Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel)

by Marcella Burnard

  Her pulse tripped over itself. “Murmur.”

  His hands clenched.

  Red-and-blue lights still flashing atop police cars illuminated his face. Terrible lines of strain and shadows speaking of deep, prolonged rage carved his expression into a parody of the griffin’s sharp face.

  Magic erupted inside the car with her. Deep earth dark. Center of the earth hot. It surged, wave upon wave, piling up against the steel and safety glass of the car. And against the frail skin and tender bone of her.

  She couldn’t move. Couldn’t cry out a plea for mercy. This wasn’t how she’d imagined he’d sacrifice her to close the portal.

  The car lurched, again. The windows exploded.

  Isa’s ears registered the pressure wave with ice pick stabs.

  Glass arced outward, spraying in red-and-blue glints against his shield before sliding to the cobbles beneath his feet.

  Consciousness dangled from the tips of her fingers.

  Murmur ripped open her door, hooked a hand around her right bicep, and hauled her across the seat. He picked her up.

  When she settled against his chest, reeling from his magical hit, contact with his still boiling ire knocked consciousness from her grip.

  ***

  “Isa.”

  She groaned, head spinning. She drowned in smoke, caramel, and sulfur.

  “Isa.” Again that ragged, whispered demand.

  Discomfort tugged her into consciousness. Cold, rough stone dug into her hands, trapped behind her back.

  Warm, unyielding weight covered her, hips to chest. Muscular legs tangled with hers.

  Murmur.

  Awareness reared up within her like a startled horse. She opened her eyes. The lavender-gray light of early morning painted the sky.

  Murmur pressed her between a wall and his body, her hands still cuffed behind her. She could neither hold him nor push him away.

  His lips moved on her neck, tracing the scar there. Magic surged. His. Hers. The heat of his sweltering power melted every last bit of frost and ice encasing her soul in a flash of intense pleasure/pain.

  She gasped and arched against him.

  “Please,” she whimpered. “Please.”

  He could take her there, in the pallid mercury light, against the rough stone wall—where the hell were they—in the cool night alley. She’d welcome him.

  She’d beg him. Was already.

  “Why?” he rasped, his hands rough in tearing through her bloody clothes as if he didn’t care what hurt he caused in his bid to access her bare skin. Or was he searching her? “You turned me away. You cut me off and hid. Why?”

  Fabric strained and finally ripped.

  Chill air brushed her ribs.

  He splayed his palms across her exposed skin.

  An inarticulate cry broke from her.

  “Why?” he repeated.

  “Freedom,” she said.

  He jerked as if she’d stabbed him in the heart.

  She swayed.

  His jaw bunched. “Yours.”

  “Yours,” she corrected.

  “Mine.”

  “Two men took me from the containment camp,” she said. “They bore Uriel’s mark. They wanted to use me to track you down. I blocked you so they couldn’t find you and so you wouldn’t come looking for me. The AMBI agents, the ones who arrested me tonight, have Uriel’s magic in their auras. He’s hunting us, trying to prevent us from locking the portal.”

  Murmur stared at her, breathing as if he’d been running a very long way. He lifted trembling fingers, traced her jaw.

  Desire shimmered through her newly thawed blood.

  “You’re haunting me,” he accused.

  Pleasure twined like a self-satisfied cat around the pillar of resentment within her. She longed for him. He craved freedom. She’d have given anything to have some hint of him lingering within and all she had was icy, echoing emptiness. How was it fair?

  “I don’t mean to.” But she liked that she did.

  He pulled her against his chest, enfolding her in his arms. Daniel’s arms.

  Was it stupid to miss the wings, the inhuman strength, even the murderous talons?

  “You have something that belongs to me. A griffin. Dangerous. Powerful. Give him to me. He’ll destroy you if you don’t. He’s mine.” His voice broke. “Was mine.”

  Isa froze at the desperate avarice in his voice. Was?

  He loved something. It wasn’t her. She should be big enough to give him the tattoo because it clearly meant so much to him.

  She couldn’t.

  Before she could so much as draw breath to speak, he shoved her against the wall, his fingers on her throat, his hips pinning her tight. His frenzied black rage and obvious arousal singed her.

  “Don’t test me,” he growled. “Not on this. He belongs to me.”

  She welcomed the heat, even as his grip on her tightened and her indrawn breath fought to find passage past his fingers on her throat.

  “He’s mine.” Murmur closed punishing teeth on her earlobe.

  Fluid gold and desire gushed through her core. Despite the punishing pressure of his body, his hands, and his teeth on her, she so craved contact, was so hungry for him, that she responded to torment as well as tenderness.

  He released his hold on her ear.

  The prints of his teeth throbbed.

  “Isa,” he growled next to her ear. “Give him to me before I take . . .”

  The chunk-scrape of a bullet being chambered in a gun sliced through Murmur’s threat. The muzzle of a Glock appeared in Isa’s limited line of sight. Pointing at Murmur’s head.

  Ice water dumped through her veins.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Let go.” Ria’s voice. Cold. Toneless.

  Her heartbeat turned frantic.

  Someone grabbed her arm. It wasn’t Murmur.

  “Get your hands off of her,” a musical masculine voice demanded.

  Isa tried to gasp. She knew that smooth as syrup voice. It belonged to a ghost from her childhood. Her vision hazed again as her breath piled up at the blockade of Murmur’s hand on her throat.

  Crack.

  Murmur grunted. His knees buckled. His fingers slipped away and his weight slid down her body.

  Her knees tried to follow the draw of gravity. The hand on her arm jerked her sideways. Her knuckles scraped the rough concrete as Isa stumbled on weak, nerveless legs.

  “Move,” Ria’s voice ordered.

  She coughed, fighting to relieve the burn in her lungs.

  “She’s blacking out,” the voice from her past said. An arm hooked her legs out from under her.

  Isa landed against a broad chest. Again. Magic the color of new sage leaves rested serenely within the confines of the muscle and sinew carrying her swiftly away from her only source of warmth.

  Ice scabbed over her insides.

  “Was he trying to kill her or make love to her?” the man carrying her asked.

  “This way. Quickly. Filthy brujo. He is without conscience,” Ria said.

  Like calling to like, Ria?

  “I will kill him,” Ria promised. “At the time and place of my choosing.”

  When there weren’t so many cops around.

  “Isa!” Murmur bellowed in their wake.

  She croaked a cry of answering anguish. Shards of glass scraped her bruised throat. Was her physical pain the price of Murmur steadily losing control?

  Yes, she wore a necklace of bruises made by Murmur’s hand. Daniel’s hands, Murmur’s intention. She released a pent-up breath. Rescue had come when she least needed or wanted it. With Murmur she’d have been safe. Eventually.

  A car door opened.

  She was deposited on cold leather. The idling car reeked of fear sweat and crunch
y, old blood. Hers? Or someone else’s? She opened eyes she didn’t remember having closed.

  Brown cracked leather, stained green across one corner, adorned the back of the passenger’s front seat.

  “You are well, señora?” Emanuel turned in the driver’s seat to peer at her. Worry spilled over the edges of his voice. “You can breathe, yes?”

  She nodded. The muscles in her neck protested. She flinched. “Yes.”

  The front passenger’s door opened and her past got into the car.

  Emanuel whipped the car into the road, leaving Ria behind. They didn’t quite burn rubber, but the tires squealed on the pavement and the engine roared. Emanuel took them east, uphill, to Second, and turned south, taking them through downtown Seattle on the surface streets.

  “Irene?” the familiar passenger said. “Your eyes are open. Are you awake?”

  Isa frowned. She hadn’t been called that name in years. How many? And that voice. For a head-spinning moment, her past opened up to swallow her. Was she still sixteen? Waking from a vivid dream? Or vision of a future that might never be?

  No. She hadn’t awakened in Ruth’s hogan. Cold still gripped her. Strange aches, and pain she couldn’t pin down, reminded her that she’d left the resiliency of sixteen behind years ago. Her sight pulled into focus on the man twisted in his seat to study her. She hadn’t seen him since she’d left the reservation.

  Thick black, shoulder-length hair obscured the broad plains of his cheeks, but she’d have recognized her cousin anywhere by his kind, brown eyes, the swoop of his nose, and the silvery-blue, new sage power that rested so peacefully within his broad-shouldered frame.

  “Jaiden?” Isa murmured. She fought off lethargy and sat straighter. “Where are we? What are you doing here?”

  “We’re taking you someplace safe, señora,” Emanuel said. “Where the brujo won’t find you again.”

  She breathed a broken laugh. They were protecting her. From her former tattoo.

  “What was it that we rescued you from, Irene?” Jaiden asked.

  Murmur’s cry for her rolled through her skull. She winced.

  “And were we mistaken?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, not certain she could safely expose Murmur, even to her once beloved cousin. “On any count.”

  Jaiden snorted.

  “Can we get these cuffs off?” she asked.

  “Sí,” Emanuel said as he slowed to accommodate early commuter traffic. “When you are safe.”

  “Can the two of you shield?” Jaiden asked. “It would be wise to obscure our back trail.”

  Emanuel’s magic, a balanced blend of cool, glacial green and angry red spread to encompass the car.

  Isa’s power lagged in answering, slowed like tree sap in the cold at her core. Gold mingled with Emanuel’s shield, filling in the cracks and voids.

  Jaiden wove a spell that smeared the edges of her magic, morphing the color of her trail as they drove into the shadows of Seattle’s few skyscrapers. Isa frowned. Her cousin wove a powerful piece of magic that Isa didn’t know.

  “Will you teach me that?” she asked.

  “Later.”

  “Why is traffic so backed up? Isn’t it a little early?” Isa noted, eyeing the clock embedded in the dash. It read shortly after 6 A.M.

  “Checkpoints,” Emanuel said. “Here. While we are stopped. Your handcuffs.” He unbuckled his seatbelt.

  “Allow me,” Jaiden said. “The light changed.”

  Emanuel grunted and dropped a key into Jaiden’s outstretched palm.

  She swung around, presenting her bound wrists. Pressure against the thin bones. The cuffs clicked. Pinching metal fell away.

  “Thank you,” she said, settling into the backseat and putting on her seatbelt. “Now. What was this about checkpoints?”

  “The checkpoints were set up to catch anyone wearing Live Ink,” Emanuel said. “Also, you’re wanted for murder.”

  A frigid wave surged beneath her feet. “Who?” Her voice cracked on worry.

  “A couple of government agents, according to Ria’s contacts,” he said.

  Lawrence and Dick. Not Jackie. Good. She could go on hoping that Jackie still lived.

  “That didn’t take long,” she grumbled.

  Jaiden snorted and rubbed his hands together. “You do have a way of finding trouble, don’t you?”

  Emanuel chuckled and clicked on the heater.

  Jaiden nodded. “Thanks.”

  She had to be doing it again. Or still. Radiating the cold that gripped her. Isa scowled as Emanuel turned right and followed the signs to Highway 99 South. They left the towers of downtown behind. The sports stadiums gave way to dingy, squat warehouses with windows so filthy they looked frosted. Her heart shuddered.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Somewhere no one will think to look for you,” Emanuel said.

  Awareness avalanched down, burying her under the crushing weight of certainty. “Emanuel, I won’t go back there.”

  He didn’t change direction.

  Jaiden swung around again to stare at her. “I need sacred ground. Someplace we can be safe for three days.”

  “It is not sacred ground! Furthest thing from it.”

  Her cousin glanced between the two of them. They crossed the Duwamish Waterway and exited the bridge. Emanuel’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. He said nothing.

  “You’re in trouble, Irene,” Jaiden said.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” she countered, then sagged. He was right. It was all she could do to keep her teeth from chattering. “How much do you know?”

  “Your coworkers briefed me,” he said. “They told me you’d been kidnapped, tortured, that someone forced a Living Tattoo on you. Then that tattoo came off. Is that right?”

  “It’s a fair summation.”

  Jaiden watched her for several seconds, meeting her gaze.

  She cut a quick look to Emanuel.

  He watched her in the rearview mirror.

  Sighing, she met her cousin’s eye. “He’s taking us to where I was held when I was kidnapped.”

  Jaiden scowled. “We cannot use so tainted a place.”

  “Ria’s orders,” Emanuel said, turning off the road and following a broken, pothole-wracked track that barely passed for a road.

  Isa’s teeth clacked together and the back of the car groaned before bottoming out on a pothole.

  “Look,” Emanuel ordered, jerking a thumb at Jaiden’s window.

  When the muscles in her neck protested turning her head, Isa turned her upper body to catch a glimpse of the cement barriers backed by military vehicles on the main road. Cars and trucks waited in double lines on either side. Soldiers with automatic rifles strode up and down the rows, waving cars on, opening cargo containers carried by the trucks.

  As they passed the barricade on the pitted gravel road, a soldier stepped out of a corrugated metal hut beside the road and gestured for them to stop.

  Isa’s breath caught.

  Emanuel rolled down his window. He waved a sheet of yellow paper.

  The soldier’s grip on his gun relaxed. Nodding, he turned away as if bored. Or exhausted.

  “Wow,” she muttered as Emanuel drove past.

  “Sí,” Emanuel said. “This state of emergency has gone on too long. They caught many people wearing Live Ink in the early days, but none in the past week. It is the trucks they watch. Not a car carrying passengers so openly.”

  Isa glanced at her hands. Solid Maya blue. She didn’t have the courage to finish unzipping her sticky jacket and lift her shirt to see how close to her heart the color had traveled. What was the sticky stuff all over her coat?

  She looked down.

  Blood.

  Drying, rusty blood, and wizened, stringy bits of what look
ed like drying flesh clung to her coat and jeans. Her shirts beneath hung in shreds.

  “What the hell?” she muttered. Murmur. He must have been shifting, like in the quarantine center. How was that possible? His true form rejecting the confines of Daniel’s body? What would happen to him if he tore through Daniel’s physical form?

  Fingering the tatters with blue digits, she surveyed the damage to her clothes. Definitely talons. Isa frowned. That was the second time he’d lost control of his form. What was happening to him?

  She shivered. And to her?

  When the car tires crunched onto the broken, gravel-strewn pavement in front of the building where she’d spent six weeks, Isa clenched her teeth.

  A yellow-and-white box truck stood in front of the cinderblock building. The concrete steps to the front door still sagged, but the building had been painted. The soot tracing the veins and cracks in the cinderblock had been erased with a layer of fresh pale green paint. The banded metal door remained, tied open with several layers of twine wound around the door latch and railing.

  As they climbed out of the car, a man in the back of the truck greeted Emanuel, before adding a rapid stream of Spanish as he hefted a box to one shoulder, and strode down the ramp into the building.

  Emanuel lifted his chin in acknowledgment. In an undertone, as if for their ears only, he said, “Go inside. Trade coats with the man and woman you will find there.”

  “This place,” Jaiden said to her. “Will it distract you? Nothing I do will cleanse your memory.”

  “So long as I don’t have to go in the actual room,” she said, “I will do this. It’s a tradeoff. Someplace no one would imagine I would willingly come versus my discomfort.”

  “You sound so cold, Irene. When did you become so practical? And your will so cast in iron?”

  She shrugged and set a shaking hand to the railing. “I’ve been cold since losing the tattoo. Maybe I’m finally getting used to the chill.”

  “You used to use your magic to warm you.”

  “I’ve tried. Since the tattoo came off, my power can no longer warm me.”

  He grunted. “That’s not good. It means we’re running out of time.”

  “You cannot mean to do a sing,” she said. The distraction got her feet to the bottom step.