Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel)

by Marcella Burnard

  She shifted forward, straining against her seatbelt to catch a glimpse of what the people fleeing the scene feared. Emergency vehicles had preceded Steve’s car and cleared a path. Drivers, assuming there’d been an accident that the ambulances, police, and fire trucks could clear, had shifted off sides, opening a narrow, treacherous lane down the middle that now filled with people running up the bridge deck for Seattle.

  As Steve laid on the horn, people shifted grudgingly to one side. Someone shouted at him to fuck off—they were running for their lives and not even the police had the right to divert them. At least no one was waving a gun around. Yet.

  Isa began to detect blood and minor injuries on the pedestrians. They gave way to more severe injuries—visibly broken bones, semiconscious victims supported between grim-faced, uniformed first responders. Some of the victims were carried by other, less injured drivers.

  As Steve’s car started down the western high rise, Isa looked into Armageddon. A bus lay overturned across the westbound traffic lanes, surrounded by victims who would never rise again. Half of the back section of the double long, reticulated bus dangled over the water. Cars and trucks had been tossed like the blocks of a two-year-old in the midst of a tantrum. One was a fire truck, lights still flashing amid the crumpled, shredded wreck of red and chrome.

  News helicopters hung high above the bridge, tottering back and forth in the air.

  Dark fluid wet the concrete bridge deck.

  Isa’s breath rose high in her chest as her shoulders tightened.

  The visual shimmer of here-be-magic resolved into a huge, scaly, five-headed monster of Ink and magic. A hydra. An enormous myth with gleaming, rainbow-hued scales stood splay-legged across the decks of both the east- and westbound lanes. Claws, dripping unspeakable meaty globs of human remains, grasped an SUV. One of the heads bent and ripped the roof from the vehicle as if it were a pop-top soup can. The other heads darted in, picking the struggling driver and passengers out of their seatbelts.

  Blood sprayed. Kicking legs went limp, dangling from the monster’s teeth. The creature flung the empty shell of the vehicle into the water on the north side of the bridge. It landed amid the people who’d taken to the lake to escape.

  Isa couldn’t count how many went down beneath the impact. A few bodies bobbed back to the surface, bouncing on the ripples. But they no longer swam. Or moved.

  As it snapped the corpses into its mouths, the hydra grew.

  Isa had to look away.

  The exodus of wounded had ended. Abandoned cars and trucks surrounded them. Their path to the battlefield spread out before them. Too short to where the vehicles of the first responders piled up against one another.

  “Do you see it?” Isa breathed.

  She didn’t know how he heard above the siren. Or above the multithroated roar of the hydra.

  Steve glanced at her, white outlining his lips. He clicked off the siren. No one remained in the cars around them to care, much less move out of the way. He nodded.

  An arcane pressure wave built against her shield the closer they drew.

  “Stop the car,” she rasped, her heart a sudden ache in her chest. She didn’t know yet why she’d said it, only that they couldn’t go any closer. Not both of them. “Stop the car!”

  Steve didn’t answer. The car kept moving at a crawl toward the murderous thing.

  “You can’t go down there,” Isa shouted at the windshield, surprised by the surge of determination that seemed to starch her quaking limbs. She undid her seatbelt, grabbed the strap of her backpack, opened her door, and rolled out of the car.

  “Oof!” She hit the cement shoulder and hip first. The raincoat absorbed precious little of the impact. Sharp pain exploded through her shoulder. Her arm went numb.

  Even though the car had measured their speed in a single digit, the momentum was enough that she slid a foot. Maybe more. If she survived the day, she’d have a hell of a fabric burn on her right hip where her jeans had saved her skin from the concrete.

  The door hit a white van and rebounded.

  Steve jerked the car to a halt.

  Isa struggled to her feet in the south wind while he slammed his door into a shiny green sports car.

  “Isa! We don’t have—”

  “You have too much magic to go unnoticed and not enough training to use it to protect yourself!” She hefted the pack strap over her left shoulder and faced him across the hood of the car.

  Outside the sound barrier of the car, she could hear the shrill din of human voices raised in terrified unison. And the crunch of snapping bone in the creature’s many maws.

  Her stomach turned.

  She didn’t have enough power or training to protect herself from something that had been gorging on blood and magic all afternoon.

  His lips curled. “Someone has to—”

  “It’s why you brought me, Steve.”

  He glanced at the carnage. The flush of rage drained from his face. “What’s your plan?”

  Plan? Isa swallowed hard. “The only hope is to contain it.”

  “You can do that?”

  “I have to try.”

  He blew out an audibly unsteady breath. “Be careful.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, closed it, and nodded once.

  She mirrored the gesture. Her throat closed on what she couldn’t say to his face. So, coward that she was, Isa retreated to business. “No closer. If it starts coming this way, get the hell out of here.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she turned and, ignoring the ache in her hip and shoulder, strode from the frying pan into the fire.

  She reached the first police and aid cars clogging the center of the bridge deck.

  Clouds scudded across the lowering sun. Dark in the next two or three hours. If she couldn’t get the hydra under some kind of control before sundown, the survivors wouldn’t stand a chance. Especially the ones in the water.

  Teeth chattering, pulse hammering in her ears, Isa fought nerves twitching with the impulse to flee.

  The wind could no longer blow away the stench of death, spilled fuel, and the sharp, electrical tang of magic overloading. She and the survivors were running out of time. Arcane sparks could ignite aerosolized gasoline as surely as any physical spark.

  The hydra froze. Every single head swiveled. Too many eyes to count turned to glare at her.

  Isa’s gut clenched.

  Magic rolled through her middle in a queasy-making wave. The ever-present river of shimmering light that ran through her core had given away her approach. She desperately needed it to protect her. And she couldn’t seem to gather enough of her scattered will to summon more than a mote.

  The hydra opened three of its bloody, reeking maws and trilled what sounded like a question. Wondering whether she’d taste good when one of its heads bit her in half?

  Adrenaline scorched a path from behind her sternum straight down. It sloshed around inside the wound left by Murmur’s departure.

  She missed him. A bitter laugh escaped her lips.

  It broke her paralysis.

  Staring into the burning, whirling yellow-green eyes of the hydra, she breathed the odors of terror, death, gasoline, diesel, and hydra poison deep into her lungs. Drawing energy in with the foul air, she concentrated power at her core. It steadied her.

  The hydra took an impossibly big step toward her. It crushed a semi beneath one clawed foot and a tiny import car beneath another.

  Quaking, clenching every muscle to keep from running, she shoved her awareness deep into the river of liquid sunlight, gathering it, calling it up for use.

  “Changing Woman, I sure need help with this one,” Isa muttered, naming one of the deities from her childhood. She wasn’t blood of Changing Woman’s people; 520 wasn’t necessarily Changing Woman’s land.

  Isa hoped it wouldn’t matter.
She only knew she was unequal to the task of neutralizing the being currently dedicating two heads to plucking shrieking victims out of Lake Washington.

  Terrible, wet splintering sounds stopped the screams.

  Her heart faltered and her gorge rose. Isa swallowed hard.

  No more victims. She had to get the thing under control.

  Power rose in a whirl, lighting her from within. Bright as noon on the desert, but no warmth. Isa pushed the glittering magic outward in a bubble around her, strengthening her shield, drawing it tight and impenetrable, she hoped, around her.

  The creature appeared to sense the energy moving. Every eye fastened upon her. One of the hydra’s many heads darted down.

  She poured power into the shield, turning the magic into something impermeable.

  Serrated teeth, dripping bloody slime, impacted the shield. The hit resonated through to her bones. She stumbled.

  The hydra rebounded, shock in the coiling of its other necks. It threw four heads to the sky and bugled a challenge.

  Her ears rang. Isa cringed.

  The creature had more raw power running through it than she’d ever encountered. It could snap her shield with a thought. If it had any rational ones with so many heads. Given that it didn’t seem to realize it courted destruction by overloading on magic, she gathered it didn’t know how to handle the energy coursing through its matrix.

  Her first piece of luck.

  She couldn’t count on any more. Though her breath shuddered and her hands still shook, she took her time summoning yet more power. She focused the energy into her tingling right palm. Lifting the arm to sketch a circle enclosing the hydra brought cold sweat to her forehead.

  Shimmering motes of energy, like sun shining through rain, rose in the air behind the maddened beast.

  It struck again.

  The blow weakened her shield, and drove her to her knees. Intent upon closing the circle around the hydra, she couldn’t afford to allow her attention and intention to waver.

  Somewhere in the wreckage of vehicles and body parts, someone with enough magic to see the creature, but not enough training to know that bullets couldn’t touch a rogue tattoo, began shooting.

  Isa clenched her teeth and concentrated on carving out the rest of the circle that would cut the hydra and her off from the rest of reality. Nothing else mattered.

  Not the bullet that shattered the windshield of the car next to her. Not the sharp-edged pain scoring her face. Not the sirens approaching from the Montlake Cut connecting Lake Washington to Lake Union.

  Police boats?

  She hoped so. They could fish survivors out of the frigid, choppy lake.

  Pivoting on her knees, she closed the circle. Containment. For as long as her will lasted.

  As Isa directed more power overhead and underfoot to cut them off completely, she prayed to any deity listening that she hadn’t enclosed any survivors with them.

  Magic and Ink rippled in lieu of muscles in the hydra’s body. It swiveled heads in all directions as if only now realizing she’d trapped it. It flung its heads at the glimmers of her magic hanging in the air.

  The impact rang through Isa like an intangible bell. The sheer magnitude of uncontrolled, stolen magic rampaging through the creature knocked the breath from Isa’s lungs.

  The hydra penetrated the shell. One beaked head chirped. Another hissed. Two growled.

  Isa flung panicky energy at the breach, closing it again.

  The hydra attacked. Head after head rained blows upon her.

  Her shield held, but the effort of maintaining both the larger circle and her personal shield crushed her, facedown, to the wet, stinking concrete. Her backpack strap sawed into her left shoulder.

  From far away, Isa heard Steve shout.

  Settling her cheek in noisome liquid that made her stomach lurch in protest, she turned her head so she could keep her gaze on the hydra.

  One of the heads vomited acid green poison over her.

  Something heavy pressed on her chest. She couldn’t breathe. Her shield bowed under the assault, then shunted the goo to the bridge deck in a circle around her. As it slid away, so, too, did the weight on her ribs.

  She drew breath and promptly choked. Where the poison touched the ground, the cement smoked. Isa couldn’t maintain both draws on her magic. She couldn’t even lever herself up off the roadway, much less access the tools in her backpack. She’d naively planned to shove the tattoo out of this world into the etheric and talk it onto stasis paper.

  In the face of its raw power, her little sheets of paper amounted to a sleight-of-hand trick. Stasis would never hold it.

  The creature threw etheric sparks warning of a coming, catastrophic arcane explosion. If it blew, the hydra would act like a magical dirty bomb.

  At least her circle would contain the worst of the damage. People nearby might suffer, but no one else would be likely to die. The explosion would render the bridge impassible, even for normal people, for a couple of generations.

  Not ideal.

  Breath quivering as she drew it in shallow gulps that did nothing to settle the deep-seated quiver in her bones, she let her personal shield go, and shunted the power into the containment bubble.

  The hydra crowed and thrust a razor wire tendril of magic, muddy with too many stolen colors, through Isa’s back, testing.

  A coughing rasp of protest broke from her throat until the pressure wave from an approaching head crushed even that out of her.

  The stench of rotting meat surrounded her. Fabric screamed as it ripped.

  Isa was lifted from the ground, dangling from the strap of her backpack. She croaked a cry of surprise before her brain kicked a flood of fight-or-flight chemicals into her blood.

  The hydra had her.

  Time clicked over to frame-by-frame slow motion.

  The creature had caught her backpack in its teeth and was drawing her up so it could snap her in half.

  She had one shot.

  Twisting, she sacrificed a few layers of skin to slip her arm out of the backpack strap and fell. She landed with a bone-jarring crunch on the hood of a miraculously intact sedan.

  Something internal to Isa popped.

  Shards of glassy hurt wrapped her chest.

  Above her, crystal imbued with her power shattered between the teeth of one of the hydra’s heads. Her Live Inks. Fragments of Isa’s power died between the monster’s teeth and grounded back to her, stinging like wasps peppering her internal skin.

  She sucked in a shallow sip of cold air. It set her lungs afire. Would the Live Inks push the creature into overload? Isa tensed, as if locked muscles could repel an arcane explosion flaying her into a sticky smear on the car windshield.

  The hydra swallowed the backpack with a noisy gulp and smacked the lips of all five heads.

  Confused nerve impulses from her left leg suggested that something in the limb was very wrong.

  The hydra froze. It belched and the rainbow of colors whirling in its massive scales dimmed.

  Isa frowned.

  One head, she thought it might have been the one that had swallowed the pack, lifted and whined a long, ear-piercing keen.

  The beaked head uttered a squawk of protest that rattled her teeth in her skull.

  A convulsion rippled through the creature.

  Twisted cars and trucks, shoved aside by the hydra’s massive feet, slammed into one another, piling up against the crumbling bridge abutment. A scrap of yellow that might once have been a VW impacted the driver’s side of the car where Isa lay. The metal bed rocked. With a sound like tin foil ripping, metal buckled. Tires screeched on cement until the car hit the concrete dividing wall.

  If she’d had any breath to take, the fiery agony lancing up her leg would have done it. As it was, she focused every ounce of attention on the tattoo.


  The whine escalated to a scream.

  Heads thrashed on writhing, twisting necks.

  As if the thoughts had a very long way to travel in order to connect, it dawned on her. The hydra hadn’t snacked on her Live Inks, several sheets of stasis paper, and her portable tattoo machine alone. It had swallowed a bottle of binding ink. Ink Isa had brewed to destroy the magic matrix upon which a Living Tattoo had been drawn.

  The same type of ink that had put enough of a dent in the Magic Eater that Ria had been able to kill it.

  It had never occurred to Isa that a Living Tattoo would ingest the ink. She had no idea what it would do, but in no way could she trust that her slow-cooked stew of magic, herbs, pigment, and rum would neutralize the creature.

  A solid bind required more from her.

  Isa groaned and summoned magic.

  Her internal river ran turgid and slow, muddied by pain and exhaustion. As the glimmers shifted in answer, weariness retreated. Golden power lit her interior, bolstering her flagging energy. She’d pay the price for that later. If she survived.

  The hydra’s front legs folded. Its body crashed to the bridge deck. Concrete buckled beneath the magical impact, shaking her.

  She should rise. Or at least sit up. Except she didn’t think she could. Gathering a small, cold sun of arcane energy between her palms, she shut her eyes and stepped into the etheric. Then she threw her bolt at the hydra.

  The creature spun out of the physical world of the bridge floating on a deep, cold lake and landed in the space between the worlds with her. Still convulsing. Still screaming. And now, able to reach her with an avalanche of thoughts and emotions that roared over the top of her in a suffocating wave.

  Loss. Confusion. Sorrow. A sense of longing that lit up the void of Murmur’s absence within her until the wound gushed fresh blood, Ink, and desolation. A riptide of despair sucked her under. She’d never be whole again. The void would never be filled, no matter how much magic she consumed. No matter how much blood she spilled . . .