Nightmare Ink (18 page)

Sinister, black glee shot through with anticipation crashed over her head in a tidal wave.

“Isa. Isa, wait! We can’t go in there.”

She heard Steve’s voice as if from far away. Something else had control of her, propelling her up those steps, commanding her hands to lever the doorknob, yanking the heavy door open when it wasn’t locked.

Fear kicked her in the gut, and she shrieked against entering that place—against facing the remembered pain and horror and humiliation—no sound emerged.

He had complete control of her body.

Isa clawed for possession of herself, scraping psychic fingernails against the nightmare bars of the prison where Murmur had locked her away from control of her body. She fought until her psychic fingers turned raw and bloody.

No impact.

The tattoo sneered with her features. Using his advantage, he tore open the seeping wound that was her memory of this place and the six interminable weeks she’d been imprisoned here.

How could she deal with six weeks of torture? How could anyone?

She hadn’t. She’d bundled it all up—memory, emotion, everything about it—and shoved it into the deepest, most obscure region of her brain possible. She’d have willingly ripped out the synapses encoding remembrance if she could have. She didn’t want to ever look at it again.

Murmur dragged it into the light and shook out the crumpled memories with a crisp snap, as if her horror were a set of fancy linens intended for a holiday table.

Images and emotion swamped her. She couldn’t draw breath. She couldn’t choke back the bile rising inexorably in her throat.

Murmur jerked her forward like poor Gus at the end of the leash still wrapped around her frozen wrist. Isa couldn’t whimper.

Her dog did.

Let go
, she ordered her right hand. Daniel’s creature could yank her around, but she’d be damned before she’d let him, or Daniel, harm Gus.

Her hand twitched. Murmur brought her to a halt and shoved her awareness up against her eyeballs so hard, she felt them bulge out.

The cage.

She had to drop Gus’s leash. Had to get him away.

Every part of her tried to shy away from the stark, bare lightbulb glare of that room. As if her ruined hands and a nasty tattoo delighting in her breakdown weren’t proof enough of the reality of what had happened there.

The bed was gone. So were the chains and manacles, though holes in the cinder block showed where the hooks had been set. Slate gray walls, a salt stain on the floor, and the stink of old urine remained.

Even though she had no control of her body, she could abruptly feel every sensation. Her breath shuddered as she drew it. Burning tears poured down her cheeks. They reeked of the same smell of stale ammonia as the room.

Her vision flickered and changed.

The empty room flashed, and she stared at her body, dangling limp from the ceiling, strung up by manacles and chains. Her shoulders throbbed in sympathetic memory. Her long black hair hung in filthy strings around her naked, inked body. Her head lolled backward at an improbable angle, baring her throat. Murmur’s emerald eye glowed and pulsed in time with the pulse thrumming at the base of that throat. Her own heart bumped into high gear.

She’d have backed away if Murmur hadn’t locked her in place.

In the vision, Daniel stood to one side of the body hanging there. Isa couldn’t call it hers, could she? It couldn’t be. She stood in the doorway hyperventilating. Did she stand? Or was
that
the vision? Was she still hanging in Daniel’s prison? Hands shattered, still tormented by the way he caressed the skin of her belly? Isa’s skin twitched in response, tingling as if the friction of skin on skin
had
happened. Yet he turned those ice blue eyes toward the door to meet her gaze with a taunting smile twisting his generous lips. He traced his fingertips down the center of the other Isa’s belly. She moaned.

An echo of damp heat bloomed in the pit of Isa’s belly. She gagged. Her throat closed on the impulse, leaving her shaking with nausea and revulsion. Her avatar hanging in the room moaned again. Isa refused to watch, even though she couldn’t close it out of her peripheral vision entirely. And she could not close her eyes. Part of her doubted she’d escape the vision even if she managed to close them.

Isa jerked her gaze to the other’s face. She didn’t make it that far. The version of her hanging in that room writhed in obscene pleasure at Daniel’s use of her, but it was the dark blood trickling down her left breast that caught and held Isa’s attention. It came from her throat—from Murmur’s fangs sunk into her jugular. It ran red from that point on her neck. It darkened to pitch-black when it touched the Ink on her skin. She cried out, a thick, guttural, animal sound, and jerked in her bonds while Daniel crooned wordless encouragement.

She stiffened, threw her head back and screamed.

Murmur ripped her throat out.

Malevolent, putrid blood sprayed the room.

Burning drops spattered Isa’s face.

Murmur laughed.

Daniel laughed.

Leathery wings ripped free of that other Isa’s skin—hell, they could
be
her skin. He tore free of her. Ink rather than blood gushed from her body, puddling on the floor beneath her feet.

Yet she didn’t die. Her face darkened and turned blue. Her throat was a raw, grotesque mash of shredded flesh that stank of raw meat. Blood stained her teeth and dribbled from her mouth, turning to Ink as it fell.

Awareness cut through horror. If Murmur gained the upper hand, Isa wouldn’t die. She’d be trapped in her body. A prisoner to his whims and to Daniel’s.

Murmur might be violent and deadly, but he wasn’t evil, per se. Simply amoral. Like a wolf hunting. Or a cat toying with the mouse it had caught. Mean? Cruel? Yes. But not evil.

Not like Daniel.

Shudders racked her physical body despite Murmur’s control. Her muscles trembled with the conflicting messages of control—her urge to throw up, to reject every ounce of the poison Murmur showed her and Murmur’s command to hold it all in, to digest and absorb it.

But still Isa couldn’t move, couldn’t flinch away from staring into the depths of six weeks of hell. Her skin crawled as alternating ice-cold and white-hot pins stabbed through muscle and bone over and over. She thrashed against the cruel bars of the prison Murmur had shut upon her, battering her bruised and aching psyche.

He chuckled.

Violet hatred pulsed through every fiber of her. It coated her tongue with the sickly-sweet taste of rot. Her ears registered it as metal shrieking against unyielding rock. It drowned out the edge-of-panic sound of Steve’s voice playing minor chords behind her.

Loathing boiled her awareness until she felt vital pieces of her sanity dissolving.

Let go,
the tattoo murmured. His clear-night-sky tone pierced through her weakening struggle for freedom, for the ability to flee the horror contained in a simple room.
Let go. It will end.

“Let go,” Isa repeated. She picked up his oh-so-reasonable command and turned it into a mental chant. A mantra. “Let go. Let go.”

She did want to let go. She’d wanted to let go since the tattoo had jerked her unwilling into the building. But it wasn’t herself she wanted to let go of. It was her poor, captive dog’s leash. The tattoo could hold her prisoner. He didn’t get to hold Gus.
Let go. Let go

A glimmer of gold rose inside her consciousness. It came from someplace she wasn’t aware she contained. It sparked in the darkness of her awareness like a solitary firefly winking out a lonely signal on a chilly spring, edge-of-summer night.

Let go,
it seemed to say in pulses of light.

Let go,
she agreed.

Her right hand responded as if nerve impulses traveled at the speed of molasses. A second golden firefly joined the first. They multiplied.

“Let go,” Isa whispered with her physical lips. The words slurred.

Let go,
the tattoo coaxed.

He’d kept her trapped up against the nerve signal processing centers so she had no choice but to feel every single sensation associated with facing the room where she’d been held.

It meant that her right hand inching lower felt like miles of motion to her. It meant that the leather loop of Gus’s leash slid down the skin of her wrist and hand, tugging every single hair, scouring the surface of her skin, and catching on the still swollen bump of her thumb before it dropped.

Jangling tags and the scrabble of claws on concrete were a symphony to her ears. A symphony of triumph.

Her friendly internal fireflies coalesced into a bright, golden sun. It burst Murmur’s cage.

She was free.

From deep within a part of her she couldn’t consciously access, resolve unfurled. She wouldn’t let Murmur have her. She couldn’t afford to lose ground to him. Not when it meant she’d end up Daniel’s slave.

She’d be then what Ruth, Joseph, and Henry had feared and taught her to abhor—a powerful, evil magic user trading her humanity for power. She’d become a Skinwalker, an enemy to all living things.

Her Navajo family had equipped her to fight that evil—to not turn into an unholy shadow of herself.

Like Daniel had.

Her teachers had spent every one of her waking moments teaching her control, not because they were afraid of what she was, Isa realized in a belated flash of insight, but because they’d been afraid of what she could be
made
to become.

Daniel had found the key by offering Murmur freedom in the form of her body. It was up to her to keep that key from turning.

Superheated, black rage tackled her mental dash to claim control of her physical self. Her firefly sunshine died as if swallowed whole.

Isa backed into awareness.

She was damnably uncomfortable. The muscles of her back cramped. She shifted, trying to ease the pain. Leather squeaked beneath her jeans. She was lying on her right side on an uneven cushion. Her legs hung off the front.

Her hands were zip-tied before her.

Her heart thumped and anxiety splashed into her chest before she reminded herself that when Daniel tied her hands, it had always been over her head. Until the day he hadn’t tied her at all.

Her breath came faster. She opened her eyes and frowned at the back of a driver’s-side car seat. The motion cracked dried salt on her face. It burned.

“You’re the same as Daniel,” she gritted aloud to the tattoo. Her voice sounded rough, and her throat stung as if it had been rubbed raw.

He didn’t move. He said nothing.

What had she expected? A twinge of conscience?

Simmering alien fury took up space inside her heart and mind. The craggy, sharp edges of him cut into her, body and soul, simply because he existed.

It was her space he was taking up. She wanted it back. All of it.

He stretched out in contempt.
You are the means to my end.

“Freedom?”

Freedom.

“Over my dead body.”

I look forward to it.

The taunt lacked bite. He’d spent her small store of emotional resources, it appeared. Weary, she shoved him out of her awareness and struggled to sit up. Relief soothed her quivering nerves when she found she could.

Steel mesh isolated her in the backseat. From the computer, the radio, and the controls, she gathered she was in the back of the patrol car Steve had brought in for backup.

Motion at the window brought her attention around. Steve opened the driver’s-side door and leaned in to study her. A Taser dangled from his fingers. Her back muscles spasmed.

“Feeling better?” he inquired.

“Define better,” she countered. “Where’s Gus? What happened?”

“Gus is fine. He’s in my car. I’m guessing your tattoo happened,” Steve said. “You dropped Gus’s leash and then threw a temper tantrum like I’ve never seen. Not even when I got roped into duty chasing down that whack job wandering around Pike Place Market with the broadsword while hopped up on meth.”

“You shot me with that,” she lifted her chin to indicate the Taser.

He nodded. “Sorry. You’re going to feel that.”

She barked a mean-spirited laugh.

“What?”

She could guess that when she’d escaped his control inside the building, Murmur had flown into a rage while in the presence of the Seattle Police Department’s Acts of Magic head detective. He’d gotten them Tased, zip-tied, and locked down in the back of a patrol car. Antithesis of freedom.

Way to earn your results
, Isa said into the silence of her head.

A spurt of ire promised she’d pay.

She shivered.

“I prefer the Taser over the gun,” she said, not sure why she didn’t come clean about the real reason for her bitter amusement. Why should she protect the monster on her skin from anything Steve might think of him?

“If you’ve got this,” Steve said, “I’ll let you out.”

She met Steve’s solemn eye and nodded. Whether she had anything or not, Murmur wouldn’t go off around cops again.

“Good,” Steve said, popping the lock on her door and opening it. His intent gaze followed as she swung her legs out of the car. He hooked a hand beneath her right arm and pulled her upright to face him with the door between them. “How bad is this, Ice? Can he make you kill?”

She stared at Steve.

The rustle of Murmur shifting as he lifted his awareness in interest drove a chill through her heart.

“You know there’s no way to separate tattoo from host,” Steve went on. “You’d both end up in prison for the rest of your unnaturally long life.”

Murmur snarled. Isa gathered it showed on her face.

Grim satisfaction twisted Steve’s lips. The smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“Message received and understood,” she whispered.

Steve urged her around the car door. He flipped open his pocketknife to slice through the plastic zip-tie holding her wrists. “You’re done here. I needed the ID on the building. Now we wait for the search warrant. Come on. I’ll take you home.”

When they walked into her apartment, they found Oki and Nathalie eating udon at Isa’s dining room table.

“Whoa!” Oki snapped her chopsticks on the table and shoved herself to her feet. “Damn it, Steve, you promised she wouldn’t come back looking like shit!”

“Thanks,” Isa said as she shrugged her coat from her shoulders. “Blame Murmur.”

“Who?”

“The tattoo,” Nathalie said.

Oki crossed the apartment with a bouncing gait. She squatted down and kissed Gus on the snout as she unclipped the wiggling dog’s leash.

“Come on,” she ordered, rising. “I brought enough for everyone. Troy’s on his way up.”

“I’m so not in the mood to be tag-teamed,” Isa said.

“Ha. Too bad,” Oki said. “There’s stuff you need to know.”

Sighing, Isa caught her coat on her left hand and hung it on one of the hooks in the hall.

“Isa!” Oki squeaked. “Your hand! What . . .”

“The breaks are healed.”

Incorrectly.

“How the . . .”

The door opened.

“Hey, guys,” Troy said. “What’s up? Wow, Ice. You look like someone took you out back and beat you.”

“So I keep hearing,” she said. “Just how many copies of my apartment key did you make?”

Troy grinned. “Lost count after Nat, Oki, Steve, and me.”

“Jeez, Daschel.”

He chuckled.

Steve dropped his chin to his chest. “I’ve got to—”

Isa tucked a twisted hand into the crook of his elbow, cutting him off. “Dump the guilt, Steve. I lived. You need to eat, too. I looked at the files you gave me. We both did. Sit. Let me tell you what I’ve found.”

Weight seemed to lift from him. He stood taller, and his set features thawed.

Isa recalled she owned a grand total of three chairs. Troy lounged against one side of the kitchen doorjamb. Steve mirrored him on the other side.

“Who’s first?” Isa said, before tilting her bowl to sip the savory broth. She couldn’t handle chopsticks or a spoon, but picking up the bowl between her palms worked fine now that they didn’t ache.

“Don’t look at me,” Troy said. “I’m freeloading. Nice move, Ice. What’d you do to your hands?”

“Healed the breaks,” she said. “I was trying to put them back to normal. I screwed it up.”

Silence drifted down. She saw the questions trembling on their lips.

Troy gathered the courage to let his fall first. “This what you did downstairs yesterday?”

“Yes. While I was in the studio making the attempt, I saw something that might help us.”

She took another sip of soup, then set down her bowl, and told Steve what she’d seen: Kelli Solvang’s magic and the dragon’s trail.

A thin black tendril wrapped around her hearing. Murmur didn’t exert himself in any other fashion, so she let him. He’d seen the remnant of Kelli Solvang’s magic, too.

“I need into the most recent murder scene,” Isa said to Steve. “The marshal.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“We know the dragon has been there,” she argued. “If it’s hemorrhaging magic the way I think it is, the trail will be fresh. We’d be able to follow it!”

Murmur started. She rocked back in her chair. It felt like he’d slammed into her spine from the inside.

“We?” Nathalie echoed.

Oh.

“Me,” Isa amended. “I’d be able to follow . . .”

“That’s a big
if
, Ice,” Steve said. “I’ll have to clear it with the AMBI.”

“Agent Macquarie’s the one who ordered me to catch the dragon,” she said.

No. She ordered you to destroy it.

“You may have noticed I don’t take orders well,” Isa said inside her head.

“What have you got for me on the other bodies that we haven’t already discussed?”

“Nothing very useful, I’m afraid. At least three different artists’ work, maybe more. None of the tattoos escaped, though one of the tattoos looked like it had started the process of pulling free. It didn’t make it. In all cases, both host and Ink died.”

“A serial killer targeting Live Ink wearers?” Troy said, scooping noodles into his mouth.

Sudden weight pressed her chest. Murmur froze.

“If any of you repeat that outside of this room,” Steve vowed, “I will hunt you down and shoot you myself.”

“To serve and protect,” Oki said, lifting her bowl in toast.

Nathalie laughed.

“No trophy taking,” Isa noted.

“Not all of ’em do that,” Troy said.

“Stop,” Steve ordered. “You’ve done your job. This part is mine. What else?”

“That’s it for me,” Isa said, picking up her bowl for another sip.

“That’s my cue, I guess,” Oki said. “You remember asking me to help you get into the Japanese Live Ink libraries? Dad spotted what I was doing. Naturally, he knows a member of the originating organization. He got me into the archives. It’s been one hell of a wild-goose chase, and I still don’t know if I’ve found anything you can use.”

Murmur listened. Isa’s ears ached with the increased load.

“Your folks didn’t mind?”

Oki smirked. “Not only didn’t they mind, the head of the organization called my dad. They want me to work for them. “

Isa lifted an eyebrow.

Oki shrugged. “I wanted to do something to help while you were missing. There wasn’t much I could do. I remembered you telling me you needed to know how to catch rogue Ink. So I started looking. I hope that’s okay. I ended up following ancient literary rabbit trails through some documents so old I couldn’t even breathe on the computer screen. I guess I impressed a couple of people.”

“Tenacity?” Isa said.

“Instinct,” Nathalie corrected.

“Oki’s rabbit trails always led her to something useful,” Troy said.

Given the gleam of Oki’s magical aura she still managed to catch glimpses of from the corner of her eye, Isa wouldn’t have been surprised if Oki had conjured the correct documents on a daily basis. Was Oki aware of her power? She deserved to know.

Isa glanced at her friends. They all deserved to know.

“So? Are you going to give up slinging sushi?” Isa said.

Oki hesitated, then said, “I never thought I’d say this, ’cause Mom and Dad go on and on about Japanese culture, you know? It’s always sounded so hopelessly uptight to me, but after trying to chase down your information, I realize there’s this whole history and way of looking at the world that I don’t know, and some of it is stunningly beautiful. I don’t know what to do.”

“Do what fascinates you,” Isa urged, “until it doesn’t anymore. Free advice, worth what you paid for it.”

“I’d have to go to Japan.”

A pang stabbed through Isa’s chest. Murmur dodged as if the knife of impending loss were poisoned.

She stuffed down the emotion. “If I came to visit, would you take me to the Japanese Live Ink organization headquarters?”

Oki grinned. “Before or after I became the association’s head librarian? Here. Start with this copy.”

She fished a notebook from the bag at her feet, flipped it open, and set it before Isa. She’d copied the text by hand. Japanese characters filled the left-hand page. English letters spelling out Japanese words filled the right-hand side. Yellow highlighting jumped out two thirds of the way down the page of characters.

Murmur already scanned the lines with Isa’s eyes. He rummaged around her brain, looking for the translation of the characters. His frustration burned like a star behind her breastbone.

“Ow,” Isa said. “Tell us what this is before Murmur gives me a stroke.”

Laugh
, he grumbled.
If you had any intellect worth preserving, you’d be safe from that method of destroying you
.

He kicked her in the right temple. Isa flinched.

“You understand that Japanese characters embody more than a single word meant to translate them, right?” Oki asked. “They encompass larger concepts as well as words.”

“I know that the Japanese language has more words for some things than we do,” Troy said. “Sort of based off of what’s important, right? Like that old saw about the Eskimos having over twenty different words for snow when we only have one.”

“That’s exactly right,” Oki said. “That’s why I highlighted the characters. All of the translations I’ve seen from Japanese to English left really important information behind. This is a passage from a book of poetry from a remote region. It’s a haiku extolling the virtues of living art, work that participates as much in life as life inspires the art itself. But when life is done, art lives on by means of a Japanese word that English doesn’t have a concept for—in fact, I’m not even sure of what it means. The root character is for paper, but there’s more to it than that. It’s like someone drew a couple of spiritual concepts over the top of the paper character.

“I’m guessing here, but I think this talks about a type of sleep, a sense of respite.”

Stygian wings unfurled inside Isa, crowding her awareness. Golden magic pinged in deep recognition.

“That’s it,” Isa breathed. “It has to be.”

Paper
? Murmur prodded.

“More than paper,” she answered aloud. “Magic combined with paper to act as a holding pattern for Living Tattoos, someplace they can exist without needing to be fed or where they need be fed minimally.”

Prison.

The deadweight of his tone made her breath shudder. “Not prison. Sleep. Hibernation, maybe. My goal would be to save them until they could be put on someone else.”

“Is that possible?” Troy asked.

None of them looked surprised or confused by the conversation with Murmur that only Isa could hear. Had they all really gotten accustomed to the interloper so quickly?

She thought of the sand paintings she’d watched Joseph and Henry make to hold the spells and prayers they’d use for healing.

“It’s possible,” she said. “Excellent work, Oki.”

“Yeah? Well, there’s a price tag.” Oki got up and slung her bag over one shoulder. “Dad wants a word.”