“Yes,” Steve said, lifting his chin. “Beside the abutment on the far side.”
She stared out the windshield at the shadowed spot he’d indicated.
Funny. She’d expected to recognize something. Anything.
She didn’t.
Steve came around to open her door. Gus hopped out, and then danced around on his toes. He tossed her a reproachful look. He didn’t approve of the gravel. She eased out of the car and discovered that she wasn’t willing to close off her escape route by shutting the car door.
A pair of uniformed police officers sat in the patrol car. Isa didn’t recognize either of them, but the driver, a woman with short salt-and-pepper hair, rolled down her window and nodded. She eased back into her seat as if settling in for a nap.
Broken glass and litter crunched under Isa’s sneakers along with the gravel. She leaned down to pick up the dog. He sidled out of reach and grumbled.
“If you get cut, I won’t hesitate to take you to the vet,” Isa told him.
The threat of a trip to the vet usually cowed him. Not this time. He eyed her, but stayed out of reach.
“Fine.” She straightened, and the pair of them picked their way across the gravel, skirting muddy pools filling the potholes. All of them bore the rainbow sheen of oil, even with the sun hiding behind the clouds.
Isa turned a circle, relieved that she couldn’t identify the sullen industrial landscape. She didn’t want to remember.
But she did want Daniel caught.
Time to hunt, Murmur growled. He gathered his intention at her center of gravity and shoved.
Isa staggered a few steps, tugging Gus in her wake. “Stop it. Tell me what you’ve got.”
The picture of Daniel, his entrails steaming at his feet, popped into sharp focus in her mind’s eye. Black storm clouds of bloodlust rolled through her.
“Crystal clear,” she muttered.
Murmur struck out with a claw, slicing open the memories she’d so carefully repressed. Images and impressions flooded her. Inside the confines of her skull, a raven called. Cold metal held one of her feet while sharp stones lacerated her knees and forearms.
“Train tracks,” she said.
Yes.
One excavated memory at a time, they traced a path through weed-strewn lots, around warehouses, across pitted streets, sneaking up on the place she least wanted to face. Steve’s footsteps followed in her wake. The rumble of the idling police cruiser and the crunch of tires on gravel trailed them. Her tiny store of courage melted.
She stopped in front of a squat, single-story building. A faint sound like the scales of a snake dragging across sandstone alerted her to the fact that she’d found the place. Her breath went shallow, and her pulse did an unpleasant swoop up.
Once upon a time, the cinder block building had been white. Untold ages of rain dragging soot out of the surrounding environment had turned the building the color of the solid mass of gray clouds overhead. Streaks of filth tracked the walls, following the painted seams between the blocks. The ancient paint had been breached in gouges and chunks. Green slime grew in abundance.
A set of bare concrete steps, bound on either side by corroding metal handrails, led to the banded metal door. One of the handrails had rusted through, and the stairs sat lower on the right than on the left giving the facade a quizzical, why-have-you-abandoned-me expression. Only the pristine metal door suggested that looks deceived.
Her heart bounced off the inside of her ribs. “This is it,” she whispered, not trusting her voice. She shoved her twisted, suddenly aching hands in her coat pockets to hide the fact that they were shaking.
Steve whirled on the patrol car. “I want everything available on this address. Now.”
Sinister, black glee shot through with anticipation crashed over her head in a tidal wave.
“Isa. Isa, wait! We can’t go in there.”
She heard Steve’s voice as if from far away. Something else had control of her, propelling her up those steps, commanding her hands to lever the doorknob, yanking the heavy door open when it wasn’t locked.
Fear kicked her in the gut, and she shrieked against entering that place—against facing the remembered pain and horror and humiliation—no sound emerged.
He had complete control of her body.
Isa clawed for possession of herself, scraping psychic fingernails against the nightmare bars of the prison where Murmur had locked her away from control of her body. She fought until her psychic fingers turned raw and bloody.
No impact.
The tattoo sneered with her features. Using his advantage, he tore open the seeping wound that was her memory of this place and the six interminable weeks she’d been imprisoned here.
How could she deal with six weeks of torture? How could anyone?
She hadn’t. She’d bundled it all up—memory, emotion, everything about it—and shoved it into the deepest, most obscure region of her brain possible. She’d have willingly ripped out the synapses encoding remembrance if she could have. She didn’t want to ever look at it again.
Murmur dragged it into the light and shook out the crumpled memories with a crisp snap, as if her horror were a set of fancy linens intended for a holiday table.
Images and emotion swamped her. She couldn’t draw breath. She couldn’t choke back the bile rising inexorably in her throat.
Murmur jerked her forward like poor Gus at the end of the leash still wrapped around her frozen wrist. Isa couldn’t whimper.
Her dog did.
Let go, she ordered her right hand. Daniel’s creature could yank her around, but she’d be damned before she’d let him, or Daniel, harm Gus.
Her hand twitched. Murmur brought her to a halt and shoved her awareness up against her eyeballs so hard, she felt them bulge out.
The cage.
She had to drop Gus’s leash. Had to get him away.
Every part of her tried to shy away from the stark, bare lightbulb glare of that room. As if her ruined hands and a nasty tattoo delighting in her breakdown weren’t proof enough of the reality of what had happened there.
The bed was gone. So were the chains and manacles, though holes in the cinder block showed where the hooks had been set. Slate gray walls, a salt stain on the floor, and the stink of old urine remained.
Even though she had no control of her body, she could abruptly feel every sensation. Her breath shuddered as she drew it. Burning tears poured down her cheeks. They reeked of the same smell of stale ammonia as the room.
Her vision flickered and changed.
The empty room flashed, and she stared at her body, dangling limp from the ceiling, strung up by manacles and chains. Her shoulders throbbed in sympathetic memory. Her long black hair hung in filthy strings around her naked, inked body. Her head lolled backward at an improbable angle, baring her throat. Murmur’s emerald eye glowed and pulsed in time with the pulse thrumming at the base of that throat. Her own heart bumped into high gear.
She’d have backed away if Murmur hadn’t locked her in place.
In the vision, Daniel stood to one side of the body hanging there. Isa couldn’t call it hers, could she? It couldn’t be. She stood in the doorway hyperventilating. Did she stand? Or was that the vision? Was she still hanging in Daniel’s prison? Hands shattered, still tormented by the way he caressed the skin of her belly? Isa’s skin twitched in response, tingling as if the friction of skin on skin had happened. Yet he turned those ice blue eyes toward the door to meet her gaze with a taunting smile twisting his generous lips. He traced his fingertips down the center of the other Isa’s belly. She moaned.
An echo of damp heat bloomed in the pit of Isa’s belly. She gagged. Her throat closed on the impulse, leaving her shaking with nausea and revulsion. Her avatar hanging in the room moaned again. Isa refused to watch, even though she couldn’t close it out of her peripheral visi
on entirely. And she could not close her eyes. Part of her doubted she’d escape the vision even if she managed to close them.
Isa jerked her gaze to the other’s face. She didn’t make it that far. The version of her hanging in that room writhed in obscene pleasure at Daniel’s use of her, but it was the dark blood trickling down her left breast that caught and held Isa’s attention. It came from her throat—from Murmur’s fangs sunk into her jugular. It ran red from that point on her neck. It darkened to pitch-black when it touched the Ink on her skin. She cried out, a thick, guttural, animal sound, and jerked in her bonds while Daniel crooned wordless encouragement.
She stiffened, threw her head back and screamed.
Murmur ripped her throat out.
Malevolent, putrid blood sprayed the room.
Burning drops spattered Isa’s face.
Murmur laughed.
Daniel laughed.
Leathery wings ripped free of that other Isa’s skin—hell, they could be her skin. He tore free of her. Ink rather than blood gushed from her body, puddling on the floor beneath her feet.
Yet she didn’t die. Her face darkened and turned blue. Her throat was a raw, grotesque mash of shredded flesh that stank of raw meat. Blood stained her teeth and dribbled from her mouth, turning to Ink as it fell.
Awareness cut through horror. If Murmur gained the upper hand, Isa wouldn’t die. She’d be trapped in her body. A prisoner to his whims and to Daniel’s.
Murmur might be violent and deadly, but he wasn’t evil, per se. Simply amoral. Like a wolf hunting. Or a cat toying with the mouse it had caught. Mean? Cruel? Yes. But not evil.
Not like Daniel.
Shudders racked her physical body despite Murmur’s control. Her muscles trembled with the conflicting messages of control—her urge to throw up, to reject every ounce of the poison Murmur showed her and Murmur’s command to hold it all in, to digest and absorb it.
But still Isa couldn’t move, couldn’t flinch away from staring into the depths of six weeks of hell. Her skin crawled as alternating ice-cold and white-hot pins stabbed through muscle and bone over and over. She thrashed against the cruel bars of the prison Murmur had shut upon her, battering her bruised and aching psyche.
He chuckled.
Violet hatred pulsed through every fiber of her. It coated her tongue with the sickly-sweet taste of rot. Her ears registered it as metal shrieking against unyielding rock. It drowned out the edge-of-panic sound of Steve’s voice playing minor chords behind her.
Loathing boiled her awareness until she felt vital pieces of her sanity dissolving.
Let go, the tattoo murmured. His clear-night-sky tone pierced through her weakening struggle for freedom, for the ability to flee the horror contained in a simple room. Let go. It will end.
“Let go,” Isa repeated. She picked up his oh-so-reasonable command and turned it into a mental chant. A mantra. “Let go. Let go.”
She did want to let go. She’d wanted to let go since the tattoo had jerked her unwilling into the building. But it wasn’t herself she wanted to let go of. It was her poor, captive dog’s leash. The tattoo could hold her prisoner. He didn’t get to hold Gus. Let go. Let go
A glimmer of gold rose inside her consciousness. It came from someplace she wasn’t aware she contained. It sparked in the darkness of her awareness like a solitary firefly winking out a lonely signal on a chilly spring, edge-of-summer night.
Let go, it seemed to say in pulses of light.
Let go, she agreed.
Her right hand responded as if nerve impulses traveled at the speed of molasses. A second golden firefly joined the first. They multiplied.
“Let go,” Isa whispered with her physical lips. The words slurred.
Let go, the tattoo coaxed.
He’d kept her trapped up against the nerve signal processing centers so she had no choice but to feel every single sensation associated with facing the room where she’d been held.
It meant that her right hand inching lower felt like miles of motion to her. It meant that the leather loop of Gus’s leash slid down the skin of her wrist and hand, tugging every single hair, scouring the surface of her skin, and catching on the still swollen bump of her thumb before it dropped.
Jangling tags and the scrabble of claws on concrete were a symphony to her ears. A symphony of triumph.
Her friendly internal fireflies coalesced into a bright, golden sun. It burst Murmur’s cage.
She was free.
From deep within a part of her she couldn’t consciously access, resolve unfurled. She wouldn’t let Murmur have her. She couldn’t afford to lose ground to him. Not when it meant she’d end up Daniel’s slave.
She’d be then what Ruth, Joseph, and Henry had feared and taught her to abhor—a powerful, evil magic user trading her humanity for power. She’d become a Skinwalker, an enemy to all living things.
Her Navajo family had equipped her to fight that evil—to not turn into an unholy shadow of herself.
Like Daniel had.
Her teachers had spent every one of her waking moments teaching her control, not because they were afraid of what she was, Isa realized in a belated flash of insight, but because they’d been afraid of what she could be made to become.
Daniel had found the key by offering Murmur freedom in the form of her body. It was up to her to keep that key from turning.
Superheated, black rage tackled her mental dash to claim control of her physical self. Her firefly sunshine died as if swallowed whole.
Chapter Seventeen
Isa backed into awareness.
She was damnably uncomfortable. The muscles of her back cramped. She shifted, trying to ease the pain. Leather squeaked beneath her jeans. She was lying on her right side on an uneven cushion. Her legs hung off the front.
Her hands were zip-tied before her.
Her heart thumped and anxiety splashed into her chest before she reminded herself that when Daniel tied her hands, it had always been over her head. Until the day he hadn’t tied her at all.
Her breath came faster. She opened her eyes and frowned at the back of a driver’s-side car seat. The motion cracked dried salt on her face. It burned.
“You’re the same as Daniel,” she gritted aloud to the tattoo. Her voice sounded rough, and her throat stung as if it had been rubbed raw.
He didn’t move. He said nothing.
What had she expected? A twinge of conscience?
Simmering alien fury took up space inside her heart and mind. The craggy, sharp edges of him cut into her, body and soul, simply because he existed.
It was her space he was taking up. She wanted it back. All of it.
He stretched out in contempt. You are the means to my end.
“Freedom?”
Freedom.
“Over my dead body.”
I look forward to it.
The taunt lacked bite. He’d spent her small store of emotional resources, it appeared. Weary, she shoved him out of her awareness and struggled to sit up. Relief soothed her quivering nerves when she found she could.
Steel mesh isolated her in the backseat. From the computer, the radio, and the controls, she gathered she was in the back of the patrol car Steve had brought in for backup.
Motion at the window brought her attention around. Steve opened the driver’s-side door and leaned in to study her. A Taser dangled from his fingers. Her back muscles spasmed.
“Feeling better?” he inquired.
“Define better,” she countered. “Where’s Gus? What happened?”
“Gus is fine. He’s in my car. I’m guessing your tattoo happened,” Steve said. “You dropped Gus’s leash and then threw a temper tantrum like I’ve never seen. Not even when I got roped into duty chasing down that whack job wandering around Pike Place Market with the broadsword while hopped up on
meth.”
“You shot me with that,” she lifted her chin to indicate the Taser.
He nodded. “Sorry. You’re going to feel that.”
She barked a mean-spirited laugh.
“What?”
She could guess that when she’d escaped his control inside the building, Murmur had flown into a rage while in the presence of the Seattle Police Department’s Acts of Magic head detective. He’d gotten them Tased, zip-tied, and locked down in the back of a patrol car. Antithesis of freedom.
Way to earn your results, Isa said into the silence of her head.
A spurt of ire promised she’d pay.
She shivered.
“I prefer the Taser over the gun,” she said, not sure why she didn’t come clean about the real reason for her bitter amusement. Why should she protect the monster on her skin from anything Steve might think of him?
“If you’ve got this,” Steve said, “I’ll let you out.”
She met Steve’s solemn eye and nodded. Whether she had anything or not, Murmur wouldn’t go off around cops again.
“Good,” Steve said, popping the lock on her door and opening it. His intent gaze followed as she swung her legs out of the car. He hooked a hand beneath her right arm and pulled her upright to face him with the door between them. “How bad is this, Ice? Can he make you kill?”
She stared at Steve.
The rustle of Murmur shifting as he lifted his awareness in interest drove a chill through her heart.
“You know there’s no way to separate tattoo from host,” Steve went on. “You’d both end up in prison for the rest of your unnaturally long life.”
Murmur snarled. Isa gathered it showed on her face.
Grim satisfaction twisted Steve’s lips. The smile didn’t reach his eyes.
“Message received and understood,” she whispered.
Steve urged her around the car door. He flipped open his pocketknife to slice through the plastic zip-tie holding her wrists. “You’re done here. I needed the ID on the building. Now we wait for the search warrant. Come on. I’ll take you home.”
When they walked into her apartment, they found Oki and Nathalie eating udon at Isa’s dining room table.
Nightmare Ink Page 20
