Nightmare Ink (21 page)

“The girl walked into my tattoo parlor, looked through the sample books like she was looking for a long lost grandma or something,” Triple J said as the elevator sank to the ground floor. “She closes the last one, then all serious, she says, ‘Where are the others?’”

Anne tilted a glance at him, suspicion in the tight line of her brows. “I don’t understand.”

“This kid, barely what?” J said. “Eighteen?”

Isa offered a neutral smile. The AMBI already knew she had no idea how old she was.

“Walks off the street because she can
feel
the Live Ink,” he said. “And believe me when I say no shop puts Live Ink on display.”

Isa pushed out the main door of the sunset-hued concrete building. The dragon’s signature had been on a window in the south east corner. She’d come out on the west side.

“I assume that means something in magic land,” Anne prodded.

Ignoring them, Isa turned left and started walking, hunching into her coat as the wind gusted, flagging her hair behind her. She waded through the eddies and currents of magic swirling the city’s aura.

“Meant two things,” Triple J answered as they trailed her. “My containment system wasn’t containing and that Ice has some mighty magical cojones.”

“There’s an image I didn’t need,” Isa said.

Triple J’s cackle made her smile.

Murmur picked that moment to tear the scab from her memory of captivity in Daniel’s cage. If he’d intended to claim her attention, he got it.

But instead of a tidal wave of feelings and images overwhelming her, only a trickle oozed forth. It weighed against her breastbone and annoyed the steady rhythm of her heart.

“Why are we doing this?” she demanded internally, shifting her shoulders as if she could dislodge the canker of her recent past. “You really want to be shot with a Taser and locked in the back of a squad car again?”

For a moment, the cacophony of people’s comings and goings etched like the grooves in a record into the background shimmer of Seattle’s magic went dead black.

So many colors associated with heat. Red, blue, green, white. Until that moment, caught in the suffocating darkness of his ire, Isa had never known black to be one of them.

“Whatever’s happening, girl,” she heard Triple J say, “ground and center. You’re about to knock me over with the power you’re throwing off out here in the broad daylight.”

Isa heard Patty’s warning echoing in Triple J’s words. She made a mental grab for the edges of her energy field. She’d wanted to believe that she’d kept her shields strong, that her passenger had been the one shooting off magical fireworks.

He hadn’t been.

Heat flushed through her from head to toe. As if the warmth of her shame scalded him, Murmur recoiled. Maybe they were both having trouble processing their combined emotional load via her limited physiology.

Her eyesight cleared. Gold shot through with sinuous tendrils of black showed where they’d been. She stood in a pool of it.

He hadn’t been the only one hemorrhaging power.

Isa channeled magic into a solid shield and shunted the excess into the earth. It calmed her. She couldn’t force Murmur’s to follow suit. He eluded her conscious grip.

“Throwing off this much magic in public is illegal,” she finally told him. “We could be arrested. If Daniel happens to be listening, he now knows exactly where we are. Would you please get behind the shield or put up one of your own?”

He’s always known where you are. He doesn’t care. It is a matter of time before I kill you.

“Yes.”

When she wouldn’t take his bait, he scraped the inside of her chest raw with frustration. He ached for a fight. She didn’t understand why. He shut off the flow of irritation and examined her shield.

For his benefit, Isa grounded again, opening an etheric hand to him before she sent the wave of power into the concrete beneath their feet. He settled a tiny mote of inky magic into her palm and watched as she sent it down and out her feet. Nodding her head, he unfolded, settling what felt like much larger feet into the confines of hers. He mimicked her energy handling, pulling his sweltering, dark power tight around her body and reinforcing her shield with one of his own. It wavered initially; then he seemed to get the hang of maintaining a permanent energy structure.

“Nice,” Triple J said. “No bleed at all.”

Murmur sucked excess power into the center of them.

Isa drew a slow, deliberate breath as his magic penetrated through her physical layers in a too-warm caress.

He sent the power in a wave through their feet. The soles of her feet grew hot. When the flow stopped, she double-checked the shielding.

Triple J radiated approval. Anne, annoyance. Steve watched, eyes narrowed, expression otherwise neutral, one hand on his Taser.

Ignoring the stabs in her hands, Isa slipped deeper into magic sight until she floated in the blue-gray waves of Seattle’s magic.

Murmur shoved a tendril of curiosity at her.

“Proof of concept,” she said into her head as she turned a slow circle. Her shoes weren’t stuck to the sidewalk. She’d half expected that they’d melted the rubber soles. “We’re shielded, so no one knows what I’m doing, right?”

Part way around, a blade of yellow and red slipped between her ribs.

She flinched.

Murmur hissed.

Northwest.

The same direction as home.

Isa swallowed a sour lump of fear and chopped off that pulse of Daniel’s power with a flare of shadowed amber.

She had a way to locate Daniel.

Never do that again
. Murmur sounded shaken.

Forcing herself to round the corner of the building, she turned her magic sight upon the building as if she’d been orienting and looking for the dragon all along. Green and gold trailed an S curve down the side of the building. A clear pool of green and gold showed where the dragon had landed. The trail led through the bushes and trees to the cold gray sheen of Lake Washington. And across that silvery expanse of water, the green line of trees marking the shores of the arboretum. Plenty of acreage. Lots of places to hide.

She deliberately turned away. “The trail disappears into the water.”

What are you doing?

“Remembering that I have no way to catch the creature yet,” she said internally.

Murmur frowned. She hoped it didn’t show on her face.

Anne’s fists clenched. She looked at Triple J. “Can you see it?”

“I’m flattered you think I have half the power Isa does,” he rumbled. “I don’t.”

“You do so,” Isa countered. “Seeing auric fields just isn’t your sack of cornmeal.”

“You know what I think?” Anne said, staring at her. “I think you’re lying. About a lot of things. My contact in Arizona went looking for the woman, Ruth, who adopted you.”

“And couldn’t find her,” Isa finished for her.

Steve frowned.

“Record of her, yes. Record of you, too. But Ruth vanished along with two other tribal elders. No trace of them. Not even gravestones. Then you got kicked out of the tribe,” Anne said. “You know what he did find?”

“Yes.”

That earned her a double take, but Anne was too wound up by whatever was burning a hole in her gut. “He found people claiming you’re a Skinwalker.”

“What?” Steve snapped. “What is that?”

The blood rushed from Isa’s head. Seven—or had it been eight?—years since last she’d heard that accusation. It still made her innards run cold.

“Among the Navajo, a Skinwalker is someone wholly evil who’s traded his or her humanity for power,” Isa said.

Murmur bolted to attention and began rifling her memories of being exiled from Navajo land after Ruth, Joseph, and Henry had disappeared. She’d confessed to doing the tattoos for them. The Tribal Council had exiled her.

“I wasn’t a Skinwalker when I left the reservation,” Isa managed. “Might be now.”

“Because of the tattoo?” Steve said.

“No. Because if Daniel comes anywhere near me again and I’m physically capable of it, I will do anything and everything I can to tear his heart out.”

Murmur bridled.
He’s mine.
He stabbed icy prickles of hurt through her temples.

“See,” Anne said, “I have no doubt that’s true, and I don’t blame you. If I’d been kidnapped and tortured, I’d want the bastard dead, too. Here’s the thing, Romanchzyk. I suspect you’ve spent too much time in the company of the police. You’ve forgotten that you’re Jane Q. Public. I think you’re going vigilante on me.”

“With fucking useless hands and a tattoo I can’t control?” Isa retorted. “That’s exactly what I’m doing. My big goal for today is to drag an AMBI agent, the head of SPD’s AMI unit, and one of my favorite people in the world into a dangerous situation with a piece of rogue Ink I have no idea how to capture or contain.”

“So you’re going to go it alone,” Anne said.

Isa yanked ruined hands out of her coat pockets and shook them in the agent’s face. “What do you imagine I’m going to do? I’m useless! I might as well have died.”

Murmur smirked with her lips. His sense of triumph tasted sour.

Triple J and Steve erupted with protests.

“Stop it,” Isa ordered. “I didn’t die. Until Murmur overruns and kills me, I’m not interested in offing myself.”

“Okay,” Anne said. “How do we destroy this thing?”

“I don’t know yet. I have one promising line of research under way . . .”

“What can the AMBI do to help?”

Anne Macquarie being reasonable?

Murmur and Isa both hesitated. Visions of their papermaking experiments rose in Isa’s head, along with the hope that they could make it work based on the leads Master Masatoshi had provided in his diaries.

Isa shook her head. “Until my research bears out, I won’t know whether the capture and containment system is going to work. Once I get it working, though . . .”

“I want that news personally,” Anne snapped. “Any time. Day or night.”

“Done,” Isa lied. Maybe if she kept it short, it’d be easier to believe.

“I’m going to call in a few favors, Ice,” Triple J said. “This can’t be the first time this has happened. I know some real old-timers who might have useful information for you.”

“Older than you?” she teased, grinning even though it felt false, as he bear-hugged her again.

“Don’t make me drown you,” he mock-growled, not releasing her. “Why didn’t you tell me you were adopted, girl? In Navajo country that Skinwalker thing’s a big deal.”

“Yes, it is.”

“They’re evil, through and through.”

Isa nodded while Murmur listened with interest.

“You ain’t. Remember that.”

“Thanks, J,” she whispered into his shoulder.

“One more thing, Ice. You stay away from Daniel.”

Isa tensed. This again?

“Let the law handle him. He’s gone power mad, Ice. He always had a thing for your magic. Why do you think I bribed you to clear out? It was the only way I could think of getting you free and keeping you safe.”

Only Triple J’s hold on her kept Isa from stumbling when the world fell out from beneath her feet. In a few short sentences, he redefined what she’d believed had happened outside his shop five years ago. “I’ll be in touch,” he promised, and let go.

“How’re you getting home?” she asked.

“Brought the bike,” he said. “You know there wasn’t much chance of me riding in a police car, right?”

He lifted a hand and walked away.

Steve dropped her at the shop.

“You’re not going after that Ink alone, right?” he asked as she climbed out of the car.

She faced him across the door he’d had to open for her. “No. I really don’t have a way to deal with it.”

Discontent not her own rumbled through her, but Murmur kept silent.

“Okay. Damn. Only four o’clock?” Steve said as the bell tower in the park chimed. “I’ll be at the precinct digging out from under a mountain of virtual paperwork.”

They grimaced in concert.

She uttered a laugh. A real one.

What is that?

Steve smiled, reached across the top of the door, and squeezed her arm.

“Nothing,” she assured the tattoo as she turned and went inside. She paused in the doorway to watch Steve pull away.

Look for the dragon.

“I will,” she answered internally. “When I won’t lead Anne to it. Maybe my morals are out of whack, but I won’t commit to destroying something that didn’t ask for the situation it’s in.”

Is this why you haven’t killed me?

“Besides the nonfunctioning hands bit? In part.”

She sensed him following the line of her unvoiced reasoning back into the depths of her head, but he didn’t pursue it or reel it in like a fish coming up from deep water.

“Hey, Ice,” Oki called in greeting from behind the reception desk.

Isa went and peered over the top of the desk. Oki bent over the computer. Isa caught a glimpse of what looked like a spreadsheet. “What are you doing?”

“Shop taxes.”

Isa’s heart froze in her chest.
Her
taxes. She’d forgotten.

Nathalie had a guy with long blond hair, a navy peacoat, and bubblegum pink eye shadow running from his eyelashes to his temples filling out piercing disclosure forms.

Troy sat inking a client with quick, sure strokes of the machine.

“Oki, you don’t need to do that. I can . . .”

Oki waved her silent. “What’s a double major good for?”

Isa lifted her eyebrows. “Double?”

“Business and a newly declared Japanese Studies major,” she said, grinning at her. “Don’t know how long the business major will last. There’s discussion underway about me transferring to a university outside of Tokyo. I’d finish my degree and work at the association library.”

“Tell her about how the head of the Japanese Live Ink organization tried to talk you into a library science major, too,” Nathalie said.

“Triple major?”

“Oh, hell, no,” Oki said. “That’s why you’re taking advantage of my accounting classes while you can.”

The bell on the door chimed. A prickle of warning walked up Isa’s spine.

Murmur stirred with an internal rustle of sharp claws and leathery wings.

“Hi,” Nathalie said. “How can I help you?”

“We’re looking for Isa Romanchzyk,” a woman said.

Isa turned.

And started.

She knew the woman from her picture in the Live Ink trade magazine Isa subscribed to out of a sense of duty more than anything else. The man at the woman’s side Isa didn’t know, but from the charcoal business suit, the briefcase, and the practiced way he rested his weight evenly on his feet as if prepared to wait forever for a call to action, she suspected he was a lawyer. What was the woman’s name?

When Isa turned her gaze inward at Murmur, he flipped her off and turned away.

“I have a cat who is far more practiced in snubbing than you are,” she said internally.

It earned her a rumble of anger, quickly suppressed.

She was on her own. She pictured the last issue of the trade mag she’d paged through. The woman’s picture had been beside her column, her loopy signature at the bottom.

Isa had it. Without his help.

Margot Herman.

“Welcome to Nightmare Ink, Ms. Herman,” she said.

The woman’s brown eyes assessed Isa with a quick rake up and down before meeting Isa’s gaze.

She vibrated with energy. Clean, clear, liquid blue magic sparked and glittered in the air around her. Was she that powerful that the etheric couldn’t contain her magic? Or was she so sloppy that she allowed it to bleed through?

“She wants you on the defensive, you pathetic moron,” Murmur snapped through Isa’s mouth. “It’s the only excuse for bleeding all over the floor like an amateur.”

Never mind that the pair of them had just bled all over the sidewalk outside the dead AMBI agent’s apartment.

Margot’s magic winked out.

So. Affectation.

“Come on in,” Nathalie said as she bustled her customer out of reception and into the back room.

“Meeting rudeness with rudeness makes everyone wrong,” Isa noted aloud, wresting control of her vocal chords from Murmur. Inwardly, she said, “Well done.”

Fuck off
.

“You’re Isa Romanchzyk,” the woman said. “And I presume that was your tattoo addressing you through you.” She put on a smile, stretched out a hand and stepped forward. “I’m Margot Herman, president of the Live Ink Association.”

“Forgive me, Ms. Herman for not shaking hands, but I’m afraid mine aren’t quite healed enough for it yet,” Isa said, lifting malformed hands.

The woman recoiled.

“How can I help you?”

Margot lowered her hand and smiled.

Murmur yanked a picture of a grinning tiger shark out of Isa’s memory and flashed it at her.

“We have concerns when one of our members appears to be accusing a fellow member of wrongdoing.”

“No appears to it, Ms. Herman,” Isa said. “How much money would I have to ‘donate’ to the cause to merit the same protection you’re affording Daniel?”

“All members are equal,” Margot shot. “It’s in the bylaws.”

“I’ve read them. Your interpretation of equal gives me pause.”

“And the association would like to inform you that your membership is hereby revoked,” the woman said, a note of vindication in her tone.

“You can’t do that!”

“Oh, but we can,” she simpered in a syrupy voice. “Also in the bylaws.”

The lawyer reached into his briefcase and made a show of producing an envelope. He placed it on the counter beside Isa, when scowling, she declined to take it.

“We’re not at all happy with you destroying other artists’ work.”

“But you’re okay with that work killing people?” Isa protested. “You sure have some twisted priorities, lady.”

“I take notice when a member vanishes for weeks and then reappears to begin making accusations against another member in good standing.”

Isa noted that she wasn’t the member in good standing.

“The bastard kidnapped her and nearly killed her!” Oki snapped.

“Mr. Alvarez is touring Europe with a Live Ink exhibition and has been for weeks,” the woman countered. “Ms. Romanchzyk, I don’t doubt you were the victim of a truly horrific crime, but it simply isn’t possible for Mr. Alvarez to be in two places at one time. It’s likely, given the trauma you endured, that your recall is affected. Doesn’t it make more sense that you were taken by one of the rogue inkers in the city? Someone whose work you routinely destroy?”

No mistaking the hatred and disdain in that last question.

Deserved,
Murmur snapped.
You kill Ink.

Isa tried shaking him out of her head, even knowing it wouldn’t work. Stupid, letting her attention drift.

It looked like Daniel had the Live Ink Association in his back pocket.

Different pocket,
Murmur said inside her head.
He’s screwing her.

Repulsed, Isa shuddered. She didn’t even want to know what he sensed that made him say it. She retrieved the phone Steve had given her and dialed.

Margot frowned.

Steve picked up on the second ring. “Isa. You dialed in on the precinct number. What’s wrong?”

“Detective Corvane,” she said. “I have a pair of visitors in the shop who’ve been in communication with Daniel Alvarez.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yep.”

“Who?”

“The president of the Live Ink Association, Margot Herman, and a gentleman who, I assume, is the association lawyer,” she said.

Margot’s frown deepened, and her magic popped back into shimmering life around her. The phone call had made her mad. Goaded by emotion, she’d lost grounding. Sloppy.