She hadn’t spilled anything.
Self-preservation popped a weak, flickering shield into existence beneath the surface of her awareness. It shoved back the icy onslaught of loss that left her shuddering and weeping in both worlds.
Isa gasped and opened her eyes on the ethereal plain.
The hydra, wracked by ripples of color-negating binding ink, sank to what passed for ground in this incorporeal place. The tattoo wheezed and shrank to the size of a mammoth. It stretched three of its heads out in a beseeching gesture that froze Isa’s breath.
It replayed what had happened, seeking to comprehend.
Pure silver light had sliced the tattoo from its host.
Horror jolted Isa. Again? That radiant silver power had belonged to Daniel’s tattoo, the malevolent angel who’d wanted unfettered access to Isa’s world so he could consume it.
It couldn’t be true. That monster had fallen through the portal between the worlds. She’d slammed the door shut on him. He couldn’t still be in this world prying Live Ink from people. He couldn’t.
But the hydra had come loose. It showed her the silver magic that had cut the tattoo’s cords. Cast adrift, raging and afraid, it had fed the place its host had once filled with the blood and magic of innocent bystanders. Staring into one of the dimming yellow-green eyes, Isa shifted to set the fingers of one hand on one of its snouts.
Her physical body, still pillowed on crumbled steel, registered the move with a flash of agonized protest. In the etheric, she channeled regret to the creature.
It had been worse than a rabid dog.
She couldn’t restore its host. The tattoo’s host had been its first victim. A picture of a giant man with silvering black hair and a round, weathered face with brown eyes that scrunched nearly closed when he smiled popped into her brain with such intensity that she flinched. She gasped in both worlds.
The hydra keened, begging for its host, for the one person who could have restored the tattoo to wholeness.
Sadness lodged a spiked lump in Isa’s throat. Her heart hurt. It had to be destroyed. She’d have to be the one to kill it. Why then, even though he was gone, did she hear Murmur’s voice accusing her of murder?
Would he have had a different solution? A way to reverse the death toll? To render the creature innocent of the horror it had visited upon countless families?
Isa choked on a sob and drew up power until the inside of her circle glowed so brightly it blinded her magic sight. Spending a little excess energy, she folded a sense of comfort she didn’t feel into the glow, hoping to soothe the hydra, if only a little.
Before she killed the soul enlivening the Ink.
Had it come into this world the way Murmur had? Willingly? Or had it been ripped from another life in another place in order to become a Live Tattoo in this one?
“Blessed may you be,” she breathed to it. “Be now all that you’ve ever—” She couldn’t get the words out. Her throat closed.
She couldn’t spare the hydra. Or herself. The only mercy she had to offer was a quick, clean death.
Get on with it, Isa.
The hydra’s mourning keen hiccoughed. Power ran in ripples and surges through the hydra, ebbing and flowing as the binding ink tangled in the matrix supporting the creature’s spirit.
Isa eased compassion into the monster while she sucked power into her ethereal body. It gathered behind her ribs, building. Isa flashed her cold, winter sunshine power into a weapon. She drove it in a beam down her arm. Magic she’d stored in the binding ink when she’d brewed it rose in recognition from within the hydra’s body to meet the weapon she shoved down the hydra’s gullet.
The creature shrieked.
Isa drove the spear of energy deep into the hydra’s body. Living Tattoos didn’t have a physical heart, but they did have a metaphorical one. The artist who’d done the art, who’d originally brought the hydra into being, had anchored the tattoo with spells. Those spells hid deep within the matrix of Ink and magic that made up the hydra.
Binding ink wound around the power branching out from the roots and trunk of those spells.
Over the hydra’s pleading cries and thrashing magical assaults, she stabbed her weapon hard into the heart of the creature’s making. With a whispered apology, Isa blew the spear apart.
The hydra died, blown out of existence by her hand. Its final pleading scream reverberated over and over inside the place where Murmur had once been. Her heart tripped and fell.
Spell shrapnel, the hydra’s, her own, ripped her etheric skin.
Cold tears wet her face. It took several seconds to summon the power to step sideways into the regular world.
Several things hit the moment Isa fell back into her physical body. The sun had gone down. Icy rain spattered her face, washing away salt tears.
Pain ravaged her.
At some point in the proceedings, she’d opened her physical eyes. When they struggled into focus and she managed to lift her head, she saw the mangled, bloody mess of her left leg. She couldn’t hold her head up. Her head banged against the hood of the car.
Shouts sounded nearby along with the racket of someone pounding on something. Steve. It had to be Steve trying to get to her. The persistent thud, thud felt as if whatever was being hit was attached to her. Isa’s skull rang with each impact.
She whimpered.
Her containment circle collapsed.
The hammering in her skull stopped.
Oh. Of course. Her circle. Part of her. The glimmer of golden magic sustaining her flickered and winked out.
“Isa!” Steve’s voice, rough with fear, shouted.
The cold, aching emptiness inside her psyche expanded, swallowing her. Isa sighed and closed sandpapery eyes.
“Murmur. I need you.”
Chapter Four
Hushed voices, muted beeping, and a too warm hand stroking her wrist reeled Isa up out of the writhing depths of nightmares she couldn’t quite remember. Even though she commanded her eyes open, something thick and cottony twined through her blood, holding her beneath the surface of consciousness.
A dull throb penetrated her fuzzy awareness. Leg. Hers? Or someone else’s? Magic, the color of an oil sheen on a mud puddle, flashed like someone taking photos. It seemed to fire off in time with the pulse thrumming in her ears. As if only waiting for her to notice the beat of magic, heat mounted with each strobe until burning pain spread to sear her.
She gasped.
“Isa?”
Steve’s voice.
A cuff on her right arm pumped up. She tried to moisten parched lips with a tongue as dry as sand, and to marshal her thoughts into some semblance of order. Recognition hit. Hospital.
A spike of hope lodged in her ability to breathe. She turned inward, wanting and needing her insides to be crowded by an angular, ill-fitting, malicious demon.
Empty. The void didn’t even echo anymore. Of course he wasn’t there. That had been the last time she’d ended up in an emergency room. This was a different iteration.
Hope collapsed. Her sigh sounded like a sob.
“Easy, sweetheart,” Steve said.
Grimacing, she forced her eyes open. She did not want anyone inside her sense of loss. Her friends had celebrated the day she’d survived Murmur ripping out her throat and leaving. Steve especially. He didn’t need to know she hadn’t survived it intact.
The blood pressure cuff deflated.
The tiny, dim room with pale yellow walls was barely big enough to contain her bed, much less Steve.
“Hey,” he said. Stubble smudged his jaw. His eyes looked sunken. Shadowed. “Are you in pain, Ice?”
The bitter, voiceless laugh Isa huffed out heightened the ache in her skin and muscles.
It was his hand on her right wrist, stroking as if trying to soothe the both of them. He stopped and stepped
away from the bed. “I need to let the nurses know you’re awake.”
“No,” Isa croaked as he reached for the call button beside the closed and undoubtedly locked door.
“They asked me to notify them, Isa,” he said. “They want to know you’re okay.”
“Containment?” she asked.
“Some of your injuries are magical. You’re throwing really uncomfortable sparks.”
Harborview had built a containment unit, individual treatment rooms tucked into the basement, as close to bedrock as they could get. They’d embedded metal cages—sort of reverse Faraday cages designed to keep energy inside—into the stone and concrete. Each room had its own cage.
The hospital had worked hard to disguise the metal skeleton enclosing the room, but the visible lack of unshielded electronics and the locked door gave it away.
Someone knocked. The lock clicked and the door slid open enough for a man in blue scrubs to poke his head into the room.
With the door open, Isa could hear an alarm beeping out in the hallway.
The nurse glanced at the monitor above her head, then at her. “I’ve paged the doctor. He’ll be here shortly. Are you in pain? Can you rate it? Scale of 1 to 10.”
“42?”
He coughed as if covering a chuckle. “Life, the universe, and everything? Not what I wanted to hear.”
“Me, either,” she said, heartened to know she wasn’t the only one who’d stumbled across and read Douglas Adams.
“I’ll page the doctor again.” The nurse left, locking the door behind him.
Isa glanced at Steve. “What happened?”
He scowled, deepening the shadows in his face. “You shattered the bones in your left foot and lower leg. You were nearly sliced to ribbons by metal and glass shrapnel. Damn it, why didn’t you shield?”
She breathed a humorless laugh. “I did. Shields stop magic. Not mundane things. Rule seven.”
“Rule what? Wait. I don’t understand,” he said. “Three weeks ago, Daniel tried to stab you. Your shield deflected his knife.”
“Not technically. My shield turned his magic which he’d channeled into the silver blade.”
“Silver?”
“Silver conducts magic.”
“Which is why Live Ink can only be done with silver needles?”
“Yes.”
“You’re saying that a single maniac with a gun . . .”
“Bullets trump magic. Every time.” Glassy shards of hurt dug at her. She swallowed nausea.
“Son of a bitch. I didn’t realize I needed to worry about that, too,” Steve said, leaning in to press warm lips against her forehead. Peace settled into her at the touch, even as cold sweat broke out on her body in response to the pain.
The room lock clicked. Slowly, as if whoever opened it stood ready to slam it shut again, the door slid open a crack, then widened. A thick-set, balding man in blue scrubs entered and closed the door behind him. “Ms. Romanchzyk, I’m Dr. Hussein. I specialize in treating magical injuries. I understand you’re in pain. We’ll address that, but I need to ask a few questions first. Your records indicate that you had Live Ink at one point.”
“It’s gone,” Steve said in her place.
The doctor lifted his eyebrows. “Unusual. I’ll make a note. Ms. Romanchzyk, have you attempted magic since waking?”
“No. Burned that candle from both ends,” Isa said.
“Based on reports I’m hearing, that’s understandable. Would you try for me? A simple shield would suffice,” the doctor said.
She summoned power. Gold glimmered for a moment in her sight, then slipped away. She took a deep breath, sighed it out, and turned her gaze inward. The river of energy moving through her was still there, its flow thick, like lava. She could see it, but no matter how she twisted or strained, she couldn’t reach it.
Squeezing her eyes shut as if she could close out the terror spreading like ice crystals across the surface of still water, she dove for the liquid amber at her core. Rather than falling into the power at her center, she floated, suspended in the icy void within. Snagged by the scars of Murmur’s absence. She couldn’t silence the tiny voice suggesting she’d lost more than Live Ink when she’d lost Murmur. That Daniel’s accusation had been correct. Her magic was only good for destroying what other people had created, that Isa, by herself, wasn’t enough. Couldn’t ever be enough.
Isa lifted eyelids lined with barbed wire.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, her voice bleak. “I’m locked out.”
“Don’t be alarmed just yet,” he said. “You may be tapped out as you said. Some patients also find that the narcotics we use for pain control have this effect. It’s been my experience that pain is equally effective at clouding your ability as the narcotics can be. You have plenty of reasons to be locked out.
“In a few days, you’ll have physically healed to a point where we’ll have more options for managing your discomfort while giving you every chance to access your magic. If you still had that Living Tattoo, we’d have far fewer options for making you comfortable. At least we’re spared that complication.”
Isa flinched and groaned when muscles moved in her left leg.
“Last question. Why are your hands blue?”
“Stain.”
“From what?”
“Pigment in clay.”
“No magic involved?”
“No,” she said before her memory reminded her she’d been blown off her canvas.
“Good. I’m ordering another dose of narcotics,” he said. “You’ll be able to rest. So will your friend. Fair?”
She wanted out of the hospital bed, but after the hydra, she couldn’t produce enough magic to light a night-light much less attempt to heal her injuries. “Yes.”
“Excellent.” He retreated. He walked softly for his size. “I’ll be back to check on you in a few minutes, Ms. Romanchzyk.”
The doctor quit the room.
The nurse entered, syringe in hand. “Say whatever you need to say. Ms. Romanchzyk’s going to take a little nap now.”
“Troy has the shop. Nathalie has the animals,” Steve said, stroking her hair and kissing her. “Rest, beautiful. They’re kicking me out so you can sleep. I’ll be here first thing in the morning. Okay?”
“Thanks,” Isa whispered. The tide of pain surging and crashing against the crumbling shores of her receded. Weariness swallowed her. Her eyes closed of their own accord.
***
Isa sat in the midst of a frosty, high desert night, before a fire that gave off no heat. In the chill, the spicy scent of pinyon turned sweet as the sap sank into the trees’ slumbering roots. The licks of yellow-orange flame illuminated three forms seated around the fire with her.
Ruth, the Navajo woman who’d adopted her, sat closest, on Isa’s left. Silver hair hung down the woman’s back. Prominent laugh lines etched deep into her placid face. She stared into the fire, not looking at Isa.
Joseph sat to her right. Henry sat beside him. Both men had helped Ruth raise Isa and teach her to master magic so it wouldn’t master her.
They’d asked her to put Living Tattoos on each of them, despite the Navajo taboo against doing so.
She’d done as they’d asked.
They’d vanished without a trace. She’d been accused of killing them. For a decade, she thought she had.
While she’d come to believe they still lived, albeit in a different form from the ones she’d known and loved, Isa knew she dreamed sitting with them.
“Your wound runs deep,” Ruth said to the flames as the colors of the rainbow played over her features. “Your spirit is torn.”
Her face shifted. Changed shape, until the fire illuminated a jaguar’s black-spotted, golden fur and whiskers.
Isa stared.
&
nbsp; Joseph stirred the fire.
Red sparks erupting into the black night drew Isa’s attention.
“Return to the tribe,” Henry ordered without looking at her. His face broadened and flattened. Age still lined the wide-mouthed, amphibious features. Moisture leaked from his round, shiny eyes, trickling down the long, long nose.
Isa glanced at Joseph. And, in the confines of dreaming, squinted.
Smoke, maybe from the fire, clouded his face, but behind the curtain, his features seemed to run like water from one shape to another, human man to coyote to snake wearing feathers.
He nodded, his lips pressed into a considering line.
“Go home,” Ruth said. “Find the healing you need there.”
Even in dreams, Isa shook her head.
“Seek the tribe,” Joseph commanded. “Heal.”
“I’m trying!” she protested.
The fire and the faces of her family vanished.
She stared into lonely, cold blackness until a hint of smoky caramel teased her senses. She imagined warm fingertips brushing her left cheekbone.
“Isa.”
The liquid baritone had lost some of its cultured smoothness. A deeper, more aggressive rumble underpinned that familiar voice. It had once belonged to Daniel Alvarez. Now it belonged to Murmur. Asleep and dreaming, she still remembered and responded.
Isa turned into the dream caress. Her pillow rustled beneath her head. She’d broken the surface of sleep.
“No,” she tried to say. It emerged as a moan. Protest? Or longing?
“You’re drugged.” Outrage lowered the timbre of his voice. It vibrated through her breastbone.
Her breath caught.
“Open your eyes.”
She rolled her head in denial. The scent of leather and sulfur and male filled her nose.
“Isa. Open your eyes.” The impatience sharpening the command jolted her heart.
“You’re a dream,” she whispered. “I don’t want to wake up.”
The touch on her face froze. He chuckled.
The sound fizzed through her blood. That should fire off a few alarms at the nurses’ station.
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