Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) (22 page)

Troy did, then zipped the pack and propped it beside the blanket.

Her friends had armed her. In the only way they knew how.

Troy rubbed a hand down his face. “You need to know some things.”

She looked at him.

He avoided meeting her eye. “You know the story about Lucifer and the war with heaven, right?”

“Vaguely.”

“The cogent piece of information is that Lucifer rebelled against God’s authority. When that happened, he wasn’t alone.”

Isa nodded.

“When he was cast out of heaven, his coconspirators, his generals in the war against God, became the legions of demons in hell.” He shifted, his brow crinkled. “Those former generals have names. One of them is named Murmur. He commands thirty legions of minor demons and rides a griffin into battle.”

Isa pinched the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. Ria must have told him about the episode in the alley. No one else but Jaiden had been there. “You’re saying my former tattoo really is a demon from hell?”

Did that explain the bruises on her throat?

Troy finally met her eye and shrugged. “According to Christian mythology? Yeah.”

She dropped her hand to her lap and studied him for a moment. “I didn’t realize you were a believer.”

“Recovering one,” he said. His face flushed. “This is all Kabalistic stuff. I don’t do that anymore.”

“So you do or don’t believe in hell?”

“I gotta say, Ice, at this point, I don’t know what to believe. Before I saw you with his handprints on your throat, I’d have said no. Now?”

“I named him,” Isa said. “What are the odds that out of every name on earth, I’d happen to pick that one?”

“Some psychic connection that whispered his true name to you is my best guess.”

It meshed with hers. Still. She shook her head. “Coincidence.”

“You can’t bring yourself to believe in a physical place of everlasting punishment?”

“I can. It just looks like a cinderblock room with Daniel Alvarez in it.”

He snorted, rose, and moved away.

Maybe what she’d told Kukulcan had been true. Knowledge wasn’t the only power. Love was, too. Maybe she ought to mention that to Troy, Nathalie, and Steve. Especially Steve. Someday.

“Normally,” Jaiden said into the ensuing silence, “no one but a Singer or Irene’s teachers would witness this process.”

“We’re not leaving,” Nathalie said as she pulled on a pair of gloves and laid out a sterile paper drape on the floor in front of Isa’s blanket.

Steve grunted agreement.

“You are her family,” Jaiden said. “I hadn’t believed you would.”

Nathalie’s lips twitched.

“You should know what to expect,” Jaiden said.

Troy set a long, narrow bundle of fabric on the blanket in front of Isa’s crossed legs. He winked when she glanced up.

She folded back the fabric and breathed a laugh.

Jaiden, seated in the middle of the room, leaned closer, his brows knitting. “Is that . . .”

“It is.” Her obsidian knife, the one Ruth, Joseph, and Henry had gifted her with. “Thank you.” Her traitorous voice cracked.

“Wanted you to have something,” Troy said. “Something that made me feel like you’d have protection. Even if you can’t carry a knife with you when you go.”

“It’s better than you know,” Isa said. “Jaiden and I will cast a circle. You’ve seen that before. We’ll shield. Under any circumstances, no matter what you see or hear, do not cross the circle.”

“But if I’m piercing . . .” Nathalie began.

“I will open the circle and let you out,” Jaiden assured her.

“How long will this take?” Steve asked.

Isa shook her head. “No way of knowing. It could be minutes, hours, even days.”

“Days?” Troy boggled.

“Jaiden. They all carry some power,” Isa said. “None of them knows how to shield.”

Her cousin’s eyes narrowed, disapproval in the tight set of his lips.

She nodded, accepting the reproach. “I imagined I had the luxury of more time.”

“I will handle it.”

“Thank you.”

“All set,” Nathalie said. “Since we’re doing this, do you want jewelry at the end of it all?”

“No,” Isa and Steve said in unison.

Troy chuckled.

“Don’t know what you’re missing, man,” he said to Steve.

Pink crept up Steve’s neck and cheeks. “Spare me.”

At the familiar teasing, delicious relaxation snuck over Isa’s body, despite the cold claiming her. Golden flakes of magic stirred and drifted at her core. “Everybody but Nathalie back to the far wall, please.”

Nathalie set the copal alight in one of the bowls.

High-quality charcoal. It burned clean, glowing red, and sending up only tiny wisps of wood smoke that mingled with the spicy, exotic, pine forest scent of the copal.

Isa breathed the incense and let her vision haze. Not having slept worked in her favor for once. Already, motes of shadow and light danced in her sight.

The music of Nathalie stripping her equipment from sterile packaging echoed in Isa’s ears, fading to the sigh of a breeze in palm fronds and stirring dense jungle foliage.

How could she know that? She’d never heard any such thing in her life. Until she’d dipped her fingers into a mixture of clay and Maya blue.

“Ready?” Nat whispered.

Isa nodded. Or thought she did.

“Open up. Give me your tongue. You’ll feel the clamp. I’m going to hold on,” she said. “Not too tight.”

The single slice of pizza Isa had eaten turned to cold stone in her stomach. The heart she’d thought had frozen fluttered at the touch of Nathalie’s clamp. She tasted metal and the bitter tang of alcohol.

“Relax,” Nat crooned. “No surprises. I’ll talk you through it. The thread is on the needle. You’ll feel the metal against your tongue.”

As cold as she was, maybe she’d be numb to pain. The internal glaciers had to be good for something. Didn’t they?

A burning point touched her tongue. She shuddered.

“Easy,” Nathalie said. “Take a nice, slow, deep breath in through your nose.”

Isa obeyed. The breath quivered audibly.

“Okay. Here we go. Breathe out.”

Pressure.

The taste of old pennies wet her tongue. Hurt howled a blood and gold blizzard through her head.

Isa fell out of her body into a cracked, broken glacial field. Whirls of night-stained powder danced the surface, vanishing into groaning crevasses. Twisted, rime-coated skeletons of trees and animals poked through the ice.

The snow beneath her feet sounded like desert sand scritching as she shifted. Even the jagged, sharp rocks wore coats of ice.

Her tongue throbbed, swollen in her mouth.

Blood dripped to the snow. Hers. It spread, stretching as if the snow itself bled, until a road, paved with her blood, descended into the shadows of the glaciers.

Isa followed, her bare feet skidding on the sharp ice until the blood from the soles of her feet mingled with the blood dripping from her mouth.

A whiff of ancient pine curled around her as her path led inexorably deeper into a wide crevasse, winding back and forth, deeper into the heart of the ice. The walls glistened as if lit from within. Every inch of her path was lined with the dead, frozen into the ice. Animals, their bodies sundered, their eyes and mouths preserved in wide-open rictuses. Then, where the ice turned from azure to Maya blue, people appeared, arms out-flung, chests ripped open, the wounds still seeping into the ice as Isa passed.

Whispers followed her. The sound of her feet on her blood-soaked road? The spirits of the dead haunting her trail?

She passed out of the reach of anything like light.

Fingers plucked at the cuffs of her jeans.

She yelped and jumped. Blood fell from her mouth.

“Help me!”

“Help us!”

Whispers resolved into words and rasping screams, the last sounds made by the dead as they’d left their lives behind.

How did she know with such certainty?

Clammy, dead hands grabbed and held her.

Adrenaline bubbled through her veins. She couldn’t stop. She’d freeze in place. Join the dead.

“Easy, brothers and sisters,” she lisped with her swollen tongue. “Join me as I journey. How may I aid you?”

The gripping hands loosened.

“Save us! Help us!” a multitude of voices cried. It sounded like the groan of a shifting glacier.

She looked up, shivering with the sudden fear that the ice had closed over her head, entombing her. Nothing to see. Only her imagination burying her.

“Saving you isn’t within my power,” she said. Her voice quavered.

The hands clutching her tightened.

“That power belongs only to you,” she said. “It always has.”

For a moment, silence fell. Far, far overheard, distant voices wailed. Or was that the wind?

Doubt rattled Isa’s bones. “Is this Xibalba?”

The hands plucking at her vanished. The ground shuddered like a horse trying to dislodge a biting fly. Isa cried out and crouched low, heart pounding. Frigid wind whistled past, rushing against her, racing back up the path. The scream of its passage retreated up the side of the crevasse.

“Xibalba.” A child’s whisper affirmed.

Isa’s breath caught. She squeezed her eyes shut, glad she could no longer see the dead frozen into the crevasse walls containing evidence of child sacrifices. Rising, she inched her toes forward.

“Where are you going?” the child asked.

“I seek the gods of this place,” Isa said. Her voice reverberated off the crevasse walls, echoing away as if walking before her.

“Why?”

Good question. “I need their advice.”

“Can I go with you? Will you ask the dread lords to free me? I don’t like being cold anymore,” the child’s voice confided.

“I welcome your company, and if you aren’t comfortable asking for your freedom yourself, I will absolutely request it in your stead,” Isa said.

A diminutive hand slipped into hers. She registered no temperature difference between the spirit’s skeletal touch and her skin.

As she shuffled down the slick path, a noise rose from below. Hollow. Like breathing. No. Sighing.

The trail leveled out.

Chill weighed upon Isa’s shoulders, dragging on her, tempting her to stop. Rest. Just for a moment.

The shifting, uneven sound drew her onward. That she couldn’t identify the noise intrigued her. It grew steadily louder. Hissing? No. Sand. It sounded like sand grains shifting in the desert wind.

Light glowed from the frosted landscape ahead. The crevasse walls opened out. Powdery snow squeaked beneath her bare feet. The fresh bloodstain still ran before her, leading to a dark river cutting across her path.

She frowned. A river, even one running and splashing the way this one did, couldn’t explain the hollow sound of sand grain ringing against sand grain.

Of course it couldn’t.

Isa recoiled.

It wasn’t a river of water.

Scorpions.

Countless black, red, yellow, blue, buff, and even white scorpions seethed and surged, eddying like water in the wide course of the riverbed.

She hadn’t heard the sound of sand grains. The river of venomous creatures flowed to the noise of exoskeleton sliding against exoskeleton.

They are your fears
, Isa’s brain supplied the memory of Spider Woman’s voice telling her.
Conquer them before they conquer you
. She’d said it months ago, while Isa had been escaping from Daniel.

Isa thought she’d put most of her fears to bed. Shivering on the bank of a river of scorpions, she tried to moisten cracked lips with her swollen, bleeding tongue. Whatever progress she’d made against her weaknesses hadn’t been enough.

Blowing out a shuddering breath, she glanced down at the spirit holding her hand.

The child had tousled, tangled black hair. His body had been painted Maya blue. Deep puncture wounds, edges curling with rot and old blood, marred his chest. When he tipped his face up to her as if to meet her gaze, Isa strangled a cry.

Sunken black eye sockets stared at her. His eyes had been plucked out. Foul, terrible stains wept down his blue cheeks.

He flinched.

Isa tightened her grip on his insubstantial, bony hand and on her run-amok pulse. “Please don’t go. We’ll get across the river somehow.”

Could she conquer her fears to the point that she could wade into the roiling mass of venomous creatures without being stung?

This was a vision and therefore magic. Albeit, magic on a scale that made her power little more than a firefly flashing in the tall grass.

Maybe a shield would deflect the creatures?

Cold wind swept her back. Fingers clutched her sweatshirt again, begging for attention. Knowing what she’d see, Isa set her expression to neutral, steeled her nerves, and looked.

Spirits. Mostly adults. All bearing the wounds that had killed them.

“Take us with you,” they whispered.

“It would be my honor,” she said, “but we must cross the river. And I don’t know how to do that and survive.”

Several of the spirits moaned and shrank back.

“The trials of this place are meant to kill mortals. You’re already dead,” she said. “Nothing here can harm you. The scorpions are here to stop the living. To stop me.”

“She will ask the gods to free us,” the child said. “She promised.”

Isa huffed a laugh. She’d promised him, because he was a child afraid of bespeaking his gods. Understandably. He hadn’t been old enough when he’d died to have been trained in the spiritual practices of his people.

Adults, though, even dead ones, would have been. They knew enough to take responsibility for approaching their own deities.

Still, Isa didn’t contradict the child because the souls of the Mayan dead were edging forward, led by a man missing an arm and part of his jaw. He’d been painted with blue dye in patterns against his brown skin. A warrior felled in battle?

He crouched beside the river, glanced back at Isa for a second, and then plunged his remaining hand into the scorpions.

Hissing, accompanied by chirps that sounded remarkably like a chorus of crickets on a warm night, erupted from the river. Scorpions scuttled around the spirit’s arm. One struck.

He started, but didn’t rise. He uttered a soft chuckle full of pleased surprise. “No pain. In this place of fear and bitter tears, the scorpion sting is nothing. How long have I let fear shackle me?”

He rose and turned so she looked at the side of his face that still had a jaw. “You will petition the gods for our freedom?”

How did he manage to speak at all? No. She didn’t want to know. Focus on the question. Isa nodded. “I will.”

“The bargain is struck,” he said.

As if the faint, sibilant words had communicated something more to the other spirits surrounding Isa, they flowed past her. The arctic breeze of their going ruffled her hair and tugged at her sweatshirt.

The child spirit pulled free of her hand. “I want to help.”

They surrounded Isa, using their petrified flesh to shunt the hissing, furious scorpions around her.

“Thank you,” Isa said, climbing down into the hip-deep riverbed.

A child’s giggle drifted up. “They tickle!”

Isa smiled. She didn’t know how to conquer her fears, but maybe showing these spirits they had nothing to fear from Xibalba’s trials counted for something.

Protected by the dead, she crossed the river without a single sting. On the far bank, the child took her hand again as the path of Isa’s blood led deep into a tunnel of icy and shimmering, frosted rock.

Goose bumps rose on the skin of her back as her dead helpers strung out behind her. Good to know there was still something colder than she.

The ice cave forced her to crawl on her belly at one point to pass beneath glinting, sharp-edged ice daggers. If her innards hadn’t already been frozen solid, contact with the burning cold ice of Xibalba did the job.

She paused when another river crossed her path.

It flowed, dark, thick liquid swirling. Blood. The taste and the smell filled her head. She couldn’t distinguish the blood in her mouth from the metallic miasma of the river.

The dead couldn’t protect her from this river.

Not that she needed them to. Blood held no horror. It was life. It was death. It could not harm her or them.

She stepped into the liquid.

The child spirit let her go.

Current washed her ankles. Her jeans wicked moisture up to her knees, weighing her down. She edged deeper, testing whether the current wanted to take her feet out from under her. Eddies curled lazily around her calves and she waded into the middle of the waist-deep river, certain of her footing.

Silence reigned on the shore behind her, as if the spirits held the breaths they did not need to breathe.

Blood soaked her sweatshirt, settling in a sticky mass against her skin.

Voices, carried on the current, called her. Recognition stopped her dead in the middle of the river.

She’d assumed the river flowed with the blood of all the sacrifices generations of Mayans had offered to their gods.

Based on the distant screams whirling in the current, it was that, in part. But the blood swirling around her carried louder, more recent voices, raised in panic, shouted in rage. Lawrence’s dying cry. Dick’s wheeze from the griffin disassembling him. A rasping moan that could only have belonged to the colonel from the containment camp swirled around her. The current picked up speed, threatening to sweep her from her feet.

She stood in the blood of everyone she’d killed, whether via direct action or through her inaction. Isa staggered. The river darkened and the tenor of the cries dragging at her changed. Inhuman voices buffeted her. Tattoos. There was the hydra’s final warble, and the dying shrieks of the tattoos she could have saved in the quarantine center. A handful of the tattoos she’d bound over the years rose from the river that no longer ran with blood. It was black with Ink.

The weight of every Living Tattoo she’d killed settled around her neck, bearing her down. Sinking her. Sucking her beneath the surface.

“The hydra was going critical,” she protested. “It had killed hundreds of people. I had to put it down. It would have killed hundreds, if not thousands, more. I had no idea I could save it. Even if I had, I’m not sure I would have.”

A little of the weight lifted.

She inched one foot across the abruptly treacherous, slick river bottom. “I would have attempted to save the tattoos and their people at the containment camp if I could have. For the damned, ignorant rules, and the guns that kept me from trying, I’m sorry that colonel died so that the families of the dead can’t sue his ass.”

“For the record, I’m not sorry about Lawrence or Dick. Predatory bastards. How many more magic users would they have murdered? If lack of remorse means I drown in their blood, so be it.”

She didn’t.

As if the resentment she harbored over the needless deaths in the quarantine center somehow appeased the souls of the tattoos and their hosts, the weight on Isa lessened further. She waded out of the greedy river.

Breathing hard, she propped her hands on her knees and glanced across the broad expanse of swirling blood.

Spirits lined the opposite bank. Hesitating, shuffling skeletal feet.

Isa studied them. Was that fear? Again? “What?”

“Priestess, you’ve killed?” The child’s shrill question cut through the gurgle of flowing blood.

Isa straightened. “I’ve killed to protect people. I wish I could tell you that in all cases I was sorry. It would be a lie.”

“Not sacrifices?” the warrior asked.

Even with the distance between them, at the motion of his partial jaw as he spoke, greasy nausea slid up her esophagus. Isa swallowed hard and shook her head. She hoped he could see the gesture. She didn’t dare open her mouth to speak.

“Protecting your people and your community,” the warrior said, “that is the charge given the warriors of our people.”

Our people?

He took the child’s hand and crossed the river. The rest of the spirits followed.

The stench of the final river, the river of pestilence, challenged Isa long before she laid her vision- questing eyes upon the crusty green-and-yellow sludge piling up and rolling over itself like some kind of toxic magma flow.

Isa lost her battle against nausea twice before dropping to her knees on the bank, weak and despairing. She’d come too far to give up. Too many spirits had followed her, relying on her promise.