Isa grimaced.
“They’re still out there,” he said, escorting her into the elevator, “following a city snow plow. They’ll find it.”
The elevator doors closed on Agent Anne Macquarie’s stare.
Isa blew out an unsteady breath. “You might have warned me I’m a suspect.”
“You wouldn’t be going home if you were,” Steve noted. “Anne takes her job very seriously.”
“I’m not the enemy.”
“I know that, Ice,” Steve said. His use of the shortened version of her name suggested they were off the clock. “Anne has to consider all the angles.”
“His Ink killed him, Steve.”
The elevator landed in the garage. With a discordant ding, the doors opened. Steve led her into the numbing cold. She shivered.
“What made his Ink kill him?” Steve pressed as he directed her to a car against the far wall.
“I’d need more information before I could answer that. Who was the original artist? What had happened to the man in the days prior to his death? Was he intoxicated? Hopped up on drugs? One theory says that marked changes in a person’s mental health can unbalance symbiosis.”
“You’re talking psychotic break here?” he asked as he unlocked and opened the passenger door for her.
“Could be,” she said, flinching as she lifted her left leg into the car. “If he really was turning on some kind of organized crime boss, I hear that’s all kinds of incentive for a nervous breakdown.”
He shut the passenger door, went to grab something from the trunk, and rounded the vehicle to the driver’s side.
“Blanket,” he said, handing over a plastic-wrapped fleece. “Since we forgot your coat in the rush to get you out of the basement before the investigative team arrived.”
She ripped the blanket free and huddled into it.
He started the car.
“You might ask the ME for a toxicology report on Solvang,” she said.
“SOP.”
“Good.”
“What are we looking for?”
Isa shrugged. “Something that would explain a breakdown that might alter his will and sense of self. When the lines of identity morph, the symbiotic balance between host and Ink unravels. That’s why so few artists want Live Ink of any size. Artists blur the lines of their identities in order to hook into the creative force.”
“Is that what you do?” he asked, shooting her a quick look as if he could see something like the creative impulse hanging over her head.
He eased the car out onto an eerily empty street. The wind-driven snow hammered against her window.
“I suppose, in a way, I do.”
“And that’s why you hide your ink? Everyone assumes you have Live Ink, but all your ink is flat because your concept of yourself is—what? Too fluid to support anything Living?”
She shifted, uncomfortable with his assumption that she had any ink at all and disliking the fact that she had to lie to him about the fact that she didn’t. In no way was she prepared to go into why. So she temporized. “Something like that. I need to know that whatever power answers me when I call is something I can trust.”
“Even though you could enhance your power with Live Ink?”
“You want to volunteer to go under the needle so I can enhance your skill as a detective? Or as a marksman?” she countered.
He recoiled. “I don’t need Ink to be good at what I do.”
“No, you don’t,” she agreed.
He awarded her a grin that kicked up her heart rate. “Nice.”
“I have no desire to have that kind of power tossed at my feet. Power I haven’t earned and learned to control is power that will destroy me.”
He glanced at her as if seeing her for the first time. “You aren’t the kid I busted for stealing seven or eight years ago.”
“Yes. I am,” Isa countered. “The difference is that when you arrested me, I was rebelling against my ability.”
“You wanted to be a normal kid?”
“Still do. Didn’t you?”
“Never.”
They rode in silence for several long minutes while she stared out the window at the whirl of white.
“Turns out overnight in jail wasn’t the place to learn normal.”
“I’ve heard that,” he said as they inched through the snow. The studded snow tires sounded like metal tractor rims on a cattle guard. “Tell you what. If it’s normal you’re looking for, let me buy you a latte.”
She hesitated, and realized she was already shaking her head. Whether to deny him or to deny the temptation of “normal” he dangled, she couldn’t say.
Steve’s smile faded. “I’m not going to grill you anymore. I swear.”
Grilling she could handle. The gleam of interest lighting his gray eyes and the sensual tug on her gut in response she couldn’t. “I have to close out the books.”
She cringed. Why hadn’t she led with the obvious? “The city’s shut down. What would be open?”
“Your books will still be there after coffee, Ice.”
But their working relationship would vanish, replaced by requests for information. All in the interests of “getting to know her better.” Questions she couldn’t face, much less answer.
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” she said. “But I’m not normal. I can’t forget that. You can’t afford to let me forget that. If I’m going to figure out how to catch a dragon that shouldn’t exist in this world, we’ll need all of the odd I can muster.”
Doubt crinkled the skin between his brows. “If I hadn’t seen you turn down every invitation from every single male within ten miles of you since you broke it off with Daniel five years ago, I’d think it was just me. But it isn’t, is it, Ice? What happened? What did Alvarez do or say to put you off taking a chance with another guy?”
She gaped at him, at a loss for anything to say.
“You aren’t still in love with him, are you?”
“What? No!”
“Good. He’s dangerous.”
She stared at Steve’s profile, unsettled by his observation echoing the warning still rumbling around her insides after facing Daniel in the precinct.
“Dangerous?” she said. “He’s ambitious . . .”
“He killed a man, Isa.”
The words dropped like stones into the depths of her. Of course, she’d heard the rumors—that Daniel had been dabbling in magic he shouldn’t have been—that he’d killed a man with Live Ink just to see if he could.
She tried to shake the rumors out of her head.
“Why are your instincts so off on this?” Steve demanded.
Because she didn’t want it to be true.
“He went on that goodwill artist’s tour of Eastern Europe over a year ago,” Steve went on. “Remember that?”
“Yes.”
“It never happened.”
“But he sent me photos of—”
“Never happened,” Steve repeated. “Someone checked into his hotels. A few discreet inquiries got security camera images pulled from those hotels. It wasn’t Daniel Alvarez at any of them. We don’t know where he was or what he was doing for that year. Then that death occurred three months after he reappeared following this supposed tour.”
“How do you . . . ? You’re saying he murdered someone?”
“I am.”
“Why is he not in jail?”
Steve gripped the steering wheel so tightly the leather squeaked. “His lawyer is a snake. And we can’t pin it to him so it’ll stick. I know he did it, and I can’t prove it.”
“Why didn’t you call me in on the investigation? I might have—”
“We called Triple J,” he said.
Daniel’s mentor. Hers, too, for a few years after she’d come to Seattle. Before N
ightmare Ink.
“I didn’t want you in that situation,” Steve added.
Investigating someone she’d kidded herself she’d fallen for. No. She had fallen for the easy, sexy smile Daniel had reserved for her. Beautiful, young women had come and gone at Weird Ink, the shop where the pair of them had apprenticed with Triple J. Daniel had ignored them all in favor of her.
She’d liked the feeling.
She’d let him seduce her. It had been so sweet, initially. His drive, his curiosity, and his art had fascinated her.
Then they’d discovered that their magic wasn’t compatible.
Daniel had stopped smiling.
His drive turned into pushing her into experiments with their magic that left her sick and shaking. Him, too. Yet he took each failure to blend their powers as a personal affront.
Through it all, he never spoke a harsh word to her. He never treated her with anything but thoughtful courtesy. But he also never let her out of his sight.
Until one bright, warm summer’s day, nine months after they’d started sleeping together. Isa and Daniel had gone to Weird Ink to find Triple J waiting for them in front of the shop.
“Go on in,” he’d said to Daniel. “Open up. Me and Ice are gonna take a walk.”
He’d walked her around the corner and handed her a check.
“Take it and clear out,” he’d said. “There’s bad stuff happening between you and Daniel. It’s gotta stop. So if you take this money, it comes with a condition. You go open your own shop in another part of town, and you break it off with Daniel. He’s distracted. I can’t have it. And you don’t need me. Not like he does.”
Isa closed her eyes on the burn of that memory and listened to the blizzard scratching at the roof of the police car.
“I’m sorry I dropped this on you,” Steve said. “I didn’t intend to tell you.”
She shrugged. What the hell had happened to the gentle, thoughtful young man she’d thought she loved? What had happened to her morals that she’d taken Triple J’s money and run from what felt like a family rejecting her?
She opened her eyes.
“It’s not coffee you need,” Steve noted.
“No, it’s not.”
“The offer is still open. I’ll even drink whiskey with you, though I wouldn’t have pegged you for a whiskey drinker.”
“I’m not.”
She had to get away from her memories and from Steve’s revelations. Isa dropped her chin to her chest, shoved her hands in her pockets, and muttered, “Maybe next time.”
“Sure,” Steve said, his voice flat. “Next time.”
Chapter Three
Seattle hunkered down the next day to wait out the snow.
Isa refused to let the multiple puncture wounds in her thigh paralyze her. Entirely. Especially not when Troy texted that someone wanted a flat ink tattoo from her.
She hobbled through the snow to Nightmare Ink.
A tall, slender young man with neat black hair and dark eyes opened the shop door as if he’d been watching for her. He wore dress slacks, a crisp white shirt, and a navy sweater.
“Ria,” Isa said. “You look—”
“Like I belong in church with my grandmother?” he interrupted, smiling. “I will be shortly. Your coat. Allow me.”
“Thank you.”
As Ria took her jacket, Isa caught Troy Daschel, a flat ink artist leasing shop space from her, eyeing the pair of them from where he sat behind the reception desk. He rose and held out a hand. “Here. I’ll hang that up.”
“Gracias.” Ria gave Troy her coat, and eyed her. “I understand you are injured, señora. I am sorry to hear this. You are well enough to do a tattoo for me?”
“It’s nothing serious,” Isa said. “Come on back. We’ll get the paperwork filled out . . .”
“Already done,” Troy said over his shoulder as he hung her coat in the back hallway.
“Have a seat,” Isa said, leading Ria around the reception desk to her station. “What are we doing?”
He settled into the chair as she switched on her work light. His gaze on hers, Ria turned his face so the overhead lamp spotlighted his left cheekbone. The light caught the three ink teardrops tattooed there.
“A fourth.”
Isa’s heart bumped down her ribs to her toes.
Teardrop tattoos were supposed to represent a tally of the murders the wearer had committed. It didn’t stop thug wannabes and stars promoting an image from getting teardrops inked on their faces.
But Ria wasn’t a wannabe.
Isa didn’t know what the young gang leader and his gang did in Ballard. Didn’t want to know. It was enough that Ria had been her first customer at Nightmare Ink. He came to her when he wanted tattoos. He brought his people suffering Ink Madness to her for binding.
Still watching her, he put a hand in his pocket and brought forth a gold and onyx ring like the one he wore, like all of his people wore.
“Emilio,” he said. “Tragic, senseless waste. Stupid. His funeral is in two hours.”
Isa rubbed the heel of one hand up her forehead.
“A quarter of the Seattle Police Department is inspecting my basement, Ria,” she whispered. “Do you really want to advertise the fact that you killed one of your own people with cops crawling all over?”
His fist closed on the ring until his knuckles turned white. “Yes. I do. Think of the stories that will be told. Police watch while I get another tattoo for another tool that failed me. A powerful message to the rest of them. Do not tell me you won’t do it.”
Refusing to work on Ria wouldn’t change anything. She turned on her tattoo machine and drew the iridescent black outline of a fourth teardrop into the skin over his cheekbone.
As if she weren’t jabbing him repeatedly with needles, Ria didn’t move a muscle until she finished and handed him a mirror.
“Bueno,” he said, inspecting the work. “I will go to the funeral with a warning label written by your hand. You save lives.”
He rose and walked away.
Troy, working not four feet away from Isa’s station, shut off his tattoo machine and straightened.
At the reception desk, Ria pulled a couple of folded bills out of a pocket, counted off three, and tossed them to the counter.
Isa stood.
With a glance back at her, he flicked something else to the countertop. It clinked, hollow and metallic as it hit and rolled.
A bullet casing.
Ria walked out into the snow without any hint that he noticed the cold.
Troy rocketed to the desk, scooped up the brass, and shook his head. “I’m going to strangle that skinny son of a bitch.”
“That’s evidence,” Isa said, holding out a hand. “And you just put your fingerprints on it.”
“Nah. It was on the news a day or so ago,” Troy said. “The kid he executed died of autoerotic asphyxiation. At least, that’s what it was made to look like. The bullet casing was just to rattle you.”
She clasped shaking hands. “Worked.”
“Let me get your coat,” Troy said. “You should get off that leg.”
No. She should take her mind off the moral conundrum inking teardrops on a psychopath represented.
Since she couldn’t manage the stairs to the basement studio where Steve and his unit were investigating Kelli Solvang’s death, she limped through the snow, around the building, to the open basement door, and hobbled in.
“Ma’am! Ma’am, you can’t be here! Crime scene investigation . . .” a young man in uniform said, attempting to bundle her out the door.
“Ow! Knock it off!” She planted her feet. “This is my place of business. Your investigation is in my studio, not out here.”
“Ma’am,” he countered, pinning her with a glare. “My job is to secure this investigation site. Yo
u’re a breach of security. Don’t make me arrest you.”
“My job is to make a new batch of binding ink so that the next time you guys send me someone strung out on magic, I can do something about it.”
He scowled and reached for the cuffs on his belt.
“Would you please check with Detective Corvane, at least?” she prodded. “I’ll wait right here, I swear.”
“You’ll do what he says?”
“No. Him I can argue to a standstill.”
The cop barked a laugh, stuck his head in the door of the studio, and asked for a word with Steve.
“Isa, I don’t have time . . .” Steve stomped out of the studio, his shoulders high and tight. He aborted his “don’t have time for this” declaration when he met her eye.
She lifted an eyebrow in challenge.
“You aren’t supposed to be moving around on that leg,” he amended.
“Nice save, Detective,” she noted.
Her bland tone had no appreciable impact on his scowl. “What is it you imagine you’ll talk me into letting you do?”
“Making a new batch of binding ink,” Isa said. “You and I don’t want me to be without.”
His shoulders climbed an inch higher.
“You’re right.” He sounded grudging. “But—”
“I don’t need in there,” she interrupted, tired of having to ask permission to work in her own shop. “Technically, I should be, but since everyone in the city who could arrest me for working minor magic in an unshielded location is in there with you, I’m comfortably certain you might overlook the infraction this time.”
“What do you need?”
“A few herbs, pigments, stuff I’m not willing to talk about, and my slow cooker back there.” She pointed at the darkest corner of the basement tucked up under the stairs.
His frown deepened. “Anything illegal?”
“Not unless someone’s outlawed sage or sweetgrass in the past twenty-four hours.”
“Not that I’m aware. No cracks about ignorance and bliss, now,” he cautioned her and the grinning cop who stood watching them. “And Isa,” Steve said, shifting his shoulders and settling them lower. “Get off that leg before you break open the wounds again. I really don’t have time to drive you to the emergency room. I’d ask Davis to take you.”
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