Nik shrugged, the motion lazy. “Still would be, but when my mom told me about Dom, well . . .”
My eyes narrowed. “You talked to your mom?” I scoffed and shook my head. “So she found you. Nice of her to tell me you’re alive.”
Nik’s pierced brow arched higher. “The way she tells it, she’s been trying to get ahold of you. Maybe if you answered your damn phone every once in a while.”
“Well, she could’ve left a message.” I held my glare for a second longer, but shame pushed my gaze down to the floor. I hadn’t spoken to his mother, Aset, in over a year. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to Dom or Lex or anyone else from our clan in at least that long, and not because they hadn’t tried. Though their efforts had certainly waned. They didn’t try nearly as hard to get ahold of me as they used to. But after the things I’d done . . . they were better off without me. “I’ve been busy,” I said, fully aware of the lame excuse.
Nik laughed under his breath, then turned, wandering to the nearest open doorway to get a look at the tattoo chair, stool, and desk within the semiprivate room. There were four such “offices” in the shop, each rented out by a different artist, aside from my own private room. This one belonged to a guy named Sampson.
“Yeah,” Nik said, walking all the way into the room. “Me too. I’ve been real busy.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “Fine, whatever,” I said, leaning against the counter. “So what’s the deal? Why are you here, now? Why are you the one telling me about Dom?” So far as I knew, the two had never been close.
“Everybody else is too busy searching for him,” he said from within the office. “Which they should’ve come to you about earlier, except I’m pretty sure they don’t know about your little moonlighting gig.” He was quiet for a moment. “And I’m not talking about fortune-telling.”
My eyebrows rose, and I made my way to Sampson’s office. “But you do?”
“You find people, Kat. You find people nobody else can.”
I stood in the doorway, leaning my shoulder against the doorframe. “How perceptive of you,” I said dryly. “How long have you been spying on me?” I was both irritated and flattered at the prospect. But mostly irritated.
“What I can’t figure out,” Nik said, ignoring my question, “is how you do it.”
I wasn’t really sure how it worked, either—the magic, so to speak, was in the ink; that was about all I knew. So I gave Nik a dose of his own medicine and ignored his question. “Why hasn’t Heru gone after him? Or Mei?” Both were Nejerets with the innate ability to make spatial shifts, and it wasn’t beyond their power to focus on a person rather than a place and jump to their target’s side in the blink of an eye. Theoretically, either of them should have been able to find Dom by simply thinking about him, then shifting.
Nik glanced at me, elbows folded behind his head. The light from the streetlamps and traffic lights on Broadway shone through the slits of the blinds, making an eerie pattern across Nik’s face. “Don’t you think they’ve tried? Dom’s not the first Nejeret to go missing. The Senate sent him and a few others out on a mission to find the missing Nejerets—ones even Heru and Mei couldn’t find. Mari’s among the missing.” Mari, my old partner in crime, was as tough as they come. And as powerful.
I swallowed sudden nausea. “Doesn’t that mean—” I licked my lips and took a deep breath. “If Heru and Mei can’t find them, wouldn’t that suggest that they’re dead?”
“Most likely,” Nik said. “That’s what the Senate thinks, at least. But I’ve been around longer than most of them . . . long enough to know there are limits to our powers. There’s always a chance that something is blocking them. I figured it couldn’t hurt for you to try, especially since it’s Dom . . .”
I crossed my arms once more. “Yeah, okay,” I said, nodding. “I’ll do it.”
2
“You fascinate me, Kitty Kat.” Nik gave the shop a quick scan. “When did you become so interesting?”
Those words were funny, coming from him. Real name Nekure, Nik is one of the ancients of our kind. He’s I-don’t-have-a-clue-how-many thousands of years old and easily the most interesting person I’ve ever met. His mother is Aset, the real-life woman the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis was based on—twin sister to Heru, the real-life man behind the god Horus. Nik’s father was some now-dead Nejeret who abducted and raped his mom. I’ve never heard him given a name.
Nik was the first ever of our kind to be born of two Nejerets—the females of our species are infertile once their immortal traits manifest—and as such, he was born with an additional piece to his soul, a sheut, which made him not quite a god, but not just a Nejeret, either. At the time of his birth, he was something new, something more.
All Nejerets are born with a ba, the part of our soul that enables us to live forever—so long as we don’t get ourselves killed. But not Nik. He was different, the first to be born with a sheut, the rare part of a soul that gives its bearer seemingly magical powers. Others came after him—even I had a sheut now, a gift from the new gods, who’ve since abandoned us—but Nik has had the most practice with his, not to mention he played host to one of the old gods in his body for several thousand years.
I have no idea all that he can do with his sheut, but I imagine it must be more than he’s ever let on. But then, he’s never been very open, always hiding behind a wall of sarcasm and smirks. Even when we were close, or close-ish, he’d wielded his attitude like a sword, keeping me at a distance. I was just a young, cursed Nejeret. He was the closest thing left on this earth to a god. I was hardly worth his time, as he’d made so abundantly clear over the years. So how the hell could I fascinate him?
I stared at the shop’s glass door a moment longer, then turned away—from the door and from Nik—and retreated behind the counter to finish the evening tasks. I left the music on as I closed out the register, counting the cash and checks and stashing it all in a zippered bank deposit bag. Somehow, I managed to do it all without looking at Nik despite him watching me from the other side of the counter.
“You grew up,” he said.
My heartbeat picked up for a few beats, and I paused in folding up the long credit card report. I couldn’t help a quick glance at him. He was just standing there, arms crossed over his chest and pale eyes scrutinizing. I continued folding the receipt tape. “You and I both know that’s not possible.” Thanks to a hasty decision made two decades ago, I was stuck in an eighteen-year-old’s body. It was my body, always had been and always would be. Teenage hormones and all.
Nik tutted me. “Literal and bitter . . . what trick will she do next?”
Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. While I would never grow into a fully mature adult physically, I was fairly certain Nik’s growth was stunted in a much less tangible way. For as long as I’d known him, he’d had the emotional maturity of a frog—and that was probably being harsh. To the frog.
I placed the folded-up credit card receipt into the deposit bag, tucked it under my arm, and picked up my tarot deck and phone, turning off the music with a tap of my finger. “So . . .” I looked at Nik across the counter. “You delivered your message.”
“I did.”
I rounded the end of the counter and headed toward the beaded curtain. “Isn’t it time for you to disappear?” It was what he was best at.
“I was thinking I’d stick around for a bit,” he said. “Maybe help you with the Dom situation.”
I clenched my jaw. The last time we’d worked together, it hadn’t ended well. “I work alone,” I said as I passed through the curtain with a clacking of stone beads and turned to the right, angling toward the door to the stairway that led up to the second-floor apartment.
“Fine.” He was following me, practically walking on my heels. “Can I at least crash here tonight? The trip wasn’t exactly planned.”
I yanked the door to the stairs open. “It’s not too late to catch the last ferry. Go stay with your mom on Bainbridge.”
&n
bsp; “Yeah . . . no.”
I stomped up the stairs. “There are hundreds of hotels in this city.”
“I’m afraid of bed bugs.”
I chuckled without meaning to and caught myself as soon as I noticed I was doing it.
“Kitty Kat . . .”
“Fine,” I snapped. “One night. You can sleep on the couch.” I twisted the knob of the door at the top of the stairs and pushed it open a few inches, then hesitated. “I, um, don’t usually bring people up here.” And by usually, I meant ever.
Nik leaned in, and when he spoke, his breath tickled the hairs at the back of my neck. “Lucky me.” His voice was low, vibrating with a deep thrum that resonated through me.
My breath caught, and I shivered. “Can you not do that?” I said, glancing at him over my shoulder.
“Do what?” he asked, eyes opened wide, innocent as a preacher’s daughter.
“Be yourself. Can you just not?”
A Cheshire grin spread across his face.
Rolling my eyes, I pushed the door open the rest of the way and walked into the barren living room, noticing things that hadn’t stood out to me in years. The only furniture in the room was a couch pushed up against one wall so I had room to move through my daily routine of mixed martial arts poses . . . which had been taught to me by Dom. Several cardboard boxes were piled up against the opposite wall. They’d been there unopened for so long that I no longer had any idea what they contained.
I placed my tarot deck on the kitchen table as I passed it on my way to the hallway. “I’ll be right back.”
My bedroom was the second doorway on the right—a corner room that had once belonged to my mom. My old bedroom was behind the first door; now it functioned as my personal office, my sanctuary where I experimented with my sheut power as well as stored everything relating to the missing persons cases I worked on for private clients. I pulled the door shut all the way as I passed. I didn’t want Nik to go in there. I didn’t want him in the apartment at all, but I wanted him in there least of all.
I stored the deposit bag in the safe in my bedroom closet, swapped my tank top for one not smeared with drying blood from our impromptu scuffle, then headed back out to the living area. Nik was in the kitchen, scoping out the contents of my fridge.
“Eat whatever you want.”
“That’s easy to say when there’s nothing to eat.” Nik pulled out a Chinese takeout carton, sniffed it through the closed lid, and gagged. “I’d throw this in the garbage, but I think the smell would stink us out of here,” he said, replacing the carton in the fridge.
I pursed my lips, trying to think back to when I’d last had Chinese takeout. Or any takeout. I shrugged one shoulder. “There’s some frozen pizzas in the freezer. Pick out a couple.” I replenished my stock every few days. It was what I lived off of—that and Dick’s Drive-In, just a short walk down Broadway. Oftentimes, my trips to grab greasy fast food were the only times I left the shop. All of the teens who worked there knew me by name.
“Maybe you should convert the fridge into a freezer,” Nik suggested, head in the actual freezer. “Monthly trip to Costco, and you’d be set . . .”
Fists on hips, I watched him. Or, at least, what I could see of him from behind the freezer door. He’d slung his long, black leather jacket onto the back of one of the kitchen chairs, revealing his array of tattoos in black and varying shades of gray. Our kind healed preternaturally quickly, and as a result, ink didn’t stick quite so well in our skin.
Much as I wanted to take full ownership for my own love of the inked needle, I wasn’t delusional. Nik had been there when my world fell apart all those years ago. He, and even more so Dom, were the ones who picked up my broken pieces and fitted them back together as best they could. Nik had left an impression. One only needed to look at my choice of business and the ink in my own skin to see that.
“Yeah, maybe.” I pulled out a chair and started shuffling my cards. Habit. “So where’ve you been, anyway?” Shuffle. “And let me offer up a preemptive fuck you for saying, ‘Around . . .’”
Nik barked a laugh, pulling his head from the freezer to look at me, those icy eyes glittering with mirth. “Like I said, you grew up, Kitty Kat.” The top quarter of him disappeared for another second or two, and then he emerged with two pizza boxes. “Hawaiian and Supreme—two of my favorites.”
“Adventurous . . .”
He turned on the oven. “You’re the one who bought the pizzas.”
I gave him a side nod. “Touché.” Was it weird that it felt so not weird for him to be there? “So where’ve you been—really?”
“Everywhere.” He tore into one of the boxes. “Nowhere long enough to matter.”
“You know, I hated you for leaving like that. After everything . . .” In many ways, I still did.
“I know.” That was it, that simple agreement. No apologies, no explanations. Not that I’d expected any. I learned a long time ago that expecting anything from other people was the quickest pathway to disappointment. So I stopped expecting things. No more disappointment.
I huffed a laugh. If only I could do the same with myself.
Nik glanced my way but remained quiet. Good. I wasn’t up for sharing my feelings, and I had work to do.
After one last shuffle, I laid out a simple three-card spread—past, present, and future. I didn’t need more than that, not with my cards, and not while finding Dom was preeminent in my thoughts. I wasn’t surprised to find that the deck had redesigned itself further after the events of the past hour. The illustrations were even more realistic than before, the colors even starker.
The leftmost card represented the past with a row of five crystal tumblers lined up on a barren surface, an ouroboros—a snake eating its own tail—burned into the surface, encircling the cups. Two were shattered, one was broken in half, and the other two remained half filled, one with a clear liquid, the other with something bloodred. Disappointment. Inability to let go. Bitterness. Refusal to give up, to move on. A sliver of hope. The Three of Cups was a depressing card to represent Dom’s past. Especially when I knew, deep in my bones, that it was about his past with me.
My eyes burned, but I jutted out my jaw and moved on. The past was the past. I couldn’t do anything about it now.
The middle card, representing the present situation, was the King of Swords, reversed. The king sat in his upside-down throne, his massive black claymore planted in the floor at his feet and his head bowed over the pommel, concealing his face. Tyranny. An abuse of power. Deceit. Manipulation. Relentless drive toward a goal. An at-any-cost mentality.
I squinted and picked up the card to get a closer look. There was something engraved into the steel of the sword blade, just above the hilt. “What the hell?” It was another ouroboros, much smaller this time.
“Everything alright?” Nik asked from the kitchen. He was sitting on the counter opposite the oven, watching me. I could see him in my peripheral vision.
“Yeah,” I said with barely a glance his way. The self-cannibalizing snake was one of the many ancient symbols my people had used over the years, representing eternity and the cyclical nature of time, but I’d never drawn it on my cards. Why the hell was it showing up now? “Just a . . .” Frowning, I shook my head. “Nothing. It’s probably nothing.”
“Is this how you do it—tarot cards?”
“Be quiet,” I said absently, then moved on to the third card.
The Hanged Man. Again. Goosebumps rose on my skin, starting on my arms and moving inward. The illustration showed Dom dressed all in black and hanging upside down by his ankle. A bright light glowed behind him, illuminating the dark, inky tendrils creeping in all around him, and a snake coiled around his calf, suspended from a branch, holding him in midair. Indecision. Sacrifice. Waiting. Letting go. Surrender. But who—me, or Dom? And why the hell did the snake’s tail, once again, disappear into its mouth?
I gathered up the cards and shuffled twice more, then drew three, laying them on
the table in a neat row. It was the same cards. One more time—the same spread, the same cards—and I accepted that it was locked in. The universe had spoken.
I settled into a pattern of drawing a single card, a single, specific question in mind.
Where is Dom now?
Did someone capture him?
Is he in pain?
Is he alone?
Who could help me find him?
Is he alive?
Eventually, no matter what I asked, I pulled the same card—the Hanged Man. Wait, it seemed to be telling me. Not yet. You’ll understand soon enough.
Frustrated, I flipped the entire deck over and fanned out the cards. They all had one thing in common—the ouroboros. Sometimes it was hidden, and sometimes it was blatant, but it was always there. I settled into the kitchen chair and started going through the cards one by one. There had to be more they could tell me. There had to be.
3
“Why’d you do it?” I ask a hulking Nejeret who calls himself Shank. He’s down on his knees, his hate-filled eyes locked on my face, the point of my sword, Mercy, digging into his neck hard enough to draw blood. “Why’d you make him kill himself?”
“Why not?” Shank says. “He was just a human.”
I feel my eye twitch, and I’m having a hard time not shoving Mercy’s blade forward. That human was my friend. He was helping me. And for that reason alone, this asshat decided to use him as a warning. I grit my teeth. “Give me the names of two others, and I’ll let you live.” I’m literally lying through my teeth, shame-free. This Nejeret is going to die, regardless of anything he tells me.
Shank smirks, his eyes still locked on mine, and jerks forward. His eyes bulge and his body stiffens as Mercy’s blade slides through his neck with almost no resistance.
I raise my right foot and plant the bottom of my boot against his chest, pushing him off the blade. He slumps to the floor, twitching and gurgling as he dies. Preemptive, but no matter. I was going to kill him anyway.
Ink Witch Page 2
