Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) (3 page)

Ria cut a sharp look her way. Whatever he saw in her scrunched-up face, he drew himself upright. He pulled his gun and fired.

Isa stumbled back, throat scratched raw by the shriek of protest no one would hear above the Glock’s report. The magic still fizzing her blood repaired her hearing again while Isa stared at the hole in the middle of Walter’s forehead.

Blood and material she couldn’t bear to identify trickled like a tear down his hairline. A muscle jumped in his right cheek, pulling his mouth into a brief grimace.

Flinching, she caught in her breath. What had happened to
not in front of Señora Ice
?

Silence settled, save for the breeze flagging the painter’s plastic wrapped around a monstrous fishing boat in the dry dock. And in the distance, a siren wailed, coming closer. Finally.

Ria studied her, his expression smooth. No compassion. No remorse. “I will need a new tattoo.” He lifted his left cheekbone to the sky. The iridescent ink of the teardrops there shimmered.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she whispered because she couldn’t trust her voice.

Ria shook his head. “What did you see when you treated him,
señora
?”

“Nothing.”

“
Sí.
He was a good man. A good warrior. His family will not be burdened by medical bills and false hope.”

She was breathing too fast, her trembling hands clenched.

Emanuel, his lips pressed tight and regret shadowing his eyes, picked up her backpack. He offered it to her. Across Walter’s corpse.

A chocolate brown Crown Vic, light bar in the back window flashing, swung into the parking lot and screeched to a sliding halt on the wet pavement and gravel. The driver’s door opened.

Steve.

“Isa!” Tension rode his voice. His short, sandy brown hair was rumpled. Harsh lines showed at the corners of his gray eyes. “What the hell is going on? Troy told me to follow the gunfire.”

“Ink emergency,” she said, cringing at the wobble in the gross understatement.

Steve’s gaze flicked to the dead man, to Ria, then back to Isa. “No time for this. We have a situation. I need you now.”

No time for a killer, still armed with the murder weapon, standing over the body of the man he’d killed? That jolted her. She grabbed her pack from Emanuel.

Ria shifted. “Thank you,
señora
. You should know. George Tollefson. You do know him.”

She frowned.

“Patty,” Ria said.

The flamboyant cross-dressing prostitute who’d worked the street in front of Isa’s shop. Patty had helped save Isa’s life after the kidnapping. And subsequently gone missing.

“Son of a bitch.” She threw her pack in the car and got in.

“I’ll ask what that was later,” Steve said. “What do you need in the way of gear and what happened to your hands?”

“The blue is a long story. As for gear, I need a quick stop for more bind ink,” she said as Steve turned the car around and sped out of the parking lot, screeching to a halt in front of Nightmare Ink a couple of minutes later.

Isa sprinted inside, clattered down the stairs, and grabbed another bottle of binding ink. She took an extra few seconds to fish the stasis paper with the whirlwind tattoo on it out of her pack. She locked it into the containment studio and took the stairs two at a time back up to the street.

When she threw herself into his car, Steve hit the siren and took off once more.

Isa couldn’t ask Steve for a briefing, not over the siren. Constant chatter filled the radio, and while Steve had it turned up, she caught only the tension and fear in the voices. She couldn’t make out the words.

It echoed the noise of confusion and conjecture in her head. A Magic Eater. Where had it come from? Her brain threw a visual memory before her for inspection.
Pure, inhuman, silver power warped the air around the creature
.

She wrapped her arms around her ribs to suppress a shudder. That energy signature belonged to something she’d thrown out of this world.
Hadn’t she? What the hell did seeing it mean?

And why hadn’t she been able to heal Walter?

Isa had to brace against her door as Steve whipped the car through the streets and around the traffic stopped on the surface streets leading to I-5. The freeway was jammed with cars. Both directions. Not just slow traffic. Parked traffic. Barely any motion at all. The Department of Transportation had erected emergency barriers, diverting traffic off the 520 floating bridge. The notification signs on I-5 flashed:
520 BRIDGE CLOSED. A
CCIDENT MID-SPAN
.

Annoyed drivers didn’t seem to be in any hurry to move out of the way of the police car. The calls on the radio became indistinguishable from the wail of the siren.

Isa craned her neck as they inched up the crest of the ship canal bridge, peering east even though she knew she’d never get a glimpse of 520.

A glimmer of hazy, visual disturbance warped the cloudy sky above Lake Washington. Pressure imbued with dreadful, crushing wrong landed on her ribs. Gasping, she slammed up a shield. Not just around her. She shielded the entire car. The weight of whatever was happening
would be strong enough to affect any magic sensitive who got close enough to the source. Including Steve.

Damn, she needed to teach him to shield for himself.

Once they’d negotiated the narrow shoulders of I-5 to the 520 interchange and edged past the DOT barriers, people who’d made it onto the highway before the barriers went up were abandoning their cars, and fleeing Lake Washington. Some had tears coursing down their faces. Isa detected a pattern in which of the people had little to no magic and which of them had enough to see past the ordinary world. Over half of the pedestrians, while they wore perplexed frowns, didn’t look back. Not once. The rest cast terrified glances over their shoulders as if afraid of what they’d see coming after them.

Rule six: It takes magic to perceive magic.

Magic, real arcane power rather than simple sleight of hand, had appeared in the world between fifty and one hundred years ago. Historians couldn’t agree on exactly when. The first obvious evidence had come from seventy years ago. An arcane explosion—overloaded magic—had leveled a town in rural China. To this day, the farmland remained fallow. Not even the birds would fly over.

More arcane explosions, usually triggered by someone coming into too much power for the human form to handle—or so the theories went—had followed. In those early years, anyone who suddenly developed an affinity for the uncanny found themselves driven out of town, if they weren’t killed outright. Then, as suddenly as they’d begun, arcane explosions had stopped. Either the advent of magic into the world had settled in or the people with magic had learned how to handle it. Or maybe it was a form of magical Darwinism. If having too much magic resulted in death, then power self-selected down—into a form the human animal could manage.

Whatever it had been, the human race had coped. Was still coping. Some people had magic. Some people didn’t. In order to see the effects of magic—like the shimmer of power warping the air above the bridge—a person had to have power of their own as a frame of reference.

She shifted forward, straining against her seatbelt to catch a glimpse of what the people fleeing the scene feared. Emergency vehicles had preceded Steve’s car and cleared a path. Drivers, assuming there’d been an accident that the ambulances, police, and fire trucks could clear, had shifted off sides, opening a narrow, treacherous lane down the middle that now filled with people running up the bridge deck for Seattle.

As Steve laid on the horn, people shifted grudgingly to one side. Someone shouted at him to fuck off—they were running for their lives and not even the police had the right to divert them. At least no one was waving a gun around. Yet.

Isa began to detect blood and minor injuries on the pedestrians. They gave way to more severe injuries—visibly broken bones, semiconscious victims supported between grim-faced, uniformed first responders. Some of the victims were carried by other, less injured drivers.

As Steve’s car started down the western high rise, Isa looked into Armageddon. A bus lay overturned across the westbound traffic lanes, surrounded by victims who would never rise again. Half of the back section of the double long, reticulated bus dangled over the water. Cars and trucks had been tossed like the blocks of a two-year-old in the midst of a tantrum. One was a fire truck, lights still flashing amid the crumpled, shredded wreck of red and chrome.

News helicopters hung high above the bridge, tottering back and forth in the air.

Dark fluid wet the concrete bridge deck.

Isa’s breath rose high in her chest as her shoulders tightened.

The visual shimmer of
here-be-magic
resolved into a huge, scaly, five-headed monster of Ink and magic. A hydra. An enormous myth with gleaming, rainbow-hued scales stood splay-legged across the decks of both the east- and westbound lanes. Claws, dripping unspeakable meaty globs of human remains, grasped an SUV. One of the heads bent and ripped the roof from the vehicle as if it were a pop-top soup can. The other heads darted in, picking the struggling driver and passengers out of their seatbelts.

Blood sprayed. Kicking legs went limp, dangling from the monster’s teeth. The creature flung the empty shell of the vehicle into the water on the north side of the bridge. It landed amid the people who’d taken to the lake to escape.

Isa couldn’t count how many went down beneath the impact. A few bodies bobbed back to the surface, bouncing on the ripples. But they no longer swam. Or moved.

As it snapped the corpses into its mouths, the hydra grew.

Isa had to look away.

The exodus of wounded had ended. Abandoned cars and trucks surrounded them. Their path to the battlefield spread out before them. Too short to where the vehicles of the first responders piled up against one another.

“Do you see it?” Isa breathed.

She didn’t know how he heard above the siren. Or above the multithroated roar of the hydra.

Steve glanced at her, white outlining his lips. He clicked off the siren. No one remained in the cars around them to care, much less move out of the way. He nodded.

An arcane pressure wave built against her shield the closer they drew.

“Stop the car,” she rasped, her heart a sudden ache in her chest. She didn’t know yet why she’d said it, only that they couldn’t go any closer. Not both of them. “Stop the car!”

Steve didn’t answer. The car kept moving at a crawl toward the murderous thing.

“You can’t go down there,” Isa shouted at the windshield, surprised by the surge of determination that seemed to starch her quaking limbs. She undid her seatbelt, grabbed the strap of her backpack, opened her door, and rolled out of the car.

“Oof!” She hit the cement shoulder and hip first. The raincoat absorbed precious little of the impact. Sharp pain exploded through her shoulder. Her arm went numb.

Even though the car had measured their speed in a single digit, the momentum was enough that she slid a foot. Maybe more. If she survived the day, she’d have a hell of a fabric burn on her right hip where her jeans had saved her skin from the concrete.

The door hit a white van and rebounded.

Steve jerked the car to a halt.

Isa struggled to her feet in the south wind while he slammed his door into a shiny green sports car.

“Isa! We don’t have—”

“You have too much magic to go unnoticed and not enough training to use it to protect yourself!” She hefted the pack strap over her left shoulder and faced him across the hood of the car.

Outside the sound barrier of the car, she could hear the shrill din of human voices raised in terrified unison. And the crunch of snapping bone in the creature’s many maws.

Her stomach turned.

She
didn’t have enough power or training to protect herself from something that had been gorging on blood and magic all afternoon.

His lips curled. “Someone has to—”

“It’s why you brought me, Steve.”

He glanced at the carnage. The flush of rage drained from his face. “What’s your plan?”

Plan? Isa swallowed hard. “The only hope is to contain it.”

“You can do that?”

“I have to try.”

He blew out an audibly unsteady breath. “Be careful.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, closed it, and nodded once.

She mirrored the gesture. Her throat closed on what she couldn’t say to his face. So, coward that she was, Isa retreated to business. “No closer. If it starts coming this way, get the hell out of here.”

Without waiting for an answer, she turned and, ignoring the ache in her hip and shoulder, strode from the frying pan into the fire.

She reached the first police and aid cars clogging the center of the bridge deck.

Clouds scudded across the lowering sun. Dark in the next two or three hours. If she couldn’t get the hydra under some kind of control before sundown, the survivors wouldn’t stand a chance. Especially the ones in the water.

Teeth chattering, pulse hammering in her ears, Isa fought nerves twitching with the impulse to flee.

The wind could no longer blow away the stench of death, spilled fuel, and the sharp, electrical tang of magic overloading. She and the survivors were running out of time. Arcane sparks could ignite aerosolized gasoline as surely as any physical spark.

The hydra froze. Every single head swiveled. Too many eyes to count turned to glare at her.

Isa’s gut clenched.

Magic rolled through her middle in a queasy-making wave. The ever-present river of shimmering light that ran through her core had given away her approach. She desperately needed it to protect her. And she couldn’t seem to gather enough of her scattered will to summon more than a mote.

The hydra opened three of its bloody, reeking maws and trilled what sounded like a question. Wondering whether she’d taste good when one of its heads bit her in half?

Adrenaline scorched a path from behind her sternum straight down. It sloshed around inside the wound left by Murmur’s departure.

She missed him. A bitter laugh escaped her lips.

It broke her paralysis.

Staring into the burning, whirling yellow-green eyes of the hydra, she breathed the odors of terror, death, gasoline, diesel, and hydra poison deep into her lungs. Drawing energy in with the foul air, she concentrated power at her core. It steadied her.

The hydra took an impossibly big step toward her. It crushed a semi beneath one clawed foot and a tiny import car beneath another.

Quaking, clenching every muscle to keep from running, she shoved her awareness deep into the river of liquid sunlight, gathering it, calling it up for use.

“Changing Woman, I sure need help with this one,” Isa muttered, naming one of the deities from her childhood. She wasn’t blood of Changing Woman’s people; 520 wasn’t necessarily Changing Woman’s land.

Isa hoped it wouldn’t matter. She only knew she was unequal to the task of neutralizing the being currently dedicating two heads to plucking shrieking victims out of Lake Washington.

Terrible, wet splintering sounds stopped the screams.

Her heart faltered and her gorge rose. Isa swallowed hard.

No more victims. She had to get the thing under control.

Power rose in a whirl, lighting her from within. Bright as noon on the desert, but no warmth. Isa pushed the glittering magic outward in a bubble around her, strengthening her shield, drawing it tight and impenetrable, she hoped, around her.

The creature appeared to sense the energy moving. Every eye fastened upon her. One of the hydra’s many heads darted down.

She poured power into the shield, turning the magic into something impermeable.

Serrated teeth, dripping bloody slime, impacted the shield. The hit resonated through to her bones. She stumbled.

The hydra rebounded, shock in the coiling of its other necks. It threw four heads to the sky and bugled a challenge.

Her ears rang. Isa cringed.

The creature had more raw power running through it than she’d ever encountered. It could snap her shield with a thought. If it had any rational ones with so many heads. Given that it didn’t seem to realize it courted destruction by overloading on magic, she gathered it didn’t know how to handle the energy coursing through its matrix.

Her first piece of luck.

She couldn’t count on any more. Though her breath shuddered and her hands still shook, she took her time summoning yet more power. She focused the energy into her tingling right palm. Lifting the arm to sketch a circle enclosing the hydra brought cold sweat to her forehead.

Shimmering motes of energy, like sun shining through rain, rose in the air behind the maddened beast.

It struck again.

The blow weakened her shield, and drove her to her knees. Intent upon closing the circle around the hydra, she couldn’t afford to allow her attention and intention to waver.

Somewhere in the wreckage of vehicles and body parts, someone with enough magic to see the creature, but not enough training to know that bullets couldn’t touch a rogue tattoo, began shooting.

Isa clenched her teeth and concentrated on carving out the rest of the circle that would cut the hydra and her off from the rest of reality. Nothing else mattered.

Not the bullet that shattered the windshield of the car next to her. Not the sharp-edged pain scoring her face. Not the sirens approaching from the Montlake Cut connecting Lake Washington to Lake Union.