Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) Read online

  “No.”

  “It is obvious when you’re together. The separation mortally wounded you both. This isn’t about saving just your life, Irene. Not anymore.”

  “I said no! You weren’t there, were you? In the vision? Do you know what they showed me?” she demanded, clutching her blanket to her chest.

  He subsided, rubbing his forehead. “Tell me.”

  Isa sank to sit on the mattress, her head cradled on the blanket. Squeezing her eyes closed as if she could shut out what she’d experienced, she told him.

  “All three of you sacrificed?” Jaiden said. His voice came from her level. “Irene, we can save you and Murmur by putting him back on you.”

  She opened her eyes and snarled at her cousin. “I have a choice. I decide. A vision isn’t fate. It isn’t!”

  “You choose,” Jaiden assured her. He sounded weary. Hurt.

  It reminded her that people several states away were dying. For no other reason than they’d been kind enough to take a frightened child into their hearts and homes. They deserved protection, too.

  “I am guilty of saving lives by taking lives,” she said. “I don’t know that I can ever atone for that, but I have to try. I won’t sacrifice him. Or his freedom. We close the door another way.”

  Even if it meant her death.

  Jaiden spread his fingers in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know what to do. If you were Navajo and we were in my place of power . . . But we aren’t. You aren’t what you want to be. I am not where I need to be.”

  He blew out an audible gust of air. “We deal with what is.”

  “You make it sound so easy.” She glanced at the door.

  Murmur stood, laden with blankets and pillows, listening, his expression unreadable. He leaked darkness into the air. It fuzzed the outline of Daniel’s form.

  Isa stirred the golden power drifting in her interior and held it out to Murmur like a hand.

  He ignored it.

  She looked away and dropped her magic. “Please, Singer, will you heal our wounds?”

  Jaiden rose. “You’re asking for him?”

  “He doesn’t know our ways. I am asking for him.”

  “I’ll amend the ceremony to heal you both.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Food in the bag,” Jaiden said, striding for the door. “From the deli downstairs.”

  Murmur shifted out of the doorway.

  Jaiden paused in the threshold. He glanced between them. “Bring yourselves under control. Do whatever it takes. I will return when preparations are complete.”

  Isa stared at her cousin’s back as he walked out of the room. Whatever it takes?

  Murmur released the blankets in favor of securing the containment door behind Jaiden.

  Fingers playing over the blanket’s zigzag pattern, Isa sighed. The breath fogged. She shivered, set the blanket aside, and went to rescue the bedclothes. “How much did you overhear?”

  “Enough.”

  “Which tells me nothing,” she said, dumping her haul on the mattress.

  “You won’t take me back.”

  She spun to glare at him. “I didn’t think you wanted to be taken back. Last I knew, you wanted freedom!”

  He swept his arms wide. His fingers brushed the granite walls. “This isn’t freedom. And this world . . .”

  Shadow wings and talons changed his shape. He dropped his arms back to his sides. “I don’t understand the pain.”

  Isa shook her head. “You shouldn’t hurt. I shouldn’t be freezing. I don’t know what’s wrong with us, but I do know that I won’t imprison you again.”

  “Ask me before you decide what I value.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You ripped my throat out for what you value.”

  “We were under attack,” he snapped. Jaw flexing, he stalked across the room and drove her three steps backward, pinning her against the wall. He traced the necklace of bruises left by his hands over twenty-four hours ago. “I did this. I may yet kill you. Why won’t you destroy me?”

  Ink dark magic swept her skin in the wake of his fingers. It sank deeper, touching more of her than blood, skin, and bone. Heat awoke at her core, thawing the surface layer of her magic. She started and gasped as liquid gold seeped into her cells and weighed heavy in her lower abdomen. She remembered this. It was what it felt like to be alive. Finally.

  “We’re back to that? Murmur, everything that’s happened, everything I’ve done since you left, has been because I don’t want you dead,” she said. “Is death what you want?”

  “No,” he murmured, tilting his head to press his lips against the scar on her neck. His hands slid down, tracing the curve of her breasts and settling in the small of her back. “Not when the pain recedes. Not when I’m touching you. What do you want?”

  His teeth grazed her skin.

  Smoky, sweet, black heat rolled through the frozen landscape of her psyche. The ice at her center broke up, melting in a rush of hot blood.

  “You,” she breathed, nudging the flood of newly fluid magic into her hands. She ran her palms and her magic up his ribs. “I want you.”

  His breath shuddered. He pulled her tight against him as balmy night magic spun out, through her, and into the room.

  Glimmering energy answered her summons and expanded to match Murmur’s.

  Their power mingled, intertwined. Sunny, smiling light and sultry, fragrant night.

  Her muscles quivered in reaction.

  His lips captured hers.

  A tidal wave of hot, black energy flooded her, crowding her internal landscape.

  She leaned into the dual pressure of his lips consuming hers and his magic filling her, stretching the scar tissue his departure had left on her soul. Without her conscious direction, her magic shimmered through her flesh and bone into his.

  He broke the contact of their lips. Eyes closed, he tilted his head back. Breath hissed between his clenched teeth.

  Tears pricked her eyes and surprised her by spilling over.

  When the first drop of moisture touched his skin, his eyes opened. He wiped the salt water away. The flow wouldn’t ebb.

  “Why?” he murmured against her lips.

  “You’re home,” she choked.

  He sucked in an audible breath.

  Dark magic flexed inside her psyche.

  “Yes.” He stripped her sweatshirt and tee from her body, then shed his own shirt before pulling her skin into contact with his.

  His shaking hands lingered against the skin of her back. He’d closed his eyes, the most peaceful expression she’d ever seen on the face he wore.

  For that brief moment, she was complete. She held him too tightly as if she could subsume him through the pores of her skin and keep him always.

  She followed the flow of her magic into the seething black depths of Murmur. She ran golden energy over the internal scar he carried. It matched hers. Her magic caught on another, much larger, uglier twist of psyche.

  “What is that?” she murmured against his skin.

  “His death.”

  Isa smoothed the scar with her power and pressed kisses to his throat. “No wonder you hurt.”

  He groaned. “That doesn’t. It’s dead. Not growing, consuming.”

  “Like the parts of us that tore,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She flexed her fingers in the wisps of dark magic curling through his skin. Gold glinted, twining into the smoky tendrils.

  “We’re losing control. Dying.”

  He stilled, not even breathing for several seconds. “Then we heal.”

  “I’ve tried.”

  “You are inexperienced.”

  “Go ahead. Heal yourself. I’ll help if I can.”

  He pulled away. “I don’t need help.”

&nb
sp; He startled a smile from her. That sounded like her arrogant demon.

  “You don’t believe it will work,” he accused.

  “I hope it will,” Isa countered. “I’d like to think it’s that simple, that I’m not doing it right.”

  He folded down to sitting on the mattress. Frowning, he closed his eyes.

  She subsided to the mattress beside him, legs crossed.

  Energy shifted. Torrid summer heat, black and heavy as midnight, enfolded her. It built, crushing her until she could no longer draw the thick air into her feeble lungs.

  His torrent of energy blew apart.

  It pasted Isa back into the bedclothes. She gasped.

  Murmur groaned and fell across her.

  “What happened? Murmur?” Isa combed her fingers through his hair, tucking a shimmer of warming power into the caress. “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It should have worked.”

  Fear clamped sharp teeth on her ribs. She blinked against the heavy weight pressing against the backs of her eyes.

  “Then we hope Jaiden’s healing will take,” she said. “Until then, I won’t let you go.”

  His chest expanded slowly and he wrapped his arms around her waist, pressing his face into her stomach.

  “I want you,” he rasped. “But not here. Not in a place so tainted by him.”

  By Daniel.

  “What the hell are you remembering that you aren’t telling me?”

  He shook his head against her.

  Isa shuddered. “Murmur, I need you. I don’t know . . .”

  “You have me.”

  Magic ran liquid and hot beneath her skin, an intoxicating blend of heated black and molten gold.

  She grappled for control of the thick, sweet light of her power.

  He rolled to his back, pulled her atop him, and arranged her as if she were his preferred blanket. Burying his face against her throat as if drawn to the physical scar he’d given her, he said, “Let go. Hold nothing back. I want all of you.”

  She urged trembling muscles to relax and fright-clenched psychic fingers to loosen. Magic surged through her. Glittering gold weighed heavy inside and out. It settled, a toasty mantle pressing her into him.

  It was unparalleled freedom to let go completely. To not have to hold back any part of who or what she was. She couldn’t hurt him. He couldn’t hurt her. Not like this. Not with the magical aspects of who and what they were.

  Could she be his tattoo? To be this warm and this safe, this accepted, might be worth it.

  Isa had no idea what time Jaiden finally knocked on the door.

  She and Murmur slid reluctantly apart and grounded so that the magic they’d shared wouldn’t slip straight out the door and light up the city’s aura.

  Murmur cracked open the door.

  “Wash. Dress,” Jaiden commanded. “I’ll be back.”

  They obeyed.

  Murmur dressed, then picked up his leather jacket. He fished the folded stasis paper holding his griffin from the inside pocket and gave it to Isa. “Guard him?”

  Her heart caught in her throat. The only reason he’d give the creature up would be because he didn’t intend to survive.

  “I will protect him and you,” she said. “With my life.”

  His eyebrows lowered.

  Dressed in pale jeans and a wine red shirt, Jaiden summoned them from the room. A length of yellow cloth tied around his forehead kept his hair from his face. Silver and turquoise cuffs adorned his wrists.

  Isa felt grubby and childish in her rumpled T-shirt and sweatshirt.

  She and Murmur shielded, clasped hands, and followed Jaiden to the elevator.

  A group of people waited in the lobby of Daniel’s offices when Jaiden ushered Murmur and Isa inside.

  Steve appeared to be single-handedly holding off a giant of a man and one woman, both of whom seemed intent on gaining access to the containment studio.

  “Damn it, Steve!” the woman said in a familiar voice. “We’re here to help!”

  “Oki?” Isa squeaked.

  The woman spun on the heel of her sensible black pumps. “Ice!”

  The man turned.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” Isa demanded of her friend. She didn’t recognize the mountain of a bearded Japanese man studying her.

  Oki grinned and smoothed the charcoal fabric of her pencil skirt. “It’s called a suit. Some people even call it professional.”

  “Better you than me. What are you doing here? It isn’t safe.”

  Oki rolled her eyes. “Don’t think I don’t know it. I have learned a few things in the past few weeks.”

  “Me, too,” Isa grumbled.

  Murmur snorted.

  “Please tell me your parents are safe,” Isa said.

  “In my tiny apartment in Tokyo,” Oki said, “still telling me what to do. It’s like I never left Seattle. Look. Ice. I’m serious. They’re okay. Dad and Mom were on a flight within hours of you sending Troy to warn them.”

  Isa blinked. She hadn’t.

  “Oh. Hey. Getting to see you, it’s like I reverted to being twelve,” Oki said. “Isa Romanchzyk, may I present Ink Master Tokoro Masatoshi.”

  Isa gaped.

  Oki reversed the introduction; at least, Isa assumed she did. Oki switched to speaking Japanese.

  A broad, brilliant grin split the man’s grizzled, graying beard, nearly crinkling his twinkling, dark eyes closed.

  Isa bowed.

  He returned the gesture.

  She straightened a moment after he rose.

  Master Masatoshi’s gaze moved to her left.

  Murmur.

  “Put me back,” Murmur commanded, shadow curling out of the confines of Daniel’s skin.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “Irene doesn’t have the four to six weeks that kind of tattoo would take,” Jaiden said. “Neither do you.”

  “Who’s Irene?” Oki demanded.

  Isa flushed and raised her hand. “Irene Sinquah, what I was named when I was adopted.”

  Master Masatoshi said something to Oki in a surprisingly gentle baritone.

  “He says there may be a way,” Oki said. “The matrix of magic and Live Ink still exists in Isa’s skin.”

  “What does that mean? And why are you not freaking out about Daniel?” Isa asked.

  “Master Masatoshi suspected he was Murmur,” Oki said. “Then I saw the eyes. As for the Live Ink thing, I may get this part wrong translating what Master Masatoshi told me, but the short story is when Ink comes off, the spells that put the Living Tattoo on you get left behind. They remain in your blood and magic. They’re a huge danger, in fact. Master Masatoshi can explain it better, later. We came to get you out of here. Both of you. We’re evacuating you to Japan.”

  “What?” Steve yelped.

  Jaiden stepped into the middle of the group and held up a hand. “Not possible. Come into the containment studio. Isa and Murmur have a momentary hold of their magic. It won’t last. They’re deteriorating.”

  Oki’s eyes widened. She translated.

  Master Masatoshi nodded. “Hie.”

  He turned and marched past Steve, leading the way into the containment studio as if he’d owned the place his entire life.

  The rest of them trailed in his wake.

  Steve waited until Isa drew even with him. Stubble shadowed his jaw. His hair stood on end. “You look like you feel better. Are you okay?”

  No. She wasn’t okay. Guilt lodged in her chest, setting hooked barbs into her flesh and bones.

  He’d been up all night, watching Jaiden sprinkle sand across the floor. On her behalf, he’d gone without food or sleep while she’d spent the night in Murmur’s arms.

&
nbsp; She hoped he’d settle for a sheepish nod.

  “Jaiden’s powerful,” he said as they filed into the white stone containment studio. He paused at the door. “This is going to work.”

  He shut the gleaming metal door and locked it.

  A cold, silvery razor sliced through her insides. Gooseflesh erupted on her skin and she hugged her arms tight around her.

  Master Masatoshi spun to stare at her. He barked something.

  Bubbling, clear power, refreshing as a mossy mountain spring, filled the room, submerging her, pressing against her. As if she’d sunk into the sea of the Ink Master’s energy, the atmosphere bearing down on her increased.

  It didn’t change the cold assailing her. The razor still traced the outlines of her soul, but contained by Master Masatoshi’s magic, the cold couldn’t escape the confines of her skin.

  “He says something seeks escape,” Oki said, frowning.

  Isa flinched.

  Murmur hissed, “Uriel.”

  “What?” Isa squeaked. “How?”

  “Explanation later! Ceremony,” Jaiden commanded, “now.”

  “I’m not dressed for ceremony!” she protested.

  Silence.

  Isa broke first, uttering a laugh that shook with an undercurrent of hysteria.

  Murmur took her hand. Black smoke curled up the magical pathways, tracing her anatomy like veins. Even the heat of his presence unfolding inside couldn’t dig the silver blade out of her psyche.

  She flashed on the vision she’d won from the dread lords of Xibalba. Uriel carving a door from the cage of her chest.

  “Nothing about this situation conforms to expectation,” her cousin said. “I don’t think the Holy Ones will begrudge you coming before them wrapped in bandages.”

  She definitely came wounded to the prayer Jaiden had painted on the floor of Daniel’s containment studio.

  The air above the painting shimmered.

  She smelled the new sage. It eased the tension from her shoulders. She led Murmur to the center of the painting, sand scattered beneath their feet, blurring the figures and releasing the first glimmers of power beyond Jaiden’s own. Isa sat cross-legged facing into the center of the painting.

  Murmur mirrored her, their knees touching.

  Master Masatoshi spoke.