Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) (16 page)

Isa stumbled.

The boy rebounded and fell.

She lurched to catch him a second too late.

His dark-eyed, harried-looking mother broke out in rapid Spanish. She darted a glance at Isa as she grabbed one of his arms and tried to lever him to his feet. “Sorry,
señora
.”

Isa squatted beside the boy. “Are you okay?”

The boy grimaced and scrubbed moisture from his eyes, but he nodded. “
Sí.
I think so.”

Isa rose and offered him a hand. “Will you let us help you up and make sure you’re not hurt?”

He glanced at his mother, who breathed a laugh. “Thank you,
señora
. Come on, Ria. The bus will be here soon.”

Isa sucked in a sharp breath.

“
Sí
, Momma.” The boy accepted Isa’s hand.

“Slowly,” Isa said, hauling him steadily to his feet. “Nothing hurts?”

He rubbed his backside. “Just this. You?”

“Everything still works.”

The kid grinned, hefted his pack higher on his back, and took his mother’s hand. They started walking. The boy’s groan drifted back.

“Well,” Simon said. “That was interesting.”

Isa glanced at him. Had he heard her reaction to the name
Ria
?

“The Catholic school is the other direction,” George told her as they started walking again.

She looked over her shoulder.

The mother and son had stopped walking.

“I don’t know anything about schools,” Isa said, “but they really are at the bus stop.”

George grunted.

“What?”

“Kid must be riding to the public school. My nephew used to do that. Same line,” George said. He squeezed her arm.

Isa shrugged off the elation howling across the snowfield of her interior.

Ria had found them. It was the only explanation for what had just happened. And if she didn’t wipe the grin from George’s face, Simon would know it, too.

“I hope they didn’t stunt your nephew’s growth making him carry all of his worldly possessions on his back like that,” she said.

George flinched as if she’d shocked him with a cattle prod. Then he wilted.

“No,” he grated. “He didn’t live long enough to have the chance.”

Simon glanced around George at her, his gaze accusing.

Isa tried to look horrified. “I’m sorry.”

“Maybe we’d better find something else to do tomorrow morning,” Simon said.

“Maybe so,” she said. “Is there a workout facility in the building? Walking isn’t really the exercise I hoped it would be.”

She’d spent most of her daylight hours for the past three days studying the books on Mayan mythology that had turned up.

After Simon and George dropped her at her door that morning, Isa settled in to reread pertinent parts of the Popol Vuh.

Without knocking, Lawrence opened her front door and stalked into the condo, breaking her concentration. Based on the angle of the sun, she’d gotten lost in research for the past three hours. Lawrence settled a folded newspaper atop her book.

Isa slanted a glance at him, then at the tiny, circled sidebar article. It was an obituary.
Colonel Adrian Meyer.

A picture accompanied the obit. The colonel from the camp.

Her hands shook and she couldn’t read the text. “What happened?”

“What do you think happened?”

She shook her head. No confirming his guess that her drawing might have had something to do with it. She couldn’t afford to play his game. But she also couldn’t keep the vision of the man’s blackened, scorched visage from taking over the backs of her eyeballs. Yes. She’d drawn him into the side of her picture in the solitary confinement cell. She wasn’t a child who didn’t understand concentration combined with intent.

She’d drawn the picture of the colonel bursting into flame to exorcise the temptation to lay a curse at his feet, rather than executing the actual curse. It had been a hurried, haphazard thing without any real intent behind it. It
had
felt good to draw. Had she slipped? Had she made something she’d drawn come true without meaning to?

She’d made that mistake once before.

Her nineteen-year-old cousin had died. Eventually.

It had been her fault. She’d been six. She’d learned too much since then. Surely this death couldn’t be her doing.

“It was the flu,” Lawrence said, satisfaction in his tone.

What had she let him see to put that note in his voice?

She relaxed. She hadn’t drawn that.

Not her fault.

“They couldn’t get his fever down,” Lawrence said. He took the paper, crushed it in his fist.

Paper crackled like ice-laden tree branches shattering.

“His heart burst.”

Isa’s breath caught and froze against the icicles dangling from her rib cage. Not again.

“By the way, minor security breach,” Lawrence announced. “We believe it may be necessary to relocate.”

Isa met his gaze over her book and lifted one shoulder. “Okay.”

“You have no objection?”

Ah. Fishing expedition. They suspected that someone had made contact of some kind that morning. She hoped they weren’t playing this same scenario with George. Either one of them on their own sucked at acting. Together, they’d torch themselves on the pyre of their inability to lie convincingly.

“None,” she said. Ria had found her once. She had faith her psychotic—could she call him a friend—would do it again.

“Relocation may not be necessary,” Lawrence said. “But for your safety, we’d like you to remain inside the building for the next few days.”

She nodded.

He left. Until seven that night when both Lawrence and Dick let themselves in.

“Isa. We’d like you to do a test run with us,” Dick said.

“Right now?”

“Are you comfortable with working outside of normal business hours?”

She awarded him what she hoped was an “Are you really asking me that idiotic question?” look. “Do you even know what my ‘normal’ business hours are?”

“I have a pretty solid idea, yes.”

“What will it take to break you guys of this?”

“Of what?”

Speaking with forked tongues. She’d heard a couple of her friends on the reservation using the stupid phrase about one of the other kids at the high school. Dave. They’d been mimicking every aged Western movie they’d ever seen. Their tone had been sly, ironic. Comedic, but distinctly not joking.

Isa had thought they were just being jerks. Maybe they had been, but it didn’t change the fact that the kid they’d been dissing told you what he thought you wanted to hear and then smiled while he explained how you’d misunderstood him. If psycho Dave wasn’t dead or in prison, he’d be hitting the national political stage any day.

The way the agents talked to her reminded her of Dave. It occurred to her that protesting their communication methods would only entrench them when she least wanted them talking in circles.

“What do want me to do?” Isa asked.

“We have an item that belongs to a test subject,” Dick said. “We want you to find her for us.”

She held out a hand.

Dick blinked at her.

“Let’s find out whether or not I can do this.”

He pulled a flip, spiral notebook from his coat pocket and put it in her hand.

“How long have you had this inside your aura?” Isa demanded, turning it over in her hands. Red cover. Creased and the edges tattered. The back cardboard cover had a series of multicolored ink loops drawn on it. Priming pens? Doodling?

“Does it matter?”

She rolled her eyes. “How do you guys get anything done?”

“I don’t understand.”

She shook her head. “Look. In my experience, magic isn’t a permanent structure unless it’s maintained via spells. It wears away. You can hurry that process along by blotting out someone’s magical signature with your own.”

Dick and Lawrence traded a glance. Another tick of theirs she’d come to hate. Maybe she could draw a way to break them of the habit in the notebook they’d given her. At least this time, the lowering of their brows and the slight frown on the boulder’s face told her this wasn’t a test. They were worried.

“Did I?” Dick asked.

Isa called up a golden flake of crystalline magic, shielded, and opened her magical eye. Powder blue energy, fragrant with the scent of spring, enfolded her. Young. Fresh. Powerful. If this was a test case, she’d eat the notebook.

Isa shook her head. “No. You didn’t overwrite the signature. Where did you find this?”

“Can’t you tell us?”

“Nope. If that’s a prerequisite, then I’m not qualified to help you out.”

“You seem eager to disqualify yourself,” Lawrence noted.

“Yeah, my people call it ‘being honest,’” she said. “You should try it. I have no idea how to track. I’m guessing here. I see an energy signature when I look at this notebook, but that’s it. It doesn’t spin out a web connecting it to its owner as far as I can see. There’s a chance, if I go to where you found this, that I’ll find this person’s magic and then be able to follow it.”

“You didn’t need proximity for your friend Daniel.”

“I didn’t exactly have a rousing success in trying to find him, either. We were lovers. That’s its own kind of proximity.” Or vulnerability. If they hadn’t worked it out yet, that Murmur was attuned to her, and she to him, she wouldn’t enlighten them. She hardly knew what to make of it except to acknowledge it as a huge chink in her armor.

“That was over five years ago,” Dick said.

“Yes, it was.”

“We’ll take you to where we picked up the notebook.”

They drove her to the Westlake Park, the tree-studded square across from the shopping mall, confirming what the magical signature already suggested. They were after a teenager.

They ushered her to one of the benches. Spring had finally taken strong hold of Seattle. Bright green young leaves, some still in miniature, fluttered in the lowering sun. Orange-gold, sun-going-down light slanted through the canyons of the buildings from Elliot Bay.

“The notebook was here,” Lawrence said.

“How long ago?” She reinforced her shield and opened her magical eye again. She turned a slow circle, looking for a matching hint of the magic she’d found on the notebook.

“For the purposes of this exercise, earlier today.”

Pay dirt. At the edge of the square, powder blue piled over with a spidery tracing of sly bronze magic puddled on the sidewalk. The magic told a different tale than the one Lawrence and Dick wanted her to believe.

The pool indicated that the notebook hadn’t been found. For that much color to have accumulated in one place, the girl had to have been detained and her notebook lifted.

Isa went to the sidewalk.

Shoppers, tourists, and commuters parted before her. She waded into the faint, floral-scented puddle of the girl’s magic and contemplated her options as the rush of people shied off around her the same way most of them gave wide berth to the lone panhandler working the square.

The notebook’s owner had power. A lot of it. Enough to be dangerous. Like Isa. At least the girl didn’t have Live Ink yet. Isa caught no hint of any other magic mingled with hers. Only the bronzy, sticky web clung to the girl’s trail as if trying to strangle some vital part of her.

It shimmered.

Suspicion slowed Isa’s breath. She stepped out of her body into the etheric into a field of blue flowers. Isa didn’t know what kind, save that they danced and waved like wide-open smiles, stretched as far as imagination could see. At her feet, predatory bronze power crept up and over the flowers, spinning a constricting web that choked the life out of everything it touched.

It wasn’t a dead magic form, a spill of energy left behind and forgotten. It was active. Someone was feeding the spell.

Isa wouldn’t be able to track the girl’s magic past the end of the block, where the trail wavered and vanished beneath the multicolored flow of other people’s power. No other magic tainted the tendril of color she’d left as she’d walked away. Except for this spot beneath Isa’s feet, the place the teenager had stopped—or been stopped. Why would anyone expend energy on a spell hours after the intended victim had departed? Isa intended to find out why.

In both worlds, she knelt and eased her awareness into the bronze spell matrix. She slid sideways, out of the field of blue flowers, into the etheric presence of a bloated bronze spider.

Interesting.
Most people took their mental image of themselves into the etheric—a sort of magical avatar. She certainly did. That this man had built such a grotesque etheric vision of himself made the hair at the back of her neck stir.

He chortled, and cast his web at Isa. Elation, slick and oily, oozed from him like venom.

“No more strangling the child’s etheric presence,” she said. Summoning frosty motes of gold, she froze his webs from the crumbled, brown flowers, ignoring the loops of his web slinging up and over her etheric body.

“She’s mine!” he snarled. “Stop it! You’re just the new girl. You don’t know anything! I’m the insurance policy. In case you screw up.”

“What would I screw up?”

“You don’t know tracking,” he said. “I do.”

“You never lose a target?”

“That’s right. And I’m betting you think you won’t play this our way,” he said, “but no one is stupid enough to lose a target with great potential if you’re the screw up I bet you are.”

Isa growled.

Lawrence. Dick. Max. They were playing Isa against one of their existing pets. How interesting to find they’d managed to find at least one person whose natural tendencies matched their purposes. Did she care?

Did she owe this man anything? He didn’t want rescue. That was plain in his mind and in the power he laced over her awareness. Snuffling attempts to muffle his self-satisfied laughter filled her with revulsion.

She might be cold. She might not care about anything or anyone, but her oath to the Holy Ones, and to Ruth, Joseph, and Henry, demanded that she protect the innocent.

This man didn’t qualify.

“You think you’re so smart,” he whispered into the etheric. “You’ll do what they tell you. Everyone does. They always do.”

Isa opened to the full force of her magic. It grew, swirling out from her core to the surface of her skin, one razor-edged ice crystal at a time, until she breathed out gold-tinged snowflakes into the nowhere of the etheric. She pulled a particularly vicious blade of golden ice to her hand, drew her awareness out of his spell and into her web-encased etheric body. She sliced the lines of his magic away.

Bronze threads writhed.

A shove with a pulse of her power returned them to sender. He screamed. Magic backlash could be a bitch.

Isa smiled.

The filaments he’d looped over her etheric body shriveled in the cold and fell to dust.

The blue flowers where Isa stood in the etheric realm had frozen solid. Ice crystals frosted their upturned faces. She quelled and sucked her power back inside herself. She wouldn’t help the girl by doing as much harm as the men hunting her.

She stepped back into her body and opened her physical eyes. Her breath puffed in a visible stream out of her mouth into the pleasant April evening. It looked golden.

The bronze web vanished from the sidewalk. Isa had done an unexpectedly fabulous job of obliterating the girl’s magical autograph, too. Lucky her. Not even George would be able to track the teenager now.

Isa rose. She’d gotten sloppy. Her golden signature drifted and flagged down the sidewalk like snow in the spring breeze.

An arrow of hot, black power slammed straight through her shield and knocked her on her ass. She yelped, rocketed to her feet. Panic sent her heart knocking against her ribs.

“No, don’t,” she whispered to the arrow. “Danger.”

She slammed her shield tight and ripped magic up from her center to turn the shield opaque. Reflective. Murmur’s magic froze and crumbled.

Pressure built behind her eyes. The sorrow and regret piling up there were too big, too sharp to escape via tear ducts.

“Isa!” Dick shouted right outside her circle.

Spectators had gathered a few feet behind the agents.

Anger crackled in her chest. Lawrence and Dick—and especially Max if he’d put them up to tracking a kid—had a lot to answer for.

Leaving the circle intact, as much to lock them out of her reach as to keep them from her, she turned on them. “Your target is under eighteen. What kind of threat to the United States is she, offshoot of Homeland Security? Also? The little puke you had working her over in the etheric is going to need a few days to recover from magical backlash.”

“What are you—”

“I will not help you kidnap children. You want to use my power for good? I’m all in. This isn’t it.”

Lawrence smiled. “This isn’t your decision to make.”

“Yeah. It is.”

His sigh as he pulled a cell phone from his pocket communicated satisfaction. Relish. That breath flashed out into the twilight tainted by pure, inhuman silver magic.

Isa’s lips curled.

Uriel’s magic. He was driving the men who thought to manipulate her.

Why? If he could reach and influence Lawrence, why not attack Isa directly? Because he’d been a tattoo in this world and his host was dead? Ish? Did that mean that Uriel couldn’t come through the portal? Because he didn’t have a body in this world?

The beep of Lawrence activating his phone drew her attention. He pressed a button. “Simon? Yes. Your observations regarding Ms. Romanchzyk’s instincts with children were accurate. We require a point of persuasion.”

Of course.

George.

They were going to use him to force her to do what they wanted. They couldn’t kill him without losing their leverage against her.

Which meant they’d hurt him. And go on hurting him. Until, weighing the sin of causing her friend’s torture against the sacrifice of a child’s life, Isa would crumble.

She lifted her face to the darkening sky. All the stars had been washed away by the city lights. The temptation to send a flare into the city’s aura brought power swirling up inside. It piled high, pressing heavy against her control. Isa clenched it in her icy grip.

No cry to the Seattle PD for help.

Bringing Steve into this would be as bad as dragging Murmur into Lawrence and Dick’s clutches.

Isa had gotten herself into this. She could and would get herself out. Had already set those wheels in motion with a drawing in flour and sugar. Maybe she should have swept her drawing ingredients into a bowl and made cookies of her intention.

She had to refuse to be the instrument of someone else’s evil. Isa also had to resist luring anyone else into that evil. Not Steve. Not Murmur. No matter how she craved Murmur, she hadn’t freed him to drag him back into prison. One of them had to be free to oppose Uriel. To slam the door on . . .