Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) (23 page)

Blue hands shaking, she forced herself to her unsteady feet.

The child’s spirit stood at her side, watching her as if he could see her out of those gaping eye sockets.

“I can’t see how to do this,” she muttered, shivering as the spirits gathered at her back.

Her breath hung golden and frosty in the frigid air.

Like magma
,
her brain noted again. The solution hit her. Solidify the flow. Freeze it.

She breathed a laugh. Time for the cold killing her to work on her behalf. Isa called up a sliver of magic. Holding her breath, clamping her stomach muscles to suppress her gag reflex, she channeled power into her right hand and touched the slimy, reeking surface of the green river.

Gold frost spread from the point of contact, hardening the surface. The river flow piled up, rolling over the surface Isa’s magic had momentarily frozen. It wouldn’t be perfect, but if the crust held, it would be infinitely better than wading through the filth.

Determination steady, Isa rose and routed magic through the soles of her bare feet. She stepped atop the green ooze she’d frozen with the touch of her hand. It supported her weight. The river couldn’t be stopped, but it could be made briefly solid. In the seconds it took to freeze a stepping-stone of pus and contagion, slime oozed over the top of her foot.

Every fiber of her being quivered in disgust and outrage.
Better than wading.
Step by careful, nauseating step, Isa inched her way across the putrid river.

Dry heaves wracked her three steps from the far bank, shattering her concentration. Croaking in protest, she sank knee deep in filth. Retching, miserable, she crawled to shore.

Her company of spirits flowed across the sickening river. The chill of their coming soothed Isa’s nausea, but the stench of rot carried on the breeze made her groan.

She couldn’t walk, so Isa crawled, following her blood trail. According to the Popol Vuh, she had one trial left before she could confront the gods of the dead.

The crossroads. The stone cairns marking the crossroads began arguing over which path was the true road to the gods before she could even see them. She stumbled to her feet. Four separate tunnels led in different directions. Ignoring the competing, disembodied voices, she peered down each of the roads. Her blood trail flowed down each path.

The child crowded against her legs.

“You hear them?” she asked.

He nodded.

“They can’t harm us. I know something they might not.”

“What?”

“Blood
and
magic,” she murmured, opening her magical eye. Light and color exploded across her etheric vision. She flinched.

Rule eighteen: Magic sight within the spirit world—bad idea.

Squinting filtered the sacred energy holding Xibalba together. She sought the dull glints of her gold signature. The second tunnel on her right bore traces of her energy. She studied the rest of the tunnels, just to be sure. Her assumption appeared correct. None of the other blood trails glowed gold.

Isa led her dead Mayans deeper into the underworld. Ice and snow dwindled. Stone paving emerged from the frost beneath her feet. Greenery appeared, growing larger and lusher as she walked. Pyramids peeked above the palm fronds. Her path opened out into an avenue. It led them through a silent city to the courtyard fronting the tallest of the pyramids.

A great, multicolored feast of fruit and foodstuffs spread across long, low tables. Seated upon stone thrones, the gods of the underworld, Hun-Came and Vucub-Came, watched her approach. Both wore crowns inlaid with jade, flint, and what looked like shell. Ragged, once brilliant feathers completed their headdresses. Their ornate skirts were inlaid with beads and shells.

However well attired the gods appeared, Isa had to suppress another roll of nausea. Both gods were rotting corpses. Flesh hung from one side of Hun-Came’s face. His lips were the color of raw, seeping hamburger. Only sinew and bone remained in his neck. Bones shone through maggot-infested skin stretched taut over Vucub-Came’s ribs.

Her reading of the Popol Vuh, hurried as it had been, had given her a view of devious, vicious gods inhabiting the underworld. They were insatiable. Yet she needed to pry not just her soul from their grasp, but the souls gathered at her back.

Though Isa readily identified the gods seated behind the feasting table, there were six gods. Three exact replicas of each of the two. Her final test. Which were the gods and which the fakes? She had to know which of them to greet. Which of them to ask how to heal the tear in her soul, to find out how to defeat the House of Cold, and then Uriel.

If she could.

Isa stared, looking for some hint as to which was simulacrum and which was deity. She floundered while the gods snickered and sipped blood from skulls. The thick, red fluid poured down the visible tendons and spine of Hun-Came’s throat.

Her gaze settled upon the food on their table. It wasn’t the wealth of fragrant, colorful fruit she’d first imagined. Silver bowls and clay plates were heaped to overflowing with hearts, some of them still pulsing.

Bodies sprawled on the tables, chests laid open.

One of the corpses pinned to the table like a beetle to a card turned its head to look her in the eye.

Isa croaked a harsh cry and fell to her knees. Daniel.

“You could have blessed my way,” he rasped. Tears flowed down his rotting cheeks. “You didn’t. Why? Did I mean nothing to you?”

“Blessed may you . . .” Isa gasped.

“
No
,” the two gods snapped as one.

Their voices ripped through Isa’s skull. Volcanoes roaring. Boulders crashing down mountain sides. Their images repeated the denial a fraction of a second after the true gods uttered it.

“Greetings, venerable and ancient Hun-Came. Greetings, venerable and ancient Vucub-Came,” Isa said, addressing the proper gods, blinking watering eyes. She stayed on her knees.

The false images vanished. The two remaining gods snarled at her. “The transgressor is ours.”

“You are the rulers of this place,” Isa said. “If you mean to keep him, and you have the right to do so, any paltry blessing I utter will have no power to take him from you.”

“He is nothing,” Hun-Came sneered. As he spoke, his lips smacked like slabs of raw meat. He gestured.

Daniel’s weeping corpse vanished.

“Save that he served to bind you to our court,” the god said.

“Is that why, honored lords, I wear the mark of your summons?” Isa asked, lifting her blue hands for them to see.

They chuckled. Vultures cackling.

“Come. You have traveled far, traversed the rivers guarding our court,” Vucub-Came said. “You recognized and greeted us as is right and proper. You bring the offering of your blood borne on an incense pleasing to our kind. Be seated, priestess. Take your ease while you speak the questions of your heart.”

Isa spread her hands wide, remembering how in the Popol Vuh the gods of the dead invited supplicants to be seated upon burning hot cooking surfaces. “Lord, in the teaching of my people, I do not belong here in your realm. Not yet. Thus to linger here would be the height of disrespect. I came seeking your blessing and your advice.”

“Advice.” Vucub-Came drew the word out in a long, head-splitting arc of amusement.

“These spirits,” she said, glancing at the child beside her. “They are tired of being cold. Will you release them from their suffering?”

“What will you give us in exchange?” Hun-Came asked.

She hesitated, frowning. What did she have to offer? Dried, foul pus crusting on her feet? Blood-and-ink-soaked clothing? Blood. Ink. She’d never wondered what happened to the tattoos she’d destroyed. Did she need any further proof that they’d been alive?

“Have I not already?” she asked. “The Ink and power of every Living Tattoo I’ve destroyed flows through the river of blood.”

“So it does,” Hun-Came drawled.

“It is potent enough to have nearly dragged even you down, priestess,” Vucub-Came said.

The rotting gods traded bloody-eyed glances, fading feathers bobbing in their crowns. Hun-Came put down his skull goblet and clapped the bones of his hands together.

Thunder rolled through the courtyard, knocking Isa flat.

Cold wind shrieked, then rose, swirling into the dark—was it sky or cavern ceiling—above the Dark Gods’ palace.

Aching, Isa climbed to her feet. The spirits were gone, including the child. She whispered a blessing for the path the spirits now had to walk. She hoped the warrior would guide the child into the Mayan paradise.

“Thank you,” she said.

The gods eyed her, but said nothing, leaving her to break the silence.

“A door has opened between worlds,” Isa said. “One that has the potential to destroy the Sixth Age.”

“Kukulcan,” Vucub-Came sneered. “A strutting toucan who squawks too much.”

“We know this door.”

“I’ve been told that the door requires blood and magic to close and lock it,” she said. “The spell that created the portal is not mine.”

“Your blood opened it,” Hun-Came said.

“The magic we hemorrhaged when my Living Tattoo came off unlocked the door,” Isa said. “Daniel’s blood opened it. I closed it.”

“Then failed to lock it.”

“I seek to remedy that,” she said, “but my soul is torn and my magic is freezing.”

“You must heal.”

“I would like to.”

“What would you have of us?”

“How do I stop Uriel? If that means healing first, how do I do that?”

Hun-Came picked up his skull goblet and took a long drink. Clotted blood plopped down his throat, splashing off the exposed bones of his spine.

Isa looked away, blowing out a measured breath to quell nausea. She had nothing left to throw up.

“What will you give us in exchange for the information you seek?”

“The two agents that died last night,” she began.

“No!” Vucub-Came said, faded feathers shaking when she glanced at him. His petulant tone rattled her teeth.

“You bargained once before with that which we already possess,” he accused. “No more.”

“All that remains then, Lord, is this.” She lifted her hands. “Brilliant blue pigment to dye the feathers in your crowns into something that not even Kukulcan will be able to look upon without envy.”

“What of your life? Will you not bargain with it?” Hun-Came asked, leaning forward.

“I will die in my time,” she said. “If I must trade my life to lock the portal, it isn’t mine to bargain. But I would trade it to preserve the Sixth Age and your court.”

“No,” Vucub-Came snapped. “Your death is not enough. Not when in your life you send so many dead into our realm. Keep your life, priestess. Give back that which is ours.”

His worm-ridden hand reached out, clawlike, as if scooping something away from her.

“If it is yours,” she said, “I yield it.”

Hun-Came bellowed a laugh that made her shudder. What had she just promised? “We have your answer. Let us show you ours.”

“One last question, Lords,” she said. “Why the House of Cold? Don’t the trials begin with the House of Dark?”

“Bah,” Vucub-Came growled. “You know the dark.”

Murmur. Isa smiled. Yes, she did. He’d shown her that there were no monsters in the darkness. She carried her monsters inside her.

“There is no sport where there is no fear. Be gone.”

The court of the Dark Gods vanished.

Isa lay upon a stone altar, naked save for a headdress and a skirt of beads and feathers. Her face was lifted to the sky—the sky she could not see. She was underground. Firelight flickered, throwing shadows across uneven rock walls. Daggers of stone stabbed up from the floor. Blades like teeth bit down from the roof. Sweet, spicy incense filled her nose. Smoke clouded her vision. Men’s voices chanted, rising with the smoke, pulsing with the thud of her heart. With the double time thumping of the heart of the perfect, golden angel standing over her, a brilliant, silver knife in his hand.

Uriel.

He slid the blade between her ribs and sawed a gaping portal into her chest. Centered on her still beating heart.

Blood and torment darkened her sight.

Firelight flared. Sparks rose and she stood. Whole. Arms and face lifted. Her priests stretched Uriel upon her altar. His curling, pure white hair brushed the tops of her bare feet. The priests stretched his limbs away from the center of his body.

Elation sped her blood and her prayers to the gods to accept the offering of this creature’s blood. His heart. His evil.

She drove the obsidian blade in her hand into his perfect golden chest.

He screamed, his back arching into the agony of her obsidian knife.

Part of her faltered. The part Ruth, Joseph, and Henry had taught. That part of her shrilled a denial and sought the magic to change the outcome of having plunged a knife into an enemy’s chest.

Her life, she’d forfeit. Fighting evil with evil? She refused.

“That which is gladly given is no sacrifice,” Hun-Came’s disembodied voice said, the flapping of his cankered, putrid lips punctuating his words.

As if the blade of volcanic glass dissolved in Uriel’s blood, a black stain spread from the point of penetration. Uriel’s scream died on a rasping, pained breath.

It was Murmur beneath her hands. It was his blood surging out around the obsidian blade buried between his ribs. His emerald gaze met hers. A single tear tracked out of the corner of his eye.

Agony twisted Isa’s breast. Horror rose on a golden tide. Choking her. Her hand spasmed on the knife.

No.

Terror shattered the ice dam hemming in her power. Gold drove down her arms into the knife. Into Murmur’s heart. Into the heart of her vision of the Mayan underworld. The vision answering the question of what it would take to heal her and lock Uriel’s door.

She wouldn’t be healed. Not like this. Not at the cost of destroying someone she—Not at the cost of destroying Murmur.

Xibalba blew apart in a haze of ice and limp, rotting feathers.

“She’s having a seizure!” a male voice shouted.

No rotting meat slap of lips. No resonating, head-aching thunder indicating a god speaking in a voice no human was meant to hear.

“Stop!” another commanded. “Do not touch her. With the magic she’s throwing, she’ll kill you. Mind your shields. All of you.”

She was back. In her own cinderblock hell rather than in the Mayan one. Was she throwing magic? Tremors wracked her body to the point that she couldn’t get her breath.

“She needs medical attention,” the first male voice growled. Steve.

“No physician in this world can cure her,” Jaiden said. “This is her journey. She has the power to control this. It’s up to her to remember that.”

Thanks for the vote of confidence, cousin.

She was freezing. She could see her bloodstained breath. Again. Still. Ah, good. Eyes open, then. Why did firelight still dance against stalactites? Why did she smell Hun-Came and Vucub-Came? The sickly, sweet scent of rot competed with the tang of copper on her swollen, aching tongue.

In the distance, metal scraped against stone.

The silhouettes—priests? her friends?—spun, crouching as if waiting to face a threat she couldn’t rally her body to face. The puffs of their breaths hung in the cold air along with hers.

Loud, rushed footsteps approached as the tremors in her limbs subsided.

Steve swore and went for the gun he kept holstered in the small of his back.

Jaiden launched to his feet. As the light caught his worry-lined face, Isa caught a glimpse of blood staining his upper lip.

Nathalie and Troy threw themselves at Steve, restraining him, holding him.

“Take it easy!” Troy shouted. “Stop it, man!”

“It’s not what you think! It’s not what . . .”

Sweet, smoky caramel overpowered the taste of blood in Isa’s mouth.

Murmur.

He strode into the room dressed in dark jeans that hugged his thighs, a button-down, and a leather motorcycle jacket. He barreled past the tableau of Isa’s cousin and her friends, through the tattered remnants of Jaiden’s circle, and into direct contact with the flood of magic she didn’t have the strength to contain.

“What the hell are you doing?” Steve growled. “Get away from her!”

“Wait!” Jaiden ordered, reaching as if he could stop Murmur.

Murmur crouched beside her and put a palm against the center of her chest. The same spot where, in the vision, she’d plunged a knife into his chest. Her chest. Uriel’s chest. Which had then become Murmur’s chest.

Isa shook her head in denial. Her head rolled once.

Murmur’s dark magic sank into her, seeping into the cold, fighting back the lethargy left by the vision. By the seizures.

“Ground,” he ordered.

He fed more power into her. Rags of her energy followed his, drawn as if even her power craved him as badly as she did. She swallowed every fragment of gold shrapnel she’d sprayed around the room. She could breathe again. One deep breath in. On the exhale, she sent magic down, out through her contact with the mattress and blanket beneath her.

“Again,” he said.

“What is he doing?” Steve said.

“Helping her,” Jaiden said. “I don’t know how he could get inside my circle, but he is helping.”

Anything to keep Murmur’s energy mingled with hers. Isa obeyed.

He let out an audible breath and took his hand away.

She croaked a protest. A string dragged on her lips. Sticky. Damp. Without thinking, she brushed it away.

“Wait!” Nathalie cried.

The string tugged Isa’s tongue with tearing pain. The twine broke free, pulling through the hole Nathalie had pierced in Isa’s tongue.

Isa shuddered.

Fresh blood tainted the taste of Murmur’s presence. At least she couldn’t smell incense or charcoal burning any longer.

Murmur sat, back against the wall, and gathered her into his arms. He drew her so her upper body rested across his thighs, her head cradled in the crook of his arm.

From that vantage point, she could see her friends staring.

Worry creased Troy’s forehead.

Nathalie hugged her arms hard around her ribs. Drying tears streaked her face.

The rage twisting Steve’s features smoothed out, calculation taking over.

Jaiden was pale, his fists clenched tight.

Every single one of them bore traces of blood beneath their noses.

“I’m sorry,” Isa said. It came out a rasp. The hole in her tongue resented movement.

“What the fuck is going on?” Steve demanded. He met her eye. “That looks an awful lot like Daniel Alvarez, but—”

“He’s dead,” Murmur said. “He no longer needed this body. I did.”

Steve reared back. “
Murmur.
”

Jaiden’s head jerked up. He stared. “Her tattoo? The last time you two met, you tried to kill her.”