Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel)

by Marcella Burnard

  “Can a dream do this?” he said. A tendril of midnight dark magic slid into the depths of her, spreading from his fingertips at her cheek and dropping into the scarred emptiness inside where he’d once lived.

  Heat flashed through her body. How she’d missed that.

  Gasping, Isa opened her eyes in a rush. Confusion rolled her while she struggled against the undertow of the narcotics. When her eyes focused, she saw nothing but a black silhouette against the dim light filtering in from the hallway behind him.

  “Murmur.”

  “Heal.”

  “Can’t. Medication.”

  “Clear them.”

  Was that possible? His tone suggesting that it ought to have been obvious. If only she’d thought of trying it herself. But if she couldn’t marshal her will because of the drugs, how could she influence the levels of medication in her body? Contemplating the possibilities, she drifted on the warm current of Murmur’s presence.

  “Follow me,” he murmured at her ear.

  An avalanche of dark power surged into her body. It swept through blood, tissue, and bones, identifying and gathering up anything that wasn’t her. As Murmur’s power swept medication out of contact with her nerves, the impression of floating on the sticky cloud of narcotics dwindled.

  Her will solidified. So did pain. Isa groaned.

  Murmur echoed her.

  Did he still feel some small part of what she did? He had when he’d been a part of her. He was free now. How could he possibly?

  “Heal,” he rasped as she watched him burn the chemicals down into sludge that her body processes picked up and carted away.

  With his black as midnight power warming her, golden motes of her magic enlivened by his presence danced into the darkness of him.

  An audible breath hissed in between his clenched teeth.

  “Shields,” she breathed through the pulse of pain intensifying with every beat of her heart. Isa called magic through the static of burgeoning hurt. This time it answered. Amber liquefied by the heat of Murmur’s power flowed readily to her hand.

  He interlaced his magic with hers until the summer night sky of their combined shield sparkled.

  In concert, they flashed the shield outward until they were contained within it.

  Isa sank into the flow of magic deep within, drifted in the shining ripples, and drank the rush of energy into a spot behind her solar plexus. The power gathered, building. Blinding.

  Superheated ebony twined through her, elbowing bits of her anatomy aside.

  She couldn’t breathe. But she could access her body’s memory of what it should be. Whole. Uninjured.

  “Now.” Who’d said it? Isa? Murmur?

  A tsunami of energy driven by intention crashed through her tiny physical shell, a violent, unstoppable monster, momentarily splintering her sanity. Agony lapped in around the ragged edges of the power coursing through her. Consuming her.

  Murmur’s fingers on her face trembled. He uttered a wordless sound of anguish.

  Wave after wave of power slowed, then drained away. Breath trickled into lungs abruptly greedy for air.

  Isa gulped as if she had almost drowned. Discomfort tugged on her leg.

  Murmur touched her hand.

  She flexed the toes of her left foot, and when they moved, she breathed out a laugh. She wrapped her fingers around his. Levering herself to one elbow, she fumbled to unwrap bandages from her left arm. “There’s a splint on my leg. Would you mind?”

  He moved down the bed, flipped the blanket up, and went to work freeing her. “What happened?”

  Isa closed her eyes because she couldn’t close her memory’s ears to the hydra’s final cry. She flung gauze away and opened her eyes. “I killed a tattoo.”

  He stilled.

  “What happened?” he repeated, anger tight in his voice.

  “A Live Tattoo came off a bus driver in the middle of the afternoon commute,” she said. “You might have felt that. I did. Even miles away.”

  “Yes.”

  “The bus driver died at the wheel. The bus flipped. Big pileup of cars and people. The tattoo gorged on magic and blood, feeding on people trapped by the accident. It was near overload when I got there. Stasis paper would never have contained it.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to bleed the excess magic off?” he said, jerking the leg splint free.

  Isa sat up. At least her physical body didn’t hurt anymore. She drew the blankets around her, even knowing they couldn’t shield or cushion her, and crossed her arms against the chill seeping out from behind her heart.

  “Bleed it where?” she demanded. “And how was I supposed to do that while it was trying to make a snack pack of me?”

  He blew out a breath that sounded like a curse.

  The night sky curtain of their shield collapsed to the floor, where it glistened like frost, fading slowly into the linoleum.

  “How did you get in here?” Isa asked.

  “This face opens many doors.”

  She didn’t want to know what kind of doors he meant.

  “I cannot stay,” he said.

  “Understood.”

  “I wonder.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You wanted your freedom. You have it.”

  “It hurts.”

  Her gaze jerked to his face, save she couldn’t see anything but shadow. Discontent rolled her like the tidal wave of magic had moments ago. How was she supposed to be happy with a situation she’d never before heard of?

  The man who’d kidnapped her was dead and her Live Tattoo had his body. She’d given a demon from another plane the freedom of this world. What did that make her? She shouldn’t be surprised he found freedom painful. Her world wasn’t always kind to those who’d been born to it. What kind of sense would it make to someone like Murmur?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, then sighed. “There’s more to the story.”

  He stilled, not even breathing from what she could hear.

  “Before I killed it, the hydra showed me someone cutting it from its host with magic.”

  Murmur hissed.

  She tightened her arms, pressing her blankets hard against her ribs.

  “The magic was pure, cold silver. I saw it earlier today, on a Magic Eater that attacked one of Ria’s gang. I’d assumed the creature had gotten trapped here, left over from Daniel and his Live Ink. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “What?”

  Isa frowned at the flat, dead question. “What the hell is happening?”

  “You can’t have fought a Magic Eater,” he growled.

  “I did.”

  “It isn’t possible.”

  “Bind ink sure as hell slowed it down,” she said, unwilling to disclose how much luck had been involved both in the Magic Eater’s and the hydra’s deaths. “And I didn’t kill it. Ria did. I couldn’t even heal, Murmur. I did what you showed me. It didn’t work. Why?”

  “Who?”

  “Walter. The man the Magic Eater attacked.”

  Fabric rustled as Murmur shifted. “Not enough magic.”

  His echo of one of Daniel’s old accusations stopped her breath.

  “The Magic Eater took his power,” Murmur said. Memory, sodden and weighted with old blood, trembled in his voice. “There was nothing to guide you. Nothing to meet you halfway. You would not help your friend Ria, either, I think.”

  “Because he has no magic.”

  “Yes.”

  She sagged. He hadn’t been saying she didn’t have enough power. It wasn’t her fault. Not her failing. Entirely.

  “Also. You were right. The Magic Eater wouldn’t have been ‘left over.’ It wouldn’t have survived the past three weeks without feeding. There would have been attacks.”

  “How did it get here, then? Daniel is dead. H
e didn’t pull that Magic Eater through or yank the hydra tattoo off of that bus driver.”

  “No,” Murmur said. “Uriel did.”

  “Who?”

  “Daniel’s Live Ink.”

  Isa shivered.

  Murmur’s nemesis. The gorgeous, perfect angel, golden curls, sculpted features, snow-white robes, wings to match, and the foulest, most horrifying heart she’d ever encountered. He’d murdered Murmur’s infant son.

  It shook her to discover something that evil had something mundane as a name.

  “How? He got sucked through the portal back to your world,” she said. She hated the tremor in her voice. “I closed the door behind him. How could he possibly?”

  “The portal.”

  “I closed it.”

  “You didn’t lock it. He’s reaching through,” he said. “Seeking a means to pry it open again.”

  “To come after us.”

  “Yes.”

  No accusation of arrogance for thinking Uriel counted her enough of a threat to pursue. No assurance that the monster would leave her alone in favor of tormenting Murmur.

  “What now?” Isa asked.

  “The portal must be sealed.”

  She reeled. She’d thought they were done. That she’d sacrificed her life for the purpose of protecting her world and Murmur’s all at the same time. Except that, apparently, she hadn’t.

  “The spell Daniel and Uriel were performing. It broke the seal and . . .” he began.

  “How do we lock it?” She. How did she lock it?

  Fabric rustled and his silhouette grew taller at the grim note in her voice. “Blood. And life.”

  Isa clenched her fists. “A sacrifice.”

  “A sacrifice.”

  He didn’t have to say it.

  She heard it in the vulture of silence circling the room.

  Him.

  Or her.

  “Why us?”

  “We were the key that unlocked the door.”

  She shook her head. “Daniel and Uriel were.”

  “Their lives threw the portal wide, yes, but it was our sundering that unlocked it.”

  Breath stabbed into her chest. “Locking the portal will cut off Uriel’s access to this world?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that enough for you?”

  Silence stretched long and sticky tendrils in the dim room. Finally, he shifted. “Trapping Uriel on that side, when he wants to be here, will not be as good as killing him. But it will be vengeance enough.”

  She nodded. Exiling Uriel on his side of the door would strand him. He’d never be the commander in the hell he wanted to make of this world. Sounded good to her.

  “Better, maybe,” she said. Was a lifetime of frustrated ambition sufficient punishment? Only one problem.

  “I won’t sacrifice you,” she said.

  Murmur squared Daniel’s shoulders. “Then you give me no choice. I will sacrifice you.”

  Chapter Five

  “You threatening my life? Now everything’s back to normal,” Isa said.

  Murmur snorted and stroked the back of her hand.

  “Teach me how to do what you said about shunting power away from someone overloading on magic,” she said.

  “How do you have the power you do and not know what to do with it?”

  “Everything you’ve shown me,” she said, bristling, “is supposed to be impossible in this world.”

  “Just as fighting a Magic Eater is impossible in mine?” he said, his voice muted as he considered.

  She nodded. Not that he could see in the dark. “Of course. We’re each of us bound by our expectations and what we assume to be true.” Rule eight?

  A single tap sounded on the door, startling her. The containment lock clicked.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “I—” Words piled up in her throat, choking her silent. So much she couldn’t say. I need you. Don’t leave me. Take me with you. Prisons. All of them. She’d helped him achieve freedom. She refused to be the one to steal it from him again.

  She cleared cold weight out of her throat. “Thank you. I would have spent days in pain waiting for the drugs to clear my system.”

  “I know,” he said, moving to the door. “Your pain was mine.”

  She frowned. “What?”

  He shrugged, the motion visible against the light filtering through the curtain on the door. “The price of attaining freedom through you.”

  He slid the door open, slipped through the opening, and then closed it behind him.

  A chill sliced her body. It landed on the internal scar of his leaving as if Murmur walking away ripped him out of her psyche all over again.

  The door opened.

  Light from the hallway stabbed into the room. A figure, too small to be Murmur, poked her head in.

  Nurse.

  Funny thing about healing with magic—something she’d learned a month or so ago. With enough applied power, and for some reason, in combination with Murmur she’d had plenty, she’d healed like nothing ever happened. Yet anyone who’d seen the original injuries had to come to terms with the fact that they’d vanished.

  Isa braced to face hours of surprise and incredulity from the medical staff and from her friends as if they didn’t inflict invisible wounds with every disbelieving exclamation.

  ***

  Steve showed up in time to hear the doctor discharge her. He drove her home, shaking his head.

  “I’ll walk you up,” he said, pulling up to the curb in front of her apartment building.

  “No need,” Isa said.

  “Humor me. You shattered a leg,” he said. “I’m still processing . . .”

  “What? The fact that you think I shouldn’t be walking within sixteen hours of having shattered the bone?” she demanded as she climbed the stairs to the second floor without so much as a twinge of discomfort. Bless Murmur’s self-interested heart.

  “This is tough stuff,” he said. “You’re defying what most of us believe is possible.”

  She flinched and paused in unlocking her front door. So she could do a few things that defied expectation. When would she know enough to stop murdering creatures because she didn’t know what else was possible?

  Dog tags jingled on the other side of the door.

  Shaking her head, she opened the apartment.

  Bouncing, puffing air in short huffs out through his open mouth, her dog plowed into her newly solid legs.

  “Oof! Morning, Gus,” Isa said. “Nathalie? Are you still here?”

  “She came over and took care of them,” Steve said. “But I think she went home to pack so she could move in until you were released from the hospital.”

  The spot warmed where Murmur’s fingers had rested against her cheek as he’d helped her heal. Her shoulders eased lower. She smiled at her whining, three-legged dog.

  Her brown tabby and white cat sauntered out of the bedroom, her tail curved high in the air. She sneered as she passed the enthusiastic, wagging dog.

  “Good morning, Ikylla.” Isa offered up her hands for feline inspection.

  Whiskers tickled Isa’s blue palms as she sniffed and then glanced up to meet her gaze. Her golden eyes half closed. She presented her back.

  Isa obliged and stroked the cat as she walked out from under Isa’s hand.

  Casting another half-lidded look over her shoulder, Ikylla padded toward the kitchen.

  “You’re only good for one thing,” Steve noted, humor in his tone.

  “Opening her cat food can,” Isa agreed. “At least Gus loves me for my access to his leash and w-a-l-k-s. Come on, silly dog. Breakfast. Come on in, Steve. Can I offer you coffee?”

  “I wish,” Steve said. “I thought I’d be stopping by the hospital long enough to catch you be
tween morphine doses. I didn’t expect . . . I’m glad I could bring you home.”

  “I am, too, but you have to go?” she finished for him.

  “The investigation is going to take days,” he said. “They’re still recovering victims. When you’re up to it, I need a statement. The AMBI may be involved.”

  Bracing her hands on the kitchen counter, Isa blew out a slow breath. “Any estimated death toll?”

  “Forty-eight confirmed dead. A hundred and three still missing.”

  “Damn.”

  “Not all of them were the Ink.”

  “I know. You and I both know there were too many people in the lake.”

  “We have divers in the water,” he said. “But yeah. I know what you’re getting at. Not many of us are thinking in terms of rescue, either.”

  Corpse recovery.

  “I wish . . .” She broke off. What? That she’d known what the hell she was doing out there? That it could have ended differently?

  It hadn’t. What good was magic, what good was she, in the face of that kind of death toll? She’d believed she’d trained hard most of her life to handle magic and there was still so much she didn’t know.

  “Yeah,” Steve said.

  Slowly, methodically, her hands shaking, Isa started coffee, then fed Ikylla and Gus.

  Despite his declaration that he had to go, she and Steve stood on opposite sides of the kitchen, arms crossed, watching the dog and the cat, listening to the hiss and spit of the coffeemaker.

  “You’re taking a thermos with you. I’ll write up what happened from my end,” she said, rummaging in the cupboards for the aged metal cylinder. “But you know I’ll answer questions anytime. For this, I swear I’ll even play nice with the Acts of Magic Bureau of Investigation agents. I’m also going to suggest that you might benefit from expanding your stable of Live Ink consultants.”

  “With who, Ice? Daniel Alvarez? This wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do that bus driver’s Live Ink, did you?”

  “No.”

  “You took out that thing on the bridge. I don’t know how you did it and I don’t care. Maybe I should, but I don’t. I’m grateful. Both that you did the job and that you survived it. One hundred percent selfish and puerile motive on that last one, I admit.”

  An ache she hadn’t realized was there eased around her heart. “I’m glad. On all counts. This is going to have repercussions. The release of so much magic—I’m not entirely sure what to expect.”