Nightmare Ink (6 page)

The memory of sulfur stung her nose. Isa flashed on what she thought she’d seen in Daniel at the police station. She shivered and stuffed the memory she couldn’t make sense of out of sight.

“Relax,” she ordered to cover her discomfort. “Lie back in the recliner. Take a deep breath. Let it go. Good. In order to understand this creature, I must wake it.”

Sweat trickled down Zoog’s face. The reek of his terror nearly overpowered the smell of sage and pinyon.

“In this place, it can do you no harm,” Isa said. “If I am to bind it, I must know its purpose.”

“Daniel said it would make me his,” Zoog whispered as if he didn’t trust his voice. “I hear it, Ice. Talking to me. Screaming at me. All the time. It wants me to do things.”

Misgiving rang through her chest. “Tell me.”

A shudder racked him, and he clenched his fists. “It wants me to hurt you.”

Interesting. A tattoo that would make Zoog Daniel’s? What use did Daniel have for a petty thief like Zoog?

She studied him again, this time looking deeper than the changed costume, the untidy hair, and the pallor. Something other than the directionless twenty-nine-year-old she’d known for the past four years looked out of his eyes at her. “Why don’t you hurt me, Zoog?”

A thread snapped. The impression of someone—something—else in his eyes vanished. Only he remained, scowling.

“’Cause you’d have Troy kick my bony ass, Ice,” he snapped, sounding impatient. “I may be in trouble with this thing, but I ain’t stupid.”

She’d beg to differ another time. With one foot, she snagged her stool out from beneath the recliner, switched on her overhead lamp, sat, and adjusted the height so she could get a detailed look at the Ink on Zoog’s arm. From the raw, red condition of the lines, the tat was recent. Zoog hadn’t been taking care of it. Scabs had formed. He’d been scratching. Maybe clawing.

“You’re resisting this thing,” she said. “That takes willpower, Zoog.”

He grunted a pained laugh. “Thought I didn’t have it in me?”

She hadn’t. Glancing up to meet his eye, she saw the hurt in the lines etched around his mouth.

What surprised her was the pang she felt for wounding the thug wannabe’s feelings. “Sorry, but me underestimating you has an upside. Your force of will makes my job much easier.”

“Oh, good,” he breathed, asperity in his tone.

It made her smile as she pulled on a set of sterile gloves. “I’m going to get to work. I’ll try to talk you through this, okay? Cleaning the tattoo first. It may sting a little.”

His breath hissed in between his teeth as she smoothed an antiseptic and Xylocaine mixture from his wrist to where his rolled-up sleeve bunched at his biceps. A few of the scabs dissolved, and fresh blood oozed to the surface of his skin. As the topical anesthetic took effect, the muscles in his jaw and neck loosened. Zoog relaxed into the recliner.

“You’ve been digging at this,” Isa chided. “You’re ruining the artwork and giving infection a chance to set in.”

“Least of my worries,” he croaked.

“Only at the moment,” she said. “Antibiotic ointment.”

“As if this thing isn’t killing me long before infection could.”

“You came here knowing I couldn’t let you die, Zoog,” she countered. “Not if I could do something about it.”

“Can you?”

She tugged off her gloves. “Yes. I’m putting my hand on your wrist. Time to roust that willpower of yours. I need contact with the tattoo, and it’s probably going to get pissy.”

He drew a breath that sounded like a sob.

“It’s on my turf now,” she said. “It doesn’t get to kill you. If only because I can’t handle any more police reports.”

That elicited a laugh from him.

Good. She nodded and covered his wrist with her right palm. “I won’t let this get out of hand.”

She hoped.

Nothing happened.

She drew a deep breath and opened the door to another, deeper sense. Either she’d frightened the creature into retreat with minor magic or the thing wanted to draw her into—

A trap.

Howling, sharp, bloody black swirled around her. Huge claws exploded out of that dark, slicing for her.

What was it with all the clawed things wanting to take her apart lately?

Only long habit kept her from throwing herself to one side and losing contact with Zoog’s clammy skin. She jerked back, psychically and physically, as the magical defenses she wore as a matter of habit flared to turn the blow aside. From the ache and warmth trickling down her right arm, she gathered she hadn’t been fast enough. Again. Muttering a curse, she leaned forward on the stool.

“This thing is really pissed off, babe,” Zoog breathed.

“Me, too,” she said, edging back into that sense of enraged, bleeding dark. She didn’t have a body per se in this world between daylight and the things that went bump in the night. Anyone who learned to deal with magic, however, needed a frame of reference for working with the astral planes no one else could see. So most people took their images of themselves into the otherworld. The etheric. Or dreamtime. Or magical planes—different cultures called it different things. Isa wasn’t invested in the semantics. The important point was that what affected her in this place impacted her physical body sitting in her containment studio if she didn’t shield quickly enough.

So when she summoned a mote of power into ephemeral hands and set it alight, it was merely to illuminate the trap and the creature that had laid it for her. In this otherworld, illumination meant both light and understanding. She desperately needed to comprehend the nature of what she intended to bind.

The next attack came, brutal and raging.

The ball of light in her hand expanded in the blink of an eye, surrounding her, protecting her.

Claws, vastly oversized and heavy, slashed. They collided with her energy shield, but didn’t break through. Light exploded over the thing.

The creature squalled. It withdrew.

It was a killing machine, something brought into being for the sole purpose of cutting down other living things. Few animals on earth killed for the sheer joy of destruction. This thing did.

Isa could bind that kind of evil. She could wipe its existence away as if it had never been, and then Zoog would have a damned ugly flat tattoo to show for his foray into Live Ink.

On the heels of her decision, the creature threw itself at her in a frenzy, ripping, shrieking in protest and terror. Even surrounded as she was with a shield, the creature knocked her off her feet.

Ice dropped into her middle.

Ground had no meaning here. It took several seconds to gain command of the notion that she’d fallen, was still falling. When she righted herself in her bubble of golden sunshine, nausea sloshed in her belly.

Zoog’s tattoo struck again, knocking her spinning.

That’s when she saw the hole between its shoulder blades. Raw. Oozing. Painful.

And that’s when Zoog’s screaming finally ripped her out of trance.

“Kill it!” he wailed. “Kill it!”

The creature shrilled in Isa’s head.

“SHUT UP!” she shouted, yanking her hand free of Zoog’s skin. “I can’t just kill it!”

Silence settled over the studio. Surprise at the pronouncement rocked her. The chill in her gut dissipated, but it took several seconds for the heat and smell of sage to drive away nausea.

“What do you mean you can’t just kill it?” Zoog said. His voice sounded stronger.

“It’s wounded. Bleeding. It’s a cornered animal, in pain and afraid.”

He scowled and shook his head. “You make it sound like it’s alive, babe. This is nothing but Ink and magic, right?”

“Who told you that?” she snapped.

He propped himself up on his elbows and levered himself up to look her in the eye. “Daniel. While he was inking me.”

Isa shivered. She shut out disquiet with a bracing dose of anger. “What? Daniel thinks he’s God, creating animate constructs with Ink and magic? What did you think while he was inking you, Zoog? That he’d birthed the animating force out his ass?”

He barked a strangled laugh. “You have a way with words, Ice.”

“Part of my charm.”

“I know. Marry me.”

“Sorry. I don’t like the company you keep.”

“You?”

“In part.” She smoothed damp palms down her jeans. An image resolved in her brain, just behind her eyes. Pressing. Wanting form. Where the hell had that come from?

She
saw
Zoog’s tattoo as it should be. Whole. Healthy. A sly, deadly predator. She squeezed her eyes shut as if she could press the unwanted vision back into the dark. Damn it. She’d sworn off doing Live Ink.

The last time she’d put Live Ink on anyone, it had been her teachers, Joseph, Henry, and Ruth. The three Navajo elders and healers who’d made her who she was.

Ruth had adopted her, and then the three of them had taught Isa to understand and control her abilities. It had taken discipline, hard work, and frustration on her part. But her teachers made sure her lessons included plenty of laughter and encouragement. They’d become her family, a patient, good-natured mother and two beloved uncles teasing her when she struggled to master a new aspect of magic they insisted she needed to know.

Eleven years into her life as their apprentice, her mentors had asked her for Live Tattoos. She’d hesitated. Drawing on someone went against what the Navajo believed. Yet her teachers had made certain she’d started training in Live Ink. They’d found a tattoo artist; Isa had never known where the young woman with the shadowed blue eyes had come from. She’d come to the reservation twice a week to teach Isa technique.

Joseph insisted Isa tattoo Coyote on his chest, over his heart. Henry wanted Lizard walking a path down his ribs. Ruth had asked for Raven between her shoulder blades.

The tattoos had turned out beautifully, better than Isa had drawn them. Her teachers had paid her the highest compliment they could. When she’d finished the last tattoo, they’d risen and left the circle, each of them pausing to squeeze her shoulder without a word.

In the morning, all three had vanished, consumed by the magic she’d etched into them. The only trace had been a single ebony feather left at the foot of Isa’s bed.

She’d sworn off doing Live Ink. Shaking with the urge to suppress the words trying to spill from her tongue, she opened her mouth to say, “Let’s bind this thing.”

Instead, she heard herself say, “Your tattoo is drawn wrong.”

Her eyes snapped open. She had to curl her left hand into a fist to keep from slapping it over her rebellious mouth.

Zoog, looking like she’d slugged him, collapsed back into the recliner. “What?”

“I think I can fix it,” Isa said. Even she heard the surprise and uncertainty in her voice.

“Fix it?” he echoed. “What do you mean ‘you think?’”

She shrugged. “I’ve never run into this before, Zoog. I won’t lie. Daniel doesn’t usually make mistakes, but when I look at this Ink, the creature is incomplete. It’s broken and in pain.”

“Maybe he left it broken so it couldn’t control me?”

She shook her head. “That’s not how this works. You know that. Live Ink is supposed to integrate. The two of you are supposed to live in symbiosis—harmony.”

“Fixing this thing will do that?”

“It’s certainly not happening now.”

“Can’t you bind it? That’s what you do.”

She hesitated. She could. She
should
. Gathering her courage, Isa nodded. “If I bind this, it dies. You’ll be wearing stupidly expensive flat ink.”

Zoog stared at her. “You’ve never had to kill one of Daniel’s before.”

“No. I haven’t.” She wasn’t going to tell him she’d never had to fix one of his before, either. It wouldn’t help him decide. It wasn’t helping her. A tremor she didn’t want to examine ran down her spine.

He blew out a shaky breath. “I can’t pay you, Ice. Not tonight.”

“You can’t pay me at all if you’re dead. If I don’t do something tonight, you’ll both be.”

He blinked again, hard, as if holding something back. “Okay, let’s do this. Fix it. I’ll find a way to pay you back, babe. I swear.”

Heart thumping against her ribs, Isa pulled the key she kept on a cord around her neck from beneath her shirt. The key unlocked a stone-lined steel box bolted to the bottom shelf of her equipment cart.

At least Live Inks didn’t go bad. The magic that went into formulating Live Ink acted as a preservative. She’d always planned to destroy hers.

She couldn’t explain why she hadn’t.

She stuck the key in the lock. For a bad moment it resisted, then it turned with the sound of stone rubbing on stone. The lid popped open. Chalky dust slid off the back of the lid, raising a cloud. Her fingers came away from the container smudged gray. Wiping her hands on her jeans left pale streaks on the black denim.

She drew forth a wooden box. The gnarled wood grain made it look as though the box writhed in her hands.

“What is that?” Zoog asked.

Glancing up, she saw he’d leaned over to watch.

“My Live Ink.”

“I meant that wicked-looking box,” he said. “That shit has ‘here be magic’ written all over it.”

For the second time that night, Zoog surprised a smile from her.

“Apple wood,” she said, “from a tree that supported an infestation of mistletoe.”

“Infestation? Isn’t that the stuff people kiss under at Christmas?”

She nodded as she pulled her sleeve down over her right hand to wipe the dust from the wood. “That’s the stuff. It’s a parasite that grows on trees with soft bark.”

Zoog glanced at his arm. “Kissing under a parasite? Ain’t that jolly? Sure explains my folks.”

“Mistletoe has magical properties,” she said, rising and setting the box atop the cart. “It was thought to be a door between the worlds. Certainly it was once used to alter consciousness. Apple wood promotes peace and harmony. The two of them together, made into a box, do a good job of keeping Live Ink quiescent.”

“Why do you lock up your Ink? Daniel doesn’t.”

Because until recently, she’d thought that all magic, except what little she needed to bind someone’s Live Ink, deserved to be locked up. Not that she’d dishonor her teachers’ memories by saying that out loud.

She frowned at Zoog instead and opened the lid. A faint apple fragrance, underpinned by the wilder green scent of a long forgotten orchard, rose to greet her. Seven crystal vials, one bigger than all the others, nestled in the box. Time hadn’t dimmed the sparkle of the quartz containing the magic swirling within. The bottles glistened in the overhead lights.

As her hand closed on the largest vial, the magic arced, pinging through the quartz to tickle her fingertips, the greeting of a long lost friend.

She sucked in a startled breath.

“You okay, babe?” Zoog raised his eyebrows.

“This is why I lock up Live Ink,” she said. “Magic is dangerous stuff.”

“Tell me about it.” He laid back in the recliner, watching as she filled an ink well from the biggest crystal vial.

She pulled on a fresh pair of gloves, and then picked up the tattoo machine.

“Hey. Isa,” he said. “My name is Horace. Just wanted you to know in case, you know, anything goes sideways.”

Isa stared at him, her head full of the vision of what his Ink should be. The offer of his real name sank through her, trailing warmth as it went.

“Names have power. Giving me yours, that’s a lot of trust,” she finally managed. “I appreciate it. Horace.”

His gaze fled hers. “Tell anyone and I’ll rip out your liver.”

“Because presumably I don’t have a heart?”

He started to protest.

She shook her head. “It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone. Horace is a strong name.”

“It means ‘Man of Time,’” he said.

“It’s also the name of an Egyptian God. Horus. Spelled differently, but he protected an entire nation. Ready?”

Horace “Zoog” Fairbanks smiled. “Ready. I think the Ink is, too. It’s been quiet since I said okay to fixing it.”

“That helps.” She hoped.

Time to find out whether she could still draw things that came to life.

Letting her focus soften, she turned her awareness inward. Sinking deep into the river of magic within, she followed it to the dark, barren place where she’d stuffed that particular talent when last she’d used it. When things had gone so wrong. She’d put the ability away, wanting it to wither and die. It had done neither.

Power unfolded like flower petals against the inside of her skin and bone. It cradled the picture in her mind’s eye of what Zoog’s tattoo needed to be made whole. Fixing the visible manifestation of the tattoo would be easy. The magic and spirit of it? That was the great unknown.

To put a Live Ink tattoo on someone, Isa drew the picture the client described, and she then summoned a spirit that wanted to embody that aspect. The concentration, the magic, the sacrifice of blood on the part of the client, and the spirit volunteering to enliven what Isa created with Ink, art, and magic brought the tattoo into being.

On Zoog’s skin, she had someone else’s magic and a spirit she hadn’t called. She had only a vague idea of how to weave her magic into Daniel’s. They’d apprenticed together for years. Even if she didn’t know Daniel anymore, she knew his magic. She knew his art. Maybe that would give her a leg up.

She brought her attention up and out of herself so she could focus on the tattoo with more than her physical eyes. And there they were; wriggling lines of magic hemorrhaging life energy away from the tattoo and from Zoog.

Daniel hadn’t closed the spell.

What had so distracted him that he’d made such a fundamental error in the inking process? She’d never known him to be sloppy. Daniel was too invested in his art for that. At least, he always had been. Had he done this on purpose?

A pang jabbed her. What if something was wrong with him? She weighed the wisdom of calling him, then dismissed it. She’d given up the right to worry about his well-being when they’d broken up.

Forcing herself to focus on the tattoo, she picked a line at random and speared it with the needle of the tattoo machine. An echo of Daniel reached her—the signature of his red/yellow energy vibrating in the thread she’d picked up. She couldn’t match his magical pattern. That was as unique as a fingerprint.

A fingerprint digging into her flesh, cutting, and spreading out in a spiderweb pattern beneath the surface of her skin. Vivid red barbs bit into muscle. Angry yellow thorns pierced her blood veins.

She flinched. Breath hissed in between her clenched teeth.

Now she knew why Daniel had refused to fix Zoog’s tattoo.

Zoog was a trap.

“Defend yourself, girl,” Joseph had ordered, battering her with magic that struck like lightning. “You will be tested. You will be attacked by those envious of your power.”

Isa had reeled, blinded, her ears ringing.

“Learn here or die,” Henry had added from the sidelines, shoving her with his purple/white energy. “If you cannot learn to control your magic and defend yourself, those of us who love you will be obliged to destroy you before you destroy another.”

Rage and sorrow pulsed through her.

They should have destroyed her.

Instead, she’d destroyed them. She’d be damned before she’d dishonor their teaching. Again.

The yellow/red tendrils wriggling into her skin and bone tightened. She couldn’t draw a full breath. Fueled by sorrow and memory, Isa pulled power into her center, forming it into a seething amber bubble. She fed the bubble, saturating the roiling ball with magic.

Daniel’s magic reached her throat and squeezed. Pain lanced from her neck to the arch of her right foot. Her control over the ball faltered. It exploded outward, propelled by sorrow and anger.

The energy couldn’t burn away Daniel’s. That wasn’t how her magic worked. Instead, it solidified, as if it were, in fact, liquid tree sap hardening to stone. It formed a shield that pushed the hooks and barbs out of her aching body. With effort, she reinforced the shield and shoved the last grasping tendrils of Daniel’s attack away.

Zoog’s hand on her wrist brought her back to awareness. “Ice? What’s wrong, babe?”

She sucked in a shaky breath and awarded him a glance.

Concern creased his forehead, beading up the sweat gathered there. From the guileless look in his eyes, she could tell he didn’t know what had happened.

Her certainty faltered. Suppose this hadn’t been a trap. Or at least not one that had been purposely set. Tattoo etiquette said that you didn’t mess with someone else’s work. With flat ink, there were obvious exceptions to the rule. With Live Ink, it had been all but codified into taboo. Could it be because working on someone else’s magic always resulted in an attack like the one she’d faced? Why shouldn’t the magic on someone’s skin defend itself?

She blew out a slow breath, relieved she could. She nodded at Zoog before she was certain she was okay and wiped the back of her gloved hand across her damp upper lip.

The purple glove came away smeared with blood.

“Nose,” Zoog noted. “It’s stopped.”

“Thanks,” she breathed. It took a few seconds of concentration to find her way back into the tattoo. She would finish what she’d started. The attack pissed her off. And while she might have given up out of doubt before, now she’d power through just to prove she could.

A surge of liquid amber rose beneath her skin, assuring her that this would work. If she kept a shield up, she could force Daniel’s energy to blend with hers enough to close the wound killing the tattoo and, by extension, Zoog.

She opened the pathways to magic and directed power down her right arm, through her palm, and into the tattoo machine and the Ink. The magic stored in the Ink danced back along the line to her fingers, providing exquisite feedback. She could feel what she was inking as she applied the needle to Zoog’s skin.

Her focus intensified as she reclaimed the tendril of magic she’d first speared. Applying the needle to Zoog’s skin, she sewed Ink and magic into him. Her vision expanded and sharpened until it was as if she peered at her canvas of human skin through a magnifying glass. The task encompassed the whole of her vision and whatever sense vibrated in sympathy with magic. The whir of the engine filled her ears.

The vision of what the tattoo wanted and needed to be filled her. It took every ounce of concentration to keep her focus on Zoog while cracking open the doors inside her mind so the creature could witness what she did to close the wound on its back.

On Zoog’s skin, that meant extending the outline of the creature and then filling that in with black shading. Simple. Except that magic had to go in with every prick of the tattoo needles. Added to that, each dangling, hemorrhaging thread of Daniel’s magic had to be tied down into Zoog’s skin and blood as well.

The hippogriff swarmed into Isa’s awareness, leaving clumsy gouges in her psyche.

Pain lanced her temples.

The creature’s sibilant hiss rolled around the inside of her skull, urging her to keep working. On Zoog’s skin, the hippogriff’s eyes rolled as if it wanted to watch her progress in fixing the hole in its back. The creature flexed its claws.

“Whoa, that feels weird,” Zoog gasped.

The scent of sun-warmed sage and pinyon competed with the sour smell of Zoog’s fear-sweat. As she worked, the earth and rainwater odor of the Live Ink enveloped her.

She picked another loose magical thread and sewed it with Ink and her own magic into Zoog.

Blood welled up from where she worked, the final lynchpin securing the tattoo and the magic in place.

Without lifting her head, she murmured, “I’m to your ribs.”

As she inked over bone, Zoog winced and breathed, “I hate this part.”

“Sorry.”

“You, I believe.”

She smiled down at the combination of black Ink and blood consuming her field of view. “You’ve been tattooed by artists who like hurting you?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Hell of a profession for a psychopath. Some of ’em are incredible artists, but even I have standards. I’d never let a psycho do Live Ink.”

Was it stupid to be obscurely reassured by that? He’d gone to Daniel for Live Ink. Was she willing to trust a two-bit hoodlum’s estimation of Daniel’s mental state? Or of her own for that matter?

“You’re saying I’m not a psycho? I’m touched. No more talking. I need you to take slow, even breaths, okay?”

“Sure, Ice.”

Power pulsed in easy, warm waves, up through her feet and legs and into her torso, where it glittered and shimmered like heat waves on the desert. It fed through her into the tattoo machine, streaming through the silver ink reservoir into the silver alloy needle and into Zoog’s skin.

He had his own magic. So did the creature. Zoog’s power was a color she’d only seen in photos of icebergs, a combination of ice blue and green, so pale that it didn’t surprise her she’d never sensed it before. She wasn’t in the habit any longer of judging whether or not the people walking through her door carried magic of their own.

The hippogriff, if that’s what this tattoo was, carried razor-edged magic in dark red. Even without being under attack by the creature, that thread of dried blood power made her uncomfortable inside her own skin.

They were well matched. Zoog’s deceptive, barely perceptible power and the knife blade of the tattoo’s magic. The tattoo would augment Zoog’s power. Zoog would temper the tattoo’s.

She looked for another thread to weave into the fabric of Zoog and his Live Ink. There were no more.

She swabbed the section she’d been working on, then straightened to survey the image before her eyes, comparing it to the one wrapped around her brain. Contentment eased through her. It was right. She stopped the machine and put it down.

Zoog shifted.

“Cleaning up,” Isa said. She barely recognized her voice. It sounded relaxed, throaty. Maybe she shouldn’t be surprised. Elated but exhausted, she sprayed dilute soapy water on the areas she’d worked. As she wiped them dry, she spent more magic sealing the work and the joining of spirit to flesh, blood, and bone already occupied by Zoog’s life force.

Her head rang empty.

The creature had gone.

On Zoog’s skin, the hippogriff’s eyes gleamed. She thought she saw them close, then open again in acknowledgement.