Nightmare Ink (30 page)

Icy silver magic slammed into her, knocking her out of her body. She fell through the etheric. She spiraled through the river of magic flowing through her and landed spread-eagled in the sand.

Isa watched, stunned, as the gold and white dust cloud raised by her impact drifted on the desert breeze. The sky was blue. Not sun-bleached old bones. Blue. Glittering yellow sunlight warmed her face.

She climbed to her feet, shoulders heavy and aching. The scent of sweet, fresh sage surrounded her. So did evidence of Murmur’s presence. There were shadows. Honest to goodness, ink black shadows being cast by brush, rocks, and trees.

“You believe you and your pathetic female are a match for me?” the creature’s voice rippled like a glacial stream. “I will rip her apart the same way I did your brat.”

He thought she was Murmur?

She turned her back to the sun and had to shield her eyes with an arm that didn’t look right at all. Were those talons?

Murmur’s nemesis hung in the sky of her—their—refuge. Silver wings, gleaming robes, white curls cascading from his head. His cold light seared away shadow.

“She weakens you,” the beautiful monster said, descending. “You’ve lost your edge. You swore to tear me into a million shining pieces, ingest them, and pass my remains through your digestive tract.”

His utter deadpan delivery, and the fact that Isa could hear Murmur saying it, startled a laugh from her. She dropped her arm back to her side.

Her mirth dimmed his silver light. He bared his teeth and clenched his fists. The pure, unadulterated loathing in the look he turned upon her drove her back a step.

She flung her wings wide as she backpedaled.

Wings?

Isa spread her fingers and stared at her hands. They weren’t her hands. They were Murmur’s.

She tensed her muscles. Her wings beat. She lifted an inch from the ground. Dust swirled in eddies and miniature dust devils. Her heart soared.

The angel body slammed her into a rock outcrop.

“Did I snuff out your spirit all those eons ago?” He pounced, pinning her to the stone. “You are no longer a worthy opponent.”

“That may be,” she rasped through vocal chords that weren’t her own. The sound resonated through a much larger chest. “But you have a serious perception problem, asshole.”

The angel’s lip curled.

“I am not him, and you’re on sacred ground.”

He started back.

Isa straightened and threw wide the doors to magic. Intertwined black and amber flooded her.

A raven cawed. With a rush of feathered wings and sweet-smelling air, she landed on the rock beside Isa. Isa recognized the Living Tattoo she’d put on Ruth.

From behind the rocky outcrop, a coyote’s hunting yip sounded, lifting the hair at the back of Isa’s neck. Hoary fur brushed her leg. The coyote glared at the angel, his muzzle wrinkled in a silent snarl that mirrored Joseph’s expression of disdain perfectly.

A striped lizard walked across her hand, its cool, dry sandpaper scales reminding her of the touch of Henry’s calloused hands on hers when he’d taught her sand painting.

Joy broke free within her, mingling with the potent blend of magic gathering at her core. She hadn’t killed them.

“Skinwalker,” Isa said to Daniel’s Live Ink. “You have no power over me or mine. This is sacred ground, and you are not welcome here.”

His breath hissed in between clenched teeth as if he sensed the gathering storm within her. “You are a thing of evil.”

“Look who’s calling the kettle black,” she said. Power foamed and boiled behind the gates of her will. She shaped her intention into a channel and whispered a command.

Magic roared like a freight train down the path she’d chosen.

He threw himself away from her. Silver flashed. Shielding.

Good idea.

Wrong location.

Following the flow of power up and out, Isa rode the energy into awareness. She jolted into her much smaller physical body.

For a second, she experienced herself as both Isa and Murmur all at once. Wings folded, constrained and too tight, around a feminine frame, all while she was the feminine frame so enfolded.

The spell she’d shaped hit Daniel and his angelic monster in the one place they hadn’t imagined they were vulnerable, where the Live Ink anchored in Daniel’s twisted soul.

Daniel bellowed. Two voices. One throat.

Behind him, a door clanged open. Five pieces of rogue Ink swarmed the doorway. Screams sounded, and then gunfire.

Daniel seemed to not notice. He threw a bolt of magic.

One of his hooks pierced Isa, setting into her diaphragm. She registered the puncture wounds, but then Daniel hauled back on the line, pulling some vital, nonphysical part of her. Pain sliced her neck where Murmur’s fangs sank into her jugular.

NO!

Was that fear in Murmur’s voice?

Her wings ached with the need to stretch out, to tear free and spread wide.

Stop it!

He clung tighter. She could barely breathe.

Daniel, his pale eyes wild, strode into the center of the glimmering symbols, his knife in his white-knuckled hand.

A fleck of red wet his white shirt. The stain grew by the second. His Ink, coming off.

The screams behind Daniel had stopped. So had the gunfire.

The unrelenting pull at her center began breaking things—as much the threads that tied her to herself as those that wove Murmur into her. Agony rang through her as the bonds binding them stretched tighter. The pain in her neck sharpened. Something warm and wet dribbled down her throat.

“Murmur! Don’t go!” Isa wailed.

Daniel threw a backhanded blow across her ribs. The knife flashed in his fist. Her ribs burned in a thin line below her breasts.

Hissing words in a language the human mouth wasn’t meant to speak, Daniel and his monster sketched more symbols on either side of her. The brush of their magic, tainted now by the flow of blood, made her sick to her stomach.

The light of the doorway dimmed. One shadow crept into the room. Another followed.

One of the threads tying Murmur into her snapped and recoiled. She cried out.

Daniel laughed and unlocked her manacles. Her legs wouldn’t hold her. She sank to sitting on the floor. Daniel followed.

“Why aren’t you dead?” she grated.

“Poor Isa, you’re never quite enough, are you? With enough power and knowledge, not only is it possible to prevent a tattoo from separating from its host, it’s possible to survive Live Ink coming off entirely.”

From working on Helen and the mermaid, she and Murmur knew how it would work—consciously unraveling their bond and healing the wounds as they went—like picking off a scab and blotting the fresh blood with every millimeter gained.

Nausea hit them both. They shuddered.

“You’ve done neither,” she said.

“I will,” he snapped.

“Daniel Alvarez! You’re under arrest!” a male voice boomed through the vast, metal echo chamber. “Get that circle open.”

Her breath hitched. “Steve! Don’t!”

“Time to die,” Daniel and the angelic monster said.

Voices swore in Spanish. Was that Ria and his gang?

Isa heard Steve swear. More voices rose in fear and anger. She couldn’t see past Daniel.

SHIELD!
Murmur roared.

Defenses winked into place, but it cost another of the threads binding them. The blood at her neck ran faster.

Daniel wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her chest against his. Her jacket bunched between them. He uttered a command in that hair-raising language.

Silver, yellow, and red shot up from the symbols beneath her. The shield shunted the flow of power around them.

Daniel stabbed, aiming for her physical heart.

Murmur threw a solid wall between her and the knife. It slid off, sounding like a stick on the washboard of her ribs.
Tock, tock, tock.

Dim, distant physical pain sounded an alarm in her head to go with the voices shouting outside the circle.

Another thread of her connection to Murmur popped.

Isa screamed.

Daniel growled in disgust.

Heal. I’ll disengage.

“No!” she shouted, summoning magic and slicing the silver line of magic pulling Murmur from her.

Isa. Heal. Trust me.

“Why not ask me for something I’m good at?”

Murmur smiled with her lips and nodded her head once.

Trembling, she gathered power. It answered so eagerly, running through her veins in tongues of shadow fire. She extracted Daniel’s hook and insinuated a bolt of their magic into the structure of the spell.

Murmur shunted some of the energy to his purpose, cutting free bits of her and pieces of him.

Physical hurts she could heal. The heart wound that would come of losing him—

NOW.

She shoved Daniel’s fishing hook out past her shield, through Daniel’s Ink, and into his bleeding chest, solidified her shield, and then she blew his cursed hook to hell. Inside of him.

Two voices screamed from his throat.

Murmur shoved the wall of palpable magic at them.

Daniel’s knife turned away from Isa.

Daniel jerked. His pale blue eyes went wide. His breath rushed out across her face. Yellow-red magic exploded across the surface of her shield. Silver followed.

The circle around them fell. Containment breached.

Daniel slumped into her.

She smelled blood. At least she could see now, even through the pulsing, bright flare of silver light streaming from the symbols on the floor around her.

Bodies crowded the doorway.

Much closer, Steve struggled to reach her, his face a blue-white she’d never seen before. Bishop’s python tattoo wrapped around his chest, its fangs sunk in Steve’s shoulder.

Steve faltered. Fell.

Her heart tripped. The python wriggled free, turning sly, predatory eyes upon her.

And from the etheric, she heard/felt a bolt in a door thrown back.

The portal.

Isa gathered everything she had, everything she was, and slammed it into the structure of the symbols streaming unearthly magic from Murmur’s plane into hers.

Emanuel, carrying what looked like one of his ice phoenix’s feathers, attacked the python, slicing it to magic-hemorrhaging pieces.

ISA!
Murmur wailed.

Instead of healing, she blew apart the portal spell.

Power exploded, leaving her untouched at the epicenter.

Every living thing in the room collapsed.

Murmur ripped out her throat.

Isa slid into oblivion.

Midnight and fireflies crushed her.

Fire seared Isa’s neck. Her ribs. The formless, echoing, empty spaces in her soul. That pain convinced her she wasn’t dead. Not yet.

She reached for Murmur.

No answer.

She opened her eyes.

Daniel leaned over her, worry in the pucker between his brows, his emerald eyes dark with fear.

Adrenaline kicked her in the gut. She gasped and shoved him away.

“Isa,” he said, “stop. I need you.”

That low rumble wasn’t Daniel. Neither were those eyes.

Where had she seen them? “Murmur?”

He nodded and attempted a tremulous smile with Daniel’s lips.

She stared. She couldn’t seem to shake any sense out the vast, deserted cavern inside her head. She levered herself to sitting.

Bodies lay strewn throughout the room.

When she thought to look with more than her physical eye, every last hint of magic had vanished as if it had never existed, except for a fading glimmer of smiling blue sky.

“Steve!” Isa scrambled the three feet to where he lay, his wide-open eyes staring out of his blue-tinged face. Blood foam flecked his lips. She touched his face with trembling fingers, grief and horror burning her from the inside. His eyes focused on her, and his breath rattled out in a whisper. “Isa.”

“Don’t.”

“Sorry.”

“Steve? Don’t go. I need . . .”

He relaxed. Air burbled out. His gaze lost focus. No inhalation followed.

She should be brave. She should choke out the blessing for the dead that Ruth had taught her. It would help Steve’s spirit on its journey.

She couldn’t. She couldn’t get anything past the shards of glass in her throat. Isa buried her face in Steve’s immobile chest and cried for them both.

Hands smoothed over her shoulders. “Heal him.”

Murmur using Daniel’s vocal chords.

She twisted away. “It’s too late.
I’m
too late.”

“Heal him,” he insisted, taking her hand. “Come with me. I’ll help you.”

A tickle of black power caressed her palm. It nudged her into a cushion of golden sunshine untainted by fractals of ebony. Even in magic now, she was alone.

She expected to step into the etheric with him. Instead, she landed in the desert. Blue sky, warm sun, and the scent of new sage greeted her. The hand she held here in this otherworld seemed much larger than the one her physical self gripped.

“Isa.”

She turned to face him and gaped. In this place, in their refuge, she knew him.

Murmur wore his true form.

Funny. Tears translated across the planes. Sobbing, she threw herself into his arms. And wings.

He enfolded her, resting his chin atop her head. A long sigh went out of him.

She couldn’t tell if she was trembling or if he was.

A raven chuckled beside them.

“Call magic,” Murmur said into her hair. “Every iota you can spare. Everything these spirits who are more than they seem will lend you.”

Isa straightened and pulled away, scrubbing moisture from her cheeks.

Joseph-Coyote sat on his haunches before her, tongue lolling, and yellow eyes twinkling. Ruth-Raven perched in a pinyon. Henry-Lizard darted up the sandstone monolith beside her. He paused at eye level, his striped tail twitching.

“I’ve come to raise the dead,” she said to her family. “Will you help?”

“He isn’t quite dead, yet,” Murmur corrected, squeezing her hand. “Hurry.”

She grounded, and then she called with every ounce of pain and longing laced through her spirit. Magic surged to fill the void inside until she thought she’d burst into flame. Still she summoned, tapping the love she could now admit bound her to the surrogate family she’d inadvertently built at Nightmare Ink, including Steve. Brilliant, blinding power slammed through every fiber of her.

She couldn’t contain it. Magic spilled out of her through her hand into Murmur. He gasped. Burning hot ebony flowed into her from his grasp, mingling with her bright sunshine power, lending it shadow and depth.

She smiled.

“Bring it all with you,” he murmured at her side. “Now we heal.”

A simple nudge put her back in her body. Her wet face was still buried in Steve’s silent chest, and one hand was still clasped in Daniel’s. Murmur’s.

“Now,” he said.

She shoved fierce light and shadow into the broken body beneath her touch.

Murmur’s ink dark magic thundered through Isa into Steve.

Steve’s crushed ribs knit as if they’d never been broken. Lacerated lungs healed. Pooled blood vanished, burned away by the furnace of combined energy. The puncture wounds in Steve’s shoulder closed.

But his heart didn’t beat.

No hint of Steve remained.

“Put him back.”

“What?”

“You called him. You carried him back with you when you summoned with everything you feel, everything you are.”

“I can’t have,” she protested, straightening to stare down at Steve’s healed but still dead corpse. “I’m not enough.”

“You are. You freed me.”

She thought she’d finished crying. “Show me?”

The flecks of his magic gathered within her at her center. Coalescing, the whispers of Murmur’s presence rose to a spot behind her heart.

Steve curled there, as if asleep, inside a crystal box.

One childhood fairy tale too many?

She knew then what had to happen. She had the key. She was the key. And she hesitated to open that container and guide Steve back into his body. Because that box contained everything.

His life.

His death.

How he’d been made whole once again.

He’d hate the fact that Murmur had anything to do with restoring him. He might loathe her.

She could let his spirit go. She should. It was the right thing to do. But she was a selfish coward.

Isa unsealed the crystal, wrapped Steve’s spirit in the gentlest breath of gold and black magic she could manage, and stuffed him into his dead body.

Murmur sealed him in with magic. “Your fairy tale. Wake him.”

“Snow White? Wake him with a kiss?” Isa gasped.
Not a kiss, dummy. CPR.
She tilted Steve’s head back, opened his mouth, and blew a puff of air into his perfect lungs.

“Can you start his heart?” she asked.

Sirens sounded in the distance, coming closer. Her pulse jumped.

Murmur pressed a hand to Steve’s chest. The energy he used tugged at her core.

“We have to get you out of here,” she said. She blew another breath into Steve.

“I won’t leave you,” Murmur said.

Steve exhaled. And drew in another gulp of air. On his own.

Hope lifted sharp wings within her. She turned to Murmur in Daniel’s body and squeezed the hand still clutching hers.

“Thank you,” she whispered. Heart hammering, she leaned in and touched his lips with hers. She’d meant it to be quick. Little more than a brush of skin. She didn’t think she could stand anything more. Not with him wearing Daniel’s features.

But it wasn’t Daniel she kissed.

A wave of hot, black energy swamped her, filling her with him as if he’d never left.

Murmur captured her head in his free hand and kept her there spinning out on the sensation.

She hated having to pull away to breathe. He released her as if reluctant to let go.

She touched the bloody white shirt he wore and shook her head. “I don’t know how this happened.”

“The paper in your coat pocket,” he said. “Your blood. Daniel’s lifeblood. Me, cut free. It acted as a conduit.”

A twinge of pain touched her neck. “You killed Daniel and then ripped out my throat.”

“I did. You would have survived me if you’d healed as I’d told you.”

“The portal opened. I couldn’t sacrifice my world and yours. Not in trade for my life. I had to close the door.”

He nodded, emerald eyes gleaming. Barely any trace of Daniel remained. New shadows subtly changed the planes of his face.

The sirens wailed, much closer.

“Go,” Isa said in a rush. “Before the police arrive. You’re wearing a body that’s been accused of all kinds of crime. I won’t watch you be put in prison. Not now.”

His eyes closed on a pained expression.

“You’re Daniel Alvarez,” she said.

He grimaced. She took his face in her hands. He opened those piercing green eyes.

“Hate him,” she said. “But he’s dead, and you’re free.” Her voice cracked on the last word.

Murmur raised a shaking hand to cover one of hers.

“He had resources and money. Use them. He was already sliding out from under the charges. Call his lawyer. Get clear. The information will be in the pockets of his clothes,” she said.

“I won’t lose you,” he bit out.

Moisture leaked from between her lashes. Again.

“You know where to find me.” Her hands slid from him as he rose.

Staring at her, he hesitated for a moment.

The first siren died in a screech of tires. One of the bodies nearby moaned.

Murmur pressed his lips tight and fled.

Isa buried her face in Steve’s warm, rising and falling chest. She let the tears fall.