Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) (20 page)

“Go around the corner at the end of the hall,” Antonia told her, yanking Isa’s grimy jacket on and zipping it up halfway in imitation of the way Isa had worn it.

The man, Salvatore, Isa gathered, put on Jaiden’s jacket.

“
Bueno
,” Emanuel said. “You have food. Water. We will leave. To anyone watching, you will be leaving with me. Stay inside. Stay quiet. Ria or I will be back.”

“This isn’t a good idea,” Isa said. “You and Ria know where I am. You can be used to find me.”

Emanuel snorted. “No one uses Ria.” He walked out, Antonia and Salvatore on his heels.

Isa glanced at Jaiden.

He pressed his lips together and shook his head. No talking until they were alone in the building.

She waited.

The truck driver brought office chairs, a tiny desk, and finally a big, flat cardboard box containing a twin mattress. He folded the cardboard down to a thick bundle he could tuck under one arm, grinned at them, winked, and stomped out of the room.

His boots thudded on the concrete, dwindling. The front door shut with a clang that set the pulse she thought had frozen solid to thumping in her ears. The bolt running home rang through the hallways.

Isa blew out a slow, measured breath that fogged visibly out of her mouth.

“You were told to seek the tribe, Irene,” Jaiden said.

Isa tensed. Bruised muscles in her neck complained. Here they were, finally able to say everything that couldn’t be said in front of others.

“That’s right, I was,” she said. “I said no.”

He stared at her as if the words made no sense. “You said no.”

“I’m an exile, Jaiden,” she snapped. “I seem to be the only one clear that it means forfeiting the right to run home to the reservation.”

“Necessitating that I come to you,” he retorted. “You’ve deprived our family of yet another Singer.”

“I didn’t ask you to come.”

“No, you didn’t. Ruth did that for you.”

Anger rushed out of Isa. Sorrow stayed behind, sticky and hopeless. “You’ve seen her?”

He studied her. “Haven’t you?”

“All of them,” she said. “First in the Otherworld, then here. I thought I was imagining it. But they’ve been—helping me.”

“Imagination? Irene. Of all people, you should know better,” he chided.

She rolled her eyes. “Says the man who never suffered a moment’s self-doubt.”

“Only concerning you.”

Rubbing the chaff marks on her blue wrists, Isa looked away, focusing on her hands instead. Scratches marred her knuckles. They should have been red. Inflamed. Bloody. They were blue. Cold. Isa sighed and dropped her hands to her sides before turning back to face her cousin.

“What is that?” he asked, his gaze following the swing of her hands. “What’s happened to you?”

She shook her head. “I’ll get you a ticket home. Somehow. I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I came because my aunt asked me to help my cousin and my people.”

“Why does my dilemma with a Living Tattoo have anything to do with the Diné? The Navajo Nation,” Isa corrected, not certain she had the right to the word of a language she wasn’t supposed to know.

“You believe your struggle cannot touch those of us you imagine you left in your past? That is the reason you wouldn’t come home?” he surmised.

Her cousin had always seen through her so easily. How had she forgotten? “The mess is mine, even if I didn’t make it. Entirely,” she said by way of agreement. “Being imprisoned made it hard to hop a flight. Beyond that, I saw no need to expose myself to more declarations that I’m not one of you and never will be.”

“Three wise elders adopted you,” he said, “brought you up in our ways . . .”

“Half in, half out,” Isa corrected. “They never would teach me the language.”

“And yet you speak more Navajo than some of our peers.”

“Probably not anymore.”

“Those three elders made sure you belonged, Irene.”

“Elders I’m accused of killing,” she said. “They aren’t there to shield me from the people who believe I should never have been brought into the heart of the Diné to begin with, Jaiden.”

“We all know Ruth, Joseph, and Henry aren’t precisely dead.”

“Not ‘we all know,’” she said. “I know. You know. My former tattoo knows . . .”

“He’s the problem. Or part of it,” Jaiden said.

Isa snorted at the understatement. Murmur was a problem she had no intention of discussing. Not even with Jaiden. She stalked to the box of clothes and picked it up by the creased, dog-eared cardboard flaps.

“From what you aren’t saying, I gather there’s more to the story of your tattoo than anyone is telling me,” Jaiden said. “I know enough about Living Tattoos to know that in the rare instances they come off, it is because the host lacked the magic to hold the tattoo’s spirit. That was not your problem, was it?”

She hesitated in the doorway. “No.”

Her cousin eyed her. “Don’t both the host and the tattoo usually die?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t die,” he said. “Your tattoo didn’t, either, did he?”

Isa drew a deep breath. Her eyebrows climbed without her permission. “I hope no one else has your perception.”

Her cousin smiled.

“You knew,” she accused. “You can’t have talked to Troy or Nathalie before you bought a ticket and flew up here. How did you know?”

“A vision.”

Isa met his level gaze. “That bad?”

“Irene, the vision itself was bad enough, but the fact is, you’re turning blue,” he said. “Ruth, Joseph, and Henry came to me. They tell me you’re dying. Henry insists on a healing ceremony.”

“A healing ceremony?” Isa echoed. “Jaiden, we can’t stay here.”

“We can’t leave,” Jaiden said. “You saw the soldiers. They’re on every road out of the city.”

“Then we don’t leave the city,” she said.

“Your friends went to great lengths to help protect you,” he noted.

Isa drew her brows together. “Ria seems to have thought of everything.”

“But?”

“I’m not a friend. I’m a tool,” she said. “An inanimate object that’s skating the fine line of being more trouble than she’s worth. I’m alive only because of what I can do for him.”

Jaiden blinked, a slow, deliberate gesture. One he used to hide a quick, calculating mind. He shook his head. “Nothing about you has ever been easy, has it? You need healing.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Not fast enough,” he bit out. “When your tattoo came off, I believe that more than blood and magic were sundered. Your soul tore. Without meeting your tattoo, I can’t say for certain, but I am willing to bet his tore, too.”

Frowning, she studied him. “So what? Most hurts scab over and finally heal, even if they leave a scar.”

“If you had healed, Irene, I wouldn’t be here,” Jaiden said.

Tearing pain deep inside punctuated the truth of his claim. Weariness lapped up over her head. She sighed. “I’m going to clean up.”

He nodded.

She found the bathroom where Antonia had said. She’d expected to have to take a sponge bath in a sink, but there was a tiny shower stall tucked into the corner.

The clothes Ria had supplied were new. Jeans, T-shirt, and a sweatshirt, each with tags dangling from them. Under the clothes, she found a toothbrush, toothpaste, both sealed in the packages, and a pump bottle of antibacterial soap.

An advance against the teardrop tattoo she knew he still needed? She didn’t have the right to care. After turning a rogue tattoo on Lawrence and Dick, Isa had no room to judge Ria’s execution of his wounded gang member.

Isa transferred the two sheets of stasis paper from her bra, laying them atop the pile of clean clothes. She then brushed her teeth before taking the bottle of soap into the shower. She didn’t even wait for the water to warm. External heat made no difference to the frost encasing her spirit. She scrubbed clean, dried with the bright orange towel provided, and dressed. She transferred the notebook from her one pair of jeans to the other.

The cat tattoo went into the other back pocket.

She put the griffin in her front pocket.

No hair dryer. She combed the snarls out of her hair, and left it hanging before returning to the room.

Jaiden sat in one of the chairs, hands folded, his head hanging. He lifted his face to eye her. “You look more comfortable.”

“Much.”

“Your friend, Ria.”

She nodded.

“The man is soul sick, Irene.”

“Yes.”

Jaiden frowned. “You could help him.”

“He hasn’t asked.”

Her cousin’s expression cleared.

“Then you know you have to ask for my help before I can heal.”

“Yes,” she said, still parsing what Jaiden had said about her soul tearing. Murmur’s, too. Was that why she sometimes tasted his kiss when he was nowhere near? Was that hint of smoke and caramel what had kept the griffin from killing her? “When our souls tore, do you suppose my tattoo ended up with part of mine, and I with part of his?’

“Unofficial diagnosis,” her cousin said, lifting one shoulder. “I’m a singer. You’re the diagnostician.”

“Ruth trained me to diagnose the ills of your patients so you could compose the proper prayers,” she corrected. “I never actually did it.”

“You diagnosed Berta,” Jaiden said, naming a woman from his father’s side of the family that every kid Isa and Jaiden had known had grown up calling Aunt Berta.

“That was a test and no one was supposed to know,” Isa said.

He smiled. “They were proud of you.”

She cringed beneath a surge of guilt. No need to ask which
they
. Ruth. Joseph. Henry.
Were
. She closed stinging eyes. She’d certainly failed to live up to expectation, hadn’t she?

Isa opened her eyes because weariness rushed to paint hemorrhaging pictures of the night’s violence on the insides of her eyelids. “What made you come all this way, rather than calling me, Jaiden?”

“Because with this wound you carry, you’re bleeding magic and secrets that aren’t yours to spill,” he said. Distant screams and rattling, bare bones underpinned the grim note in his voice.

The flesh of her back crawled. Isa hunched her shoulders. The small hairs at the back of her neck lifted. “Damn it, there’s a Skinwalker?”

“You didn’t know?”

“It didn’t occur to me. It should have.”

“Hard to think of everything in the midst of trauma,” he said. “You’re tied to us whether we want it or not. Whether you want it or not. The rift in your soul is dangerous to all of us. Two people have died. My songs and chants aren’t enough to close the defenses your crisis is breaching at home.”

Isa blanched. “How is this my fault?” Why was she so certain it was? Even before she’d been accused?

“Your magic is inextricably tied up with Ruth, Joseph, and Henry. Because you’re fragmented, your anchor point in the spirit of the Diné has become a doorway for things better left in the dark places.”

The portal. Uriel. A shudder traced the frosted matrix of her bones. She’d always imagined the portal had been located inside the hold of a huge rust bucket of a commercial fishing boat moored on the boat canal just inside the locks separating the fresh water of Lake Union from the salt water of Puget Sound.

What if she’d had it wrong and the portal between Murmur’s world and hers was inside her? Inside Murmur?

It would take both of their lives to close it.

And now that Isa had the griffin on stasis paper, it seemed she and Murmur were adversaries.

Again.

She dug blue fingertips into the skin at her temples. “I am a doorway into the spirit of the people?”

“We have to reunite you with your tattoo.”

She gaped at him, already shaking her head. Denying him? Or the longing twining through the icy reaches of her? “Then we’re doomed. He came into this world and into my psyche in pursuit of his freedom. We achieved that. I won’t take it from him.”

Jaiden rose, incredulity in the lift of his brows. “You’d sacrifice your people for one man?”

“You’re asking me to sacrifice a man’s life and freedom in a bid to stop a Skinwalker,” Isa countered. “Is it even possible to stop that kind of evil with evil of our own?”

He spun and slapped his palms against the wall.

She flinched. That had to sting.

Jaiden sighed. “I trained hard. Mastery of myself came so easily. Maybe too easily. Not even a few hours in your company and I’m losing my temper as if I hadn’t trained every hour of the past sixteen years.”

“I get under a lot of people’s skin. It’s a curse of some kind.”

He straightened and put his back to the wall. “It’s not that, Irene. You matter. You always have. You don’t get under my skin. You’ve been inside of me in a way I can’t understand, much less define, from the moment Joseph brought you out of the desert as a wide-eyed, terrified child.”

She froze. Deer in the headlights of a semi that felt like it had already hit her. She didn’t know what he saw in her expression, but he smiled, genuinely amused.

“I’ve never understood your self-doubt, Irene,” he said. “Not when your moral compass is true. Come home.”

That broke her paralysis. “No.”

Jaiden blew out an audible breath.

“Do you know why they’d never teach me the language?” Isa blurted out.

He lifted an eyebrow.

“Ruth said it was because that while she’d adopted me and that made me one of the Diné, I wasn’t the same blood. I wasn’t tied to the land by the blood in my veins. She said that the reservation wasn’t my place. And that once I found my place, and my people, I’d need to learn to speak their language.”

He grunted as if recognition had punched him in the stomach.

“She was right,” Isa said. “I have found my place, Jaiden. I don’t know how this moss-and-drizzle-ridden city could be it, but I am home. Even in this building I never wanted to see again. Sorry.”

“Then we work with that.”

“What?”

“Like it or not, you’re getting my healing services,” he said. “We have to close that door. Before anyone else dies.”

“I’m on the run, Jaiden.”

“You’re Diné, Irene,” he said, one side of his mouth canted upward in a bitter smile. “If this is your home, you’re being hunted in your place of power.”

Her place of power? All that power, every last mote of the warmth generated by her will to live, had been torn from her like a page from a notebook. She studied Jaiden for several seconds.

He met her gaze for a minute, then finally looked away.

“Are you hunting me, too, Singer?” Isa asked. “We both know what I’m becoming. What I’ve become.”

Power leaped from his gaze when it rushed back to meet hers. “You are not a Skinwalker. It is the rift, Irene. You are no longer whole.”

“I never was.”

He spread his fingers in a gesture of defeat. “You’re less so now.”

“I killed two men last night.”

“The charge is true?” He stared at her. “Why?”

She told him.

“Did those men deserve their deaths in the claws of that creature?”

Isa opened her mouth to snap “yes.” A glimmer of sunshine stirred within her and altered the shape of the word on her tongue. “I don’t know.”

“Those men did not die by your hand.”

“Close enough. I could have tried harder to stop the griffin,” she countered.

Jaiden canted his head as if listening to something more than her words. “You said the creature is incredibly powerful. More powerful than you?”

“Easily.” She sighed out her relief at her assured answer. “You don’t believe I’m a Skinwalker?”

“No. You may yet have to atone for those deaths, I cannot say. It isn’t my place to weigh such things, but you are not a Skinwalker. Not yet.”

“Someone in the tribe told the AMBI I was.”

“I remember. Not everyone agreed,” he said. “Besides. Truth is mutable. You know that.”

“Based on perception and wishful thinking? Yes. I do remember Henry saying that.” For no good reason, that made her smile.

“Very well,” Isa said. “I can’t stay here. The police are currently too busy to recall that I’ve tattooed a bunch of Ria’s gang members. That won’t last. It’s a matter of time before the police begin following Emanuel straight here.”

Jaiden’s eyes widened.

“You aren’t carrying a cell phone, are you?” she asked.

“Turned off,” he said. “Ria warned me it could be tracked.”

“Welcome to the fringes of criminal life,” she said.

The discordant rasp of the bolt being unlocked on the front door scraped its fingernails along the walls.

Both of them froze.

Isa didn’t hear the door open, only the deep bass gong of the metal hitting the railing outside. Someone raised the roll-up door on the back of a truck.

“Where’d they want this stuff?” a familiar masculine voice yelled.

Scowling so she wouldn’t grin, Isa peeked out the doorway of the room.

Jaiden put a hand on her shoulder, pressed his lips, and shook his head, when she glanced at him.

“That’s Troy,” Isa whispered.

Jaiden’s hand fell away. He breathed a near silent laugh.

Troy, dressed in a blue coverall, carrying a pair of cardboard boxes, came through the front door.

Nathalie, robin’s egg blue curls bobbing, followed in his wake.

Another man followed on her heels, also in blue coveralls, and hefting boxes, but Isa would have recognized the sandy brown hair and lean frame anywhere.

“Steve!” she rasped.

It had come out little more than a whisper, but all three of her friends arrowed in on the sound.

A grin split Troy’s face. He strode down the hall, driving Isa back into the room as he squeezed through the door. He deposited his boxes against one wall and crossed to wrap a hand around her arm.

“Good to see you,” he rumbled.

Nathalie rushed into the room and up to Isa as if she intended to throw herself into Isa’s arms. She drew up short, gulping and sniffling.

Troy’s hand fell away.

Isa should hug her friend. It’s what people did. Normal ones. Wasn’t it?

Steve came through the door, lines of rage and maybe worry, etched deep into his forehead. The shadows in his face lifted the moment his gaze met hers.

The cold inside didn’t thaw, but weight she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying lifted.

He dropped his boxes, closed the distance in two strides, and gathered her into his arms.

For a moment, she allowed herself to relax into his hold, to return his embrace, and imagine what it would be like to have it be everything she needed.