it isn’t healthy for me to pry into my clients’ motives,” Isa said, “I don’t know why gang members and petty criminals favor Live Ink, unless it’s some kind of look-how-tough-I-am status symbol. I mean, we know honest people get Live Ink, too. The Living Tattoo registry proves it.”

“Hacks dodge the registration requirements,” Steve said, “and brag about it until my team and I track them down and put them out of business.”

Anne nodded. “I’ve seen your team’s numbers, Corvane. You do solid work. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got uncounted numbers of criminals running around this city with Live Ink.”

“If they start to lose control of that Ink, I destroy it,” Isa said.

“Like you destroyed Kelli Solvang?”

“His dragon killed him!” Isa snapped. “You have the photos to prove he’d had that Live Ink for years. This wasn’t integration failing. The question you should be asking is what happened to make that dragon go bad now? Find that out and you’ll know who murdered your witness.”

Isa spun on her heel to walk away. Tearing pain set fire to the nerves in her left leg. She gasped.

Steve took more of her weight. “Want some aspirin for that leg before we go? It’ll be a long trip. WSP has closed the roads. We’ll have to take my car.”

“What about the team tracking the dragon?”

He shook his head. “Lost the trail at the ship canal.”

Isa grimaced.

“They’re still out there,” he said, escorting her into the elevator, “following a city snow plow. They’ll find it.”

The elevator doors closed on Agent Anne Macquarie’s stare.

Isa blew out an unsteady breath. “You might have warned me I’m a suspect.”

“You wouldn’t be going home if you were,” Steve noted. “Anne takes her job very seriously.”

“I’m not the enemy.”

“I know that, Ice,” Steve said. His use of the shortened version of her name suggested they were off the clock. “Anne has to consider all the angles.”

“His Ink killed him, Steve.”

The elevator landed in the garage. With a discordant
ding
, the doors opened. Steve led her into the numbing cold. She shivered.

“What made his Ink kill him?” Steve pressed as he directed her to a car against the far wall.

“I’d need more information before I could answer that. Who was the original artist? What had happened to the man in the days prior to his death? Was he intoxicated? Hopped up on drugs? One theory says that marked changes in a person’s mental health can unbalance symbiosis.”

“You’re talking psychotic break here?” he asked as he unlocked and opened the passenger door for her.

“Could be,” she said, flinching as she lifted her left leg into the car. “If he really was turning on some kind of organized crime boss, I hear that’s all kinds of incentive for a nervous breakdown.”

He shut the passenger door, went to grab something from the trunk, and rounded the vehicle to the driver’s side.

“Blanket,” he said, handing over a plastic-wrapped fleece. “Since we forgot your coat in the rush to get you out of the basement before the investigative team arrived.”

She ripped the blanket free and huddled into it.

He started the car.

“You might ask the ME for a toxicology report on Solvang,” she said.

“SOP.”

“Good.”

“What are we looking for?”

Isa shrugged. “Something that would explain a breakdown that might alter his will and sense of self. When the lines of identity morph, the symbiotic balance between host and Ink unravels. That’s why so few artists want Live Ink of any size. Artists blur the lines of their identities in order to hook into the creative force.”

“Is that what you do?” he asked, shooting her a quick look as if he could see something like the creative impulse hanging over her head.

He eased the car out onto an eerily empty street. The wind-driven snow hammered against her window.

“I suppose, in a way, I do.”

“And that’s why you hide your ink? Everyone assumes you have Live Ink, but all your ink is flat because your concept of yourself is—what? Too fluid to support anything Living?”

She shifted, uncomfortable with his assumption that she had any ink at all and disliking the fact that she had to lie to him about the fact that she didn’t. In no way was she prepared to go into why. So she temporized. “Something like that. I need to know that whatever power answers me when I call is something I can trust.”

“Even though you could enhance your power with Live Ink?”

“You want to volunteer to go under the needle so I can enhance your skill as a detective? Or as a marksman?” she countered.

He recoiled. “I don’t need Ink to be good at what I do.”

“No, you don’t,” she agreed.

He awarded her a grin that kicked up her heart rate. “Nice.”

“I have no desire to have that kind of power tossed at my feet. Power I haven’t earned and learned to control is power that will destroy me.”

He glanced at her as if seeing her for the first time. “You aren’t the kid I busted for stealing seven or eight years ago.”

“Yes. I am,” Isa countered. “The difference is that when you arrested me, I was rebelling against my ability.”

“You wanted to be a normal kid?”

“Still do. Didn’t you?”

“Never.”

They rode in silence for several long minutes while she stared out the window at the whirl of white.

“Turns out overnight in jail wasn’t the place to learn normal.”

“I’ve heard that,” he said as they inched through the snow. The studded snow tires sounded like metal tractor rims on a cattle guard. “Tell you what. If it’s normal you’re looking for, let me buy you a latte.”

She hesitated, and realized she was already shaking her head. Whether to deny him or to deny the temptation of “normal” he dangled, she couldn’t say.

Steve’s smile faded. “I’m not going to grill you anymore. I swear.”

Grilling she could handle. The gleam of interest lighting his gray eyes and the sensual tug on her gut in response she couldn’t. “I have to close out the books.”

She cringed. Why hadn’t she led with the obvious? “The city’s shut down. What would be open?”

“Your books will still be there after coffee, Ice.”

But their working relationship would vanish, replaced by requests for information. All in the interests of “getting to know her better.” Questions she couldn’t face, much less answer.

“I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” she said. “But I’m not normal. I can’t forget that. You can’t afford to let me forget that. If I’m going to figure out how to catch a dragon that shouldn’t exist in this world, we’ll need all of the odd I can muster.”

Doubt crinkled the skin between his brows. “If I hadn’t seen you turn down every invitation from every single male within ten miles of you since you broke it off with Daniel five years ago, I’d think it was just me. But it isn’t, is it, Ice? What happened? What did Alvarez do or say to put you off taking a chance with another guy?”

She gaped at him, at a loss for anything to say.

“You aren’t still in love with him, are you?”

“What? No!”

“Good. He’s dangerous.”

She stared at Steve’s profile, unsettled by his observation echoing the warning still rumbling around her insides after facing Daniel in the precinct.

“Dangerous?” she said. “He’s ambitious . . .”

“He killed a man, Isa.”

The words dropped like stones into the depths of her. Of course, she’d heard the rumors—that Daniel had been dabbling in magic he shouldn’t have been—that he’d killed a man with Live Ink just to see if he could.

She tried to shake the rumors out of her head.

“Why are your instincts so off on this?” Steve demanded.

Because she didn’t want it to be true.

“He went on that goodwill artist’s tour of Eastern Europe over a year ago,” Steve went on. “Remember that?”

“Yes.”

“It never happened.”

“But he sent me photos of—”

“Never happened,” Steve repeated. “Someone checked into his hotels. A few discreet inquiries got security camera images pulled from those hotels. It wasn’t Daniel Alvarez at any of them. We don’t know where he was or what he was doing for that year. Then that death occurred three months after he reappeared following this supposed tour.”

“How do you . . . ? You’re saying he murdered someone?”

“I am.”

“Why is he not in jail?”

Steve gripped the steering wheel so tightly the leather squeaked. “His lawyer is a snake. And we can’t pin it to him so it’ll stick. I know he did it, and I can’t prove it.”

“Why didn’t you call me in on the investigation? I might have—”

“We called Triple J,” he said.

Daniel’s mentor. Hers, too, for a few years after she’d come to Seattle. Before Nightmare Ink.

“I didn’t want you in that situation,” Steve added.

Investigating someone she’d kidded herself she’d fallen for. No. She
had
fallen for the easy, sexy smile Daniel had reserved for her. Beautiful, young women had come and gone at Weird Ink, the shop where the pair of them had apprenticed with Triple J. Daniel had ignored them all in favor of her.

She’d liked the feeling.

She’d let him seduce her. It had been so sweet, initially. His drive, his curiosity, and his art had fascinated her.

Then they’d discovered that their magic wasn’t compatible.

Daniel had stopped smiling.

His drive turned into pushing her into experiments with their magic that left her sick and shaking. Him, too. Yet he took each failure to blend their powers as a personal affront.

Through it all, he never spoke a harsh word to her. He never treated her with anything but thoughtful courtesy. But he also never let her out of his sight.

Until one bright, warm summer’s day, nine months after they’d started sleeping together. Isa and Daniel had gone to Weird Ink to find Triple J waiting for them in front of the shop.

“Go on in,” he’d said to Daniel. “Open up. Me and Ice are gonna take a walk.”

He’d walked her around the corner and handed her a check.

“Take it and clear out,” he’d said. “There’s bad stuff happening between you and Daniel. It’s gotta stop. So if you take this money, it comes with a condition. You go open your own shop in another part of town, and you break it off with Daniel. He’s distracted. I can’t have it. And you don’t need me. Not like he does.”

Isa closed her eyes on the burn of that memory and listened to the blizzard scratching at the roof of the police car.

“I’m sorry I dropped this on you,” Steve said. “I didn’t intend to tell you.”

She shrugged. What the hell had happened to the gentle, thoughtful young man she’d thought she loved? What had happened to her morals that she’d taken Triple J’s money and run from what felt like a family rejecting her?

She opened her eyes.

“It’s not coffee you need,” Steve noted.

“No, it’s not.”

“The offer is still open. I’ll even drink whiskey with you, though I wouldn’t have pegged you for a whiskey drinker.”

“I’m not.”

She had to get away from her memories and from Steve’s revelations. Isa dropped her chin to her chest, shoved her hands in her pockets, and muttered, “Maybe next time.”

“Sure,” Steve said, his voice flat. “Next time.”

Seattle hunkered down the next day to wait out the snow.

Isa refused to let the multiple puncture wounds in her thigh paralyze her. Entirely. Especially not when Troy texted that someone wanted a flat ink tattoo from her.

She hobbled through the snow to Nightmare Ink.

A tall, slender young man with neat black hair and dark eyes opened the shop door as if he’d been watching for her. He wore dress slacks, a crisp white shirt, and a navy sweater.

“Ria,” Isa said. “You look—”

“Like I belong in church with my grandmother?” he interrupted, smiling. “I will be shortly. Your coat. Allow me.”

“Thank you.”

As Ria took her jacket, Isa caught Troy Daschel, a flat ink artist leasing shop space from her, eyeing the pair of them from where he sat behind the reception desk. He rose and held out a hand. “Here. I’ll hang that up.”

“Gracias.”
Ria gave Troy her coat, and eyed her. “I understand you are injured,
señora
. I am sorry to hear this. You are well enough to do a tattoo for me?”

“It’s nothing serious,” Isa said. “Come on back. We’ll get the paperwork filled out . . .”

“Already done,” Troy said over his shoulder as he hung her coat in the back hallway.

“Have a seat,” Isa said, leading Ria around the reception desk to her station. “What are we doing?”

He settled into the chair as she switched on her work light. His gaze on hers, Ria turned his face so the overhead lamp spotlighted his left cheekbone. The light caught the three ink teardrops tattooed there.

“A fourth.”

Isa’s heart bumped down her ribs to her toes.

Teardrop tattoos were supposed to represent a tally of the murders the wearer had committed. It didn’t stop thug wannabes and stars promoting an image from getting teardrops inked on their faces.

But Ria wasn’t a wannabe.

Isa didn’t know what the young gang leader and his gang did in Ballard. Didn’t want to know. It was enough that Ria had been her first customer at Nightmare Ink. He came to her when he wanted tattoos. He brought his people suffering Ink Madness to her for binding.

Still watching her, he put a hand in his pocket and brought forth a gold and onyx ring like the one he wore, like all of his people wore.

“Emilio,” he said. “Tragic, senseless waste. Stupid. His funeral is in two hours.”

Isa rubbed the heel of one hand up her forehead.

“A quarter of the Seattle Police Department is inspecting my basement, Ria,” she whispered. “Do you really want to advertise the fact that you killed one of your own people with cops crawling all over?”

His fist closed on the ring until his knuckles turned white. “Yes. I do. Think of the stories that will be told. Police watch while I get another tattoo for another tool that failed me. A powerful message to the rest of them. Do not tell me you won’t do it.”

Refusing to work on Ria wouldn’t change anything. She turned on her tattoo machine and drew the iridescent black outline of a fourth teardrop into the skin over his cheekbone.

As if she weren’t jabbing him repeatedly with needles, Ria didn’t move a muscle until she finished and handed him a mirror.

“Bueno,”
he said, inspecting the work. “I will go to the funeral with a warning label written by your hand. You save lives.”

He rose and walked away.

Troy, working not four feet away from Isa’s station, shut off his tattoo machine and straightened.

At the reception desk, Ria pulled a couple of folded bills out of a pocket, counted off three, and tossed them to the counter.

Isa stood.

With a glance back at her, he flicked something else to the countertop. It clinked, hollow and metallic as it hit and rolled.

A bullet casing.

Ria walked out into the snow without any hint that he noticed the cold.

Troy rocketed to the desk, scooped up the brass, and shook his head. “I’m going to strangle that skinny son of a bitch.”

“That’s evidence,” Isa said, holding out a hand. “And you just put your fingerprints on it.”

“Nah. It was on the news a day or so ago,” Troy said. “The kid he executed died of autoerotic asphyxiation. At least, that’s what it was made to look like. The bullet casing was just to rattle you.”

She clasped shaking hands. “Worked.”

“Let me get your coat,” Troy said. “You should get off that leg.”

No. She should take her mind off the moral conundrum inking teardrops on a psychopath represented.

Since she couldn’t manage the stairs to the basement studio where Steve and his unit were investigating Kelli Solvang’s death, she limped through the snow, around the building, to the open basement door, and hobbled in.

“Ma’am! Ma’am, you can’t be here! Crime scene investigation . . .” a young man in uniform said, attempting to bundle her out the door.

“Ow! Knock it off!” She planted her feet. “This is my place of business. Your investigation is in my studio, not out here.”

“Ma’am,” he countered, pinning her with a glare. “My job is to secure this investigation site. You’re a breach of security. Don’t make me arrest you.”

“My job is to make a new batch of binding ink so that the next time you guys send me someone strung out on magic, I can do something about it.”

He scowled and reached for the cuffs on his belt.

“Would you please check with Detective Corvane, at least?” she prodded. “I’ll wait right here, I swear.”

“You’ll do what he says?”

“No. Him I can argue to a standstill.”

The cop barked a laugh, stuck his head in the door of the studio, and asked for a word with Steve.

“Isa, I don’t have time . . .” Steve stomped out of the studio, his shoulders high and tight. He aborted his “don’t have time for this” declaration when he met her eye.

She lifted an eyebrow in challenge.

“You aren’t supposed to be moving around on that leg,” he amended.

“Nice save, Detective,” she noted.

Her bland tone had no appreciable impact on his scowl. “What is it you imagine you’ll talk me into letting you do?”

“Making a new batch of binding ink,” Isa said. “You and I don’t want me to be without.”

His shoulders climbed an inch higher.

“You’re right.” He sounded grudging. “But—”

“I don’t need in there,” she interrupted, tired of having to ask permission to work in her own shop. “Technically, I should be, but since everyone in the city who could arrest me for working minor magic in an unshielded location is in there with you, I’m comfortably certain you might overlook the infraction this time.”

“What do you need?”

“A few herbs, pigments, stuff I’m not willing to talk about, and my slow cooker back there.” She pointed at the darkest corner of the basement tucked up under the stairs.

His frown deepened. “Anything illegal?”

“Not unless someone’s outlawed sage or sweetgrass in the past twenty-four hours.”

“Not that I’m aware. No cracks about ignorance and bliss, now,” he cautioned her and the grinning cop who stood watching them. “And Isa,” Steve said, shifting his shoulders and settling them lower. “Get off that leg before you break open the wounds again. I really don’t have time to drive you to the emergency room. I’d ask Davis to take you.”

“Better than the AMBI,” she muttered.

“Yeah, they have more questions, too,” he called as he turned and stalked into the studio.

“Freaking yay,” she said, turning her back on the young cop’s smirk.

She shuffled to her scarred wooden workbench. A bare lightbulb illuminated shelves stacked with bottles of reagents charged for making magic ink. Isa stuffed the slow cooker full of ink ingredients, a dab of magic, and a liberal splash of high-test white rum.

Then, since most of Seattle PD’s Acts of Magic unit was in her studio expecting her to use unshielded magic, Isa brought up power for an experiment. Warmth shimmered inside her body in answer.

Halfway between normal and the otherworld existed a place where the two overlapped. She’d learned to access it years ago when she’d still lived with her adoptive mother, Ruth. Isa wanted to see if, in the marriage of magic and the mundane, she could pick up the escaped dragon’s trail.

Opening to another sense, she studied the basement, concentrating on the path from the studio to the alley door. The gold of her magic permeated the space, spillover from what she’d summoned to make ink, she assumed. But between the studio and the exit, a multicolored path twisted, evidence of people coming and going, unaware of their magic leaking out wherever they went. They’d erased every trace of the dragon’s escape.

Isa swore. She’d try again in the alley.

Shifting her other-sight to one side, she turned on the slow cooker and set the timer.

“Officer Davis?” she said as she limped for the door. “If you smell smoke? Don’t go in there.”

“Wait. What?” he yelped.

“I’ll be back to check on it tomorrow,” she said before stepping out into the crispy snow. “If it doesn’t blow up.”

“Ha-ha. Very funny!” he hollered from the doorway. “That was a joke, right?”

Isa waved and thought she caught a glimmer of green and gold magic at the corner. She followed. Until it vanished into the energy wash of people using the snow as an excuse to walk to restaurants, grocery stores, and other shops up and down the street.

Frustrating that she hadn’t been able to go with Steve’s tracking team. Between her injury and the blizzard, Steve had flat refused to let her go after the dragon.

In the twenty-four hours since Kelli Solvang’s death, Steve’d had his tracking team on the streets. They’d reported tantalizing traces of the creature, but nothing that persisted in the environment to allow them to follow it.

She needed a plan for what to do when it turned up.

A knock on her apartment door three hours later brought her out of her chair without thinking, which upset the dog sleeping hunched atop her stocking feet. Her injured quad cramped. She collapsed into the chair with a yelp of pain.

Gus barked once, then crowded against her legs, his snout on her knees asking if she was okay.

The door opened.

Steve stalked into the apartment, bristling with indignation. “What did I tell you about getting off that leg?”

“I am!” Gritting her teeth, Isa pressed her fingers deep into the muscle fibers in an uninjured spot.

Agent Anne Macquarie followed Steve through the door at a sedate pace, pausing to close it behind her.

Isa swallowed a curse. Of course the police had access to the apartment building, but she should have locked her apartment door. She’d left it unlocked because Nathalie had insisted on walking Gus in Isa’s stead. She’d even scooped the cat’s litter box.

The cramp receded. Something warm and wet trickled from at least one of the puncture wounds.
Great.

“Agent Macquarie has some additional questions, if you’re up to it,” Steve said.

As if she could say no without him carting her to the ER. She gestured them into the apartment and shut her laptop. “Sure. What do you want to know?”

“I’m told you could have prevented that thing from escaping,” she said.

Gus rumbled a low growl.

Isa wound a hand in his collar and rubbed one of his ears to silence him. She scowled at the agent. “Been talking to Daniel, I take it?”

He was the only person who’d known she’d failed to cast a circle. What the hell was he doing? Trying to force her out of business? Did he really think she’d work for him if he managed to run her out of Nightmare Ink?

“Yes or no, Ms. Romanchzyk?” Anne pressed.

“True,” Isa said to spite her. “I could have prevented the creature’s escape.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“The ritual required to lock the creature inside a magic circle with me would have taken time your witness didn’t have,” she said.

“I may be at some fault, too,” Steve broke in.

They looked at him. The surprise written in Anne’s raised eyebrows mirrored Isa’s.

He shrugged. “I opened the studio door. If I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have gotten away.”

That was true, too.

Isa sighed. “The fact remains that a circle cast inside the studio would have contained the dragon whether you’d opened the door or blown down the entire room. That’s the point of casting one. However, Mr. Solvang was already bleeding and incoherent when the marshals brought him in. We were out of time before they got him through my door. I forewent the circle in the hopes of saving him.”

“So,” the agent said in a rippling tone that conveyed far too much satisfaction for Isa’s comfort. “Multiple procedural violations?”

Gus shifted against Isa’s hold on him, tags jingling. He growled again.

“Sure,” Isa said, using her free hand to press the dog’s haunches down. “Multiple procedural failures led to the dragon’s escape, but not to your witness’s death. In retrospect, nothing could have stopped that.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Mr. Solvang had bloody foam on his lips when he came in.”

“Meaning?”

Isa pinned her with what she hoped was a hard look. “He was already drowning in his own blood, Ms. Macquarie. How many procedural violations will you be racking up for the marshals who failed to recognize Ink Madness until it was too late?”

“My source suggests that Mr. Solvang could have been saved,” Anne persisted, brushing off the question.

“Who, precisely, is your source?” Isa demanded. “Daniel doesn’t bind Ink. He doesn’t know how.”

“Could he?”

Confirmation of Daniel’s meddling in the case.

Gus whined a sharp complaint and twisted. The audible click of his teeth said her willful dog was losing patience with her hold on him. He tugged.

Isa didn’t dare release him. She suspected he intended to herd Anne out the door.

“Absolutely Daniel could do a bind,” Isa said, meeting the agent’s smug gaze, “right after he developed his own binding ink recipe, a ritual for binding, an inking method, and then pulled his ramrod definition of
artiste
out of his ass so he could do the work.”

“You’re the only person in the world—” she began.

Shoving her free hand in her pocket, Isa produced a handful of change and bit out, “Here’s a quarter.” She flipped the coin at the agent. It struck her gray lapel, rebounded, and hit the floor. “Make a phone call to the Live Ink Association. Ask them who in the US binds Live Ink. Come on back with questions about saving Mr. Solvang after you have that list of people who might actually be qualified to talk about what happened to your witness.”