Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) (24 page)

“No,” Murmur said, then hesitated. “Yes. I might have. It would have destroyed me. And this world.”

“And yours,” Isa whispered.

“No.”

“All right,” Jaiden said. “Unless your vision said otherwise, Irene, you still need healing.”

She shook her head. It went better this time. “Nothing we can use. Can’t stay here. Need containment.”

“We can’t take you to Nightmare Ink,” Troy said. He glanced at Steve. “No offense, but the cops are like leeches. All over the neighborhood.”

“I could have killed you,” she said. As she spoke, it got easier, as if muscles merely needed loosening. Maybe after a seizure, they did. “I think I’m losing control.”

“My containment studio,” Murmur said.

Silence settled heavy against her bones. Isa opened her eyes.

“Daniel’s containment,” he amended. “There’s a car.”

“It’ll have been seen,” Steve said.

“My—Daniel’s lawyer is adept at keeping the AMBI at bay,” Murmur said.

“Why do you care what happens to Isa?” Steve demanded.

Murmur brushed her hair from her forehead as if unaware that he did so.

“We have work left unfinished,” she said when she met Murmur’s gaze and saw him struggling to respond. “It will take both of us to lock Uriel out of this world.”

Steve straightened. His gaze flicked between the two of them. Doubt creased the corners of his mouth when his gaze rested on Murmur. He met her eye. The nascent jealousy pinching his expression died, though the glimmer of hurt in his gray eyes remained. He frowned.

“She needs rest. I need twenty-four hours to prepare,” Jaiden said.

Murmur nodded.

“Don’t pretend this is about her safety,” Steve shot. “You’ve never done anything that wasn’t self-serving.”

He had, but there wasn’t any way Isa could explain that to Steve that wouldn’t leave him even angrier. Especially when her safety was Murmur’s priority only to the point that he could use her to take revenge on Uriel.

The Mayan gods had laid out her choices. Be sacrificed, or sacrifice Murmur. They’d finally found a test she couldn’t pass. She’d never know whether there’d been another option. She’d blown their vision apart too soon. Too bad. She’d turn her obsidian blade against herself before she’d willingly go back into Xibalba. Or destroy Murmur.

Isa shivered, and for a moment, her breath clouded out of her mouth. Just hers. Everyone else seemed to have warmed up.

Murmur glanced down. His brows lowered. He eased a tendril of heat into her body. The cold backed down.

“I have no choice. I need containment,” Isa said to Steve. “I won’t put you at risk again. Not any of you.”

She looked up and met Murmur’s emerald gaze. For a breathtaking moment, it jolted her back into a fire-lit cave.

“Please,” she said. “Containment.”

He nodded.

“I’m going,” Steve said.

“So are we!” Nathalie said, her voice catching.

“No,” Jaiden answered.

“He’s right,” Steve said. “If you and Troy don’t open Nightmare Ink, it’ll be a red flag.”

“Fuck,” Troy grumbled. “We’re already late by a couple of hours.”

“Jaiden is too polite to say so,” Isa said, “but the healing ceremony isn’t a spectator sport. It’s . . . sacred and secret. It’s like some of the magic goes out of it when it’s not guarded.”

“Weird,” Nathalie muttered. “But hey, you’re going to need all the magic you can get to fix this, right? So okay. It’s kind of like not being allowed to watch the surgeons operate on you.”

“Good analogy,” Jaiden said. “Mind if I steal that?”

Nat’s smile wobbled.

“At least you aren’t blue anymore,” Troy said, his voice shaking.

Isa lifted a hand. Brown. Olive. Whichever color she wanted to use to describe her normal skin tone. It was back. Hers. Even her palms. Albeit scraped and bloody.

“Bastards,” she muttered. “Had to have the skin as well as the pigment, didn’t you?”

For a moment, laughter like bones rattling clattered inside her mind. She shivered.

Murmur did, too.

Jaiden busied himself taking down the circle Murmur had plowed through. Troy and Nathalie turned away, folding up the blankets they’d used to ward off her chill. Steve paced back and forth collecting trash.

None of them would meet her eye. The glimpses she caught of their pallid, set expressions suggested they were struggling not to remember. She frowned. What had they seen or heard?

Murmur tugged her blanket up around her, rose to kneeling, and tucked his arms beneath her.

“I can . . .”

He stood.

She settled against his chest, head spinning. Maybe she couldn’t stand. Much less walk. “My knife. My pack.”

“I have them,” Jaiden said.

“Nat and I are going to do an initial pass,” Troy said. “Make sure the obvious DNA samples are gone.”

“Good,” Steve said.

“Tell Gus and Ikylla I love them?” Isa asked. Her voice broke. She closed her aching eyes.

“Course,” Nathalie said.

Isa opened her eyes.

Steve led the parade to the door. Jaiden followed Murmur and Isa. Steve put up a hand. Murmur stepped out of line of sight of the door. Steve opened the door and froze.

“Oh. Hey,” a young woman’s voice said. “I had a message from a mutual friend. He asked me to come here.”

“Which mutual friend?” Steve demanded. “No one I know would send a news truck . . .”

“Emanuel,” she said in a rush. “He said that someone here had a story to tell, a story that might stop the riots before too many people get hurt.”

“He did not tell you to blow the cover he built for this place with a news truck,” Steve said.

“Shit,” the woman said. “Look. We’re not supposed to be here at all. We’re supposed to be in the middle of the marches. It was the best I could do. He said it was important.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

Isa frowned. Emanuel had to be talking about her. She just didn’t know what he imagined she’d say.

“Put me down?” she whispered to Murmur.

Scowling, he glanced at her, already shaking his head. He stilled, and then lowered her feet to the floor.

Wrapped in the blanket, Isa shuffled to the doorway.

“Get back,” Steve ordered.

“I’m the one Emanuel sent you to talk to,” Isa said, squinting against the bright afternoon sunshine.

“Whoa,” the young woman breathed. “You’re—no wonder your friend is so prickly. You’re wanted. I get it. But I protect my sources. Give me an interview and I’ll get my AD’s ears on the police scanners. How about if we film on the side of the building away from the street?”

“No,” Steve, Murmur, and Jaiden all said at once.

Isa grimaced. “Yes. There are lives at stake.”

Steve closed a hand on her arm, desperation in the uncomfortable pressure. “Yes. Your life.”

“Five minutes,” she said.

“Damn it, Isa.” His grip loosened.

She edged out the door, into sunshine, her eyes adjusting enough to follow the young woman with a curly mane of violet-red hair.

“Come on around here,” she said, galloping down the stairs and around the building. She carried a video camera and microphone, both off at the moment, given the way they dangled from her hands. “My name’s Jen.”

“Isa.”

“I know,” she said, tossing Isa a grin. “This is good, against the wall.” She hefted the camera to her shoulder. “I’ve got great light. No, no. Keep the blanket.”

Isa suspected she looked like she’d slept standing on her head. At best. She’d faced down the gods of the underworld. Stupid time to be vain.

Steve rounded the corner of the building and, arms crossed, leaned against the cinderblocks not three feet away. Her bodyguard.

“Are you comfortable here?” Jen asked.

“I’m on the run,” Isa said. “If your friends in the truck aren’t calling the police, I’m comfortable.”

“Gotcha,” Jen said. She pressed the microphone into the hand Isa used to clutch the blanket. “Leave it right there and say your name for me, so I can check levels?”

Isa complied.

Jen grunted in satisfaction. “Set?”

“I guess.”

A red light winked on atop the camera.

“Okay,” Jen said. “In three, two, one. I’m Jen McIntyre with Ms. Isa Romanchzyk, a tattoo artist specializing in Living Tattoos. Ms. Romanchzyk?”

Isa blinked, her mind a jumble. Blowing out a shaky breath, she shook her head. “My name’s Isa Romanchzyk. I escaped from a containment camp.”

Silence.

“Tell me about that,” Jen prompted.

“I can’t talk about how I got out,” Isa said, “not without endangering the people still there. The containment camp I was in on the eastern side of the Cascades was ill equipped and woefully underprepared to handle people with Live Ink. Still, if someone you know is in a containment camp, they’re safest there.”

Jen pounced on the word. “Safest? What makes you say that?”

“This is complicated.”

“Hey, your mouth is bleeding.”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Take your time.”

“Short story. There’s a power-hungry magic user. He’s insane. I don’t know if he was insane to start with or if grasping for more and more magic made him that way. Doesn’t matter, I guess. He’s pulling Living Tattoos from people. Has been for longer than the police want anyone to know.”

Steve straightened, drawing Isa’s eye briefly. She looked back to the camera.

“He was responsible for the disaster on the bridge,” Isa said. “That bus driver did not lose control of his tattoo.”

“You know because you were out there on that bridge, weren’t you, Ms. Romanchzyk?” Jen asked. “The news helicopters got some rough footage. News crews have been trying to find you since you were ID’d on the film.”

“I was picked up by the AMBI and taken across the mountains within the first twenty-four hours after the bridge disaster,” Isa said.

“But that was you on the bridge, wasn’t it?”

She hesitated and resisted looking at Steve again. Would it damage the investigation if she said so?

“Ms. Romanchzyk?”

“I was on the bridge.”

“Why?”

“You identified me as someone who specializes in Live Ink,” she said. “That’s recent. My first specialty is binding Live Ink, destroying tattoos that were in the process of going bad.”

“You make it sound like that happened often,” Jen said.

“When people go to hacks, it does,” she retorted. “Then when tattoos started coming off people . . .”

“Because of the madman you mentioned?”

“Yes.”

“How did you discover him?”

“About the first of this year, I saw an uptick in Live Ink going bad,” Isa said. “Because I was the only Live Ink artist in the area doing binds, it was obvious something was going wrong.”

“Did your kidnapping have anything to do with what you discovered?”

“I can’t answer that question without compromising that investigation,” Isa said, echoing something she’d heard police spokespeople saying to reporters before.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Jen said. “Back to the bridge disaster . . .”

“The Seattle PD Acts of Magic Unit asked me if I could bind the rogue tattoo,” Isa said.

“You destroyed it.”

“Yes.”

“And as a result, ended up imprisoned without due process,” Jen said.

Isa nodded.

“Do you have Live Ink, Ms. Romanchzyk?”

“No. They came for anyone who could do Live Ink first. Then they started in on the people with Living Tattoos.”

“They, who?”

“Initially the AMBI. Now I think there are more agencies involved than I can identify. I didn’t want to be tangled up in this. Still don’t. But I am. The important thing for anyone with Live Ink to know is that distance matters. If you’re having trouble with your Ink, get out of town until this guy pulling Ink from people is—” She broke off, searching for a word that wouldn’t make her sound as mad as Uriel was.

“What, Ms. Romanchzyk?” Jen coaxed.

Isa sighed. “Neutralized. I know how that sounds.”

“Do you?”

“Like I have delusions of superhero-dom? Yes. I do.”

Jen chuckled.

“I have to go. The important thing to know is this. If you have loved ones in a containment camp,” Isa said, “they need food, warm blankets, and clothes. They need heat. They need medical supplies.”

“The camps aren’t feeding people?” Jen asked, her voice sharp, avid.

“They had more people than food,” Isa hedged. “Maybe the supply situation has been remedied since I left.”

“We’ll find out,” she promised. “Can you describe the camp?”

She did, sketching out a hurried verbal painting of razor wire, quarantine, metal dorms, threadbare blankets, and bare lightbulbs to ward off the high desert early spring chill. “Thanks for the chance to let people know what’s going on. Marches and violence are feeding the madman I told you about. He’s counting on the bloodshed. Stop it. One last thing. If you or someone you know has any capacity for magic whatsoever, learn to shield.”

“From whom?” Jen asked.

Isa shook her head. “I wish it were as easy as giving you a few names. There are people with credentials in this city. In this environment, anyone who charges more than a few bucks to teach you isn’t one of them.”

Isa handed the microphone back to Jen.

“Thank you, Ms. Romanchzyk.” The red light winked out. Jen set the camera down and accepted the microphone. “Our lead reporters will have further questions. I know you’re on the run . . .”

“I can’t tell you where I’ll be,” she said. Or if she’d be alive in twenty-four hours.

Jen keyed a walkie-talkie clipped to her pink sweater. “Lou! Text Tanya. She’s going to want to run with this file and some of the tips we just got.”

She released the button. “I’m going to give you a card. It’s my direct number. Can you call in?”

“Phones can be traced.”

“When you aren’t on the run?”

“Sure.”

She grinned. “You’re a bad liar.”

Isa nodded. “At least I know that. I’ll take the card; I can’t make any promises.”

“Understood.”

“Producer’s going ballistic,” a gruff male voice said over the unit on Jen’s sweater. “Wants you to hang on to the source.”

Isa slid toward Steve, shaking her head. “Your communications channels can be traced and it won’t take long for the authorities to figure this out.”

“Too bad Tanya’s message got here after you took off,” Jen said.

“Thanks,” Isa said. Her breath fogged on the word.

“Like I said. Protecting my source.”

Steve took Isa’s elbow and escorted her to the back door of the black sedan.

Murmur, already in the backseat, held out a hand.

Isa took it.

“Ground,” he said.

Steve drove.

Murmur refused to relinquish his grasp on her.

Isa was glad.

He sat, one arm around her shoulders, sending wisps of heat into her whenever her breath became visible.

Jaiden, in the front passenger’s seat, shot long, searching glances at her as they drove back into town.

“No checkpoints,” she noted.

“No one imagined that anyone with Live Ink would want to sneak into the region,” Steve said.

“It’s not just Seattle, then?”

“Every route into the Puget Sound region is covered,” he said. “It’s starting to impact delivery of goods and fuel.”

Maybe that fact, all by itself, would end the containment camps, without anything she’d said. Or failed to say.

If she could slam Uriel’s door before he swarmed through it into this world.

Relaxed and warmed by the contact of Murmur’s magic, Isa’s eyes closed. She jolted awake when Murmur drew away.

She opened her eyes on an underground garage. She slid out of the car.

Murmur led them to an elevator. He keyed in a passcode, then wrapped an arm around her waist when the elevator lifted off and she swayed.

On her other side, Steve took her elbow.

Isa closed her eyes before she rolled them. Torn between two men? No. Three. If Uriel counted. He wanted her and Murmur dead. Maybe that was all she needed to know for right now.

The elevator slowed and stopped.

Isa opened her eyes as the doors swept open on a lavish, polished marble foyer. Huge potted palms on either side of the elevator draped graceful fronds over their heads as they exited the lift.

Murmur led her into a penthouse made of sunshine.

“Nice digs,” Steve said. “No way did Live Ink pay for this.”

“No,” Murmur agreed. “I am discovering that Daniel Alvarez had dirty fingers.”

Isa frowned.

Steve’s brows lowered in confusion.

“Had his fingers in many pies?” Jaiden guessed after a second.

“Okay, that makes sense,” Isa said as Murmur escorted her into the master suite.

“He may have been right the first time,” Steve said. “Daniel had blood on his hands.”

So did Isa. Did why she’d killed matter? She’d recently learned it didn’t change the color of the blood.

The master bedroom dwarfed the black lacquer bed covered in what looked like garnet watered silk. A leather sofa, bookended by upholstered armchairs, sat beneath a bank of windows shrouded in sheer falls of gold fabric.

“This is bigger than my whole apartment,” she said. “You can’t tell me this is containment?”

Murmur took her to what should have been the door to a walk-in closet. It didn’t open like a simple wooden door. It opened like something much heavier. He turned on the light.

“He retrofitted the closet?” Isa marveled.

“What the hell was he doing up here?” Steve demanded.

“It could be some sort of magical safe room,” she said.

Steve and Murmur both snorted.

“Then I don’t want to know,” she said. “I can already imagine more than makes me comfortable.”