Nightmare Ink (13 page)

A laugh filled with bitterness and spite escaped her.

Steve started, banging his head into his car’s metal door frame. “Ow.”

The tattoo snickered.

“Not even a nice try,” Isa said aloud to the tattoo. “I saw Live Ink come off a guy. I know a whole hell of a lot more about how that’ll happen than you do.”

I’ll make the nice officer wipe your ass,
it retorted.

Isa shrank from the image the tattoo thrust into her internal field of view and from the hand Steve offered to help her out of the car.

Steve’s smile fell. He dropped his hand to his side and straightened.

Isa closed her eyes against the slash of ice that went through her middle. She hadn’t escaped Daniel’s cage. Not really. She wasn’t in the cinder block room anymore, but he’d so successfully altered the landscape of her life that she’d never be free. Her independence was gone. As smashed as her hands.

What did desperation smell like? Sulfur? Rotten eggs? It was something like that, but tinged with the musk of terror. She wanted to say that none of it was her own, that it came from Daniel’s creature . . .

I AM NOT HIS!

The roar rolled around and around inside her skull.

Isa flinched and opened her eyes. She resisted the urge to begin counting the people coming to gawk.

She turned sideways in the seat and put her feet on the sidewalk.

“Watch your head,” Steve cautioned. “May I take your elbow?”

She met his painfully neutral eyes, grateful that while he appeared to want to go on playing macho protector, he was willing to let her set the parameters.

Whatever he saw in her face made his set expression thaw.

She nodded.

With his hand hooked under her right elbow, he lifted, making it look like maybe her overnight recovery hadn’t been so miraculous after all.

Nathalie watched with a smile on her face. It wasn’t for Isa. Her gaze rested on Steve. He’d been out of his mind over her disappearance, Nat had said.

Oh.

“Welcome home, Isa-san,” Oki’s mother said, her huge smile crinkling her bright eyes nearly shut.

Nathalie unlocked and held open the door to the apartment building while Troy drifted in Isa’s wake.

“Yunna-san,” Isa said past the lump in her throat. “I’m so hap—” Her eyes burned and her throat locked down on the word. “Thank you,” Isa whispered.

Ikylla laid down a strident, blanket meow from within the apartment the moment Isa set foot on the stairs. Isa’s heart kicked. Gus added shrill, excited puppy yips.

“Easy,” Steve said. “You’re—”

Isa ran up the stairs, yelling, “Oki! Open the door!”

She did.

Isa barreled into her apartment and put her back to one of the walls. Ikylla twined around and around her legs, her meow demanding. Isa slid, not caring about the jab of pain from her hands when her butt hit the floor. The cat climbed into her lap and stood, her front paws on Isa’s shoulder, so she could rub her face against Isa’s chin. She folded her arms around the cat while Gus whined and Steve thundered up the stairs.

Isa’s pulse thrummed in her ears and hot tears tracked her face.

“Easy, Gus,” Oki said. “Gently!”

She had him leashed, but the forty-pound tripod yanked. Oki stumbled closer, laughing. Isa opened her arms. He scrambled onto her legs, his entire backside wagging. Jockeying with the cat for position, he licked the tears from Isa’s face.

“Okay,” she whispered, wrapping her forearms around them both. “We’re okay.”

Warmth blossomed inside her chest.

She had her family back.

Steve, Nathalie, and Troy stood in the doorway, smiling at the reunion. A hint of wistfulness put lines in Steve’s forehead. Nathalie wiped away tears.

Oki crouched beside Isa, ready to corral either of the enthusiastic greeters. Her eyes shown suspiciously red, too, and she blinked repeatedly.

“Thank you for taking care of them,” Isa said. Contentment unfolded within her. The tattoo flinched away as if the touch of happiness was acid. It didn’t last long.

Gus and Ikylla both craved,
needed
, the reassurance of touch. Isa needed it, too, and she couldn’t accommodate any of them. Couldn’t scratch their ears or the base of their tails. Worse, she had no way to explain. It hadn’t occurred to her how much she’d relied on her hands. Not having the use of them drove home how crippled she’d be if the surgeons couldn’t restore their function.

Anxiety made her breath shudder. She wanted her hands. Perfect. Whole. Restored to a full, painless function that not even surgery could guarantee.

Pathetic,
the voice in her head sneered.

“And you’re stuck with me,” she retorted mentally.

Only until I break you.

He supplied a sound so like her own bones snapping that it woke a reflexive throb in both hands. Her breath caught on a stab of terror.

He laughed.

Her shattered hands were a knife in her gut, one Daniel had set deep and the thing on her skin deliberately twisted.

“You say you aren’t Daniel’s?” she muttered at the tattoo. “You sure dance to his tune.”

He growled. Twin pinpricks jabbed her neck.

Gus jerked backward and fell off of her lap, tumbling Ikylla to the floor as well. The dog’s muzzle wrinkled in a silent snarl. Isa saw the whites of his eyes.

Ikylla glared at Isa’s throat, her tail lashing. She hissed.

The tattoo clambered into her eyesight and narrowed her eyes.

“You leave them alone,” Isa gasped aloud.

“Isa?” Steve said.

Eyes wide, Oki grabbed Gus’s trailing leash.

Dark, sticky tendrils of relish and anticipation bled into her chest from the Ink. Sucking in a breath between clenched teeth, she shoved him out of her vision center, mentally stomped on his tenebrous grip on her awareness, and stuffed him into a box in the depths of her psyche.

Panting like she’d run a race, she glanced at the animals. Gus blinked. His hackles relaxed. Ikylla huffed, then sat on her haunches to wash a paw.

“Steve? Troy? I didn’t have a plan for getting back up. Could I trouble you . . . ?”

The guys jumped into action, one on each side. They hauled her to her feet.

“Ink giving you trouble?” Troy asked.

She nodded.

“Let’s get you to the couch,” Steve said.

“I can—”

“Not listening,” Troy said as they walked her to the sofa, their hands hooked under her upper arms and supporting her weight as if she hadn’t sprinted up the stairs under her own power.

“Okay,” Steve said once she sat down. “Pillows, blanket, what else can I bring to make you comfortable?”

“I’m not sick,” she said.

The four of them awarded her blank stares. For all that they had watched her Ink heal the worst of her injuries, they clearly couldn’t reconcile the shell they’d found last night with the reality of her sitting in front of them.

Weariness dragged at Isa’s shoulders. Maybe she couldn’t either.

Ikylla sauntered over, jumped up on the couch, and settled onto her lap with a sigh. Her purr rumbled against Isa’s thighs.

Gus tugged at his leash, straining in their direction, and whined.

“If you won’t accept police protection,” Steve said, “then one of us will be here with you around the clock. Nathalie . . .”

“No. Get out of here,” Isa said, and lifted her chin to indicate the cat and dog. “Take them with you.”

Troy uttered a rude noise. “Tell the Ink to fuck off, Ice. We’re not going anywhere.”

“This isn’t him. I’m asking.”

“We’re still not going anywhere,” Oki repeated. “Not after what you’ve been through.” She unclipped Gus’s leash.

Grinning, the dog bolted for the sofa. He put his forepaws on the cushions, set his lone back paw, calculated a moment, and leaped. He turned three circles, then flopped down beside her, his back nestled against her thigh.

“Yunna-san had to get back to the restaurant, but she sent snacks,” Nathalie said, marching for the kitchen. “You look like you could use something besides hospital food.”

Isa’s stomach grumbled in agreement.

“Pillow and comforter, please,” Isa said to Steve. A nap didn’t sound so bad.

“Let’s get your shoes off,” Troy said, kneeling at her feet. He cut off her protest. “Have to practice for the kid, you know?”

Oki trailed Nathalie into the kitchen while Troy set Isa’s shoes to one side. He picked up the dog. Gus grumbled at him.

“It’s temporary, buddy,” Troy said, putting the dog at one end of the couch. “You, too, Ikylla. Shift it, darlin’. Got to get your pet human comfy.”

Against her better judgment, Isa smiled.

Steve returned, arms laden with half of her bedclothes. He set the pillow against one arm of the couch.

They got her settled, reclining on the sofa and covered with her threadbare green comforter. Ikylla draped across her belly. Gus stretched out on her legs.

Nathalie and Oki returned to hand out plates of food. Wielding chopsticks with a grace Isa had never acquired, Oki deftly offered her a slice of California roll. She balanced Isa’s chopsticks across the top of the plate, picked up her own utensils, and tucked in while Isa chewed. She turned feeding Isa into a nonevent.

Isa loathed Daniel and the creature on her skin for making it necessary.

As if by some kind of unspoken agreement, Steve, Troy, and Nathalie chatted while they ate. They’d stopped watching Isa with concern pinching their brows.

She relaxed. Her eyes began drifting shut.

“I’ve got to take off,” Steve said, his voice quiet. “Some active searches to check up on.”

“You got this?” Troy said.

“Totally,” Nathalie said. “Phone right here. Nine-one-one and Steve on speed dial.”

“I’ll help you clean up,” Oki said.

“Thanks.”

Isa heard the scrape of plates being picked up from the coffee table and then footsteps receding. The front door opened. Closed.

Gus sighed and stretched.

A sense of pressure built within one of the cobweb-strewn crevices of her consciousness where she’d shoved the tattoo. She stiffened.

The tattoo burst free, roaring,
DON’T EVER . . .

“My body!” she shouted over him. Her mental voice rolled around the inside her head like thunder. “My body, my rules.”

Rage banked into resentment. He smiled. She felt it, even though she denied him the use of her features to express it.

Not for long
, he murmured, petting her too-fast pulse.

Inky fingers picked the scabs from the seeping wounds inside her psyche. He submerged her in an endless loop replaying her captivity and torture. Laughing as she twisted and raged, he held her beneath the surface of sleep.

Isa either learned to breathe poisoned memory, or she drowned in it and in him.

Surrender
. The tone was so tender, so lulling.

A paw slapped her jaw. Claws out.

“Ow!” Isa wrenched free of the tattoo’s grip and woke. Opening her eyes felt like ripping out the eyelashes.

“Whoa,” Nathalie said from beside her. She pressed a tissue to Isa’s stinging jaw. “Whatever you were dreaming wasn’t good. Ikylla had some issues with it, too. You okay?”

The cat sat on Isa’s belly, studying her, her whiskers and ears back.

“She whacked you a good one. You want me to take her?” Nathalie withdrew the tissue. Blood sprinkled the surface.

“No,” Isa said. “The Ink had me trapped. I think she was slapping him, not me.”

Ikylla’s ears twitched forward, and she settled slowly into a meatloaf position.

The door buzzer sounded.

Nathalie answered. Florist delivery. She buzzed them up.

A young man brought flowers from one of the businesses next to Nightmare Ink. His arrival heralded the opening of the floodgates.

At first, the buzzer went off a few times an hour, all flower deliveries, save for one cookie basket.

“Thoughtful,” Isa said when Nat showed her the card.

“Proof that Ria has a sister, a mother, or a girlfriend to make him do the right thing,” Nathalie said.

“Grandmother,” Isa said.

The apartment smelled like springtime. Most of the bouquets were from the business owners up and down Ballard Avenue. Isa recognized a few client names, and one of her flat ink vendors. The rest were from perfect strangers.

“Why am I getting flowers from people I don’t know?”

“Turns out people disappear all over the state,” Nathalie said. “There’s a sort of foundation that helps search and distribute fliers. They turned out in force every weekend to help us look for you.”

“You looked for me based on what? Dreams?”

“Stupid, huh?” Nathatlie said, but she wouldn’t meet Isa’s eye, and Isa guessed there was more to it than she wanted to talk about.

Being reigning queen of not wanting to talk about the past six weeks, she didn’t pry.

One of the local news teams sent a live plant in a basket. Save for the glossy, heart-shaped leaves, it was swaddled like a baby someone might have left on the doorstep. Laughing, Nathalie searched it for hidden cameras and microphones.

The flow of deliveries spiked to the point that Nathalie rarely had to buzz anyone in the front door. Delivery people met one another coming and going.

“You’re a celebrity,” Nat said over her share of the miso soup she’d heated for lunch. She’d propped the apartment door open and sat before it, ostensibly to run interference on the animals.

Ikylla refused to move from Isa’s lap. Gus contented himself with curling up on the sofa cushion beside her feet and resting his head on one shin. He’d stopped raising his head to inspect the interlopers after the third delivery.

The apartment turned into a jungle. Nathalie had run out of surfaces and had begun setting vases and pots on the floor.

“I put some really ginormous arrangements out in the hallway and on the landing,” she said when she saw Isa studying the maze.

Nathalie closed the door.

“They’ve slowed to a trickle,” she explained. “Oki brought up another box from Yunna-san.”

Isa groaned, but her stomach grumbled.

The thing on her skin stirred, scraping talons and rough leather against intangible parts of her.

Ikylla opened her eyes, stretched a paw up to Isa’s chest, and yawned. A purr Isa felt rather than heard vibrated through the blanket.

What is that?
the demon demanded. His voice resounded through her skull, and he crowded into the use of her sight. Eyes squinted against the sudden ache in her temples, she reflexively clapped her twisted, bandaged hands over her ears. Stupid external reaction to something internal.

Aspirin. Her kingdom for aspirin that would kill the pain of him. Or maybe just him.

She lowered her throbbing, useless hands.

Ikylla closed her eyes. Her purr intensified.

“It’s a purr,” Isa said aloud, stroking her gauze-wrapped splint down the cat’s spine. It worked. “Vibration Ikylla produces when she’s happy.”

Nathalie looked up from her computer, her eyebrows raised. “Mr. Hyde, I presume?”

He shifted again. Talons pierced Isa’s insides, lacerating her psyche, though it felt so much like her physical body that she looked down at herself, expecting blood.

“Ow.”

Stop it
, he hissed, making a clumsy grab for her motor control. Her left arm jerked as if to sweep Ikylla from her lap.

“Leave her alone!” Stinging indignation lent Isa the strength to wrest control away from him.

The doorbell rang.

Ikylla bolted from her lap and vanished into the thick, colorful undergrowth of flower arrangements.

“Hey, asshole,” Nathalie said over her shoulder as she went to the door. “Cats purr at a frequency that heals broken bone.”

She opened the door and started back, swearing.

Energy brushed past Isa in a sly-sounding red-yellow wave. Her nerves fired. Her heart rate shot to a gallop.

The tattoo hissed her breath in between her teeth.

Gus jerked upright, growling at the open door, hackles raised.

She sat bolt upright and dropped her feet to the floor.

“Don’t touch it!” Isa yelled without knowing what the
it
was. “Shut the door! Ikylla!”

The brown and white tabby streaked past Nathalie’s ankles.

Isa surged to her feet, powered both by fear for the cat and by the tattoo’s rage at having something of Daniel’s on the doorstep.

Ikylla paused on the threshold and hissed. Behind Isa, Gus’s tags clanked. He began barking, a high, frightened yip that took the breath from her lungs.

The Ink surged into her head and body, fighting for control.

She stumbled into the flowers. Two vases went over in her path. Flowers, leaves, and stray petals flooded across her carpet with the water.

A split second spent fighting him sent urgency pounding through her chest into her head.

The Ink fought for her body, but she still controlled her voice.

“Daniel sent it!” Isa shouted at Nathalie. “Grab Ikylla and get away from it!”

“Oh, God, Ikylla,” Nathalie said. “Don’t kill me. Come on, sweetheart.”

Ikylla, the fur on her tail standing straight up, warbled a shrill battle cry that made Isa’s blood run cold.

Her eyes narrowed when she hadn’t asked them to, focusing in on the tableau of angry feline, arrangement of wine red roses, and the shaking piercing artist.

Power pummeled her again, stinking, filthy brown, shot through with hints of Daniel’s magic.

Screaming in outrage, Ikylla struck out, claws unsheathed.

“Ow!” Nathalie leaped backward, yelping. “What the fuck is that?”

The cat shrieked and hissed again, turning as if to keep something in her line of sight. Whatever it was shrilled a stomach-turning giggle and skittered in the door. Yowling, bristled, Ikylla dove into the midst of the flower jungle after the creature.

Nathalie gagged and backpedaled into the array of plants and flowers. She fell and cried out.

Glass shattered.

“Stay still! Stay still!” Isa urged, automatically reaching for the cell phone she no longer had. “Damn it! Are you cut?”

Breathing in audible sharp gusts, Nathalie shook her head.

Scratchy, nails-on-a-chalkboard giggling traced the creature’s progress through the apartment. Flowers sprayed into the air, petals and leaves shredded as if the thing were a manic food processor. Vases exploded in its wake, sending shards of glass flying.

Isa caught a glimpse of stalklike legs that seemed jointed in ways nature never intended. It was the color of rain-bleached dog poop. When she caught a whiff of it, it reeked of dung and dead things. A string of scarlet beads ringed its round face, featureless save for a wide slash of a maw.

Eyes. Deadly. Get out.

Throat dry while her insides ran to water at the thought of Ikylla tangling with it, Isa shuddered.

The tattoo shoved another command at her motor control. She jerked closer to the door. His intent slammed into her chest. He meant to get out of the apartment and close the door on the thing Daniel had sent. Trapping Nathalie, Gus, and Ikylla inside with it.

“No.” She clenched her muscles and froze in her tracks. “You know this thing. Fight it.”

Multiple crashes from the kitchen brought cold tears to her eyes.
Please, let my cat be okay
. She couldn’t say who she prayed to. As far as she could tell, having a demon inked on her skin, taking up space inside she didn’t have to give, meant that only he heard.

Fight with what? You can’t even feed yourself.

His rumble of frustration powered her through his attempt to control her body. Tapping that line of energy, she turned her back on Daniel’s countless long stem red roses in the hallway.

Gus stood with his front paws braced on the back of the couch, barking at the kitchen, his tail tucked and his ears down.

Nathalie lay where she’d fallen. Isa saw the whites of her eyes.

“Don’t let it get me, Ice,” Nathalie whispered.

“It doesn’t get anyone,” Isa gasped. “Ikylla? Kitty, kitty, kitty?”

Get out!

She backed up a step. The internal pressure to flee redoubled.

“Ice?” Nathalie’s voice caught on a sob.

Panting for breath, Isa reached behind her, snagged the edge of the door with her twisted, aching left hand, and slammed it. With her on the inside.

“Fuck off, you coward,” she said to the tattoo.

Wrath seared her insides.

She whimpered.

The fire of his rage went ice cold.
Die, then. I will be free.

He pulled back. He still watched through her eyes, but his stance made it plain he would offer no strength or word of advice.

Fine. At least she could move.

Wavering with fear, she tottered to the kitchen to rescue her cat. She couldn’t hear the giggling anymore. Heart trembling, Isa shuffled her slippers through the water, glass shards, and flower corpses.

She expected bloodstains at best and Ikylla’s disemboweled corpse at the worst.

She saw neither.

Her tabby warrior had the abomination cornered between the wall and the stove. Yellow-green slime dripped from the monster’s rows of flower-caked teeth.

Isa edged closer, “Get away from it, Ikylla! Come here, baby girl.”

The cat didn’t even twitch an ear in her direction. Growling in a low rumble that made the hairs on the back of Isa’s neck stand up, Ikylla landed a lightning quick slap on the creature’s paw.

The stink coming off the thing intensified as puce blood welled up from the scratches Ikylla had opened on the paw. Or was it a hand? Either way, the insanely long, serrated talons made Isa flash on an old horror movie. Shuddering, she reached for one of the knives in her block before recalling she couldn’t hold it.

The damned tattoo was right. How was she supposed to fight this reeking, ghastly thing?

A sense of grim satisfaction seeped into her chest from him. He stabbed a command at her to flee. Isa growled in return.

The creature looked at her. Her skin crawled.

Gus’s barking turned to frantic howls.

“Steve!” she heard Nathalie scream from the living room. “We’re being attacked!”

The knee-high monster launched itself at Isa. Cringing, she brought her arms up to shield her face as the tattoo shouted inside her head.
RUN!

The thing landed with a sickening thud against her chest. It sounded like an overripe melon. It clung to her sweatshirt. Fabric ripped. Putrid, brown magic sliced at her mind. Golden power, tainted by the touch of shadow, flashed to her defense, sewing up the psychic wounds. Agony slammed her hands.

Gagging on the burning, open-sewer smell of the creature, she jerked her arms away from her face.

And batted the thing right off of her. Talons flailing, it hit the floor.

Ikylla screeched in fury and, tail lashing, pounced.

Fur. Slime. Screams—theirs and hers—sprayed the kitchen as cat and creature rolled, locked in combat.

One of the screams fell a quarter tone.

Isa’s heart tripped.

The thing pitched Ikylla halfway across the kitchen.

Already twisting to reacquire her target, the cat landed on her feet. The throw might as well have been a springboard for attack. Windmilling, her glittering claws out, Ikylla hurled herself at the monster crouched on the black-and-white marbled linoleum.

Isa cried out and rushed the roiling mass of fur and she-didn’t-know-what.

NO!

Isa froze in reaching to yank Ikylla out of the battle by the scruff of her neck with hands that didn’t work.

The tattoo had mastered her motor control.

Flecks of red blood flew from the combatants. Horror choked her. The creature didn’t bleed red.

Ikylla
. Her voice wailed inside the echo chamber of her head.

Another caterwaul rent her hearing. An answering off-pitch shrill flattened a full half tone before rattling into silence.

“Let go!” she snarled at the Ink. Adrenaline seared her system. She shook with it even while the tattoo locked her in place.

The blur of cat and creature flipped.

Ikylla stood splay-legged, her sides heaving, her ears plastered flat to her skull, her bottlebrush tail lashing side to side, and her jaws clamped on the noisome thing’s gullet.

The monster’s limbs twitched then went limp.

Isa noticed abruptly that where globs of slime had landed the linoleum and her white-painted wood cabinets had turned black.

Your purr-thing killed it,
the tattoo murmured. He sounded surprised and a little like his surprise disturbed him.

“Cat, you asshole,” Isa corrected. “She’s a cat. Now let go or help her.”

She doesn’t require aid. Asshole. Is that your name for me?

“If you keep acting like one, yes.”

He didn’t understand. Oh, he comprehended and accepted
asshole
as something filthy and beneath contempt. He’d absorbed that insult as if he’d expected it, but he seemed to have no comprehension of what her use of the word meant—as an epithet earned by his action.