“Whoa!” Oki snapped her chopsticks on the table and shoved herself to her feet. “Damn it, Steve, you promised she wouldn’t come back looking like shit!”
“Thanks,” Isa said as she shrugged her coat from her shoulders. “Blame Murmur.”
“Who?”
“The tattoo,” Nathalie said.
Oki crossed the apartment with a bouncing gait. She squatted down and kissed Gus on the snout as she unclipped the wiggling dog’s leash.
“Come on,” she ordered, rising. “I brought enough for everyone. Troy’s on his way up.”
“I’m so not in the mood to be tag-teamed,” Isa said.
“Ha. Too bad,” Oki said. “There’s stuff you need to know.”
Sighing, Isa caught her coat on her left hand and hung it on one of the hooks in the hall.
“Isa!” Oki squeaked. “Your hand! What . . .”
“The breaks are healed.”
Incorrectly.
“How the . . .”
The door opened.
“Hey, guys,” Troy said. “What’s up? Wow, Ice. You look like someone took you out back and beat you.”
“So I keep hearing,” she said. “Just how many copies of my apartment key did you make?”
Troy grinned. “Lost count after Nat, Oki, Steve, and me.”
“Jeez, Daschel.”
He chuckled.
Steve dropped his chin to his chest. “I’ve got to—”
Isa tucked a twisted hand into the crook of his elbow, cutting him off. “Dump the guilt, Steve. I lived. You need to eat, too. I looked at the files you gave me. We both did. Sit. Let me tell you what I’ve found.”
Weight seemed to lift from him. He stood taller, and his set features thawed.
Isa recalled she owned a grand total of three chairs. Troy lounged against one side of the kitchen doorjamb. Steve mirrored him on the other side.
“Who’s first?” Isa said, before tilting her bowl to sip the savory broth. She couldn’t handle chopsticks or a spoon, but picking up the bowl between her palms worked fine now that they didn’t ache.
“Don’t look at me,” Troy said. “I’m freeloading. Nice move, Ice. What’d you do to your hands?”
“Healed the breaks,” she said. “I was trying to put them back to normal. I screwed it up.”
Silence drifted down. She saw the questions trembling on their lips.
Troy gathered the courage to let his fall first. “This what you did downstairs yesterday?”
“Yes. While I was in the studio making the attempt, I saw something that might help us.”
She took another sip of soup, then set down her bowl, and told Steve what she’d seen: Kelli Solvang’s magic and the dragon’s trail.
A thin black tendril wrapped around her hearing. Murmur didn’t exert himself in any other fashion, so she let him. He’d seen the remnant of Kelli Solvang’s magic, too.
“I need into the most recent murder scene,” Isa said to Steve. “The marshal.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“We know the dragon has been there,” she argued. “If it’s hemorrhaging magic the way I think it is, the trail will be fresh. We’d be able to follow it!”
Murmur started. She rocked back in her chair. It felt like he’d slammed into her spine from the inside.
“We?” Nathalie echoed.
Oh.
“Me,” Isa amended. “I’d be able to follow . . .”
“That’s a big if, Ice,” Steve said. “I’ll have to clear it with the AMBI.”
“Agent Macquarie’s the one who ordered me to catch the dragon,” she said.
No. She ordered you to destroy it.
“You may have noticed I don’t take orders well,” Isa said inside her head.
“What have you got for me on the other bodies that we haven’t already discussed?”
“Nothing very useful, I’m afraid. At least three different artists’ work, maybe more. None of the tattoos escaped, though one of the tattoos looked like it had started the process of pulling free. It didn’t make it. In all cases, both host and Ink died.”
“A serial killer targeting Live Ink wearers?” Troy said, scooping noodles into his mouth.
Sudden weight pressed her chest. Murmur froze.
“If any of you repeat that outside of this room,” Steve vowed, “I will hunt you down and shoot you myself.”
“To serve and protect,” Oki said, lifting her bowl in toast.
Nathalie laughed.
“No trophy taking,” Isa noted.
“Not all of ’em do that,” Troy said.
“Stop,” Steve ordered. “You’ve done your job. This part is mine. What else?”
“That’s it for me,” Isa said, picking up her bowl for another sip.
“That’s my cue, I guess,” Oki said. “You remember asking me to help you get into the Japanese Live Ink libraries? Dad spotted what I was doing. Naturally, he knows a member of the originating organization. He got me into the archives. It’s been one hell of a wild-goose chase, and I still don’t know if I’ve found anything you can use.”
Murmur listened. Isa’s ears ached with the increased load.
“Your folks didn’t mind?”
Oki smirked. “Not only didn’t they mind, the head of the organization called my dad. They want me to work for them. “
Isa lifted an eyebrow.
Oki shrugged. “I wanted to do something to help while you were missing. There wasn’t much I could do. I remembered you telling me you needed to know how to catch rogue Ink. So I started looking. I hope that’s okay. I ended up following ancient literary rabbit trails through some documents so old I couldn’t even breathe on the computer screen. I guess I impressed a couple of people.”
“Tenacity?” Isa said.
“Instinct,” Nathalie corrected.
“Oki’s rabbit trails always led her to something useful,” Troy said.
Given the gleam of Oki’s magical aura she still managed to catch glimpses of from the corner of her eye, Isa wouldn’t have been surprised if Oki had conjured the correct documents on a daily basis. Was Oki aware of her power? She deserved to know.
Isa glanced at her friends. They all deserved to know.
“So? Are you going to give up slinging sushi?” Isa said.
Oki hesitated, then said, “I never thought I’d say this, ’cause Mom and Dad go on and on about Japanese culture, you know? It’s always sounded so hopelessly uptight to me, but after trying to chase down your information, I realize there’s this whole history and way of looking at the world that I don’t know, and some of it is stunningly beautiful. I don’t know what to do.”
“Do what fascinates you,” Isa urged, “until it doesn’t anymore. Free advice, worth what you paid for it.”
“I’d have to go to Japan.”
A pang stabbed through Isa’s chest. Murmur dodged as if the knife of impending loss were poisoned.
She stuffed down the emotion. “If I came to visit, would you take me to the Japanese Live Ink organization headquarters?”
Oki grinned. “Before or after I became the association’s head librarian? Here. Start with this copy.”
She fished a notebook from the bag at her feet, flipped it open, and set it before Isa. She’d copied the text by hand. Japanese characters filled the left-hand page. English letters spelling out Japanese words filled the right-hand side. Yellow highlighting jumped out two thirds of the way down the page of characters.
Murmur already scanned the lines with Isa’s eyes. He rummaged around her brain, looking for the translation of the characters. His frustration burned like a star behind her breastbone.
“Ow,” Isa said. “Tell us what this is before Murmur gives me a stroke.”
Laugh, he grumbled. I
f you had any intellect worth preserving, you’d be safe from that method of destroying you.
He kicked her in the right temple. Isa flinched.
“You understand that Japanese characters embody more than a single word meant to translate them, right?” Oki asked. “They encompass larger concepts as well as words.”
“I know that the Japanese language has more words for some things than we do,” Troy said. “Sort of based off of what’s important, right? Like that old saw about the Eskimos having over twenty different words for snow when we only have one.”
“That’s exactly right,” Oki said. “That’s why I highlighted the characters. All of the translations I’ve seen from Japanese to English left really important information behind. This is a passage from a book of poetry from a remote region. It’s a haiku extolling the virtues of living art, work that participates as much in life as life inspires the art itself. But when life is done, art lives on by means of a Japanese word that English doesn’t have a concept for—in fact, I’m not even sure of what it means. The root character is for paper, but there’s more to it than that. It’s like someone drew a couple of spiritual concepts over the top of the paper character.
“I’m guessing here, but I think this talks about a type of sleep, a sense of respite.”
Stygian wings unfurled inside Isa, crowding her awareness. Golden magic pinged in deep recognition.
“That’s it,” Isa breathed. “It has to be.”
Paper? Murmur prodded.
“More than paper,” she answered aloud. “Magic combined with paper to act as a holding pattern for Living Tattoos, someplace they can exist without needing to be fed or where they need be fed minimally.”
Prison.
The deadweight of his tone made her breath shudder. “Not prison. Sleep. Hibernation, maybe. My goal would be to save them until they could be put on someone else.”
“Is that possible?” Troy asked.
None of them looked surprised or confused by the conversation with Murmur that only Isa could hear. Had they all really gotten accustomed to the interloper so quickly?
She thought of the sand paintings she’d watched Joseph and Henry make to hold the spells and prayers they’d use for healing.
“It’s possible,” she said. “Excellent work, Oki.”
“Yeah? Well, there’s a price tag.” Oki got up and slung her bag over one shoulder. “Dad wants a word.”
“Was that supposed to sound ominous?”
“He’s my dad,” she said, grinning. “It’s always ominous when he goes all formal like that.”
“Uh-oh.”
Murmur ransacked Isa’s brain for an image of Oki’s dad and snorted.
“He may look frail, but he’s wiry and tough,” she told him internally.
You’re afraid of an old man.
“I guess I am.” She didn’t feel bad about it either. It wasn’t like being afraid of Daniel. It reminded her of the awe and respect she’d held for Ruth, Joseph, and Henry.
“I thought of something, just now,” Isa said. She set her bowl down. “I wouldn’t normally look, but when I first escaped, my vision was messed up. I couldn’t help seeing what I—”
“Isa, what in the hell are you talking about?” Nathalie interrupted.
“You’re magic. All of you.”
They stared at her as if she’d started speaking Navajo.
Isa described what she’d seen. Nathalie’s fairy fire. Troy’s watercolor. Oki’s starlight. Steve’s blue sky.
Troy shook his head. “No, man. I get what you’re saying about Oki and Nat. It explains Nat’s dreams, and Oki finding what she needs in those Japanese texts when she needs it, right? But me and Steve? We’re—”
“Magic,” Isa repeated. “I swear. It’s a spectrum. Not a shred of power on one end and loads of power on the other. It’s not like a bell curve. You won’t find most people in the middle, instead, people stack up from ‘almost no power’ to ‘middle-of-the-road power.’ True null magic is rare. Lots and lots of power is also rare.”
“But that’s you,” Nathalie said, her tone sharp.
Isa shook her head. “Not lots and lots. Joseph, one of my first teachers, liked to say ‘enough to be dangerous.’ That’s where Oki is on the scale, too.”
Oki grimaced.
“I apologize,” Isa went on. “I had no right to invade your privacy by looking into your magic without permission. I wanted you to know. You deserve the chance to learn to control your magic so it doesn’t control you.”
Brittle silence fell.
Nathalie blew out a noisy breath. “Wow. I need a drink.”
Troy chuckled. “I got to get back to the shop.”
Isa couldn’t read Steve’s shuttered expression.
The party, if that’s what it was, broke up. Steve and Troy carried dishes into the kitchen, then Steve tucked a flip phone into Isa’s coat pocket.
“You haven’t found any of my belongings from that night, then,” she said.
“Not yet. And I don’t think it’s wise for you to be without a phone.”
“I don’t care about the phone,” Isa said. “I wanted my boots back.”
“We’re still looking. On that note, I have another search warrant to execute,” he said. “I programmed nine-one-one, my cell, and my desk at the precinct into the phone. Voice or single-button dial.”
“Thanks.”
From the bleak light in his eyes, Isa could tell that neither of them imagined he’d find anything in the shabby building where she’d been kept.
Troy and Nathalie walked with Oki and Isa as far as Nightmare Ink.
“Don’t go back to the apartment without one of us,” Troy said.
Dark indignation merged with Isa’s impatience. “You guys are going to have to live your own lives at some point.”
“Humor me.”
“What are my options?”
“Giving me another black eye,” Troy said. “But if you do, Cheri might think we got a thing going on.”
Oki snickered.
Murmur tipped Isa out of control of her expression and twisted her lips into a come-hither smile.
So that’s how you do that.
“Fuck off, Murmur,” Troy said as he went through the door.
“How do you know expressions I’ve never used?” Isa asked Murmur aloud. “Not like you can dig them out of my memory. Don’t tell me. You were the Don Juan of Hell?”
“Don’t knock it,” Oki suggested as they walked. “That was a pretty solid come-jump-my-bones look. It might come in handy someday.”
Cold-as-night loathing coated her bones, but Murmur released his grip.
Okari Sushi occupied two floors of a modern brick, steel beam, and plate glass building. They didn’t open until four, but Oki’s dad was already in the kitchen filleting tuna.
Which meant that Hiro-san got to have his word with Isa while armed with an ultra-sharp knife.
“Konnichiwa, Hiro-san,” Isa said when he caught sight of them. He set down his knife, pulled off his gloves, and went to wash his hands.
Murmur joined her eyesight and studied Oki’s father. Hiro-san’s black hair had silvered. He carried no excess flesh on his five-foot-eight frame. His limbs looked unnaturally thin, almost brittle. The lines in his face rested peacefully, as if they touched nothing but the surface of him, like wind ruffling the surface of the water.
“Hey, Dad,” Oki said.
“Your mother would like your help in the stockroom,” he said.
“See you, Ice.”
Isa nodded.
Hiro-san crossed the kitchen to study her. She and Murmur met his gaze.
“Why do you tattoo my daughter when you know her mother and I do not approve?” he demanded.
Isa sucked in a startled breath.
> Murmur’s scorn ripped her open from the inside.
She crossed her arms, shoulders hunched. Damn it. Even though she’d never actually lied to Hiro-san about his daughter, Isa felt like she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
“She’s over twenty-one,” she said, “an adult with an identity of her own. But she loves you. So she indulges her aesthetic in a way she hopes won’t offend you.”
His hard expression didn’t soften. If anything, it tightened further. “Would you give her a Live Tattoo if she asked?”
She uncrossed her arms to rub a palm up her forehead. “Until recently, I would have sent her to Daniel. But now . . .”
“You would do the work yourself?”
“Not with these hands, no.” Tension rode her chest. Her breath sounded harsh. “No.”
He frowned. “You would send her to a hack?”
“No! I just . . .” Isa stopped and pulled in a sharp gulp of air. And caught a hint of magic. It tasted sweet, like exotic honey. She straightened and shoved away the baggage of her past so she could remember that she carried magic of her own. She opened the way for the fire and light at her core and looked at Oki’s father. Really looked.
Still, she couldn’t see anything that would account for that hint of honey. Nothing that would explain the ripple of power that had fluttered past. Save that it happened again. Subtle. Powerful.
No wonder Oki gleamed with magic.
Murmur crowded her for more of her etheric sight.
The older man’s expression thawed.
“That’s amazing,” Isa breathed. “All this time, I never saw, never sensed your tattoo. You were inked by a master.”
“I was,” he said. His right hand smoothed his white shirt over his ribs. “It is what I would want for my child, should she decide to invite another entity to share her skin. I would want her to come to you.”
Isa shook her head. “I’m not a master.”
“You could be.”
“No.”
“Why not? I am a feeble old man. Help me understand.”
Murmur snorted. Isa choked back the sound. “Carrying a Living Tattoo so lightly that I haven’t detected it in five years? You are not a feeble old man on any level. That’s some willpower. You understand far more than I do.”
Nightmare Ink Page 21
