Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) Read online

  She caught in a breath that sounded like a sob. “You’re putting me back?”

  “You’ll have to let me go, but yes, if you’re okay with it.”

  The mermaid released Isa so fast, they both stumbled. “Yes! What do I have to do?”

  “Follow the line of magic, Ink, and blood back to Helen. I’m the bridge between Helen’s magic and yours.”

  The mermaid clapped her hands to her mouth. Brilliant tears, vibrating with hope, caught on her blue-green lashes. She made to throw herself at Isa again.

  Isa raised her hands to forestall her. “Let me get a circle up so we can put you where you belong.”

  The mermaid subsided, dropping her hands to her sides. “You don’t like feeling. Do you?”

  Isa pressed her lips tight, forced a smile, summoned more magic, and got to work.

  Helen’s skin and soul took Live Ink beautifully. Because she was used to it? Or because she and her chosen tattoo loved one another?

  Isa didn’t care. After establishing the initial flow of magic and Ink, she relaxed into the process of painting the pair of them together again.

  “You’re different, you know,” Helen finally said as the tattoo neared completion.

  Isa blinked her physical eyes. The gesture rippled through into the etheric, where she stood within a second circle of magic, using the flow of her energy to thread the soul of a mermaid through silver tattoo needles into the skin and soul of the woman on the recliner.

  Isa parsed her attention, half for the mermaid waiting in the otherworld, half for Helen.

  “Almost done,” she said. “How are you holding up?”

  “This is nothing,” Helen said. “I’d bleed myself dry to save her.”

  Helen’s declaration rippled through the line of energy Isa had established to bridge the worlds. They reached the vivid blue-green mermaid.

  “I wouldn’t let her!” she said.

  Helen apparently caught part of that. She snorted.

  “Easy, you two. In a minute you can argue without me in the middle,” Isa said.

  The mermaid laughed, a clear, bright splash of waves on sparkling sand.

  “Okay,” Isa said. “Last strokes going in.”

  In the physical world of the containment studio, she applied the final strokes of Live Ink, finishing the picture of the mermaid poised upon rocks awash with waves.

  In the etheric, she picked up the last blue-green thread of the mermaid’s magic, freeing her from the stasis paper.

  “Last one,” Isa told the mermaid. “You should feel the pull as I weave it into Helen.”

  Color washed out of the mermaid, surging through the line of power, down Isa’s right arm into the Live Ink flowing through the silver tattoo needles, and into Helen’s skin.

  Isa poured concentration and energy into that final filament, sealing the work, giving the both of them a chance to heal on every level.

  She hoped.

  The mermaid, the ocean, and the rocks vanished from the etheric plane.

  Beneath Isa’s physical hands, Helen’s diaphragm kicked, then shuddered. “She’s back. She’s home!”

  Isa brought her awareness out of the otherworld to the empty shell of her own body.

  “Cleaning up,” she said. “I’ll need another minute to make sure everything is sealed.”

  Helen subsided, though her breath continued to catch.

  “Sorry,” she gasped. “I didn’t realize it would be . . . I feel again.”

  A block of ice lodged in Isa’s throat wouldn’t let her answer. She nodded. She swabbed the tattoo, then surveyed the artwork. Her shoulders eased lower. It was right. She stopped the machine and put it down.

  She sprayed dilute soapy water on the areas she’d worked. As she wiped them dry, she spent more magic sealing the work and the joining of spirit to flesh, blood, and bone already occupied by Helen.

  On her skin, the blue-green mermaid sat on rocks, combing her seashell-studded hair while waves broke on the rocks behind her. Serene. Radiant.

  Murmuring thanks to the power she’d used, Isa closed her eyes, and dispersed magic into the black basalt stone beneath her cold-numb feet.

  When she opened her eyes, Helen met her gaze.

  Both she and the mermaid looked at Isa from Helen’s brown eyes.

  It rocked Isa back on her stool. She turned that jolt into a reach for the hand mirror she kept on her work cart.

  Helen accepted it, but didn’t look into it as Isa had hoped she would. Already, gentle waves of blue-green magic softened the blunt gray power glimmering in Helen’s eyes.

  Envy rang through the void in Isa’s psyche.

  Helen’s gaze locked on the ruby drop of blood and the faint white scar on Isa’s neck. She frowned. “What happened? I thought—”

  “I had Live Ink?” Isa finished for her. Her voice only shook a little. “I did.”

  “Did?” Helen echoed. “That’s why your magic feels so changed. So cold.”

  Isa started. Helen and her tattoo had been dying the last time Isa and Murmur had been sharing a body—when they’d saved Helen and her tattoo together. How had Helen had the presence of mind to register Isa’s magic combined with Murmur’s? Much less remember it well enough to notice his absence now?

  “He’s gone? How . . .” She caught the words back, her face flushing.

  “Same thing that nearly happened to you,” Isa said. “Someone was pulling our tattoos from us. Mine came off.”

  The blood drained from Helen’s face. She glanced into the mirror. Her expression lightened. Her mouth softened and the lines at the corners of her eyes eased as she studied the tattoo on her torso. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too,” Isa breathed, then paused to clear the prickles from her throat and push back from the recliner.

  Helen rose. “I’m not a cow in a pink cartoon tutu anymore!”

  The description, coming from the compact woman, wrung a smile from Isa.

  “I’ll pay for the planter I broke coming in,” she said, putting her shirt back on and buttoning it gingerly as if afraid of hurting the mermaid.

  “No,” Isa said.

  “The tattooing.”

  “No.”

  Helen stilled. “Are you okay?”

  No. Isa drew a shallow breath and shifted her shoulders. “How do you two feel?”

  “Amazing,” Helen breathed, her voice deeper and richer than before her tattoo.

  “Good,” Isa breathed, taking down her circle and opening the door of the containment studio. “Good.”

  She didn’t feel anything but cold.

  Chapter Six

  Helen had already integrated part of the mermaid by the time Isa led her to the top of the stairs. She hugged Isa and implored her to let Helen pay for something. Anything.

  Forcing a smile as she backed away, Isa shook her head.

  Her gaze turned inward for a moment, then focused again, not on Isa’s face, but on the scar on Isa’s throat. Helen frowned. With a nod, she hurried out of the shop with the buzz of Troy’s tattoo machine covering the sound of her flight.

  Troy’s machine shut off.

  Stretching her shoulders and back, Isa rounded the reception desk to peek at his work.

  He’d put a 1950s-style pinup girl on a gap-toothed bruiser of a dock worker. The woman grinned down at the vivid flat ink.

  She let Isa snap a photo of it for Troy’s portfolio.

  “Thanks, Ice,” he said, taping a loose cover over the tattoo, and then handing the woman a sheet of paper. “Care instructions. You have any problems, you get back here, or you call me, got it?”

  “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” the woman said, grinning as she straightened her clothes and rose. “None of them assholes at work figured I’d get ink. Can’t wait to show ’em.”

  Sh
e paid and then marched out the door into the gusty April wind.

  Isa picked up her cell phone.

  As if the brief hit of Murmur’s company in the night were a drug she’d become addicted to, she found she needed a quick Internet search for any recent news regarding one Daniel Alvarez.

  She’d check on the whirlwind tattoo she’d put on stasis paper yesterday, after.

  Nothing. Not the slightest mention to assure her that Murmur was okay. That freeing him into a world and a body not his own hadn’t been a mistake. Despite what he’d said about pain last night.

  Behind her, Troy paused in taking his machine apart for cleaning. “Ice, your stasis paper worked. Why wouldn’t you let your client pay for the Ink?”

  She flinched, blanked her phone screen, and glanced over her shoulder at her business partner. If he or Nat saw her search parameter, they’d haul her to a psychiatrist to be treated for Stockholm syndrome. As far as they knew, Daniel was still Daniel, not Murmur. They’d only see the man who’d had her kidnapped and then who’d tortured her for a month and half.

  Not that any of them would be thrilled to see Murmur, either.

  The muscular former bouncer turned flat ink tattoo artist sauntered closer to the glass and steel reception counter. His wife had built the new counter after they’d lost their old one. The police had taken it as evidence, since Daniel had nailed a man’s skin to it. How long ago had that been? Three—four months?

  Before she’d had Live Ink forced on her. Before she’d lost that Ink.

  Was that all her life would be?

  A series of canyons dividing her from what she’d been and what she’d had?

  “The stasis paper didn’t work,” Isa countered, pocketing the phone. “The tattoo was starving to death. Something’s wrong with my recipe. Or with my spell. I don’t know which.”

  He frowned. “It worked for what? A couple of weeks?”

  She nodded.

  “Better than nothing, right?” Nathalie said, exiting her curtained-off studio to come prop one hip against the counter.

  “She’s right,” Troy said. “Your few weeks’ grace saved that woman’s life.”

  “And having her tattoo back on saved our last remaining planter,” Nathalie said, grinning.

  “Let’s say you’re right,” Isa said, “and I put a couple of Live Tattoos on stasis paper as it now stands. At about the three-week mark, my guess is I’ll have to open a vein and begin feeding those tattoos or they’ll die.”

  “Now imagine I’ve taken this stasis paper on a bunch of calls for the police. I’ve put a couple of pieces of Live Ink on the pages and they all need blood. Are you guys going to volunteer to let me feed you to my growing library of starving fiends? ’Cause that scenario is only a matter of time.”

  Nathalie paled, no mean feat, and muttered, “Live Ink feeds on blood and magic. It is a whole new definition to having a tattoo shop named Nightmare Ink.”

  “So fix the paper,” Troy said. “Talk to Master Masatoshi. The original concept for the paper was his, anyway, right?”

  “You sent your recipe to Master Masatoshi, didn’t you?” Nathalie said.

  Tokoro Masatoshi was one of the founders of Living Tattoos. Legend in the industry asserted that his master had discovered Living Tattoos about sixty years ago. Master Masatoshi had sought her out through Oki’s family shortly after she’d escaped Daniel. He’d asked her to be his apprentice, mostly, Isa suspected, because he seemed fascinated by the fact that she’d worked out a way to bind Live Ink.

  His interest still baffled her.

  The Live Ink Association of the United States had disowned her over binds. And because they’d been covering for Daniel.

  Master Masatoshi had sponsored Isa as a member in the oldest Living Ink organization in the world, the Imperial Order of Living Art. Too bad all of their, what looked to be excellent, literature was in Japanese.

  “I did send it, along with all of my experimentation notes, two weeks ago,” Isa said.

  “Hell, Ice,” Troy said. “Call. You’re the old man’s apprentice. You should be able to call him.”

  “He’ll just bug me about that write-up about binding tattoos he asked me to do.”

  Troy barked a laugh. “Then maybe you should write it.”

  “I have something to check downstairs,” she said. “When I come back up, I’ll pull up what I’ve already written for you. You can tell me what I’m missing.”

  “Deal,” he said. “Like I’d know.”

  “In keeping with our hypothetical rulebook of magic, it’s time we found out what your magic can and can’t do,” she said as she set foot on the top step leading down. “When I get back upstairs.”

  Nathalie groaned. “I’m going to regret letting you drink with Oki, aren’t I?”

  “Probably,” Isa said, then clattered down the stairs. She sealed herself into the containment studio without activating the cameras. Acts of Magic laws required that she do her research and development inside containment. Ethics dictated that, too. But she didn’t have to record anything going on in her studio unless she had a client in the chair.

  Infected by Steve’s sense of urgency the day they’d gone after the hydra, she’d dropped the stasis paper containing the whirlwind atop the beat up wooden desk against the west wall. It was still there, the edges faintly tattered from having been shoved into her backpack.

  She unfolded the page.

  The whirlwind remained bright. Vital. A sliver of yellow magic stung her fingers when she brushed the image.

  Stasis paper was intended to be a safe place to store Living Tattoos for long periods of time. Sure, Live Ink fed on blood and magic. She’d purposely embedded both into the papermaking process. Something that ultimately limited how much of the paper Isa could realistically produce. Unless she wanted to spend the rest of her life anemic.

  Presumably, the mermaid had used up the store of blood and magic Isa had put into her sheet. It seemed likely that the whirlwind tattoo would do the same. What she didn’t know, despite the horror story she’d spun for Troy and Nathalie, was whether or not the tattoo could be fed.

  She needed to find out.

  If she couldn’t feed it with her magic and blood in any meaningful way—meaning that neither of them died in the process—she’d have a limited amount of time to attempt to find a host to put it on before it starved to death.

  She drew chilly magic into her body, and put a shield up around her and the desk. From the top drawer, she retrieved a hypodermic needle and pricked a finger so she could squeeze a few drops of blood onto the page.

  Two tiny spatters hit the paper. They hunched up, bright against the snowy field like lost cats uncertain of their reception.

  Isa held her breath.

  The drops sank between the fibers, leaving no hint that they’d ever been there. Not even a stain.

  A whirl of new leaf-scented breeze lifted her hair.

  On the page, the Ink of the tattoo’s making gleamed. It hadn’t when she’d first unfolded the paper.

  Okay. Maybe she had a bloodthirsty stop gap. This wasn’t conclusive proof that she could feed a tattoo on stasis paper in perpetuity. She should have tried feeding Helen’s mermaid with blood rather than magic alone before she’d put her back on Helen. Not that she’d have been happy with an experimental sample size of two. Not knowing how much blood would be required to keep a tattoo alive on stasis paper, much less how often it would be needed, Isa wasn’t comfortable with expanding her experimental set, either.

  She had to find someone to put the whirlwind on. And she needed to work out what had gone wrong with her stasis paper.

  Dropping her shield, Isa left the paper on the desk, and jotted notes into the spiral-bound notebook she kept for the purpose. No computer would have survived being in contact with magic. The video cameras managed b
ecause she’d shielded them with little mini-Faraday-type cages. She also didn’t touch them with magic. Her containment circles excluded them. Still. She replaced at least one of the cameras every year.

  Rule number what? Nine? Electronics and magic don’t mix. Maybe she’d jot down her burgeoning collection of rules.

  Notes completed, she left, careful to seal the room behind her, and went back upstairs.

  Troy and Nathalie took turns skimming the bind ink report she’d written for the Ink Master she’d not yet met. Isa hadn’t even spoken to Master Masatoshi in person. Their limited interaction had initially happened via Oki, then through e-mail.

  Troy offered content suggestions, making comments about points he didn’t understand or where he believed Isa assumed her audience knew too much.

  After Nathalie read it, she shook her head. “I revoke your right to use passive verbs.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “You’re serious. Sit right on down,” Nat said, patting the desk chair next to the one she occupied. “You’ll get the song writer’s crash course in how to put written words together so someone will want to read them. Or listen to them in a song.”

  Between breaks for Nathalie’s piercing customers and two of Isa’s flat ink clients, Nat ripped the report to shreds and then showed Isa how to put it all back together again.

  “You’ve missed your calling,” Isa told her as night fell and the buzz of Troy’s tattoo machine transformed a man’s open heart surgery scar into a work of art. “You’re a damn sight better at explaining this stuff than any of my high school teachers were.”

  The front door opened.

  Smell hit first. Unwashed bodies and blood.

  Smoky caramel spread on her tongue. Isa gasped.

  “Isa.”

  That strained, warm baritone brought her to her feet. Her chair clattered into the back hallway.

  Troy’s tattoo machine clicked off. His stool screeched across the hardwood as if he’d thrown it.

  Awareness jolted Isa with sudden, dizzy joy. Her heart thudded.

  Tall, dark, and lithe Daniel Alvarez stood in her shop doorway. Except it wasn’t Daniel. Not anymore.