Nightmare Ink

by Marcella Burnard

  A dog’s bark jolted Isa to awareness. She was horizontal, curled on her side. For one gut-twisting minute, she feared she’d dreamed her escape.

  A cold, wet nose pressed into her neck.

  Her eyesight couldn’t penetrate the hazy dream state of otherworld superimposed on postindustrial despair cityscape. Did she really recognize that dog’s moan of terrible relief and worry?

  “Troy! Oki! Over here!” a female voice shouted. Nathalie.

  Footsteps pounded closer. Sneakers on concrete and crunchy gravel. “Isa? Is that . . . holy shit. Troy! It’s her. Ria nailed it! And the animals! They knew. All this time, they knew where she was, and we wouldn’t listen.”

  The footsteps stopped. Isa heard the clunk of kneecaps hitting the concrete before her. Nathalie burst into noisy sobs.

  Isa saw her, not in this world but in the other. In her broken sight, a glitter of pale lavender fairy fire outlined Nathalie’s form.

  More footsteps approached at a jog. The first was a watercolor wash of marigold orange magic. The second gleamed pale yellow, like warm starlight. Powerful magic.

  Nathalie muffled her crying.

  “Is she breathing?” a second female voice asked. Oki.

  Of course she was, but Isa couldn’t summon the resources to say so.

  She squinted both physical and magical eyes. The starlight belonged to Oki. How? A wet nose, frantic snuffles, and paw pokes drained the question from her head. She should reassure the owner of that wet nose. She wanted to.

  “Shift over, Nat,” a man said.

  “My God,” Nathalie said between hiccupping gulps for breath. “Her hands.”

  “Fucking bastard. If Steve won’t kill him, I will,” the man rumbled.

  Feet and layers of fabric shuffled at her back. Denim creaked. Something burning hot touched her cheek. As if no longer a part of her, the skin twitched like a pony’s hide shrugging off a fly.

  “She’s freezing,” the man said. He unzipped fabric that sounded like the threads screamed when they rubbed against one another. More rustling, then something heavy and hot settled over her left shoulder. It smelled faintly of Old Spice aftershave.

  Troy.

  Isa heard the beep of a cell phone.

  Another.

  Three voices tangled in her awareness. Troy’s, Oki’s, and Nathalie’s.

  Nathalie cried like someone who wanted to stop, but couldn’t.

  “I need an ambulance,” Oki said.

  “Steve?” Troy said, the name rushed, his tone urgent. “Get here.”

  “Where the hell are we?” Oki demanded.

  “Under an overpass,” Troy said. “No, I don’t know which one!”

  The dog whined and licked Isa’s face.

  Enfolded in the delicious warmth of Troy’s coat, she drifted, only half hearing Oki and Troy talking about her as if she weren’t lying at their feet. It felt familiar, being an object, familiar and terrifying. She couldn’t get her breath.

  Fabric scraped across her right hand.

  Pain shot through her. She croaked in protest.

  “I can’t!” Oki cried. “It hurts her! Okay. Okay.”

  Tentative fingers rested against her wrist.

  “Oki’s on the phone with nine-one-one dispatch,” Troy said. “Track her phone. You’ll find us.”

  “I can’t feel anything,” Oki said. “Yes, she’s breathing.”

  Another nudge of desperate escape energy trickled into her chest.

  Nerves twitched. Muscles tensed, as if to respond, but the impulse to action drained away as if the fiber of her being couldn’t contain it.

  “There. I get a flutter. It’s not strong. Okay. Hang on, Ice,” Oki said. “I’m shifting the coat just a little bit. I’ll put it back, I swear.”

  Isa shivered as Oki moved the jacket away from her throat.

  Warm fingers pressed against her neck.

  “Yes. Yes, there it is. Count? I don’t . . . Okay. Say when.”

  “You got us? Yeah, yeah. We won’t hang up. Got that Oki? Don’t hang up!”

  “Shut up! I’m trying to count! Damn it. It’s—I can’t tell! It’s fast. What? Yeah, I think she’s bleeding. It’s dark. Our flashlight gave up the ghost an hour ago.”

  Sirens sounded in the distance.

  “We can hear the ambulance! I’m not going to hang up.”

  Freedom. A forth voice pleaded from inside.

  “Freedom,” Isa murmured internally, soothing the restless thrust of get moving energy that tried to shift her to her forearms and knees again. The impulse crept up her spine, urgent, terrified.

  “Gus! C’mere, boy. Leave her alone,” the man said, his tone tender.

  Gus? Her Gus? Definitely dreaming. Except, if she was, why couldn’t she open her eyes and arms to her dog?

  “Troy?” she breathed.

  “Hey, darlin’,” he said, “Good to hear your voice again. What up?”

  “How long?”

  “How long what, darlin’? How long have you been gone?”

  Isa nodded, or at least she intended to. Warm, gray fog armed with clubs and razors enshrouded her. No relief there, but she couldn’t fight the downward slide into it.

  “It’s the Ides of March, Isa. We’ve been looking for you for almost six weeks.”

  Six weeks of her life lost. Her breath caught on an unexpected sob.

  “No, no,” Troy crooned as if soothing an infant. “It’s okay. You’re okay now. Nat and Oki and I have been staying with Gus and Ikylla. They missed you, but they’re fine. Gus is right here. Ikylla’s waiting at home for you, all right?”

  She choked on a sob.

  “What’s wrong?” Nathalie gasped. “What’s happening?”

  “Take it easy, Nat. She’s crying. She just doesn’t have any tears,” Troy said.

  “It’s okay,” Oki said. “Nat’s got enough for both of them.”

  “Not funny!” Nathalie snapped.

  It was. And something about hearing the teasing made Isa feel suddenly, stupidly invincible. As if Daniel couldn’t or wouldn’t find and destroy her friends.

  The creature tattooed on her skin shifted, jabbing her innards with some cutting bit of his psychic anatomy.

  “Hang on,” Nathalie urged. “You hang on, Ice. We’re getting help. You’re safe now.”

  She wasn’t safe. Not with Daniel’s creature etched into her skin and soul.

  She wouldn’t ever be. Neither would they.

  Chapter Nine

  Not his.

  The masculine murmur inside Isa’s head dwindled in the confusion of flashing lights, shouting, and gloved hands checking her pulse and her blood pressure.

  “Hey, can you hear me? I’m here to help, okay?” Male voice. Young. Overloud. He wrapped something unyielding around her neck. “What’s your name?”

  She wanted to shout back that until now her ears had been the only uninjured part of her body.

  “Isa Romanchzyk,” Troy answered.

  “You her SO?”

  “She’s a friend.”

  Enough of a friend that he’d come out in the cold and rain to search for her when he should have been home with his wife and brand-new baby boy.

  On a three count, the owners of those hands rolled her onto a backboard. She managed to straighten her legs. That seemed to encourage them and the loud one went on talking, trying to elicit a response she couldn’t muster the strength to give him. He secured her to the board with straps, even immobilizing her arms.

  She was a prisoner. Again.

  Ice rushed through her veins. She whimpered, and her passenger rolled like an uneasy swimmer in deep water, abrading her bones from the inside.

  Freedom, he murmured.

  His protest knocked a tidbit of information loose inside
her head. It careened out of conscious reach before she could catch it.

  A sting in her left arm made her and the creature sharing her body flinch. Her hand tingled. It grew to a throb that seemed to echo the unsteady ping of her heart.

  “All right, Ms. Romanchzyk,” the loud voice said. “We’re going to Harborview, okay?”

  Her brain kicked. Something important she should remember.

  More sirens approached.

  “Looks like police!” Oki called.

  “We’ll wait for Detective Corvane,” Troy said, “and meet you there.”

  A swarm of people clad in blue surrounded her when the ambulance crew brought her into the emergency department. Medical personnel lobbed questions at the crew, who caught them and tossed back answers.

  Again, the annoying buzz of something she should recall sounded inside her head. And she had it.

  “No drugs,” Isa tried to say. Nothing but a croak emerged.

  “I know you hurt,” a woman said. “We’ll get you something for pain in a few minutes.”

  She had to make them understand. Pressure mounted in her chest.

  “No drugs,” she mouthed over and over.

  The nurse undid the straps holding Isa down while “X-ray, CT, and labs” winged through the air above her.

  She closed her eyes.

  The entity sewn into her skin, still weak from his introduction to her flesh, flashed on an image of being stuffed into too small a space. He struggled, weak against the current of unconsciousness, pulled down a split second before Isa slid beneath the dark water in his wake.

  The nightmares began.

  She was confined, encased in something far too small and rapidly shrinking. Bones snapped as she screamed, as the prison reshaped her natural form, breaking off bits and constricting around her like a starving reptile. No matter how she fought, no matter how she shrieked in rage, she couldn’t escape. She was trapped, imprisoned for eternity.

  She woke herself screaming.

  Harried-looking personnel filled the room.

  Breathing as if she’d run a long way, she closed her mouth so fast her teeth clacked together.

  “Jesus, Ice,” Nathalie rasped from somewhere near her feet. “You scared the shit out of half the hospital.”

  Nathalie was here? How long had Isa been out?

  “Are you in pain?” a male voice demanded from her left side.

  The tattoo floundered inside her skull as if trying to shake free of the sticky tendrils of nightmare.

  “Talk to me, Ms. Romanchzyk. Where do you hurt?”

  Memory poked her. She had to tell them before they killed her and the tattoo.

  “No drugs,” Isa said. “No drugs.”

  “What?” the man working at her side said.

  “What is she saying?” Nathalie asked at the same time.

  “Now that we have some of your blood work back, I can give you something for pain, okay? Just enough to take the edge off,” the man at her side said. “Here you go.”

  She tasted salty chemicals. Medication.

  Shadowy magic poured strength through her.

  “No! No drugs,” she cried, bolting upright through no will of her own.

  Tearing pain shot up her left arm as the IV catheter tore free.

  A syringe clattered to the floor.

  Multiple voices swore.

  Gloved hands took hold of her, urging her to lie down, to let them help. Restraining her. The two of them.

  Hot, bitter-tasting rage burned the back of her tongue.

  The partial dose of pain meds dulled the constant throb in her hands. It also smeared the edges of her personality and her will.

  Multiple alarms shrilled.

  She couldn’t get her breath. Black ire hooked a claw into her consciousness and slung her out of the driver’s seat of her body.

  Her awareness slid down the inside of her skull. Confused, she turned to swim against the ebony tide pulling her down. Inky bars blocked her way to her control center. This wasn’t unconsciousness or sleep.

  While she couldn’t control her body, she heard the shouts. She knew she was moving, fighting for escape.

  For freedom.

  Daniel’s creature had taken over. No different than Daniel kidnapping her. Rage exploded into hatred. Her rage. The tattoo’s hatred.

  No. The bars imprisoning her in the recesses of her head shuddered. No. Let go. Get off! The shadow magic shattered. He spiraled through the inside of her, an evil moth that had battered itself to tatters against a lightbulb.

  As if that lightbulb popped, Isa burst into full possession of her mind and body. From her hands waves of pain beat against oddly renewed strength.

  Grim-faced security guards, their noses bloody, pinned her to a bed while a pair of men in scrubs strapped her down. Again.

  She was pinned to the table like an insect to a card. Her breath came in audible sobs. She grappled for command of that and of the adrenaline tremors in her limbs.

  “Secure,” one of the nurses said.

  The guards eased their weight off of her slowly as if she might tear through the ballistic nylon holding her. They retreated from her line of sight.

  “All clear, Doctor Yammani. Thank you for your assistance, gentlemen,” one of the men said before footsteps trooped away.

  Pulling in a breath, Isa held it, and then let it out in a slow stream in an effort to coax her too-rapid heart rate lower. This wasn’t Daniel, she told the lead weight lump of panic in her gut.

  A young woman, her curly black hair cropped short, came to look her in the eye. “How are you feeling?”

  “Scared,” Isa said. Her voice wobbled. “The guy who did this kept me tied.”

  “We can tell by the marks on your wrists,” she said. “I’m—”

  “Who?” a man demanded. “Who did this?”

  She knew that voice. “Steve?”

  Frowning, she lifted her head.

  Looking haggard in a rumpled white button-down and wearing at least a day’s growth of beard, Steve leaned against the wall, sporting a busted lip. Relief broke over his shadowed expression as he met her eye.

  Troy stood beside him, a cold pack held to his right eye.

  Isa frowned. “What happened to you guys?”

  “You did,” Troy said.

  She dropped her head back to the pillow. “Sorry.”

  “You’re not the first,” Troy replied.

  “Who did this to you, Isa?” Steve repeated.

  “I’ve already told you who,” Nathalie said from Isa’s right side. When Isa looked, Nathalie stood in the doorway scowling.

  Oki hung behind her, uncertainty pinching the skin between her brows.

  “I can’t get a search warrant based on dreams,” Steve retorted.

  Isa lifted an eyebrow. What dreams?

  Nathalie wouldn’t meet her eye.

  “I need a name.” Steve had tried to press his voice into his usual cool, businesslike tone. Suppressed rage roiled up through his words anyway.

  “Daniel Alvarez,” Isa said.

  “Goddamned bastard,” Steve gritted. He didn’t sound surprised.

  “Told you,” Nathalie muttered.

  For a moment, Isa saw the glimmer of lavender fairy fire surrounding Nathalie. Was that enough magic to account for prescient dreams, if that’s what had been happening?

  “Here,” Doctor Yammani said. She raised the head of Isa’s bed.

  “Thanks,” Isa said.

  “You seem much calmer, Ms. Romanchzyk,” she noted.

  “I am. Will you undo the straps?” She met the woman’s searching gaze. “Maybe turn down the lights? He never shut them off and . . .”

  “I can do that,” the doctor said, flipping switches until only a single light a
bove the tiny sink shone. “But I can’t release you. I’m sorry. One of our psychiatrists is on his way to evaluate you. It will be his call. What happened?”

  “Live Ink happened.”

  “What?” Troy and Steve barked.

  “Damn it,” Nathalie bit out. “I told you!”

  Interest brightened the young doctor’s gaze. “Your tattoo is alive? And we tried to give you pain medication. I’ll put a note in your chart. We won’t make that mistake again.” She shook her head. “You were in bad shape when you came in. Now, you’re not. Did you know you tore out your IV and fought off a legion of personnel?”

  Dark leather wings rustled inside Isa’s skin. Satisfaction not her own twisted her lips. Her Ink-based Mr. Hyde co-opting her motor control.

  A lightning bolt of fear struck through her psyche. It split open her insides as if her awareness were the wood of an old oak, bright and green on the outside, rotten and fragile at the core.

  It wasn’t blood that oozed up from that crack in her sense of self. It was Ink. Live Ink. With intent and malice and an unknowable, alien thought process of its own.

  “You healed, Ms. Romanchzyk,” the doctor said. “I came in to bandage your arm. There’s no sign you ripped out the catheter, not even a bruise.”

  “But my hands . . .”

  The Ink laughed through Isa’s mouth, and in his amusement she glimpsed his intent.

  The doctor shrank back.

  Clenching her teeth, Isa wrested control from him, then said, “He healed me so I could fight. He values freedom.”

  “Not ‘he.’ ‘It,’” Oki corrected. “Why didn’t it heal your hands?”

  “He healed the rest of my body because he needs it. The pain from my hands is meant to erode my will. He was put on me to steal my magic and kill me.”

  And Daniel had spent six weeks shattering her hands to condition her to shrink from using magic. Was that what this was about? If he didn’t want her working with magic, then with every breath she had remaining, magic was what she’d do.

  Steve and Troy swore.

  “I take it that failed?” the doctor surmised.

  Isa shook her head. “No. It simply hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Of course it failed,” Nathalie insisted. “You survived the inking! That’s the hardest part.”