Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) Page 24

  Isa was their legacy. She was in no way prepared to step into the shoes it had taken three of them to fill.

  Jaiden opened two of the cardboard boxes. From one, he drew forth a blanket Isa recognized. It had been hers.

  Ruth had woven it. The blanket had adorned Isa’s bed throughout her childhood.

  Her cousin took the blanket to the mattress tucked into one of the back corners of the room. He spread the blanket, and turned to meet her eye.

  Isa drew herself up, pried her sneakers from her feet, and went to sit cross-legged upon the blanket her mother had made with her hands, her spirit, and her magic.

  Jaiden knelt before her, careful not to touch the blanket. “Do you want peyote to ease your way?”

  “No.”

  Steve’s brows had lowered at the mention of the drug. His frown followed Jaiden as Isa’s cousin rose and walked away.

  Steve squatted down in front of her. “Thanks for refusing the drug.”

  “I have used it,” Isa said. “It’s another tool in a deep box. It’s a convenient shortcut, but one that’s too dangerous for this situation.”

  He nodded to encourage her to go on and waited.

  Despite the cold permeating her, his gesture made Isa smile. Was this his family’s way of being polite? Or had she infected him with what she’d been taught—that it was polite to wait for a story to unfold without prompting?

  “Peyote pries open the consciousness,” she said, “and props it wide. Where I’m going, I want as much control as possible.”

  He nodded.

  Words piled up in her mouth before her brain could weigh the wisdom of letting them spill. “Do you know about Jackie?”

  He clenched his fists. “What about Jackie?”

  “She’s alive,” Isa said. “As far as I know. She was injured last night helping me chase down a serial killer.”

  He swore. “I should be out there. What the hell happened to you, Isa? I got your message. The AMBI wouldn’t officially tell me where you were . . .”

  “Anne Macquarie let it slip?”

  “Not before I was encouraged to take a leave of absence,” he said. “I did some checking, asked a few questions. You were reported missing from the containment camp. They said you escaped.”

  “No,” she said. “I was taken out of that camp by government agents.”

  The muscles in his jaw flexed. “What agents?”

  She told him about the operation Lawrence, Dick, and Max had been running.

  Steve’s expression hardened. He listened without comment as she ran down the events in the market.

  She told him everything.

  Everything except Murmur.

  “There’s a warrant out for my arrest,” she said. “Murder.”

  “The agents?”

  “Yes.”

  “The griffin killed them.”

  “Yes. The two who died weren’t the only ones in the city. I did not destroy their operation. It’s still out there,” she said, seeing Max in her mind’s eye. “Hurting people. Patty isn’t safe. I may not be.”

  “We’ll deal with it, okay? After we know you’re all right. Who is this guy?” His tight voice quivered with uncertainty as he glanced over his shoulder at Jaiden. Maybe jealousy.

  “He’s my cousin,” she said, “and the clan Singer.”

  Steve met her gaze. He shifted his shoulders, settling them lower. “Sorry. We’ll get this cleared up.”

  Snorting, Isa rolled her head, trying to drive the tension out of her neck. “I don’t know how. I’m pinned down. I don’t even know how to stop Uriel.”

  She lifted her bright blue hands in a gesture of defeat. “I don’t know how to handle this weird Mayan thing dragging me into a culture I don’t understand. I don’t know if this is related to Murmur leaving or Uriel opening a door or . . .”

  Steve took her face in his hands, leaned in, and kissed her.

  Isa leaned into the contact, craving the peace of him, the determination. She suspected she’d need it where she was going.

  He drew away. “Find out. I can’t pretend to understand what you’re about to do, but you’re looking for information, right?”

  “In part.”

  “Knowledge is power,” he said.

  Isa stared at him, trying to see whether he knew he echoed a Live Tattoo of a Mayan god. “Gather as much as you can,” he finished.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before I decided I hated school and ran for the exit the moment I’d barely graduated?”

  He smiled. “You can still go to college.”

  “Oh, hell no,” she said. “Now, mister. No more distraction. I have some meditation to accomplish before Nathalie shoves a needle through my tongue.”

  She had no way of knowing how much time had passed when the gong of the front door opening pulled her up from attempting to quiet her fears.

  The pair came armed with more boxes. Nathalie brought one to Isa’s corner, set it down, opened it, and began unpacking piercing supplies.

  Troy rounded the chair Steve had dragged up beside Isa’s position and parked himself in.

  Steve rose and paced the hallway while Troy unpacked a fragrant bag of resin, charcoal, bowls, and a brand-new backpack.

  Isa frowned. It looked like her Live Ink kit. “You didn’t.”

  “Yes, we did. Figured you’d want this if you have to deal with Daniel’s tattoo,” Troy said. “Couldn’t find a key for your Live Ink. Except for them, this should be everything you lost.”

  To an out-of-control hydra on a bridge. How long ago?

  Isa found an unbidden smile on her face. Stasis paper. The kit wouldn’t contain stasis paper, either. She hadn’t had a chance to make any more.

  “Here.” She pulled the uncomfortable notepad from her back jean’s pocket. Then the big cat tattoo. The griffin, she’d keep. She didn’t want anyone knowing where that tattoo was. Not with Murmur hunting it. “Put those in there, too?”

  Troy did, then zipped the pack and propped it beside the blanket.

  Her friends had armed her. In the only way they knew how.

  Troy rubbed a hand down his face. “You need to know some things.”

  She looked at him.

  He avoided meeting her eye. “You know the story about Lucifer and the war with heaven, right?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “The cogent piece of information is that Lucifer rebelled against God’s authority. When that happened, he wasn’t alone.”

  Isa nodded.

  “When he was cast out of heaven, his coconspirators, his generals in the war against God, became the legions of demons in hell.” He shifted, his brow crinkled. “Those former generals have names. One of them is named Murmur. He commands thirty legions of minor demons and rides a griffin into battle.”

  Isa pinched the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. Ria must have told him about the episode in the alley. No one else but Jaiden had been there. “You’re saying my former tattoo really is a demon from hell?”

  Did that explain the bruises on her throat?

  Troy finally met her eye and shrugged. “According to Christian mythology? Yeah.”

  She dropped her hand to her lap and studied him for a moment. “I didn’t realize you were a believer.”

  “Recovering one,” he said. His face flushed. “This is all Kabalistic stuff. I don’t do that anymore.”

  “So you do or don’t believe in hell?”

  “I gotta say, Ice, at this point, I don’t know what to believe. Before I saw you with his handprints on your throat, I’d have said no. Now?”

  “I named him,” Isa said. “What are the odds that out of every name on earth, I’d happen to pick that one?”

  “Some psychic connection that whispered his true name to you is my best
guess.”

  It meshed with hers. Still. She shook her head. “Coincidence.”

  “You can’t bring yourself to believe in a physical place of everlasting punishment?”

  “I can. It just looks like a cinderblock room with Daniel Alvarez in it.”

  He snorted, rose, and moved away.

  Maybe what she’d told Kukulcan had been true. Knowledge wasn’t the only power. Love was, too. Maybe she ought to mention that to Troy, Nathalie, and Steve. Especially Steve. Someday.

  “Normally,” Jaiden said into the ensuing silence, “no one but a Singer or Irene’s teachers would witness this process.”

  “We’re not leaving,” Nathalie said as she pulled on a pair of gloves and laid out a sterile paper drape on the floor in front of Isa’s blanket.

  Steve grunted agreement.

  “You are her family,” Jaiden said. “I hadn’t believed you would.”

  Nathalie’s lips twitched.

  “You should know what to expect,” Jaiden said.

  Troy set a long, narrow bundle of fabric on the blanket in front of Isa’s crossed legs. He winked when she glanced up.

  She folded back the fabric and breathed a laugh.

  Jaiden, seated in the middle of the room, leaned closer, his brows knitting. “Is that . . .”

  “It is.” Her obsidian knife, the one Ruth, Joseph, and Henry had gifted her with. “Thank you.” Her traitorous voice cracked.

  “Wanted you to have something,” Troy said. “Something that made me feel like you’d have protection. Even if you can’t carry a knife with you when you go.”

  “It’s better than you know,” Isa said. “Jaiden and I will cast a circle. You’ve seen that before. We’ll shield. Under any circumstances, no matter what you see or hear, do not cross the circle.”

  “But if I’m piercing . . .” Nathalie began.

  “I will open the circle and let you out,” Jaiden assured her.

  “How long will this take?” Steve asked.

  Isa shook her head. “No way of knowing. It could be minutes, hours, even days.”

  “Days?” Troy boggled.

  “Jaiden. They all carry some power,” Isa said. “None of them knows how to shield.”

  Her cousin’s eyes narrowed, disapproval in the tight set of his lips.

  She nodded, accepting the reproach. “I imagined I had the luxury of more time.”

  “I will handle it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “All set,” Nathalie said. “Since we’re doing this, do you want jewelry at the end of it all?”

  “No,” Isa and Steve said in unison.

  Troy chuckled.

  “Don’t know what you’re missing, man,” he said to Steve.

  Pink crept up Steve’s neck and cheeks. “Spare me.”

  At the familiar teasing, delicious relaxation snuck over Isa’s body, despite the cold claiming her. Golden flakes of magic stirred and drifted at her core. “Everybody but Nathalie back to the far wall, please.”

  Nathalie set the copal alight in one of the bowls.

  High-quality charcoal. It burned clean, glowing red, and sending up only tiny wisps of wood smoke that mingled with the spicy, exotic, pine forest scent of the copal.

  Isa breathed the incense and let her vision haze. Not having slept worked in her favor for once. Already, motes of shadow and light danced in her sight.

  The music of Nathalie stripping her equipment from sterile packaging echoed in Isa’s ears, fading to the sigh of a breeze in palm fronds and stirring dense jungle foliage.

  How could she know that? She’d never heard any such thing in her life. Until she’d dipped her fingers into a mixture of clay and Maya blue.

  “Ready?” Nat whispered.

  Isa nodded. Or thought she did.

  “Open up. Give me your tongue. You’ll feel the clamp. I’m going to hold on,” she said. “Not too tight.”

  The single slice of pizza Isa had eaten turned to cold stone in her stomach. The heart she’d thought had frozen fluttered at the touch of Nathalie’s clamp. She tasted metal and the bitter tang of alcohol.

  “Relax,” Nat crooned. “No surprises. I’ll talk you through it. The thread is on the needle. You’ll feel the metal against your tongue.”

  As cold as she was, maybe she’d be numb to pain. The internal glaciers had to be good for something. Didn’t they?

  A burning point touched her tongue. She shuddered.

  “Easy,” Nathalie said. “Take a nice, slow, deep breath in through your nose.”

  Isa obeyed. The breath quivered audibly.

  “Okay. Here we go. Breathe out.”

  Pressure.

  The taste of old pennies wet her tongue. Hurt howled a blood and gold blizzard through her head.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Isa fell out of her body into a cracked, broken glacial field. Whirls of night-stained powder danced the surface, vanishing into groaning crevasses. Twisted, rime-coated skeletons of trees and animals poked through the ice.

  The snow beneath her feet sounded like desert sand scritching as she shifted. Even the jagged, sharp rocks wore coats of ice.

  Her tongue throbbed, swollen in her mouth.

  Blood dripped to the snow. Hers. It spread, stretching as if the snow itself bled, until a road, paved with her blood, descended into the shadows of the glaciers.

  Isa followed, her bare feet skidding on the sharp ice until the blood from the soles of her feet mingled with the blood dripping from her mouth.

  A whiff of ancient pine curled around her as her path led inexorably deeper into a wide crevasse, winding back and forth, deeper into the heart of the ice. The walls glistened as if lit from within. Every inch of her path was lined with the dead, frozen into the ice. Animals, their bodies sundered, their eyes and mouths preserved in wide-open rictuses. Then, where the ice turned from azure to Maya blue, people appeared, arms out-flung, chests ripped open, the wounds still seeping into the ice as Isa passed.

  Whispers followed her. The sound of her feet on her blood-soaked road? The spirits of the dead haunting her trail?

  She passed out of the reach of anything like light.

  Fingers plucked at the cuffs of her jeans.

  She yelped and jumped. Blood fell from her mouth.

  “Help me!”

  “Help us!”

  Whispers resolved into words and rasping screams, the last sounds made by the dead as they’d left their lives behind.

  How did she know with such certainty?

  Clammy, dead hands grabbed and held her.

  Adrenaline bubbled through her veins. She couldn’t stop. She’d freeze in place. Join the dead.

  “Easy, brothers and sisters,” she lisped with her swollen tongue. “Join me as I journey. How may I aid you?”

  The gripping hands loosened.

  “Save us! Help us!” a multitude of voices cried. It sounded like the groan of a shifting glacier.

  She looked up, shivering with the sudden fear that the ice had closed over her head, entombing her. Nothing to see. Only her imagination burying her.

  “Saving you isn’t within my power,” she said. Her voice quavered.

  The hands clutching her tightened.

  “That power belongs only to you,” she said. “It always has.”

  For a moment, silence fell. Far, far overheard, distant voices wailed. Or was that the wind?

  Doubt rattled Isa’s bones. “Is this Xibalba?”

  The hands plucking at her vanished. The ground shuddered like a horse trying to dislodge a biting fly. Isa cried out and crouched low, heart pounding. Frigid wind whistled past, rushing against her, racing back up the path. The scream of its passage retreated up the side of the crevasse.

  “Xibalba.” A child’s whisper aff
irmed.

  Isa’s breath caught. She squeezed her eyes shut, glad she could no longer see the dead frozen into the crevasse walls containing evidence of child sacrifices. Rising, she inched her toes forward.

  “Where are you going?” the child asked.

  “I seek the gods of this place,” Isa said. Her voice reverberated off the crevasse walls, echoing away as if walking before her.

  “Why?”

  Good question. “I need their advice.”

  “Can I go with you? Will you ask the dread lords to free me? I don’t like being cold anymore,” the child’s voice confided.

  “I welcome your company, and if you aren’t comfortable asking for your freedom yourself, I will absolutely request it in your stead,” Isa said.

  A diminutive hand slipped into hers. She registered no temperature difference between the spirit’s skeletal touch and her skin.

  As she shuffled down the slick path, a noise rose from below. Hollow. Like breathing. No. Sighing.

  The trail leveled out.

  Chill weighed upon Isa’s shoulders, dragging on her, tempting her to stop. Rest. Just for a moment.

  The shifting, uneven sound drew her onward. That she couldn’t identify the noise intrigued her. It grew steadily louder. Hissing? No. Sand. It sounded like sand grains shifting in the desert wind.

  Light glowed from the frosted landscape ahead. The crevasse walls opened out. Powdery snow squeaked beneath her bare feet. The fresh bloodstain still ran before her, leading to a dark river cutting across her path.

  She frowned. A river, even one running and splashing the way this one did, couldn’t explain the hollow sound of sand grain ringing against sand grain.

  Of course it couldn’t.

  Isa recoiled.

  It wasn’t a river of water.

  Scorpions.

  Countless black, red, yellow, blue, buff, and even white scorpions seethed and surged, eddying like water in the wide course of the riverbed.

  She hadn’t heard the sound of sand grains. The river of venomous creatures flowed to the noise of exoskeleton sliding against exoskeleton.

  They are your fears, Isa’s brain supplied the memory of Spider Woman’s voice telling her. Conquer them before they conquer you. She’d said it months ago, while Isa had been escaping from Daniel.