Nightmare Ink (9 page)

The corpse had been skinned. He was a mass of vivid red muscle and white sinew. There were gaping twin holes where his nose should be. And without lips, he grinned a death’s-head rictus at the shop ceiling. And her living room floor. It suddenly struck her as stupid to live above the shop.

Isa glanced at the reception desk because she couldn’t bear to go on looking at him.

Her brain registered what her eyes had tried to show it before.

The breath wheezed out of her chest.

Zoog.

It was Zoog who’d been thrown through her window.

She knew because it was his tattooed skin nailed to her reception desk. In its entirety. Scalp and hair. Legs. Arms. Every single digit, carefully split and peeled as if from bloody twigs.

Pressure built behind Isa’s solar plexus. Horror pounded in her head. Nausea surged. She swallowed it down.

That broke her paralysis. Breath coming in sobs, Isa bolted for the phone on the desk.

Dead.

She slammed the handset down and remembered. Nathalie had unplugged it.

She shoved the chair aside, scrambled under the desk, and fumbled the plug into place. Shaking, unable to get enough air, she struggled out from under the desk and, without bothering to stand, grabbed the phone.

Dial tone.

With quaking fingers, Isa dialed 911.

A hand and cold cloth clamped over her nose and mouth from behind. She fell against a hard, denim-clad leg.

“You were told not to interfere,” a male voice growled.

Some hyperaware portion of her brain recognized that voice and the sly, predatory taste of his magic. Bishop. Patty’s apprentice—no. Daniel’s spy.

He wrapped his other arm around her throat and hauled her upright.

She shrieked into the sweet with the stink of chemicals cloth, and twisted, struggling to win free.

From far away, Isa heard a female voice say, “Nine-one-one. What is the nature of your emergency?”

Buzzing filled her brain and ears. It rose and fell almost like a healing chant she remembered from childhood. Her resolve melted into mist and dissipated. The phone slipped from her fingers. She never heard it hit.

Pain brought Isa to consciousness. Ice picks stabbed her head in time with her pulse. Burning claws raked the back of her throat. She swallowed to ease the discomfort. It didn’t help. Had she fallen asleep with metal in her mouth? If she had, it was gone now, but the taste lingered. A roll of nausea accompanied a lightning strike in her brain.

She had to get up. Didn’t she?

Frowning, she struggled to remember why.

Gus howling. The crash of glass. The shop alarm.

Her breath caught. Had she dreamed that? Her heart flip-flopped, amplifying the pounding in her skull.

No. She hadn’t.

The memory of Zoog’s dead body and his tattooed skin nailed to her reception desk played against the inside of her eyelids.
Why?
Because she’d helped him? Had she gotten both Zoog and his tattoo killed?

Get up, Isa.

Bonus points. She was up already.

Her arms stretched painfully above her head. She tried to put them down. Something wrapped tight around her wrists prevented it. Hurt lanced through her shoulders. She might be upright, but she wasn’t on her feet. Her arms and shoulders held her entire body weight.

What the hell?

She tried to stand. The signal between her splitting head and her feet seemed confused. She fumbled the job. It took straining her aching arm and shoulder muscles further to leverage her feet beneath her to take the load off of her screaming joints.

“Ah, the lamb awakes,” a fluid, warm baritone murmured.

Awareness fizzed through sluggish blood.

Daniel
.

Fabric rustled and a chair creaked as if someone rose.

Her eyelids flew open. She gasped at the agony stabbing through her head as light pierced her sight.

Squinting against the light, she studied Daniel. He was dressed in form-hugging black jeans and a crisp white button-down. Though he stood in front of her, he didn’t meet her gaze. His eyes roamed her body. Anticipation showed in the satisfied curve of his lips.

Fear, late to the party, chilled her.

She’d been trussed up in a tiny cinder block room that had been painted gray. Recently. Oily, cloying paint fumes lingered.

Tipping her head back for a quick glance up stirred nausea. She dropped her chin back to her chest and took slow, deep breaths to dispel the queasiness.

She’d been suspended from the ceiling by a pair of leather manacles. Her breath rasped in her throat as adrenaline set her pulse racing. The headache receded.

“You’ll be mine. One way or another.”
Memory provided his promise from the police station. It resonated inside her head, then down into her racing heart.

“Daniel. Let me go,” Isa managed to squeak. She sounded craven. “Before you do something you’ll regret.”

He turned away as if he hadn’t heard a word, and sauntered to a corner beside the narrow, battleship gray door, his back to her.

He had a work cart stored there. Shielded by his body, he picked up something and turned to face her.

Simple fear matured to terror, rending her ability to think. She strained back, away from Daniel and from the filleting knife in his hand.

Joseph used to have one like it. He’d used it to dress out deer in hunting season.

A vision sloshed around her mind of the last bloody carcass she’d helped Joseph dress out. Ribs gleamed white through the deep red muscle tissue as he’d painstakingly peeled back skin and muscle, one stroke of his knife at a time.

Imagination substituted Zoog for the deer and Daniel for Joseph.

She whimpered and pulled against her bonds until the bones in her wrists creaked and pain snaked down her forearms.

Light winked across Daniel’s blade. He smirked as if he could hear the shrill of panic ringing through her skull. He closed the distance in one stride.

With detached, surgical precision, he cut away her clothes.

“Beautiful,” Daniel breathed. He rolled his cart beside her where Isa couldn’t get a clear glimpse of the top.

It didn’t matter.

He settled into a ritual she knew well because she’d watched him do it throughout their apprenticeship. Casting a circle. Power rose steadily in the room, scraping her nerves. His magic pulsed up over her head, until she breathed the sinuous, barbed energy. She choked, drowning in Daniel.

The unmistakable buzz of a tattoo machine started.

Daniel eased closer, wrinkles of concentration between his brows. The faraway look in his pale eyes said he no longer saw her. The artwork had taken him over.

At the first touch of the tattoo needle and stab of his magic, pain spiked. His power magnified the tiny hurt of her physical body until it consumed her on the astral and resonated through to the most secret and sacred parts of her.

Without conscious summons, her amber power boiled up and solidified, shouldering him out of her skin.

He set down his machine, stepped around her, and drove a fist into her back below her ribs. Breath wheezed out of her lungs, and she sagged against her bonds, unable to keep her feet. Without a word, Daniel picked up his tattoo machine and went back to work. He renewed his magical assault on her interior landscape where she couldn’t abide having him.

Power rolled within her before she could assess the wisdom of opposing him again. Shimmering gold erased the slashes of his magic from inside her skin.

He didn’t even shut off the machine. Expression never changing, he reached up and snapped the little finger of her left hand.

Shock and agony strangled her scream.

His message was clear. Fighting him meant punishment. Isa didn’t know whether there was a point past which she dared not push him if she hoped to survive at all. How long could a canvas be recalcitrant before you simply disposed of it?

She didn’t know how many hours passed while Daniel worked Live Ink into her skin and soul. It cost her two more broken fingers.

When the tattoo machine finally shut off, Daniel unlocked something above her head. Her arms fell, deadweights. Her manacled wrists were chained together, and the broken fingers jutted out at impossible angles. The sight made her heart quiver. Blood rushed into her arms and hands, pounding agony with every surge of her pulse.

Daniel shoved her. Weak and shuddering, she fell prone onto a cot. He grabbed the chain and hauled her arms over her head again. Another sinister
snick
of a key in a lock.

Daniel walked out.

Pain rolled through her shivering body. She wasn’t cold. On the contrary. Fine beads of sweat broke on her skin, reeking of fear. Stress response. “Needle nerves” she’d learned to call it during training. What should she call this?

When he walked back through the door, it might have been hours or days later. She had no means of knowing. Daniel’s gaze locked not upon Isa but upon the tattoo he’d begun. Without a word, without any more regard for her than he might show a wood and linen canvas, he dragged her from the bed by the chains.

The pressure on her wrists stabbed fiery pain up her arms, surprising a cry from her.

He didn’t pause. He hauled the chain over her head and looped the links over the hook in the ceiling, leaving her hanging while he cast his circle and readied his tattoo machine.

Anguish exploded in her shoulders, arms, and throbbing wrists. She bit back a shriek but couldn’t stop the hot tears tracking her cheeks.

When he set the tattoo machine to her skin, Isa’s magic rose in automatic defense.

He broke more fingers, then started on the bones in her left hand.

It became clear. Daniel meant to break her. Mentally. Emotionally. Maybe spiritually.

Her sense of time slid away in the windowless room. The light never dimmed. Food and water appeared at irregular intervals while she withered.

It was as if she’d ceased to exist. Maybe she had.

As the tattoo progressed, the stain of magic Ink spread on her spirit. As Daniel destroyed first her left hand and then her right, her ability to marshal her will bled away. Her stained and brittle skin stretched too tight, straining to contain too much; her and whatever thing Daniel forced into the confines of her skin and bones one prick of the tattoo needles at a time.

Sometimes, the buzz of the tattoo machine triggered a wave of loss and homesickness so intense she thought she’d drown. When and how had this ocean and rain beleaguered city become home? How had the tiny apartment above her unfashionable tattoo shop found its way into her heart? Or had it? Was it simply that Gus and Ikylla owned her heart and they represented home?

She missed them. For them, she’d fight to live. She wouldn’t abandon them. Not like that. She prayed that Nathalie and Troy were taking care of them.

For a few minutes, she imagined she heard them. No. She heard music. And not with her ears. It was a complicated riff on an electric guitar stringing up a glittering, come-hither melody before her otherworldly eyes.

Nathalie.

The piercing artist played lead guitar for her band, Rage of the Raptors. Despite any number of invitations, Isa had never heard them play. For the first time, it occurred to her that she might be missing out.

“She’s out there somewhere,” she heard Troy growl above the guitar strains. He sounded so far away. “You feel it. I feel it. We’ll do what it takes to bring her home.”

The auditory illusion popped.

Isa slammed into her physical body and couldn’t recall having left it. Something was different. A sheet covered her skin, and at first she couldn’t compel her brain to catalog what felt so odd. It took effort to command her eyes open.

She wasn’t chained.

Pain permeated her as if it were a brine she’d been pickled in. She felt wrinkled and wizened, as if parts of her had shrunken toward her core. Places with newer Ink, and at least one spot she suspected was infected, stretched tight and hot. Some of the hurt came from within, and she couldn’t localize it. Not that it mattered. She recognized the flutter of her pulse in her ears. Her heart flopped like a dying fish.

She was dying. Blood poisoning? Malnutrition? Dehydration? She didn’t care. She cared only that Ikylla and Gus would never know what had happened. They’d mourn, thinking she’d abandoned them. Acid tears burned her eyes.

They tipped her into the otherworld. It was the world that lived cozied up to the regular one—the two paired up like socks in a drawer. Touching, entwined, but rarely accessible one to the other, unless you’d purposefully opened the doors and stepped through.

She’d learned how. She’d had to. In order to control magic, she’d been taught to handle the ceremonial drugs that had initially shown her the path between the worlds. That sorrow opened the door surprised her.

She stood naked on the desert sand beneath a sky the color of old bones. Her long black hair brushed her back as a breeze stirred sagebrush that cast no shadow in the knife-sharp light and heat. Glistening black scorpions scuttled all around, one across the top of her bare feet. Beneath the bushes, rattlesnakes buzzed.

Fear wrapped tight around her laboring heart. If she moved, the scorpions would sting. The snakes would strike. She’d die, envenomed. And dying here meant dying in fact.

A sound like thunder drew her attention southeast. Isa gasped.

Spider Woman strode toward her on long, articulated legs. Her every step shook the world like the skin of a drum, raising puffs of soil where her feet touched down. The serpents and scorpions parted before her.

When Ruth had adopted Isa, she’d given her a blanket depicting Spider Woman’s creation of the world. Ruth had woven it with her own hands. It was the first of many gifts Isa had received from her new mother, but she’d always had a fondness for Spider Woman. Maybe because she created reality with everything she wove, or maybe because in that first present given by her new family, Isa had finally thought she’d achieved the acceptance she craved.

Her heart soared. The sight of the spirit who’d taught the Navajo to weave filled her chest with joy and awe. There wasn’t enough room for breath.

She had nothing with which to honor her, not a pinch of cornmeal, not a single offering. Nothing. She’d come into the spirit world with nothing to connect her to the physical world.

So be it.

If this was dying, she was touched that, at the end of her life, it was her adopted family’s spirit that came for her soul.

“Daughter.” The word resounded in her head, overpowering.

Isa dropped to her knees, eyes watering.

The rattlesnakes and scorpions had fled. On her knees, Isa could see the faint tracks of their passage in the soil, s-lines from the snakes and the line of the scorpions dragging their tails, paralleled by the divots of their footprints on either side.

“You do not have permission to die,” Spider Woman said in a voice like the end of the world. Or maybe its beginning. “Rise,” Spider Woman went on, her tone softening to the sound of rain in the cornfields.

She stepped to one side. Beside her, a dull gray path rose from the sand. It looked like concrete, even though it shifted and glimmered. One moment it looked solid. The next it was ghostly and ephemeral. “Your path is before you. Seek freedom. My messenger will greet you.”

“The scorpions will sting me,” Isa quavered. “And the snakes will bite.”

“They are your fears, daughter, and they will destroy you if you do not conquer yourself and them. Seek freedom.”

Freedom
. The word echoed in her head. It wasn’t her voice or Spider Woman’s, though the longing embedded in it could have belonged to Isa.

Her physical eyes snapped open on the cinder block room. She smelled sage, still saw the shadow of Spider Woman.

Conquer herself and her fears. Could she?

Trembling, weak, she forced herself to sitting. Her head spun. When the roar of dizziness subsided, she wrapped the sheet around her. Her broken, swollen hands couldn’t tuck in the edges. She could only clench the hem beneath one arm to secure the makeshift dress in place.

She wavered to her feet. Gasping, sweating, she used the wall as a support. Stabs from the soles of her feet suggested that Daniel had tattooed even those.