And yet. Isa knew full well that she didn’t get to pick and choose gods. When you walked the spirit realms, you encountered gods and monsters both. Sometimes, they were one and the same. And even the traditions of sacrifice were as old as the human race itself.
The dream she’d had in the hospital, of her teachers changing shape, she recognized the one Joseph had taken on. It stared at her from the woman’s arm.
“Crash course on Xibalba. Nine levels. The House of Dark, the House of Cold, the House of Jaguars, the House of Bats, and the House of Knives. That’s five of the tests prescribed by the lords of the underworld. In addition, there are three rivers, the river of scorpions, the river of blood, and the river of pestilence. Should you cross these, you come to the final level, the seat of the gods.”
“You’re expected to greet the gods, but they’ve put up images of themselves—illusions that look like the real thing. And if you make the mistake of greeting the wrong gods, you’re dumped into the most humiliating and terrifying of the tests. It may eventually kill you, but the point is to make your debasement last as long as possible for the amusement of the gods.”
“This is their sport? Why would anyone go? Where’s the value?”
The woman shrugged. “They are powerful and knowledgeable in their way. I can’t know why you’re on this path. Do the lords of the dead have someone you love? They are jealous gods and will give up their hard-won subjects only if they’re tricked and defeated.”
Isa stared at her. Someone she loved? “No.”
Certainly not Daniel. She was sorry he’d died. She hadn’t wished that upon him. He’d earned his results. She did not want him back.
Only Murmur.
Was that it? She imagined she loved someone—something that wasn’t even human?
Still. The Mayan gods of the dead must have something she needed. Or she had something they needed. Ruth, Joseph, and Henry had taught her that much. The gods didn’t take notice of you unless you could serve their purpose. Or unless you or your people needed something only they could provide.
Very well. She’d been trained for this. Hadn’t she? Shamanic journeying hadn’t been her teachers’ strong suit. The Navajo weren’t entirely shamanic. But they’d made certain she’d trained. First with an Apache elder and then with an Irish woman who’d trained in the druidic ways of her people.
Isa had a few paltry tools.
“Xibalba isn’t meant to be survived,” the woman said. “Not by humans.”
“How did the Hero Twins survive?”
“They didn’t,” she said. “They cut themselves into pieces, then restored themselves.”
Isa frowned.
“Agricultural demigods.”
“Vegetative regeneration,” Isa said. “Not that it helps me much.”
“There is a door,” she said. Her voice had deepened, become more resonant. Heads came up across the room. Eyes turned in their direction. The woman’s tattoo, speaking through her.
“Hail, Kukulcan. I have no offering with which to honor your aspect.” If the spirit enlivening the tattoo really was some tiny fragment of a god, Isa would be respectful. If playing to the spirit’s ego gave her further information about what was happening and why—she’d play along.
The woman inclined her head, though Isa doubted seriously that she had control of her body at the moment.
“Lack is the nature of this place.”
Isa nodded.
“There is a door between worlds.”
There were many doors between many worlds, but at the moment, only one concerned her. And which mattered to Living Ink throughout Western Washington. “Yes.”
“If it opens, it will destroy us. The fifth age has ended, as the counting of my people foretold. But what would come through that door would erase the people of this world as if they had never been. The sixth age would die aborning. Humankind. Every creature of the earth, sea, and sky. Not even the gods would survive the dismantling of this age.”
He was talking about Uriel.
Did Murmur’s nemesis have so much power that he could destroy this world? How did she fight that?
“So the gods of the dead are trying to stop me from locking the door?”
“Their greed for blood and death and suffering knows no bounds. It is possible. Or. It is possible even their rotting hearts know the fear of their unmaking. This test you face. This cold. It spans realities. Learn its shape. Understand its depths and its extent and its limits. Find your own thereby. Knowledge is the only power.”
“No, it isn’t,” she surprised herself by saying. “Love is power, too. Of a different kind.”
Kukulcan inclined his host’s head, and then rose and walked away, retreating to the far side of the room, where the woman burrowed beneath a pile of blankets shared by four other women.
Behind the barracks, a coyote sang a song of loneliness and longing.
“Hello, Joseph.”
Delicate, barely audible claws scraped the metal behind her head.
“Henry.”
Isa lifted an eyebrow, waiting for the final shoe to drop.
Raven cackle-coughed outside the door.
“Ruth. How am I supposed to go to Navajo land,” Isa muttered, flopping back into bed and hauling pitiful blankets up over her shoulder, “while I’m trapped in this frozen containment camp?”
Silence settled on the barracks, drifting against her back like a blanket of snow.
She’d always heard that it was dangerous to fall asleep in the snow—that the cold would steal away body heat until you didn’t feel the cold anymore. You’d feel warm and heavy and sleepy. And if you succumbed to that false siren song of wonderful, druggy warmth, you’d lie down in the snow to sleep and never wake up.
If that held true, she was perfectly safe. Her fingers cracked and popped when she bent them. So did her toes. Based on the constant pain in them, she’d taken to examining them for the pasty white evidence of frostbite each morning.
Her blankets might have had more effect if she’d had any body heat for them to insulate. As it was, as far as Isa could tell, they only radiated chill back to her.
Either she slept and dreamed, or she slid beneath the frozen crust of vision.
She stood on the desert sand surrounded by sage and pinyon. Save that the plants were twisted in thick, impenetrable ice. Hoar frost crackled beneath her shifting weight. Even the rocks wore growing coats of ice. Like a time-lapse film recording the onset of winter in the Arctic, ice climbed the brush and the trees as Isa watched, entombing the limbs.
A rangy jackrabbit, back legs still half coiled in the act of springing away, flash-froze into a feature-perfect ice sculpture.
Before her, beneath a foot of solid ice shot through with white inclusions, a fawn lay, her spots smeared with blood and gore, her stomach ripped open, and partially eaten. The single brown eye Isa could see was wide. So was her mouth. Frozen in terror-stricken death throes.
Isa’s breath, when she finally got it, sobbed into her chest. The cold plunged knives into her body from inside her lungs.
Too late, she noticed the ice had claimed her feet and ankles in hard-cased shackles. Freezing tendrils reached up her legs and torso, climbing inexorably for her heart.
Lifting her face, Isa sucked in the breath to scream.
Ice drove down her throat.
Above, the constellation of Orion twinkled in the black winter sky.
A tsunami of fresh green leaves slammed her out of nightmare. Out of bed entirely.
Isa hit damp concrete, still tangled in her blankets, breathing as if she’d only just remembered she ought to be.
On the far side of the barracks, someone groaned.
Apparently, she wasn’t the only one suffering bad dreams.
She sat up and fought off the useless wool encasing h
er.
Another surge of green rolled over and through her. A desperate, nails on a chalkboard scream of sandy beige power followed.
The two energy streams, one green, one the color of beach sand, lodged in her gut clinging in alien terror to her viscera, afraid to let go.
Magic.
Isa gasped.
More than magic. Live Ink going critical.
She leaped to frozen feet, spent a precious second retrieving the two pieces of stasis paper she’d been allowed to keep because no one knew what they were, and bolted out the door, following the line of pain and sorrow wrapping twin fists around her organs.
She emerged into the lavender light of early morning. The soldier who usually stood guard on the barracks sprinted toward the line of buildings beside the gate.
Quarantine.
Isa followed.
Even in full body armor, and weighed down by a rifle, the soldier ran faster than Isa did. Isa plowed through the door of the quarantine building to shouts of “Halt!” and slid to a stop facing three wide-eyed soldiers staring from her to the barred metal containment door.
“Open it!” Isa ordered. “I can stop what’s happening!”
Inside the barred room, someone screamed.
The two men and one woman stared at her, no comprehension in their faces. One of the young men hefted his weapon higher.
“Open the damned door!”
A cacophony of color and panic-stricken magic erupted from behind the door. It drove her to one knee.
The sandy beige thread of magic lost its grip on her gut. It flickered out.
Choking on horror, Isa forced herself to her feet and threw herself at the containment door. She’d expected to be intercepted and thrown back. Instead, she hit the door and heaved on the bar blocking it.
It was padlocked in place.
“They’re dying!”
“Step away from that door! That’s an order!”
“They’re dying!” Isa snarled into the face of the nearest soldier. “Needlessly! I can stop it! Open the fucking door!”
One of the young men grabbed her arm and pulled her bodily away.
She landed in the middle of the concrete, already gathering determination for another round.
He pointed his rifle at her face.
Sobbing, she clapped her hands over her ears as if that could block out the screams of terror and the fountains of panicked magic ripping through her.
The door to the quarantine center, the same one she’d come through, burst open on a roar of rage that echoed the one shrieking in her heart.
Shouted warnings to stop, calm down, broke off in cries of pain, and the rattling thud of soldiers in armor hitting the ground.
“Open the door. Now!” The bellow was pure Murmur. No hint of Daniel’s physicality hampered the command.
“Stand down!” a younger man’s voice countered, shaking. “Stand down or we’ll shoot!”
Murmur roared.
Terror poured into the empty space inside Isa. She rocketed to her feet before she realized she intended to interfere.
Pure, black rage pounded out of him in waves strong enough to rock her on her heels. Four soldiers, thin, reedy-looking striplings, clung to Murmur. He snarled. His eyes glowed emerald. Darkness poured from his fingers, pooling around his feet, swarming up his legs as if hell itself were rising to reclaim him. Shadowed wings enshrouded the body Murmur wore.
Isa gasped. It was Murmur’s true form emerging from Daniel’s body. Why? Was he losing his grip on the body? Or would his magic always follow the pathway of his original shape?
Multiple voices shouted at Murmur to freeze. As the voices grew shriller, one of the soldiers beside her shouldered the butt of his rifle.
“No!” Isa threw herself at Murmur.
Tan-and-khaki uniforms flew across the room. The building shuddered with the impact as the soldiers who’d been attempting to restrain Murmur hit the metal walls.
She wrapped around the body he inhabited. “Stop. Stop it. Please.”
Murmur stumbled. Seething, choking magic twined around her chest and throat. For a split second, it tried to fling her away, too.
He growled.
Isa tightened her grip and breathed in the superheated ebony. Where it belonged. Motes of gold exploded like fireworks within her core, celebrating the return of his dark magic.
She sent the sparks out through her hands, into him.
His breath caught. He faltered. Arms, human arms without talons or webbed wings, circled her, and he shuddered.
“Stop,” Isa begged. “Please, stop.”
Shaking, he dropped to his knees in the middle of the floor with her still clinging to him. He settled back to sit on his heels, hauling her tight against him so that she straddled his lap.
It had to look indecent.
She didn’t care. She wrapped her legs around him, too. Anything to make the soldiers think twice about shooting either or both of them. If they even gave a damn.
“They’re dying,” he spat.
“I know,” she said. “These people don’t care.”
“Then they die, too.”
His ink black magic surged. Outraged golden light erupted inside her in answer to his anger.
He’d taught her to heal.
Isa did not want to know he could teach her to kill. She’d done enough of that already in her life.
Someone chambered a round.
The metallic sound pierced her already trembling heart.
“Stop it!” she shrilled at the soldiers. “I’ve got him. I’ve got him.”
She released him long enough to cup his face in shaking hands so she could meet those eyes where rage and magic boiled, building pressure like lava in a magma chamber.
Her ears popped as she dropped beneath the surface of his gaze. Weight settled on her ribs and a deep, bass rumble filled her ears.
“If they shoot you,” Isa murmured to him, “in this form, you’ll die.”
He stared at her.
The sense of pressure increased.
Isa couldn’t breathe.
“There will be a time and a place to avenge them,” she wheezed. “This isn’t it.”
He sagged and closed his eyes.
Air slammed into her cold lungs. She gulped in a deliberate breath and held it, hoping to ease the painful thunder of her heartbeat.
He touched his forehead to hers.
“One day,” he murmured, “you will test me and I will fail.”
He wasn’t talking about nearly getting himself killed.
“I can survive your rage.”
“You know nothing of my rage.”
“Murmur,” Isa whispered for his ears only, “you were turning.”
He froze.
“Ma’am? Sir? You’re under arrest,” one of the soldiers said. “Any further, unauthorized use of magic will result in the use of deadly force.”
Isa swiped moisture from her cheeks by rubbing her face against either sleeve of her dusty coat. It only smeared.
Whatever had happened in quarantine, it was over.
Only damning silence met her magical—no. Not quite silence. Isa sighed.
“The rogue Ink is dead,” she said. Her voice sounded dull. Flat. Accusing. “And you have a survivor.”
Chapter Ten
The death rattle of another round being chambered beside Isa’s ear brought her hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“It isn’t magic! It’s—another sense. I can’t shut it off! And your containment unit doesn’t contain.”
Murmur cleared his throat and looked at the soldier.
The muzzle of the rifle wavered.
“May we ground? It will reduce the stray energy running around the room,” he said. “Your weapons are far
less likely to malfunction.”
The comment kicked her in the gut. Did he have that power? To make their weapons misfire? Force bullets astray? Had Isa mistakenly, in her desperation to protect him, doomed the people, and the tattoos, in quarantine to a messy death?
Fragile emotional equilibrium shattered. She covered her face with her hands and broke down crying like she hadn’t since childhood. Like she’d gone to great lengths to assure she’d never, ever cry again.
Murmur wrapped a hand in her greasy, knotted hair, and drew her into his chest.
She assumed the soldier answered in the affirmative, though she couldn’t hear him above the noise of her own guilt and grief.
Murmur set light fingertips against the scar on her throat. Magic twined into her.
It settled into the scar on her psyche. Warm. Welcome. The first tender shoots of spring flowers heralding the end of an ice age. It did more to soothe the sorrow wracking her than any words of comfort could have.
Rule eleven: Never assume you know everything about how magic works.
Her breath settled into a hiccoughing shudder. She slumped, spent, and dropped her hands from her swollen face.
“Ground,” he murmured at her ear.
She didn’t want to. Not if it meant losing that sense of him inside.
“Isa.”
The word resonated. It sounded like more than Murmur’s voice. Was that the caw of a distant crow? Or a raven.
Fine.
Closing her eyes, she drew every mote of golden fire into her core.
Even though he wasn’t a part of her anymore, Murmur’s power flowed around her, past her, caressing as it went as he pulled his power into his center.
The sense of him inside her being remained strong. Isa drew a breath deep into her lungs. It tasted faintly sweet. A little like hope.
“Now,” he said.
She exhaled magic down, through the base of her spine, into the earth.
He did the same.
“Wow,” a woman’s voice muttered.
“You can feel that?” one of the men demanded, a blade of accusation tucked into the question.
“Can’t you, Tulsca? Or too brain dead?” the woman said. “Sensing stuff isn’t a crime, asshole.”
Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) Page 13
