Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel)

by Marcella Burnard

  A sensation like ice trickled down her spine. Isa was glad she wasn’t the one chasing down a sword-and-magic-wielding whacko.

  She turned her attention back to the cat tattoo. The transfer to the page had gone well. She had the Live Ink. She folded the stasis paper and tucked it into the inside pocket of her jacket. She’d have to find someone to put the cat on soon. Between the cat and the whirlwind, she’d started to amass the library of fiends she’d mentioned to Troy and Nathalie.

  How long could she safely go on feeding tattoos before the paper would no longer hold the Ink? Something else she needed to ask her newest teacher. Isa hoped Master Masatoshi would have an answer. Or at least suggestions.

  Assuming she ever got to talk to him again.

  Hadn’t there been a story about a book that granted wishes, but that required blood in order to actually open and read it? If she accumulated any more tattoos on stasis paper, she’d be making that book. On so many levels.

  Feeding Lawrence and Dick to her burgeoning collection of stasis-held Live Ink started to sound good. It would solve a multitude of problems. Save that it would turn her into something she feared.

  No meeting evil with evil.

  “Anything else I can do to assist here?” Isa asked.

  The petite woman with long brown hair crouched beside her. She’d been the one to hand Isa the gloves she wore. “Why didn’t his Ink heal him?”

  “It tried,” Isa said. “But that neck injury—”

  “Severed most of his spinal cord,” she said. “At least that’s what it looks like without an autopsy.”

  Isa swallowed, trying hard to keep her gaze from wandering back to the now crusty mess of flesh. “Between that and the blood loss . . .”

  She nodded. “You’re saying he should have died instantly, and in this case, the Ink made him linger. Poor bastard.”

  Isa nodded as she stripped messy gloves from her hands.

  A wave of bloody, shadowed malevolence brought Isa to her feet, swaying.

  “Isa?” Lawrence said.

  A woman screamed. Her cry rolled along the concrete hallway.

  Jackie.

  Isa sprinted the direction Jackie and the other cop had gone, into the main market, and down the stairs to the lower level.

  Voices, sharp with fear, grabbed at her from behind.

  She couldn’t let them stop her. She’d discovered that the fear of a friend being hurt outweighed her fear of whoever loitered in the market preying on people.

  Footsteps pounded in Isa’s wake, but it was as if the initial pulse of magic had struck everyone else with paralysis. From the sound of the shoes on the concrete behind her, Isa led the pack by several seconds.

  She burst onto a landing overlooking Elliot Bay. Buskers favored the acoustics of the spot during the day. A pair of feet encased in men’s dress shoes poked out of an alcove. Blood, orange in the mercury light, ran in rivulets across the walkway to spill over the edge of the stairwell.

  Glass and splintered wood from the shattered door across from Isa littered the floor.

  Jackie, her boots just on Isa’s side of the threshold, sprawled in the debris. Her breath came in audible, rasping sobs.

  Over her, frozen, head cocked to stare at Isa with fierce yellow eyes, crouched a griffin the size of a pony. It gleamed black and gold, each razor-edged feather a gleaming paean to bloodshed. Claws the size of large daggers dripped blood. So did its jagged, carved beak.

  Isa hesitated, caught by the penetrating gaze. A questioning tendril of dried blood magic tasted her skin. She couldn’t get her breath. Liquid, gold magic sloshed around her insides.

  Ink. Their serial killer was a rogue tattoo.

  A faint echo of black stirred deep within the void Murmur had left in her soul when he’d left. Isa started.

  The griffin leaped over Jackie’s supine body and rushed Isa.

  “Isa!” George bellowed.

  “Stay back!” she shrilled and slammed a shield up. She blocked the door that would let the officers into the landing behind, then she threw a bubble around herself.

  The creature impacted her shield with a thunk that rattled Isa’s bones. Roaring in frustration, it reached for her, bloody claws outstretched.

  Voices, swearing and shouting, piled up behind her.

  The griffin’s head swiveled as it studied first Isa and then the people in the doorway behind her.

  “Keep them quiet,” Isa quavered, trusting Lawrence or Dick or Simon were close enough to hear. “I can’t shield all of you, myself, and Jackie at the same time.”

  “Where’s Brown?” Lawrence asked.

  Isa assumed he meant the redheaded cop. She glanced at the bloody loafers poking out of the alcove. “Down.”

  Lawrence swore, then Isa gathered he turned away. He raised his voice, but she couldn’t decipher what he said.

  “They need medics!” someone protested. “We can bring them in from the other side.”

  The griffin shifted, circling, testing her shield.

  “Let me help,” Isa said to the creature, her heart beating hard. It didn’t look in the least like it needed or wanted help of any kind. She caught none of the sorrow, none of the sense of being lost in the world that she’d picked up from the other piece of rogue Ink she’d dealt with. And without a key to something the griffin wanted or needed, she had no way to grapple it to the last of her four pieces of stasis paper.

  Rule fifteen: Never settle for test batches of anything that works. Even if it only kind of works.

  First things first. Containment. She erected a hurried circle, enclosing her and the griffin.

  As the circle went up, the griffin turned his baleful yellow eyes upon her and shrieked a challenge. He charged. Razor-sharp talons popped her shield like it was a blister. The tattoo bowled her over, power and talons pinning her to sticky concrete. His magic stabbed deep into her chest cavity.

  Isa grunted. So much power.

  Patty, no, George, shouted her name, fear thick in the gravelly baritone that rose to alto.

  She couldn’t catch her breath, or rally her will.

  The claws of energy tightened, flexed to rip her heart out of her chest. Ironic. Lost in the House of Cold, only to be sacrificed by having her heart sliced from her body. Was this what the gods of Xibalba had intended all along?

  How did she know that’s what the creature meant to do?

  Isa tasted a hint of smoky caramel.

  The griffin froze, her laboring heart still clenched in its magical claws. It chirruped a question, tipped its head. Such an avian gesture from a creature with its eyes in the front of its head.

  The magic biting into her flesh and blood loosened, then eased out of the envelope of her body altogether.

  She drew a tentative breath. Gold seeped into the spaces left by the griffin’s assault, healing the wounds. Wasted reflex action.

  The raptor beak swooped for her face.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Her life didn’t end in a fountain of pain.

  The griffin uttered beseeching chirps and ruffled her hair. His vocalizations sounded remarkably like the sweet-throated chuckles crow parents used with their chicks.

  He worked her hair with that beak. Not pulling. Grooming. A gesture of affection. Tenderness.

  Confounded, Isa lifted trembling fingers, summoned a whisper of sage and pinyon and brushed the surface of the tattoo with power.

  It sat back and chittered, looking for all the world as if it couldn’t understand why it hadn’t torn her limb from limb, either. It still examined her with that birdlike quick jerk of its head and the fore claws flexed as if still wrapped in her ribs.

  She sat up. Slowly. Not certain which of them she didn’t want to startle.

  And laid eyes on her two dark-suited jailors. No other onlookers. They’d
cleared the scene. Had they sent the other officers around to pull Jackie out of harm’s way, bring in the EMTs?

  They had George. One on each arm. Maybe they’d been supporting him. His ashen features scrunched tight.

  When Isa sat up, some of the terrible fear in George’s face dissipated. Only some. That pissed her off. Waves of frigid ire, like an ice storm on the high desert, pounded her.

  “Destroy it,” Lawrence ordered, the “or else” plain in his tone.

  Anger piled high, building layer upon layer. Cold, frosty, deliberate wrath.

  She hated them. Lawrence. Dick. Simon. Max. Hated their prison. Their manipulation. She hated them for trying to force her to harm an innocent.

  Most of all, she hated the fear and self-loathing they’d put in Patty’s eyes by forcing her to live as George.

  The griffin followed the line of her gaze. He clacked his beak and pressed against the edges of her containment circle. Clearly seeking escape. No. He wanted to hunt. Her enemies had become his.

  How?

  Again, that fleeting sip of smoky caramel on her tongue.

  The griffin hissed and lashed out at the circle.

  Magic the color of old blood threaded through her will. Isa gasped. The shield she’d summoned shattered. The griffin dug magic into her psyche the way his claws had been buried in her chest. It fed the supernatural chill assailing her.

  No matter how she twisted, her faltering magic was no match for the griffin. Cold consumed her until she looked through ice-rimed eyes. Through the lens of inhuman chill, Isa saw with clarity she’d never before known.

  Lawrence. A shimmer of watery brown-colored energy surrounded him. She could see the stain of every evil thing he’d done in the pulse of his life force. She wanted to crush his heart in her beak first. His sins were the greatest. His heart would taste sweetest, heavy and black as it was.

  Drop the prison. Spread your wings. Rejoice in vengeance upon those who so richly deserve it.

  No longer struggling against the creature’s grip, Isa dropped the circle.

  The griffin screamed a gleeful hunting cry that climbed into whistle tones.

  “Contain it! Contain it!”

  She achieved her feet, didn’t remember seeking them. Ice filled her veins. Frost defined the skin and bones of her. Her heart had become a slow-moving glacier, barely remembering to beat.

  Isa liked it. Liked being unhampered by anything warm. Or human.

  Panicked, Lawrence and Dick tried to use George as a shield.

  Isa snarled at them.

  Echoing her rage, the griffin reared to tear George from their grasps.

  She refused.

  The tattoo warbled frustration.

  George screamed and dropped to the floor. The move saved his life. He’d caught Dick in the act of trying to throw him at the tattoo.

  Lawrence yanked his gun from his belt. He aimed, not at the griffin, but at Isa. First useful thing he’d done since pulling her from the camp. He might even kill her. If her blood could still flow.

  The griffin squawked and pounced.

  A shot rang out, reverberating longer than Lawrence’s scream that ended on a wet, splattering sound. A rush of hot, dirty copper hit Isa’s taste buds. Like a ripe grape, Lawrence’s heart popped in the griffin’s beak.

  Isa gagged on the cloying filth that gushed over her tongue.

  From the way the griffin snapped up the morsel, humming in delight, she gathered that the heavier with offense the heart, the sweeter to the griffin’s palate it was.

  Isa’s lunch came up like a block of ice. It shocked her when it struck the cement and spattered.

  Dick ran.

  This tickled the griffin to no end. It chortled and lifted off. The creature slammed Dick face first to the concrete steps leading back up to Pike Street. Talons sliced Dick’s spinal cord.

  The paralyzed man could only breathe rasping cries as the griffin pulled him apart rib by bloody white rib. When the griffin snapped up Dick’s odious heart, not even nausea stirred in Isa.

  The griffin turned, beak, talons and head feathers covered in gore. It chirruped at her.

  She opened her arms.

  The creature buried its head against her chest.

  “Get up, George. Patty. Whoever you want to be,” Isa said. She barely recognized her voice. It echoed oddly, rebounding from the walls with a sound like icicles shattering. “Where is Simon?”

  “Don’t hurt him!” George cried. “Please! He’s just doing what they ordered him to do.”

  “Then disappear, if it’s what you want.”

  Slowly, the internal ice age retreated. Magic stirred. Conscience, too.

  The dead bodies, blood still running and steaming, accused her.

  She wasn’t sorry.

  “My God, Ice,” George grated, sniffling. “What the hell are you?”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  She put up another circle to protect the griffin. The creature looked to her for refuge. Even after everyone it had killed, Isa couldn’t destroy it. Not when it recognized something in her that she didn’t. She needed to know too badly what that might be.

  George’s breath caught on an audible sob as he climbed to his feet. “Thank you. I knew you’d find me. I knew you’d help. Whatever you drew, it worked.”

  “This was not how I’d meant to attain freedom,” she said.

  Rule sixteen: If you keep getting unexpected results from magic, you can’t go on calling them unexpected.

  “I’m glad they’re dead,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  “I don’t know what this changes, Ice,” he said. “I don’t know if either of us will survive the week. If we do, I’ll be seeing you.”

  George lifted a hand, smiled, and turned to vanish into the darkness of the stairs leading down to the waterfront.

  Isa stepped into the etheric and talked the griffin onto the stasis paper. It was easy. For reasons she didn’t comprehend, he trusted her, and seemed eager to please.

  He watched her anchor the first of his tethers, then matched her, move for move, tying himself to her paper. As he vanished from the etheric, the filaments of his magic vanished within her.

  The tattoo’s power overshadowed her own. Why the hell was she still alive?

  Isa hesitated in tucking his page into her back pocket. Another surge of smoke and caramel coated her tongue. The page holding the griffin shifted in her hand. Pulsed maybe.

  On instinct, she tucked the paper into the left side of her bra. Not exactly comfortable, but it soothed her too rapid heartbeat somehow. She put the page with the cat into the right side.

  Jackie moaned.

  Isa dropped her circle, and bolted for Jackie’s boots.

  Footsteps running on the floor above and clattering down the stairs told her the rest of the police were on their way back.

  Isa touched a fingertip to Jackie’s bloody boot heel. The hot metallic scent of blood strengthened. She sent magic into Jackie’s body.

  Jackie was alive.

  Pain flooded from Jackie into Isa. Fear. Horror. Jackie had her magical eyes open. She’d “seen” everything that had happened. Everything Isa had done.

  Heartless cuts frayed Jackie’s uniform and the skin of her back.

  Swallowing around a block of shame, Isa summoned the power to heal Jackie’s wounds.

  Hands closed on Isa’s upper arms and yanked her backward. She sprawled on the concrete, power splintering.

  “Isa Romanchzyk, you’re under arrest.”

  She blinked up at the face of the AMBI agent. Ogilvy. More sirens approached. Shouts sounded and booted feet thundered overhead. Ogilvy and his partner hauled her upright, rummaged through every last one of her pockets. They shouted at her to produce the paper with the tattoo. As they c
uffed her hands behind her back, Isa caught glimpses of power in their auras. Pure silver. Cold. Pristine.

  Uriel. Again.

  Deaf to her questions about Jackie’s condition, the AMBI agents marched her up through the ramps, past the empty fish market stinking of bleach, past the flashing lights of the Medic One truck, and shoved her into the back of their sedan.

  They slammed the door. The locks clicked. The pair walked away.

  Shaking with anger, exhaustion, and worry for Jackie, Isa subsided into the cold leather of the backseat. Weariness suggested that most of the night had passed. How long had they been in the market anyway? Her sigh emerged as a visible cloud of gold-tinged breath.

  Isa closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see the evidence of the internal ice age taking her over. Not anymore.

  It would kill her eventually. Sooner rather than later, she hoped. Especially after her performance tonight, turning a rogue tattoo loose to murder at her behest.

  It hadn’t even solved many of her problems. If—when—Jackie recovered, Isa might find herself trying to explain yet another murder indictment to Steve.

  His gray eyes filled her internal field of view.

  A sharp tug of longing tangled in her ribs. She missed him. Missed the peace he carried with him. Missed the safety of his arms around her and the assurance that she could say anything to him. Not that she had taken advantage of that. So much she hadn’t told him. Or anyone.

  Except Murmur. And that hadn’t been voluntary. Most of the secrets he’d pried out of her, he’d used against her.

  She’d spent most of her life wanting to be accepted and loved unconditionally. Stupid of her to realize so late that maybe she was and she was too much a coward to trust it. Or Steve.

  Instead, she pined for a demon who didn’t belong in her world, much less belong to her.

  Yet she could still taste him.

  Smoky, sweet caramel spread on her tongue, filled her nostrils. She drew the scent deep into her lungs.

  Molten black power slammed through her chest.

  The car rocked.

  Isa opened her eyes.

  He stood at her car door, black roiling the outline of his frame like a heat shimmer on asphalt.