Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) (25 page)

Smooth granite lined the floor, ceiling, and walls. When Isa sent an experimental flicker of power down through her feet into the stone, it sank into the rock, and wicked away, out of her magical sight. She nodded.

“Perfect,” she said. “Thank you. I can rest in here while you three do—”

“I’m not leaving you alone,” Steve interrupted.

“I can’t hurt anyone who isn’t in here with me, Steve,” she said. “You still have blood on your face from my last lapse.”

“I will stay,” Murmur said.

“No,” Steve growled, fists clenched.

Murmur released Isa and drew himself up.

“Keep it up and I’ll give you both bloody noses,” Isa grumbled. “Without magic.”

Murmur sneered.

“I am not leaving him, either him, alone with you!” Steve snarled.

Jaiden stepped between the two men. One man. One demon in a dead man’s body. “Detective. Have you noticed that in his presence”—Jaiden lifted his chin to indicate Murmur—“Irene is no longer cold?”

Steve’s gaze darted to her. He frowned and touched Isa’s cheek.

The contact tingled along the path of her nerves. Hope stirred in her chest.

“Why? And why him?”

“When we separated, we tore,” Murmur said. “She has a piece of me. I have a piece of her.”

Steve’s jaw flexed. “What piece?”

“Control of magic, I think,” Isa said. “We both seem to be losing our grips.”

“This is what I seek to heal,” Jaiden said to Steve. “You’re a little old to apprentice, but you have the magic and the discretion to assist me. Will you?”

Steve hesitated, uncertainty furrowing the skin between his brows. The glimmer of hurt in his eyes when he glanced at her pinched her heart. It brought her out of paralysis.

Letting her blanket fall, she went to wrap her arms around him. Max’s words echoed in her head:
You never let him in.

She wanted to. How did she do that?

Rule nineteen: So many things magic can’t touch.

Steve’s arms enfolded her, his breath went out in a rush.

“This isn’t the freedom either Murmur or I had envisioned,” she said.

Steve’s diaphragm kicked and he loosened his grasp on her to look at her cousin. “I’ll help. Thanks.”

Murmur gave Jaiden the keys to Daniel’s office with its much larger containment studio.

“I won’t kiss you just now,” Isa said when Steve met her eye. Her heart rolled over at his lopsided smile.

“You are a vision of destruction,” he said. “You have blood in your teeth.”

“Please tell me it wasn’t there during the interview.” Of course it had been. Hadn’t Jen commented on it?

Steve chuckled and press his lips to her cheek. “Rain check. We’ll bring supper up in a few minutes.”

He released her and followed Jaiden out of the room.

Murmur pushed the door closed behind them.

“Wait,” she said. “I’d really like to brush my teeth. And we might want something besides granite to sleep on.”

His head came up. He arrested the door’s swing and looked over his shoulder at her. His gaze connecting with hers rippled awareness through her like a pebble dropped into a pond.

She drew in a slow, careful breath. It did nothing to dispel the tension gathering low in her belly.

“Here,” she rasped, fishing in her front pocket. She held the crinkled stasis paper out to him.

His gaze dropped and his eyes widened, but he made no move to take the quaking page from her.

Moistening dry lips, she went to him and pressed the paper to his chest. A jolt of electricity sparked beneath her fingers.

Gasping, he started. He folded a hand over hers. And over the paper.

Isa tugged free as the rise and fall of his chest sped up.

“Why?” he breathed.

“You’re the only reason he didn’t kill me,” she said. “He’s yours. Though I admit I don’t know what to do with that. I have no idea whether or not you can have a Live Tattoo.”

“Thank you.” He caressed the folded paper.

Isa nodded.

Murmur took her hand, and led her to a tiny powder room tucked into the back of the containment closet. He released her to rummage beneath the sink. “Toothbrush.”

Still in the package. “A stash of toothbrushes? I guess Daniel—entertained often.”

“Containment here is superior to that in his office,” Murmur said. “Some days, I’m sorry I ended up with his body.”

She stared. “How much do you remember of what he’s done? Who he was?”

“Hints. Nightmares,” he said. “His life and his connections rising up to snare me. This biology succumbs to horror too readily.”

“That’s not what you said when you were giving me nightmares.”

He let out a derisive laugh and strode out of the bathroom. “An eternity in hell and yet a single human’s appetites turn my stomach.”

“That, too, may be the price of being human,” she said, turning to admire the flex of muscle as he walked away.

He spun at the door to the closet and caught her looking. His lips curved.

Flushing, despite the chill rising within her, Isa ducked into the bathroom, fumbling to open the packaged toothbrush.

Chuckling, Murmur left the containment closet.

She glanced at the mirror, bared her teeth, and groaned. Her hair stood out like a frizzy cloud around her head. Dark circles smudged under her eyes. And drying, horrible, gritty blood crusted her teeth.

“How many pantheons am I dealing with here?” she asked her reflection. “I’m not clear how a journey into Xibalba turns me into an image of Kali.”

She brushed her teeth clean, then rinsed gingerly, wanting to wash the taste of blood from her tongue without breaking open the puncture wound.

“Irene?” Jaiden called from the outer door.

When she left the bathroom, Jaiden and Murmur wrestled a mattress between them. She picked her blanket up so they could set the mattress into one corner.

Murmur shed his leather jacket, shot a glance from Jaiden to her, turned, and quit the room.

Jaiden studied her for several seconds. “We have to put him back.”

“No.”

“It is obvious when you’re together. The separation mortally wounded you both. This isn’t about saving just your life, Irene. Not anymore.”

“I said no! You weren’t there, were you? In the vision? Do you know what they showed me?” she demanded, clutching her blanket to her chest.

He subsided, rubbing his forehead. “Tell me.”

Isa sank to sit on the mattress, her head cradled on the blanket. Squeezing her eyes closed as if she could shut out what she’d experienced, she told him.

“All three of you sacrificed?” Jaiden said. His voice came from her level. “Irene, we can save you and Murmur by putting him back on you.”

She opened her eyes and snarled at her cousin. “I have a choice. I decide. A vision isn’t fate. It isn’t!”

“You choose,” Jaiden assured her. He sounded weary. Hurt.

It reminded her that people several states away were dying. For no other reason than they’d been kind enough to take a frightened child into their hearts and homes. They deserved protection, too.

“I am guilty of saving lives by taking lives,” she said. “I don’t know that I can ever atone for that, but I have to try. I won’t sacrifice him. Or his freedom. We close the door another way.”

Even if it meant her death.

Jaiden spread his fingers in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know what to do. If you were Navajo and we were in my place of power . . . But we aren’t. You aren’t what you want to be. I am not where I need to be.”

He blew out an audible gust of air. “We deal with what is.”

“You make it sound so easy.” She glanced at the door.

Murmur stood, laden with blankets and pillows, listening, his expression unreadable. He leaked darkness into the air. It fuzzed the outline of Daniel’s form.

Isa stirred the golden power drifting in her interior and held it out to Murmur like a hand.

He ignored it.

She looked away and dropped her magic. “Please, Singer, will you heal our wounds?”

Jaiden rose. “You’re asking for him?”

“He doesn’t know our ways. I am asking for him.”

“I’ll amend the ceremony to heal you both.”

“Thank you.”

“Food in the bag,” Jaiden said, striding for the door. “From the deli downstairs.”

Murmur shifted out of the doorway.

Jaiden paused in the threshold. He glanced between them. “Bring yourselves under control. Do whatever it takes. I will return when preparations are complete.”

Isa stared at her cousin’s back as he walked out of the room.
Whatever it takes?

Murmur released the blankets in favor of securing the containment door behind Jaiden.

Fingers playing over the blanket’s zigzag pattern, Isa sighed. The breath fogged. She shivered, set the blanket aside, and went to rescue the bedclothes. “How much did you overhear?”

“Enough.”

“Which tells me nothing,” she said, dumping her haul on the mattress.

“You won’t take me back.”

She spun to glare at him. “I didn’t think you wanted to be taken back. Last I knew, you wanted freedom!”

He swept his arms wide. His fingers brushed the granite walls. “This isn’t freedom. And this world . . .”

Shadow wings and talons changed his shape. He dropped his arms back to his sides. “I don’t understand the pain.”

Isa shook her head. “You shouldn’t hurt. I shouldn’t be freezing. I don’t know what’s wrong with us, but I do know that I won’t imprison you again.”

“Ask me before you decide what I value.”

“You’re kidding, right? You ripped my throat out for what you value.”

“We were under attack,” he snapped. Jaw flexing, he stalked across the room and drove her three steps backward, pinning her against the wall. He traced the necklace of bruises left by his hands over twenty-four hours ago. “I did this. I may yet kill you. Why won’t you destroy me?”

Ink dark magic swept her skin in the wake of his fingers. It sank deeper, touching more of her than blood, skin, and bone. Heat awoke at her core, thawing the surface layer of her magic. She started and gasped as liquid gold seeped into her cells and weighed heavy in her lower abdomen. She remembered this. It was what it felt like to be alive. Finally.

“We’re back to that? Murmur, everything that’s happened, everything I’ve done since you left, has been because I don’t want you dead,” she said. “Is death what you want?”

“No,” he murmured, tilting his head to press his lips against the scar on her neck. His hands slid down, tracing the curve of her breasts and settling in the small of her back. “Not when the pain recedes. Not when I’m touching you. What do you want?”

His teeth grazed her skin.

Smoky, sweet, black heat rolled through the frozen landscape of her psyche. The ice at her center broke up, melting in a rush of hot blood.

“You,” she breathed, nudging the flood of newly fluid magic into her hands. She ran her palms and her magic up his ribs. “I want you.”

His breath shuddered. He pulled her tight against him as balmy night magic spun out, through her, and into the room.

Glimmering energy answered her summons and expanded to match Murmur’s.

Their power mingled, intertwined. Sunny, smiling light and sultry, fragrant night.

Her muscles quivered in reaction.

His lips captured hers.

A tidal wave of hot, black energy flooded her, crowding her internal landscape.

She leaned into the dual pressure of his lips consuming hers and his magic filling her, stretching the scar tissue his departure had left on her soul. Without her conscious direction, her magic shimmered through her flesh and bone into his.

He broke the contact of their lips. Eyes closed, he tilted his head back. Breath hissed between his clenched teeth.

Tears pricked her eyes and surprised her by spilling over.

When the first drop of moisture touched his skin, his eyes opened. He wiped the salt water away. The flow wouldn’t ebb.

“Why?” he murmured against her lips.

“You’re home,” she choked.

He sucked in an audible breath.

Dark magic flexed inside her psyche.

“Yes.” He stripped her sweatshirt and tee from her body, then shed his own shirt before pulling her skin into contact with his.

His shaking hands lingered against the skin of her back. He’d closed his eyes, the most peaceful expression she’d ever seen on the face he wore.

For that brief moment, she was complete. She held him too tightly as if she could subsume him through the pores of her skin and keep him always.

She followed the flow of her magic into the seething black depths of Murmur. She ran golden energy over the internal scar he carried. It matched hers. Her magic caught on another, much larger, uglier twist of psyche.

“What is that?” she murmured against his skin.

“His death.”

Isa smoothed the scar with her power and pressed kisses to his throat. “No wonder you hurt.”

He groaned. “That doesn’t. It’s dead. Not growing, consuming.”

“Like the parts of us that tore,” she said.

“Yes.”

She flexed her fingers in the wisps of dark magic curling through his skin. Gold glinted, twining into the smoky tendrils.

“We’re losing control. Dying.”

He stilled, not even breathing for several seconds. “Then we heal.”

“I’ve tried.”

“You are inexperienced.”

“Go ahead. Heal yourself. I’ll help if I can.”

He pulled away. “I don’t need help.”

He startled a smile from her. That sounded like her arrogant demon.

“You don’t believe it will work,” he accused.

“I hope it will,” Isa countered. “I’d like to think it’s that simple, that I’m not doing it right.”

He folded down to sitting on the mattress. Frowning, he closed his eyes.

She subsided to the mattress beside him, legs crossed.

Energy shifted. Torrid summer heat, black and heavy as midnight, enfolded her. It built, crushing her until she could no longer draw the thick air into her feeble lungs.

His torrent of energy blew apart.

It pasted Isa back into the bedclothes. She gasped.

Murmur groaned and fell across her.

“What happened? Murmur?” Isa combed her fingers through his hair, tucking a shimmer of warming power into the caress. “Are you all right?”

“No.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It should have worked.”

Fear clamped sharp teeth on her ribs. She blinked against the heavy weight pressing against the backs of her eyes.

“Then we hope Jaiden’s healing will take,” she said. “Until then, I won’t let you go.”

His chest expanded slowly and he wrapped his arms around her waist, pressing his face into her stomach.

“I want you,” he rasped. “But not here. Not in a place so tainted by him.”

By Daniel.

“What the hell are you remembering that you aren’t telling me?”

He shook his head against her.

Isa shuddered. “Murmur, I need you. I don’t know . . .”

“You have me.”

Magic ran liquid and hot beneath her skin, an intoxicating blend of heated black and molten gold.

She grappled for control of the thick, sweet light of her power.

He rolled to his back, pulled her atop him, and arranged her as if she were his preferred blanket. Burying his face against her throat as if drawn to the physical scar he’d given her, he said, “Let go. Hold nothing back. I want all of you.”

She urged trembling muscles to relax and fright-clenched psychic fingers to loosen. Magic surged through her. Glittering gold weighed heavy inside and out. It settled, a toasty mantle pressing her into him.

It was unparalleled freedom to let go completely. To not have to hold back any part of who or what she was. She couldn’t hurt him. He couldn’t hurt her. Not like this. Not with the magical aspects of who and what they were.

Could she be his tattoo? To be this warm and this safe, this accepted, might be worth it.

Isa had no idea what time Jaiden finally knocked on the door.

She and Murmur slid reluctantly apart and grounded so that the magic they’d shared wouldn’t slip straight out the door and light up the city’s aura.

Murmur cracked open the door.