Soul Ink

by J. C. Nelson

  Liam stood up and walked to the mantel, where he licked his fingers and then touched two candles. The candles burst into flame. “Blessing? Curse?”

  My harathakin didn’t answer. In fact, while Haniel had done his “deprive Marissa of life” bit, they hadn’t so much as tossed a piece of garbage. Then again, two spell creatures versus an archangel wouldn’t be much of a fight.

  “Can you see them?” I glanced to Ari.

  “Still blind to magic, M.” For all Ari complains about how the spirit world distracted her, losing her sight, even temporarily, didn’t improve her attitude. “Grimm say how long he’d be gone?”

  “One day.”

  Liam nodded. “Which could mean the whole weekend, since tomorrow is Friday, right?”

  I hadn’t considered it. “I’d notice if he were gone that long.”

  “Yeah, but no one else would. I’ll bet you get the next three days to sleep late.” Liam rose and grabbed the plates, serving us dinner.

  “You know what that means?” I asked, ignoring the pained expression that spread across Ari’s face. “We can stay up late. Talk.”

  Ari looked like she’d swallowed a chunk of mana. “If you mean talk, I won’t need my earphones.”

  I didn’t.

  • • •

  The next morning, after Liam dragged himself from bed and off to truck through the sewers again, I took my note from Grimm and prepared to go into Kingdom. Which meant checking in on my roommate. “Ari. You up for a trip to Kingdom?”

  “Go away.”

  “There will be coffee. And donuts.” As if Ari could resist donuts.

  “Go away. I’m exhausted.”

  I opened the door to her bedroom. “Why? You weren’t the one up all night.”

  “Yes, I was.” Ari sat up in bed. “You need a gag. Or a soundproof bedroom. I need a pair of industrial earplugs and a few hours’ sleep.”

  “We’re not that bad.”

  “You are.” Ari rolled over and put her pillow over her head. “Good night, Marissa.”

  So I left her.

  The gates of Kingdom divide it from the rest of the city, which is convenient, since Kingdom and the city overlap. It’s basically a separate layer of reality, held in place by the gates. And if you thought the city was crazy, Kingdom would push you over the edge.

  Though Kingdom was only open to those with a connection to magic, my harathakin, living creatures given to me by the fae, could let me access Kingdom on my own. One was a blessing, one was a curse, and both were at least mildly psychotic. I turned the corner, passing the gates, and waited for the magic to take hold.

  With each step, a part of the city sloughed away. The air lost the ever present aroma of urine. The concrete shifted to sparkling marble. The crowds—well, the crowds changed, but that’s about all they did. Friday morning in Kingdom was a preparation for one hell of a party. By midnight tonight, the place would be so thick with spells and enchantments you’d have princesses hooking up with farm boys.

  Many a man went to bed with a princess and woke up with a witch. It happened in Kingdom too.

  The shops here sold everything a person might need for a fairy-tale life. Charms for when your prince wasn’t. Long dresses, which didn’t get caught in weeds or wick up mud. Veils just perfect for not quite being able to see a woman’s face, which came in handy if you were secretly passing yourself off as someone else. Or if you just didn’t feel like applying makeup.

  Today, however, I was headed to the museum. Kingdom’s museum, which made it marginally less boring. A banner hung over the sandstone exterior. “Lance-a-lot: The exhibition of pig-stickers.” Unlike the post office, there was no line to get in.

  I tapped on the first ticket window, waiting for the man inside to respond.

  “Pssst. He’s dead.” The man’s voice came from behind me.

  I glanced around to the other ticket taker. “As in—”

  “Dead. Died two weeks ago, just after lunch.”

  On second glance, the ticket taker did look lifeless, even for a government employee. I tapped on the window and he didn’t move. Again, not unusual for a government employee. “If he’s dead, what is he still doing there?”

  “He was only four weeks from retiring. It would kill him to miss it by a few days. Can I help you?”

  I shuffled to the second ticket booth and paid my money. “You’ve still got magical antiquities, right?”

  He nodded. “Just past the display on living with pixies. If you reach the Hall of Warts, you’ve gone too far.”

  With ticket in hand, I entered the domain of evil. Well, not evil, but boredom. Which could be kind of evil. Museum air has a certain quality to it, no matter where you are. It’s a scent that says “Somewhere in this building are mummified bodies. Not the ones outside in the ticket booth. No, old ones. We have them here.” It also says “We’re grinding them up and feeding them into the air-conditioning.”

  The dust on the floor lay thick, only disturbed by a parade of school students being forced to take the field trip tour. They held on to the rope, not so much to avoid getting lost as to be dragged along with the group if they slipped into a coma from boredom.

  I found the side hall labeled “Magical Antiquities.” I could have turned a tractor trailer around inside. And yet the whole thing was lit by five measly light bulbs. The exhibits themselves made watching leaves rot look interesting. Ancient scrying crystals (a fancy term for “glass beads”). Ancient divination pearls (glass beads). The shrunken heads of five hundred gnomes (not glass beads, but still boring).

  Only one display held anything of interest, and that was due to the emblem on the brass plaque. A single rose in a ring of thorns, it matched line for line the scars on my left hand. The handmaiden’s mark. Symbol of the Black Queen. I still couldn’t look at it without feeling the thorns tear into me.

  The case held a single sword, a blade that looked more like an overgrown thorn than metal. So this is what she used to kill people. I reached out to brush the edge of the blade.

  And a light flashed, a siren blared. “Intrusion detected in Magical Antiquities,” said an automated voice. Actually, come to think of it, it might have been a man’s voice, but since it was a museum employee, it was hard to tell.

  A moment later, an old man stumbled into the exhibit, a flashlight in one hand, a cane in another. “It’s true!” He turned and shouted. “We have a visitor!”

  “Are you the curator?” I shouted, hoping he could hear me.

  “I am,” he said. “The exit is right over there, if you’ve gotten lost. I’m so sorry. We used to have a light showing which way it was, but people would just leave.”

  While my first instinct was to leave as well, I couldn’t without what I came for. “I’m looking for the Press of Aiyn. Is it here?”

  His eyes widened. “You want to see something here? And you aren’t, I don’t know, sick?”

  “Not far as I can tell.”

  “This way,” he said, leading me to the far corner. There, a tuning fork the size of a guitar lay in a padded case. “This here is the only magical press ever created. Ansel Aiyn went on to invent the soul sieve, a much more efficient method of extracting spells.”

  “How does it work?”

  He choked out a laugh. “Damned if I know. Using it might destroy it, and the only thing we destroy here is curiosity.”

  I reached out and flicked the fork, but resting in the padding, it didn’t hum. “So do I need to sign something saying I’ll bring it back?”

  “Back from where?” He fiddled with his hearing aids. “The bathroom, you say? That way.”

  I let out an annoyed sigh at all the times Grimm failed to mention details like this. “Do you have any idea who I am or who I work for?”

  “No, young lady, I don’t.”

  “Good.” I
seized the fork from its display, setting off an alarm like a howler monkey, and sprinted for the nearest fire exit. As I threw it open, the chorus of alarms became a sea of shrieking. I had to disappear. Grimm would disapprove of killing guards, and based on the size and age of the guards I’d passed on the way in, just chasing me down the alley might kill them.

  Rooftops were out. No way to climb with the fork, which weighed more than a bucket of cat litter. Even Kingdom police could spot “woman carrying three-foot tuning fork.” So I stopped at the end of the alley and pried up the manhole cover, then slipped down into darkness.

  Kingdom’s sewers weren’t built large so women could walk upright in them. They weren’t built large to provide a perfect nesting place for mutant alligators. They were built large because Kingdom’s population of ogres produced more waste than the humans themselves.

  In order to tell you how hot the sewers were, I’d need something to gauge against, like, for instance, the surface of the sun. Which was only a few degrees less hot, and I’m fairly certain less humid. The stench down there was practically a creature of its own.

  You’d think the stink would be the same, and of the same thing.

  You’d think wrong. Oh, the underlying stench was most definitely of toilet, but the scents mingled and mixed like colors on an artist’s pallet. So I tore my sleeve loose and bound it around my head, forming a not nearly effective enough breathing apparatus.

  All I had to do was go with the flow far enough to hit the next pumping station. As I approached the next junction, the theme of stink became “rotten meat.” And a rumble through the tunnels came rolling like thunder. Reminiscent of a passing bus, except that this particular bus had evolved before the dinosaurs.

  Why hadn’t I insisted on Liam coming with me? Oh, right. Because he was a free man. One day, I’d fix that in the normal, socially accepted manner. Maybe. Cursed with the power (and microscopic brain) of a dragon, Liam measured monster alligators in “boots per foot.”

  I snapped open my cell phone. Damned cell towers gave me poor reception on a good day. The roaring, which grew louder by the moment, told me this was not a good day. And I didn’t even bring my anti-alligator ammo.

  The tunnels opened out to a pumping pool, and there, a bad day went worse. At first, I wondered why Kingdom Sewage Services had allowed so many rocks to pile up. The pebbly surface of the rocks reminded me of something else.

  A pile of eggs. A large pile of eggs, belonging to something large and angry.

  I searched for the manhole ladder, because regardless of where I came up, and regardless of whether or not there were police in the area, it would be a lot better for my health aboveground. I spotted a set of iron prongs and clambered over the pile of eggs to reach them.

  My foot slipped, cracking an egg. Inside, a wet form thrashed feebly and let out a dying squeal that echoed through the tunnel. Beneath me, the mound of eggs answered in muffled squeaks. And the world roared around me as an angry mother answered.

  I caught the bottom rung, but the pile of eggs shifted beneath me, crushing more eggs. And the smell of death overwhelmed every other stench. Hand over hand, I climbed up toward the manhole cover and possible safety.

  Two pegs from the top, the thrashing below went silent. I risked a glance into the pumping station below. A single red eye glared up at me, filled with primal hatred. I was safe though. Not even the alligator’s nose could fit in the narrow surface access tube.

  She swung her head like a club, crashing into the pillar holding my ladder, obliterating it.

  And I fell.

  Seven

  Falling back into a monster alligator’s lair wasn’t on my list of things to do for the day. Landing in a pile of eggs and obliterating the few that remained ranked even lower. I sank into the detritus of shells and dying alligator-lets, and froze.

  My hunch was that Mama worked mainly on smell. And covered in egg goo and bits of shell, I couldn’t possibly smell like shampoo or deodorant, which were the only two scents Liam admitted to me having. If I ever smelled like anything else, he kept his mouth shut, and hopefully she would too.

  Now, some people will tell you dinosaurs went extinct because they had brains the size of walnuts. I’ll point out that alligators, mutant or otherwise, never went extinct. Scientists would say this was because they were well adapted. I’d say it was because they were too smart.

  This one stopped moving, running a careful gaze over the ruined mound of eggs. It cracked its jaws just wide enough to sift through the eggshells, and began transferring shells into a smaller mound which would contain only broken shells and things that weren’t me.

  Grimm had given me three months of training on how to deal with monsters like banshees, imps, or mother-in-laws, but I’d learned a fascinating trick on the job. Taught to me by a Himalayan Sherpa on vacation in the city, it involved how to handle yetis.

  After many days of tracking one through the slums, we’d camped, building a fire in the remains of a Volvo, and there he revealed his secret to preventing the yeti from tearing his arms off: Hit them with something heavy, and keep hitting them until they stopped moving.

  So when the alligator’s head turned away from me, I sat up, swung the tuning fork like a club, and brained it right across the head.

  It hummed a note to end the world. To tear the ether apart and rend the dead. A vibration which shook all forty of my fillings and made the world shake. So I hit it again, using all the strength my tattoo could summon. It surged up my arm, all too happy to help with violence.

  I suspect the alligator was used to being shot at, grabbed with ropes, or having flamethrowers leveled at it. She was the only one reacting worse to the tone. While it threatened to tear my spirit from my body, a combination of head injury and head-splitting hum left her thrashing upside down.

  And my tattoo danced like something alive. It ran like a river of ink, pooling into puddles under my skin and then spreading out. With each strike of Aiyn’s Press, the strength it gave me faded, but so did the control it had over my arm. When I stopped, the alligator lay still. Only the slightest quiver at the tip of her tail told me she was still alive.

  Now seemed like as good a time as any to split. With the fork over my shoulder, I climbed across the motionless alligator—and froze.

  In the darkness of Kingdom’s sewers, something else moved. Not footsteps, but the slow slosh of something old and patient, or maybe just old and out of shape. Either way, it crept relentlessly forward. How many nests had Liam said he found? Two? And here was a third. Which either meant someone had crossed an alligator with a hen, or we had multiple gators loose.

  The concrete column I’d tried to climb out with lay in ruins, and all the side tunnels might lead somewhere too small for me to climb out, but not too small for me to be eaten. So I waited, ready to swing the fork.

  Two glowing red eyes appeared in the darkness, slithering toward me, hissing with foul breath. Which was saying something, given where I was.

  The eyes closed, giving me no way to know where it was. If it was swimming up through sewage to lunge at me.

  “Marissa?” The voice came from the tunnel. Liam’s voice. “What are you doing down here?”

  With a gasp of relief, I hopped down off the moribund alligator. “I found a nest, but don’t worry. I already destroyed it.”

  “That’s the fifth one today,” said Liam. He emerged from the shadows completely naked, and completely unconcerned about it. With a cough, he spit in one hand, using the flame on his palm as a torch. “How did you get down here?”

  “Manhole behind the Kingdom Museum of Magic. Shouldn’t you be wearing clothes? Or at least boots?”

  Liam blew smoke from his mouth. “Down here’s about the only place I can let the curse run loose. It has a sense of smell that’s amazing—I could smell you from a mile away. I figured it was just another one of your purses.
What are you carrying?”

  Liam carried a curse. Which was to say it co-inhabited his body. I’d say it gave him the power to change into a dragon, but it still wasn’t entirely clear who was in control. Liam described it more like a time-share where your co-renter was a six-thousand-year-old lizard.

  I shifted the tuning fork. “Grimm told me how to remove the tattoo. This is—”

  “Aiyn’s Press. Isn’t that in—Marissa.” Liam crossed his arms over his bare chest. “Wasn’t that on display at the museum?”

  I choked, not on the smell, which practically came in chunks, but trying to figure out how Liam knew exactly what had been in Kingdom’s least interesting museum. “Yes. You’ve been there?”

  “Grimm sent me right after I started moonlighting. I have a membership. Did you know what they’re showing this month? Lances!” A wide grin split across his face. “It’s like a horror show. The curse keeps whispering about how this one killed a dragon, who still owed it a thousand gold pieces.”

  “I’m going to return the press. Grimm said it would help me remove the tattoo, and I think I know how.” I swung the fork, clipping the wall.

  Liam winced as the fork went off, holding his hands over his ears. “Stop that.”

  I ran my hand down it. “Does it hurt?”

  “Hurt’s not the right word. It’s numbing.” He walked past me to put a hand on the prone alligator. “You might want to go stand over there. This isn’t going to be pretty.”

  Seeing the alligator defenseless, motionless, I couldn’t stand what I knew he’d do. “Don’t.”

  Liam let go of her snout. “Don’t what? I’ve already killed two of them today. The whole damn sewer’s infested.”

  “Then let her go. I already ruined the nest. It’ll be another year before she lays again. I just—I just don’t feel good about this.” My arm trembled at those words, and I quickly shifted the press to my other hand, in case the tattoo had ideas of its own.