Nightmare Ink (20 page)

They garnered a few disgusted looks from other people trying to get around them on the sidewalk.

Even though he didn’t comment, Murmur slipped into her eyesight and watched Gus.

At the corner of Leary Avenue, they paused for the light.

Gus leaned one warm shoulder against her leg until the crosswalk light blinked to
WALK
. He bounded up, urging her into the crosswalk.

Isa heard the car engine revving behind them and pegged it as another impatient driver wanting to turn right onto Leary and resenting the pedestrian traffic. Except the roar of the engine got louder, as if the car were accelerating into the crosswalk, not slowing.

Spurred by Gus’s enthusiasm, she led the clump of pedestrians.

Tires screeched.

Gus hesitated. Isa’s heart leaped into her throat. She hauled back on the leash. Gus yelped and sprawled on the pavement behind her.

A silver sedan turned within inches of her and jerked to a stop right in the middle of the crosswalk.

The couple behind her in their knit caps and saggy jeans pulled up short, shouting obscenities. Cars on Market, waiting to turn, laid on their horns until the blue and red light bar in the back window of the sedan lit up.

The driver’s-side door exploded open.

Anne Macquarie popped up to glare over the roof of the car. “Get in.”

“Jesus!” the woman behind Isa shrieked at the agent. “You nearly nailed the dog in front of like a million witnesses!”

Anne’s lip curled. “Report me. The local AMBI office will be thrilled to hear from you.”

The girl drew breath to say something else.

“Hannah, shut up,” her boyfriend hissed.

“What a bitch,” Hannah muttered.

Isa did her best not to nod in agreement as the rest of the pedestrians scattered, casting her sidelong glances as if they couldn’t decide whether to pity her or be suspicious now that they knew the AMBI wanted her and her little dog, too.

Isa bridled.

“Get in the car, Ms. Romanchzyk,” the woman ordered.

Gus rebounded. Scrambling up, he wedged his butt against the front of Isa’s legs and began barking at Anne, his teeth bared. He planted his forefeet, setting his weight against Isa, urging her back from the perceived threat.

Another car, Isa recognized it as Steve’s unmarked, chocolate brown Crown Vic, roared around Anne’s sedan, pulled in front of her, shrieked to a stop, and then backed up close to her. Steve opened his door and slid out into the open. Strain stood out in his pinched white face.

Isa crouched to gather Gus into her arms to calm him. He subsided against her, settling for a snout wrinkling growl aimed at Anne.

“What’s going on?” Isa demanded of the pair. Now that she had Steve’s tension as a cue, she saw the stress in the set of Anne’s shoulders and in the white lines etched around her lips.

“That monster killed another one of my men,” Anne snarled. “Get in the damned car.”

Murmur instantly shot into her awareness on full alert. The throb at her temples made her glad she hadn’t yet risen.

Gus pressed tight against her and snarled.

“Hey, Augustus,” Steve said. “Take it easy, buddy. Isa, let me take Gus home while you accompany Agent Macquarie. I’ll join you on-site. Get a bead on that thing. Take it down.”

“It isn’t a thing. It’s a dragon,” she said, rising to take Gus to Steve.

“It’s a murderer,” Anne snapped.

Urgency beat at Isa’s ribs. She had to find the creature before Anne did. Isa didn’t know what she could do, but she had no doubt the woman would try to kill it.

Gus went to Steve with his tail down and a wary eye trained on the woman in the charcoal suit.

Steve nodded, put Gus in the passenger seat, and drove off.

Isa did not want to get into Anne’s car. From the watchful, cautious state of Murmur’s presence, she gathered he wasn’t keen on it, either.

She needn’t have worried. Anne said nothing. She drove as if Isa didn’t exist. If the silence had been meant to weigh upon her in some fashion, the agent had underestimated Isa’s antipathy.

Anne pulled into the underground parking garage of a high rise apartment building on the western shore of Lake Washington. Police cars, two vans, and any number of colorless sedans crowded the bottom floor.

She led Isa to the elevator and punched the button for the sixth floor.

How had a flightless tattoo managed elevators?

Form determines function?

Isa nodded once, hoping Anne wouldn’t detect the internal conversation. “The magic is supposed to be bound by the framework. You have wings, so you’d be able to fly. The dragon doesn’t.”

The real question was why he cared about what was happening with Live Ink at all. She wouldn’t ask. He’d just sidle away, like Ikylla oozing out from under a pet she hadn’t solicited. Already he hovered on the edge, prepared to evade her. Interesting that she could detect so subtle a shift in him. Home field advantage? Or getting too accustomed to him?

Anne nodded to the suited agent standing at the door of the apartment. He reached to the side and opened the door while his gaze wandered all over Isa.

The old Isa would have avoided his eye. Carrying around the assurance that not much worse than Daniel could possibly happen now, she met him stare for frank stare. Either she or Murmur raised her eyebrow at the man’s neutral expression. The agent looked away.

Anne led her into the dim entryway.

The smell reached her first: scorched cotton, underpinned by the chemical stink of melted nylon. And blood. She’d never fail to identify that metallic bite at the back of her throat. Not after Zoog.

The narrow, dark entryway funneled them to a T intersection. To the right, the hallway led to the bathroom, first door on the left, and the two bedrooms at the end of the hall, right across from one another. To the left, an archway opened on the living room, dining room and kitchen.

Anne paused in the arch.

Isa stopped short at her shoulder. Her heart bumped into faster rhythm. Murmur snatched more of her vision for his own use. Pain clawed her skull. She gasped and swayed.

“Keep it together, Romanchzyk,” Anne snapped. “Corvane told me you were a professional.”

“I am,” Isa retorted. “Tattoo’s not.”

He jabbed an ice pick through one temple. Her eyes watered. She scrubbed a sleeve across her face and then tried to focus on the room swimming before her.

The once beige sofa bore char marks in a narrow band across the front of the cushions. A two-foot section of rosy carpet had been melted into a stiff, blackened mat.

All that remained of the dead man was the blue painter’s tape outline of his body and the bloodstains. Dark stains surrounded the outline, too big for blood spray. One large blotch inside the lines had shrunk the carpet fibers so that it looked like someone had cut a rusty, crumbling wound in the rug.

“How long ago did this happen?” Isa asked, lifting her chin to indicate the crime scene.

“Last night.”

“Is the investigation complete?”

The agent awarded her a sideways glance and a sneer. “Of course not.”

The tattoo sneered right back at her. It felt like he was better at it than Anne was.

Good enough. “You know very well I want to go in for a closer look without messing up evidence.”

“Don’t touch anything,” Anne said by way of grudging permission.

Stepping onto the plush carpet, Isa stared at where she put her feet, hoping to detect any kind of blood-spray pattern, wanting to avoid stepping on any remnant of the dead man.

There were magical reasons for that, but also her mentors had drummed deep respect for the dead into her. It was terrible luck and worse manners to disrespect the evidence of someone’s last moments of life. Graveyards were holy. Until this murder had been solved, this man wouldn’t be free to continue on his journey in the next world. Treating the place where his blood still stained the floor casually might offend his spirit.

There.
Murmur grabbed control of her eye muscles and twisted them hard.

Isa yelped. The rug beneath her feet jumped into impossibly fine focus. Swallowing a wave of nausea, she looked where he’d directed.

Blood spatter. Or more precisely, what looked like a fine mist of blood droplets, speckling the rug fibers.

Had he bought her superstitions about the dead? Or did he carry baggage of his own in that regard?

“Relax the vision back out, please?” she said aloud. “We’ll get kicked out if I throw up on the evidence, then I won’t be able to see if we can track the dragon.”

He hesitated, torn between tormenting her and his incomprehensible interest in the escaped tattoo. Finally, he let go of her eye muscles.

It felt like he’d shoved her eyeballs back into her head. Isa rocked again at the barbed band of hurt entwining her head.

Laughing a nasty, enjoying-her-suffering chuckle, he subsided.

Isa caught Anne’s eye roll of contempt and the spiteful smile on her lips. She looked like she hoped Isa would barf on her crime scene just so she could toss her out. Unless Steve got here pretty quick, Isa doubted she’d bother to use the door.

Murmur snorted as Isa retreated to the tiled entryway.

“Tracking the creature means handling unshielded power,” she said.

“Power,” Anne echoed.

“Magic.”

“So?”

“There are these laws . . .”

“Find that thing and destroy it,” she ordered. “I don’t care what it takes.”

Baring his teeth, Murmur tried to snap his wings open.

Isa’s lip curled. The skin on her back and sides rippled. She grunted.

He didn’t like the destroy order. Interesting.

All right. She knew where the blood mist began in the room, thanks to Murmur’s trick with her still throbbing eye muscles. Now to read the magic signatures and see where power and blood overlapped. If they did.

She spent several minutes walling physical sensation out of her awareness, insulating herself from Daniel’s conditioning that using her magic meant pain.

The damned tattoo drummed his talons against the inside of her breastbone. She spent an extra few minutes erecting defenses against him. It was a tissue paper wall, but it would have to do.

Magic, turgid and murky, rose when she called. It was enough to let her slip into an altered state of seeing. The room where the man had died swam with power signatures from the people investigating his death. Where he’d died, a shimmering pool of indigo played over the carpet and splashed the walls.

Murmur and Isa cursed via her vocal chords.

People, unaware of their magic, or perhaps simply untrained, had traipsed through the scene, spray painting their own auras all over the room. In their own way, Anne’s investigators had vomited all over Isa’s crime scene evidence.

“That’s a lot of magic,” she muttered.

And blood.
The calculating tone of his voice inside her head shored up her suspicion.

“The dragon didn’t feed,” Isa said into the silence in her skull. “It’s still hungry. We’ve got to find it.”

She turned a slow circle. And with her overcrowded eye caught a sparkle of gold and green.

“Windowsill,” she said.

Murmur shoved her to one side of her visual control. She pushed right back, but he’d grabbed hold. He yanked the fine muscles around her eyes again, bringing the nearly tangible glow of magic into sharp focus.

She swallowed hard and tottered around the back of the sofa, avoiding going anywhere near the outline of the corpse.

“Don’t touch anything!” Anne screeched, again, her heels scraping tile.

Isa heard the front door open.

“Rosenberg!” Anne hollered. “Get a team up here!”

Murmur wanted to shift aside the gauzy curtain.

“No,” she said. “It’ll taint evidence.”

They’ve done that.

He abandoned her eyesight so abruptly that her head rang with the pain of his going. She staggered. When her abused eyes cleared, Murmur had shifted the curtain aside with her right hand.

Isa swore.

“What the fuck?” Anne snarled. She stalked in beside Isa and batted her hand away. “What part of ‘don’t touch anything’ confused you?”

“Isa?” Steve’s voice said from the entryway.

She jumped. Shaming hot blood squirmed into her cheeks. What did it mean that she didn’t give a rat’s ass what Anne thought, but it clearly mattered that Steve knew she’d messed up an active investigation site?

“It wasn’t me!” Isa protested. “It was the tattoo.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe it was a mistake to bring you to the crime scene. If your passenger wants to play hardball, I’ve got his number,” Steve said, coming in on her other side, one hand on his Taser.

Murmur wanted to flip Steve off. Isa’s hands wouldn’t accommodate him. Frustration and hatred bubbled like acid through her veins. He settled for snarling at Steve.

“Bring it,” Steve said.

Her muscles flexed as if the tattoo intended for Isa to rush Steve.

“Don’t be stupid!” she shrilled, fighting for a lock on her body. “We have to find that dragon before it kills again! Help me!”

The Ink barked a laugh that grated her throat, ripped his clawed wings out of her awareness, and retreated, slamming some kind of mental door that pinched a part of her she couldn’t name—as if she’d caught incorporeal fingers in it. Reeling at the purple-tinged agony ringing through her skull, Isa gagged. Nothing came up, but it was close.

“You’d better have this thing’s trail,” Anne said.

“The dragon came and went through this window. I’ll have to pick up the trail on the ground outside,” Isa said.

Nausea retreated, giving ground one slow, hard-fought inch at a time.

“Come on,” Steve ordered, taking her elbow and drawing her out to the entryway. “If I read you right, the monster left. Let’s do this before he comes back.”

“He hasn’t left,” she rasped. Even though he’d made a show of denying her request for help, she sensed him, a shadow, coloring her senses.

“He’s left enough. Besides, I brought someone you need to see.” Steve directed her out the open apartment door.

A hulking form stood in the hallway, his back to her. The man was dressed in skintight, faded blue jeans, and a beat-to-hell motorcycle jacket covered with Sturgis patches.

Isa froze. “Triple J?”

The big man turned. A gap-toothed grin split his dark face. “Ice! Little girl, it’s been too long!”

He snagged her open jacket, and pulled her into a bear hug.

“Corvane?” Agent Macquarie snapped.

“Meet Triple J, Agent,” Steve said. “Isa apprenticed in his tattoo shop before she opened Nightmare Ink.”

Before Triple J had taken her aside and paid her to break off her affair with Daniel. Isa trusted only she and Triple J knew that part of the story.

“Glad to see you,” Triple J rumbled at the top of her head. “Some of the things I heard . . . I gotta tell you, Ice, I didn’t think I’d see you in this world again. Oo-ee, girl. That is some serious mojo you got running around your aura.”

He’d sensed the Ink. Isa stiffened, abruptly aware that he might not know that Daniel had put it there. Daniel had been J’s golden boy. Still was, as far as she knew. She’d stayed in the background where she belonged, picking up the pieces of instruction she could glean from Triple J’s assignments.

“I won’t be long in this world, J. The Ink you’re sensing is too big for me to survive.”

He pushed her out to arm’s length to study her. “So this nice officer tells me. He also tells me what I see you’re too afraid to say to my face. Daniel did this.”

She blinked back a sudden surprise burn in her eyes. She couldn’t trust her voice. She nodded.

J released her and shoved his hands in his coat pockets. “Show me.”

She shrugged out of her coat and lifted the hem of the flannel shirt she’d put on that morning. She couldn’t manage the buttons. She hesitated at unbuckling her jeans. “All of it?”

As if he couldn’t help himself, he shook his head. Not in denial. In wonder. “That boy has a gift.”

Her heart scrunched tight, and her rising joy at seeing Triple J shriveled. Her gaze slid past her former employer to the wide eyes of the AMBI’s forensics team behind him.

“Look at me, Isa,” J ordered.

She stuffed everything she felt—lonely, not good enough, worthless—into the gaping hole at her center. Then she obeyed, meeting his dark brown gaze.

Triple J snorted. “You know why I brought you into my shop as an apprentice when I already had Daniel?”

She knew this story. “I had potential.”

“Yep,” he said. “And talent. The most I’d ever seen. You could have run Live Ink circles around Daniel. But you wouldn’t. And I couldn’t make you. Maybe I failed you. I shoulda kicked you out so you could find a teacher who could get through to you when I couldn’t. I was selfish. I wanted you to be everything you could be, and I wanted to be the one to pry it out of you. You never would let me.

“I don’t know what happened to you before you came through my door, girl, but it ain’t the Ink that’s gonna kill you,” he said. “It’s your baggage.

“Officer Corvane wanted me to come here and talk you into fighting that Live Ink you never asked for. I don’t know that it’s my place to tell you what to do. But I know you, Ice. More than you think I do. So I’m going say this; you have the power and the talent to conquer that Ink. But only if you’ll sort yourself and your past. If you don’t, I’ll be burying the best and brightest artist who ever walked through my door.”

Isa reeled.

“Let’s go,” Agent Macquarie grumbled.

Putting her clothes in order, Isa shook off confusion and trailed Steve.

Triple J followed them into the elevator and began regaling his captive audience with the story of how Isa had come to be his apprentice.

When Isa tried to relax, Murmur locked her magical vision wide-open despite the growing ache in her hands.