“Let’s take a walk,” Troy said to him. “This isn’t the time or the place, man.”
“Daniel is still out there,” Steve snapped. “When is?”
“I’m getting dressed,” Isa said, shifting around to put her feet over the side of the bed. “You can stand there and watch or you can hit the hallway.”
The sight of her bare legs did the trick. Steve spun on his heel and stomped out. Grinning, Troy followed, pulling the door to behind him.
“Sorry,” Nathalie said. “We should have known Steve would go all macho protector on you. He was out of his mind when you vanished. We all were.”
“Me, too,” Isa said. It came out a whisper.
Nathalie looked away and cleared her throat. “Are sweats okay?”
“Hang on. Everyone’s gotten to see this but me.” She rose, went to the mirror set over the sink, and shrugged the hospital gown off her shoulders.
He was monochromatic black. Some trick of the magic that enlivened the thing gave the Ink depth and shadow, if black could have such a thing.
She’d seen other examples of Daniel’s work. While she’d admired his skill and his talent, she hadn’t cared for most of his art. But this was a masterpiece.
If she turned her head just right, the tattoo seemed to breathe and move on its own. That hint of life in static, if magic, Ink took her breath away.
A dark thread of amusement twined around her throat.
She’d have had no trouble binding and destroying something ugly. How had Daniel known she’d hesitate to kill something beautiful? Or had he been counting on it?
“Stunning work,” she managed. Her voice shook.
Nathalie’s gaze darted to Isa’s face, and she drew an audible breath. “It looked pretty rough last night. Mind if I take a closer look?”
“Go ahead.”
Nat flicked on the overhead lights.
Isa flashed on Daniel’s brightly lit cage. She flinched, and her heart picked up speed. She didn’t want to cower. She’d get over the association. She’d have to, or she’d never be able to work again.
Was that what she wanted? To go back to working at Nightmare Ink as if nothing at all had changed? As if she hadn’t been shattered and murdered by Daniel and was just waiting around for death to creep up on her?
Studying the artwork, Nathalie came close, squinting as if trying to bring something into focus.
Isa looked, too.
He had black wings wrapped around her waist and back as if he embraced her. From beneath her hair, an eye gleamed emerald. Was that amusement or malice she saw? His face, inked in profile, nestled against her neck, teeth poised at her jugular. A single drop of crimson welled from the contact, as if with Ink Daniel could magically compel the creature to tear out her throat.
Maybe he could.
For, if the creature inked to her skin and now sharing a body with her wanted to break free, that bite would have to be completed.
Life for life.
If he had the power, he’d take possession of her body, heal the wounds that had killed her, restart her heart, and then, while her body would live on, Isa wouldn’t be in it.
He would.
In that fashion, she’d become a tool in Daniel’s hand. One he’d forged himself. Would it be enough for him?
A tremor shook her, because if it wasn’t, she might not actually die. If the system shock of having her throat ripped out failed to free her spirit to death, she’d be trapped by Daniel and the creature, unable to affect anything they did.
She’d rather die.
“I don’t understand,” Nathalie said as she peered at Isa’s skin. “You’re you. The tattoo is complete, isn’t it? Why aren’t you different? Like Zoog was?”
Sorrow burned in Isa’s chest.
Chalk up two more lives to your tally, the voice inside murmured. No derision. No emotion in that tone at all. Just statement of fact. You’re as accomplished a murderer as Daniel.
He handed her a mental picture, not of Zoog skinned and dead on the shop floor but of the trust in Zoog’s face when she’d begun fixing his Ink.
The fire behind her sternum burned higher until it singed the backs of her eyes.
Nathalie frowned. “Ice? You need to sit down?”
Isa shook her head. “I missed Zoog’s funeral, didn’t I?”
Nathatie’s brows lowered, and her frown deepened. “Troy, Oki, and I went. So did Steve. And Patty. Hold still. I want to see the back.”
She circled.
Isa planted her feet to keep from turning to keep Nathalie in her line of sight. She’d have clenched her fists if her broken hands could have moved. As it was, pain lanced up her arms. Her breath went shallow, and the skin of her back tightened.
“Keep talking,” Isa urged. Her voice wavered.
Nathalie instantly returned to meet her gaze. Isa didn’t know what she saw, but Nat’s eyes widened. “Whoa. I don’t need to see the back.”
Every fiber of Isa’s being shrilled agreement. But if she gave in to the fear Daniel had instilled, she’d be crippled psychologically as well as physically. More crippled than she already was, at any rate.
“Look,” Isa urged. “Just keep talking while you’re behind me. Daniel never said anything. He just . . .”
“Hurt you,” Nathatlie finished in a dead, flat voice.
Isa nodded.
“I know,” she said.
“Are we talking about the dreams Steve mentioned he couldn’t base a search warrant on?” Isa’s memory replayed the glow of lavender outlining the younger woman. “Nathalie, were you dreaming what happened to me?”
“Every fucking night,” she breathed. “I stood there paralyzed, watching him hurt you.” She smeared moisture from her face and seemed to debate with herself for several seconds.
Isa hoped she’d say they didn’t have to do this now. She’d take the out.
She didn’t.
“I’m going to look at the back,” Nathalie said, circling around. “Are you going to tell me why I don’t see someone else looking at me when I meet your eye?”
“We haven’t integrated,” Isa said, trying and failing to suppress the apprehension that shivered through her as Nathalie stopped moving. Nathalie, not Daniel. Nathalie. The mental chant made no difference. Terror bubbled in her gut.
“But the tattoo is complete,” she said, her voice muted in what Isa recognized as Nathalie preoccupied. “What do you mean you haven’t integrated?”
Her voice soothed the panic fluttering like a bird beating its wings against the bars of a cage.
“Integration usually begins when the inking process is complete,” Isa said. “We were both too weak from the inking. Integration will take time.”
“Because this tattoo is so big?”
“Yes.”
“My God, Isa,” Nathalie said. She came around the side, still peering at the Ink. “If I didn’t detest Daniel with every fiber of my being, I’d tell you what an amazing piece of work this is.”
“I can loathe him and still think this is a masterpiece,” Isa said. “I hope Steve finds him. I don’t want to have to hunt him down.”
I do. Hunt and destroy, an alien voice snarled in her mind.
A picture of Daniel, his entrails a steaming, bloody pile at his feet, popped into focus in her head. She started.
“What’s wrong?” Nat demanded, reaching out as if to grab her arm. She couldn’t quite bring herself to touch.
Doctor’s orders? Or distaste and fear?
Disgust. Pity. She reeks of them both.
“Shut up,” Isa gritted through clenched teeth.
Nathalie jerked her hand back.
The thing on her skin sniggered.
“Not you,” she assured Nathalie. “Mr. Hyde’s awake.”
Nat look
ed at her and grimaced. “Oh, yeah. There he is.”
With a start, Isa felt the arrogant twist of her lips and the too-high tilt of her chin so that she looked down her nose at her piercing artist. At her friend.
“Let’s get you dressed,” Nathalie said, “before the doctor comes back to remind me I’m not supposed to touch you.”
“Why not?” Isa sat on the edge of the bed.
Nathalie grinned as she held the sweatpants for Isa’s feet. “No one can quite believe you went from death’s door to going home because of a magic tattoo. I think the doctors still half expect you to keel over from the massive infection you had when you came in. They’re pretty freaked that the infection is gone and they never even got antibiotics on board.”
Mentally, Isa flipped off her passenger and wrested control of her expression from him.
Once Isa was dressed, the discharge nurse presented her with a wheelchair. Sweating and shaking in pain, Isa sat down.
“Whoa,” Troy said when he saw her.
“Should have cut the cuffs off the sweatshirt,” Nathalie said.
Both men swore.
The Ink chuckled.
Steve took command of the chair. Troy and Nathalie ranged out on either side. They had to look like an advertisement for some kind of superhero TV show as they swept through the hospital corridors to the main doors where Steve’s car waited. Isa was tempted to hum some kind of theme song, but no one needed to know she couldn’t carry a tune in a bag.
She spotted the reporters and cameras the same time Steve did. Their parade came to a halt.
“Do you want to talk to them?” Steve asked.
Isa started. “Me?”
“Local business owner vanishes after a dead guy is tossed through her shop window,” Troy said. He sounded as if he recited something. “Six weeks later, in really rough shape, she escapes her kidnappers, who are still on the loose. She miraculously heals in one night. Welcome to your fifteen minutes of fame.”
She tried to retreat into her interior, but her insides were overfilled with a malevolent, winged demon. Hands pounding, she croaked, “Hell, no.”
“Let me get you into police protection,” Steve urged.
“You son of a bitch,” Nathalie snapped. “She already said no!”
“With Daniel’s Ink on her skin,” Troy said, “it wouldn’t matter where you took her.”
“Now, stop it!” Nathalie said to Steve. “Ice is whiter than your knight-in-shining-armor complex.”
“Stop. Please. Stop. I’m right here,” Isa babbled. Her voice sounded shrill. Terrified. “I’m not—”
The tattoo shot out a dark hand and strangled her voice. An animal? He dropped the thought into the still pond of fear and poison inside her mind. Yes, little rat in a maze, you are.
She twitched. Her breath caught on a sob.
Nathalie crouched before the chair so she could look Isa in the eye. “Of course you are,” she soothed, unwittingly shoring up the demon’s assertion. “What’s going on?”
“Didn’t mean to upset you, Ice,” Troy said at the same time.
“Talking over you rather than to you?” Steve surmised, a note in his tone that made her blood run cold in horrified recognition.
Of course. She’d been treated like an object for six weeks and tortured for protesting. No wonder having people talking over her scared her.
She swallowed a groan. Would she ever have a spine again?
The tattoo snickered and fed her the combined vision and sensation of him chewing on her vertebrae. Prickles walked up and down her back. She heard tendons popping and crunching as she shifted.
“Let’s get you home,” Steve said. He glanced between Troy and Nathalie. “Close ranks.”
Her friends boxed in the chair, and they went out the door into the chilly mid-March air. Brilliant flashes of blue sky peeked out from beneath the fast-moving cottony cloud tufts.
Isa heard Steve say, “No reporters.”
He got her installed in the front seat of his car while Troy loomed, arms crossed, beside the door to keep the press at bay.
“Nice impression of a bouncer,” she said to his back.
“Not an impression,” Troy said, turning to block the open door with his body. He grinned. “I was the best bouncer in the city until a little curly-haired girl came along and handed me my ass. Married her. Changed careers.”
Isa stared at his black eye.
He ran his fingertips across the cheekbone and flinched. “Told you you weren’t the first.”
The picture of Troy’s diminutive, good-natured wife, Cheri, taking a swing at him surprised a smile from her. Extra bonus, the mental image took the tattoo aback, as if Troy’s amused summation of his past somehow did not compute in his Inky mind. Or was that in Isa’s Ink-etched brain? What was he thinking with if not the limits of her gray matter?
Steve climbed in the driver’s seat. Nathalie clambered into the back.
“All set?” Troy asked. “Closing up.” He shut her door.
Steve pulled out.
Going home turned into a parade. A patrol car followed. So did a few of the reporters, despite the police officers warning them not to. Troy brought up the rear in his truck.
By the time Steve pulled up in front of Isa’s apartment building door, Oki’s mother was standing out front, laden with fabric-wrapped boxes. Gifts. Isa hoped they were full of Yunna-san’s excellent cooking.
Given the number of people who emerged from nearby businesses as they pulled up, Steve and his escort might as well have had their lights and sirens on. Isa craned her neck to peer down the block to Nightmare Ink.
Had the window been fixed? Or was it still boarded up? How had Troy and Nathalie done business? How would they go on doing business if she didn’t survive the tattoo?
Banishing shivery speculation, Isa squinted. She didn’t see plywood standing in for her shop windows. Would the insurance company have let Troy file the paperwork to get the window replaced?
She remembered the shop window the way she’d last seen it. Smashed. Zoog’s corpse just inside. And someone lying in wait.
Her heart rate jumped.
Black-edged contempt cut from within. Isa shrank from it.
The tattoo.
It sliced deep, coming as it did from inside her own body—even if it didn’t originate from her. Humans were designed so that thoughts engendered emotion and biological response. Harboring an alien intelligence seemed to confuse her body, emotions, and brain. They couldn’t seem to tell the difference between her condemnation of herself and the tattoo’s.
The fact that she had to wait for Steve to get out of the car and let her out didn’t help matters. She couldn’t even deal with the seat belt. That Steve enjoyed the act of leaning in and pressing a stupid button to free her set her nerves on edge. She wouldn’t survive having to have people to do everything for her.
You’d rather be dead than live like this, the tattoo murmured inside her head.
Yes.
Release me. You’ll feel nothing.
A laugh filled with bitterness and spite escaped her.
Steve started, banging his head into his car’s metal door frame. “Ow.”
The tattoo snickered.
“Not even a nice try,” Isa said aloud to the tattoo. “I saw Live Ink come off a guy. I know a whole hell of a lot more about how that’ll happen than you do.”
I’ll make the nice officer wipe your ass, it retorted.
Isa shrank from the image the tattoo thrust into her internal field of view and from the hand Steve offered to help her out of the car.
Steve’s smile fell. He dropped his hand to his side and straightened.
Isa closed her eyes against the slash of ice that went through her middle. She hadn’t escaped Daniel’s cage. Not really. She wasn’
t in the cinder block room anymore, but he’d so successfully altered the landscape of her life that she’d never be free. Her independence was gone. As smashed as her hands.
What did desperation smell like? Sulfur? Rotten eggs? It was something like that, but tinged with the musk of terror. She wanted to say that none of it was her own, that it came from Daniel’s creature . . .
I AM NOT HIS!
The roar rolled around and around inside her skull.
Isa flinched and opened her eyes. She resisted the urge to begin counting the people coming to gawk.
She turned sideways in the seat and put her feet on the sidewalk.
“Watch your head,” Steve cautioned. “May I take your elbow?”
She met his painfully neutral eyes, grateful that while he appeared to want to go on playing macho protector, he was willing to let her set the parameters.
Whatever he saw in her face made his set expression thaw.
She nodded.
With his hand hooked under her right elbow, he lifted, making it look like maybe her overnight recovery hadn’t been so miraculous after all.
Nathalie watched with a smile on her face. It wasn’t for Isa. Her gaze rested on Steve. He’d been out of his mind over her disappearance, Nat had said.
Oh.
Chapter Eleven
“Welcome home, Isa-san,” Oki’s mother said, her huge smile crinkling her bright eyes nearly shut.
Nathalie unlocked and held open the door to the apartment building while Troy drifted in Isa’s wake.
“Yunna-san,” Isa said past the lump in her throat. “I’m so hap—” Her eyes burned and her throat locked down on the word. “Thank you,” Isa whispered.
Ikylla laid down a strident, blanket meow from within the apartment the moment Isa set foot on the stairs. Isa’s heart kicked. Gus added shrill, excited puppy yips.
“Easy,” Steve said. “You’re—”
Isa ran up the stairs, yelling, “Oki! Open the door!”
She did.
Isa barreled into her apartment and put her back to one of the walls. Ikylla twined around and around her legs, her meow demanding. Isa slid, not caring about the jab of pain from her hands when her butt hit the floor. The cat climbed into her lap and stood, her front paws on Isa’s shoulder, so she could rub her face against Isa’s chin. She folded her arms around the cat while Gus whined and Steve thundered up the stairs.
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