Chapter One
Funny how longing for something you can’t have gets blown away in the first swirl of snowflakes heralding an oncoming blizzard. Or by something as innocuous as a cell phone buzzing in a pocket, like Isa Romanchzyk’s was doing as she stared at the thin strip of slate-colored sky above the brick and sandstone buildings outside of her tattoo shop.
She retrieved the phone.
Caller ID said “Corvane.” Detective Steve Corvane. Seattle Police Department.
“Steve. Please tell me this is a social call.”
“Sorry, Isa,” Steve said. He sounded strained. “Are you at the shop?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sending a case your way. The guards are en route. I am, too.”
Uh-oh. “What have we got?”
“Live Ink going rogue on a two-hundred-eighty-pound lifer.”
Steve’s way of saying he’d sent a hardened criminal being driven insane by his Live Ink into the shop for evaluation and an involuntary bind of said Ink.
“Okay.” She locked the front door, flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED at midday, and turned off the neon OPEN sign.
“They’ll bring him to the basement door in the back alley,” Steve said. “He’s in a bad way. I put in a call to the paramedics.”
Misgiving drove a chill through her.
“I appreciate that. Headed downstairs,” she said, pausing in the threshold of the scratched, black metal door that separated the basement from the light and day-to-day life of the upper world.
Her piercing artist, Nathalie, had plastered the shop side of the door with fliers for indie bands Isa had never heard of until she’d hired the younger woman. The riot of color and block print had started peeling.
She clattered down the narrow concrete steps and into the brick and cement basement, where she’d built a room specifically for containing and grounding magic work.
“I’m ready,” she said into the cell phone.
“Thanks,” Steve said, relief in his raspy, outdoorsman’s voice. “I owe you.”
The line went dead.
Isa pocketed the phone, then unlocked and lifted the metal bar from the steel door set in the far basement wall. Once upon a time, it might have been a coal chute or a supply door of some kind. When she’d leased the place, the management company had said the door had been enlarged to accommodate fire codes during an earthquake retrofit. The entire building had the exposed steel I-beams to prove it had been updated to earthquake standards.
A strong gust of icy wind nudged the dull gray door. It creaked open on the grimy alley. Dark clouds turned the day to twilight at noon. Wind rattled in the open door. She shivered. A plastic water bottle clattered down the broken, pitted concrete.
She switched on the computer standing outside the thick, nonconductive metal door of the containment studio. Poking her head in through the open doorway, she checked the three security cameras bolted into the metal-lined ceiling. Ready lights winked as the system came online.
She’d searched long and hard to find a storefront with a basement that allowed for a huge metal cage that could be anchored into the earth. Then she’d brought nonreactive basalt blocks in to line the outside of the cage. Nathalie called the stone and metal room the “Magic Microwave.” It was a good concept, though the room contained and concentrated magic rather than ultra-short wave radiation.
Engines grumbling, the crunch of tires in potholes, and muffled screaming announced the prisoner’s arrival.
Isa flicked on the studio’s overhead lights, arranged the recliner bolted into the basalt blocks of the floor into a flat table, and swept a drape over it.
Footsteps pounded into the basement.
“Ms. Romanchzyk?” a male voice bellowed.
“In here.”
A man with thinning blond hair, hazel eyes, and a patch of freckles across his nose filled the doorway of the studio. He gripped his still holstered gun hard enough to turn his knuckles white. “Victor Talles from the Federal Detention Center. Detective Steve Corvane sent us.”
“He called,” she said, nodding. “He’s on his way, but I’m ready if you’re comfortable getting started.”
“I think we’d better.” He withdrew and said, “Bring him.”
Hard soles clattered on stone. A car door opened.
The muffled screams grew louder and shriller.
From the rattle of metal and the skid of rubber soles on concrete, it sounded like they had to drag the prisoner into the building. His cries, contained by the rock walls, resolved into a hoarse blend of pain and terror.
A sick shiver traced up her esophagus. She swallowed hard.
Two burly officers, one of them Victor, wrestled the handcuffed and shackled man into the studio.
Catching a glimpse of his face, Isa gasped. Her heart tripped into staccato triple time.
Red-tinged foam formed on the man’s lips. His eyes rolled back into his head. Only the bloodshot whites showed. Over his ribs on the left side, the prisoner’s orange jumpsuit bore a dark, wet stain.
His escort forced him to the table and clipped his steel manacle wires into the eyebolts embedded in the basalt floor. They tied down his legs in a similar fashion before they stepped back, breathing hard and wiping sweat from their faces. Their uniforms bore the stains of the prisoner’s blood.
The reek of his acrid terror and metallic blood tasted sharp on her tongue. She’d never seen, much less treated, someone so strung out on Ink.
A quiver of panic pinched her breath. “I need those paramedics.”
The door to the alley thudded closed.
“ETA five minutes,” Detective Corvane replied from the doorway. He had to yell to be heard above the shrieks reverberating around the room.
Warm relief spilled into her. Steve had recruited her to be his Live Ink consultant two years ago. She knew how he worked. She could count on him. The panic riding her diminished.
“Talles,” Steve said, gesturing at the studio door. “The monitor right outside the door is set up for live feed.”
The big guys backed out of the room as one.
“Steve, the tattoo’s already bleeding. Can you help me get this jumpsuit cut open?” she jerked her chin at the thrashing prisoner.
Steve tossed her a surprised look.
She’d never asked for help before.
He leaped into action, brandishing his pocketknife.
Isa grabbed a pair of gloves then tossed the box to him.
He caught it with one hand and fumbled for a pair of gloves.
She pulled on hers and grabbed her obsidian knife from her altar. Pulse fluttering in her veins, she mentally begged her long-gone teachers’ forgiveness for using a ritual knife for something as mundane as cutting fabric. She prayed she wouldn’t snap the volcanic glass blade.
The prisoner moaned. His body arched as if he sought to throw himself from the table.
Taking hold of his collar, she sliced through the fabric underneath, baring most of his torso.
Steve sawed open the arms, then went to work on the left waistband to give her better access.
“Damned glad to see you,” she told him. “Not happy about the circumstances.”
“Right there with you,” he grunted, affording her a brief, lopsided smile.
Isa focused on the prisoner.
Blood welled up in a pink froth from a hole in his left side. The wound exposed two red-smeared ribs. A whiff of charred meat hit her. As she watched, the flesh around the wound bubbled and cracked as if being burned. A green, gold, and red Ink dragon bared its sharp, gore-caked teeth and turned its head from where it had been tattooed across the man’s lower rib cage.
The tattoo looked her in the eye.
Seething rage slammed into her.
She rocked back on her heels and smelled her hair burning.
She looked up at Steve’s pale, pinched expression as he stared without comprehension at the man’s wounds.
“Go!” she bellowed, summoning power to shield. The man’s Live Ink was killing him—draining him of life and chewing its way free of his body as it did so. “It’s going critical!”
Even she heard the shrill note of terror in her voice. She’d never dealt with anything like this. Until now, she’d only heard about the possibility of Live Ink consuming its host.
Steve hesitated, concern in the frown he turned upon her.
“I can’t shield us both,” she said.
His gray eyes widened. He found his feet then and scrambled out, pulling the heavy metal door closed behind him.
The toneless clang of its closing reverberated around and around the stone studio.
Everyone outside would be safe.
Turning back, she reached deep within, tapping the core of magic that ran through her like a fathomless, shimmering river. Golden warmth and the scent of sage washed away the stench of blood and fear.
She raced for her equipment, sloshing binding ink onto her jeans in her haste to begin destroying the creature of magic and Ink tattooed across the man’s diaphragm.
On the heels of a rattling wheeze of a shriek, he suddenly fell silent.
Isa spun to stare at him.
He convulsed and then arched so hard against his bonds, she heard the dry-twig snap of bone breaking.
Her nerveless fingers opened. The crystal bottle of binding ink shattered at her feet.
The man’s tattoo ripped free of his body.
Hot droplets stinking of copper pennies and old meat slapped her face.
The magic-enlivened Ink resolved into a stylized Asian dragon. Needle-sharp teeth and claws. No wings. Hot, fetid breath.
Her patient’s body slumped lifeless to the table. Blood and binding ink mingled in puddles on the floor.
The dragon charged.
She’d shielded. Within the confines of a containment cage, no one’s stray magical construct should be able to touch her.
The thing breathed fire.
Isa smelled her cotton sweater scorching, but her shield shunted most of the assault harmlessly into the basalt floor. And while her attention focused on the breath attack, the creature hooked its claws deep into her thigh.
Isa screamed.
Desolation cascaded through her.
It wasn’t hers. It made her heart hurt nevertheless. She gasped at the dual pain of magic talons embedded in her leg and the creature’s sorrow shredding her heart.
For a long second, Isa stared into the dragon’s glittering gold eyes, stunned by the sheer beauty of the creature.
The gold dulled as the dragon absorbed the magic and life force that had gone into its creation.
Isa expected it to feed on her blood and life force then.
The dragon flexed its claws in her flesh as if preparing to do just that.
They shrieked in unison.
Inexplicably, the creature retracted its claws and let go.
Her shield collapsed. The power she’d used to form it snapped back at her like a stretched rubber band, bruising, stinging on more than a physical level. Her vision went fuzzy. She fell.
Clang.
The noise rolled around inside her head as if waiting for her to place it, but for two long seconds, the ring of metal on metal made no sense.
Then it hit her.
The door.
Someone was breaching containment.
Panic shoved adrenaline through shock. She propped herself up on one forearm and reached as if she could bar the door from where she lay.
“No!” she shouted. “Don’t open the door!”
“Isa!” Steve roared. He bolted into the studio.
The dragon issued a cry.
Isa clapped her hands to her head to keep her skull from splintering.
The Ink of the dragon’s making, sucked dry of magic and life energy, exploded in a glittering rainbow of dust. Invisible now to anyone but another magic user, the dragon swarmed past Steve and out the door.
A frigid blast of dry air suggested that someone had opened the basement door again. The dragon was free.
Blanching, Steve stopped dead.
Even if he could no longer see the dragon, he’d clearly felt the magic brush past his definition of reality.
He glanced over his shoulder at the open door. When he turned his gray eyes back to her, dread colored his scowl.
“Something bad just happened, didn’t it?”
Isa closed her eyes at his understatement and dropped her head to rest on her forearm.
“Pattaja!” he hollered out the door. “Get the paramedics in here!”
His footsteps approached. She heard the shoosh of fabric as he crouched beside her. The heat of his hand hovered above her shoulder. Before he could touch her, the remnants of magic in her system arced between them. He pulled back and cleared his throat. “Are you okay?”
She lifted her head to meet his gaze. “I will be.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Yes.”
He looked around, his eyes wild until they settled on the dead man on the table. “What happened?”
“His Ink killed him and then came for me.”
A pair of paramedics, snow melting on their coats, rushed into the studio, medical equipment Isa couldn’t identify in their hands. They went for to the man on her table, slowing as they ascertained that the corpse was beyond help.
They turned then to her.
Staring, Steve’s jaw flexed as if he’d braced himself. “A bit of magical Ink poked bloody holes in your leg?”
“It did.”
“And?”
“It’s out there now. In the world.”
“Because I opened the door?”
“Yes.”
“I heard you scream and saw you go down. I thought—” He broke off and blew out a shallow breath.
“Can you get the department’s magic trackers out after it? While the trail is fresh?”
“Good idea.” Steve nodded. “What happens if we don’t find it?”
“If I can’t find it and bind it, people die.”
Chapter Two
Waiting amidst the shouting, the swearing, and, at one point, the football toss going on over the tops of far too many heads, Isa sat beside Steve’s desk. The state patrol had closed both floating bridges. The storm had dropped a foot of snow in the past three hours and turned the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct into a three ring circus of police officers who couldn’t patrol the city.
Steve had propped her bandaged, throbbing left leg on a board laid across the top of a trash can and then gone in search of coffee. She doubted he’d find any worth drinking.
She leaned in and picked up the photo of Steve’s smiling parents and doe-eyed sister. Running a fingertip down the raised knot work on the frame, she smiled back. She liked Steve’s desk. It was peaceful. Something about it, either his penchant for tidiness or more likely the man himself, erected a wall of serenity.
She envied him the evidence of family, of connection. As much as Isa valued the peace Steve seemed to impart, however, she didn’t want to spend the day camped beside his desk.
Replacing the photo carefully, she sat back. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose hard. The headache that had settled in behind her eyes refused to subside.
The desolation she’d picked up from the dragon lingered behind her sternum, hunched and uncomfortable. It resolved into homesickness.
Definitely not hers.
It had to have come either from the dragon or from the man it had killed, Mr. Kelli Solvang. She doubted a dead man could suffer homesickness. That left the dragon.
Why hadn’t it killed her?
She should be out there with Steve’s trackers searching for it. While the dragon wouldn’t be interested in people without magic, anyone with enough power to see the rogue Ink would be vulnerable once the thing got hungry for another dose of blood and magic.
Approaching footsteps alerted her to Steve’s return, hopefully with the coffee he’d promised.
“Isa. What happened?”
The fluid, warm baritone jolted awareness straight through her core. Her eyes flew open. She jerked upright. The move pulled over the trash can. Her left foot hit the floor. Pain stabbed through her leg, wringing a squeak of protest from her throat.
Not Steve.
Tall, dark, and lithe Daniel Alvarez stood before her, his expensive-looking black suit crisp and perfect. Not a spot of lint. No beaded moisture to hint that he’d come in from the storm. No flakes of melting snow lingered in his gleaming black hair.
Graceless, pulse hammering in her ears, she struggled to her feet and rubbed suddenly damp palms on the sweat pants she’d managed to pull on over the thick bandage after the paramedics had cut her jeans from her wounded leg.
“Daniel.”
He smiled, crinkling the corners of his pale blue eyes.
“What are you doing here?”
“Detective Corvane called and left a convoluted message about prisoners and Live Ink. Are you going to answer my question?”
“What happened?” Isa repeated, trying to ignore feeling like a grubby five-year-old next to his polished good looks. “The police brought me a guy strung out on his Ink.”
“They waited too long and his tattoo killed him?” Daniel finished.
“The Ink escaped,” she said. “You needed to know.”
He stared at her, disbelief in the furrows between his brows. “Escaped?”
Hot blood rushed to her face. She could have prevented the escape. Should have.
Daniel took her by the shoulders.
Sparks showered through her blood.
“It tore through your circle?” Pity stretched his frown and strained his rich voice thin.
Poor little Isa, scraping the bottom of the magic barrel. Maybe she deserved his pity. She should have erected a circle before assessing the prisoner. She just wasn’t certain it would have changed anything if she had. The Ink had gone critical so fast.
Daniel’s power seeped into her. It took a very long time for his jagged, yellow and red energy to hit bottom inside.
“Either you’re spent or we’re mellowing,” he noted, meeting her gaze, humor in his own.
Isa’s breath caught. How she wished she could believe they’d become compatible. “Spent. The dragon attacked me . . .”
“You’re injured,” he said in the same instant, his voice sharpening. His grip tightened.
“It’s minor,” she protested.
“Magical attacks are never what they seem, Isa. Even you know that,” he snapped.
Maybe she wasn’t spent after all. At his words and the tone that suggested she might be an idiot, her own power, warm and golden, boiled up along with anger.
Where her power connected with his, the energies flared and ignited, draining them both. He released her and stepped back, his face impassive.
“Stop this and come work for me,” he said, smoothing out his voice with easy charm. “I care what happens to you.”
“Work for you?” she echoed in shock. Sure. Since they’d been students together at Weird Ink before their mentor, Triple J, had retired, Daniel had talked about the two of them having a place together. That had been before they’d become lovers and discovered that their respective powers were incompatible. Destructive, even. If he’d forgotten, the stinging sparks they’d just thrown at one another should have kicked him right in the memory.
How did that translate into working for him?
“I have more business than I can handle,” he said. His soothing tone suggested she was being unreasonable. “You have a unique and valuable skill set.”
“We can’t work together, Daniel,” Isa retorted. “My magic. Your magic. They don’t play well together, remember?”
“We worked together as apprentices.”
They hadn’t. Not really. He’d reveled in being in the spotlight, soaking up praise and attention. She’d lurked in the shadows. She still did.
“I have a shop, thanks.”
“One that barely makes enough money for you to eat,” he snapped. “In a filthy, run-down part of town that’s likely to collapse the next time a cement truck rumbles past.”
“I do fine.”
He raised an eyebrow. In a low voice, pitched only for her, he said, “How is it fine that you destroy what other artists create, Isa? It can’t be all you’re good for.”
“It saves lives.”
As if she hadn’t said a thing, he said, “How long would you ‘do fine’ if it became common knowledge that you don’t have a single tattoo? No one wants ink of any kind from someone who doesn’t have it.”
Her hands curled into fists. “You have no idea whether I have ink—”
“You forget I’ve seen and possessed every inch of that sweet body,” he interrupted.
Activity around them had quieted and slowed. Cops and their instincts? Or had their voices risen enough to be overheard?
“It’s been five years since you’ve seen anything other than my middle finger, Alvarez,” she said. “You have no idea what kind of ink I have.”
His jaw bunched. He closed his right hand around her biceps tight enough to bruise. “You will be mine. One way. Or another.”
“What?” Isa flinched and caught a faint whiff of sulfur. Ice tumbled down her innards as she stared at him. Someone—or something—else glared out at her from Daniel’s eyes.
“Mr. Alvarez,” Steve hailed in an easy-going, defuse-the-tension-at-all-costs tone of voice.
Every last hint of that something else in Daniel’s demeanor vanished. His grip loosened. His expression turned from cold stone to a warm, affable smile.
Confusion rocked her. Had she imagined that glimpse of—what? What had she seen? Could she trust her senses after watching a man’s Ink kill him on the table in her basement?
“We hadn’t meant to drag you out in this weather,” Steve went on, striding in behind her and plunking a paper cup filled with coffee on his desk.
A woman with her blond hair cut in a short bob, clad in a charcoal business suit and no nonsense black pumps, accompanied him, eying Daniel and then Isa.
“Since you’re here,” Steve said, filling the silence, “would you mind having a look at a few photographs for us? Do you know this man?”
Daniel released Isa to accept the printed photo Steve held out to him and then shook his head before handing the photo back. “No. I don’t. Do you have a photograph of his artwork from before this incident?”
The woman gave him a smaller photo.
“I’d need a better shot of the artwork before I could say anything about who might have done the work,” Daniel said. He shrugged and pasted a smile on his face.
To anyone else, it would look genuine. Isa knew better. Though the corners of his eyes crinkled as if the smile were real, his cool blue eyes didn’t warm the way they would if he’d meant it. The way they used to after the two of them had spent the night together.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help,” he said. “Come on, Isa. Let me get your coat. I’ll take you home.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Romanchzyk.” Steve laid on the “public relations” voice. “We need that statement. This is Anne Macquarie from the local branch of the Acts of Magic Bureau of Investigations office. She’ll be leading the joint task force investigating Mr. Solvang’s death.”
Isa nodded.
“Where’s your lawyer, Isa?” Daniel inquired.
“I’m a witness,” she countered. “Not a suspect.”
“That’s right,” Anne Macquarie responded, so quickly that it tripped Isa’s internal alarms.
She raised an eyebrow at Steve.
He wouldn’t meet her eye.
“I have a few questions for Ms. Romanchzyk,” the agent said. “Then I guarantee the department will see her home. We have a vested interest in her safety.”
Still uncertain about what she’d sensed in Daniel, Isa had no intention of getting into a car with him. She’d rather answer AMBI questions. Not that she’d let him know that. She needed the scraps of flat ink business he sometimes tossed her.
“I appreciate you coming in, Daniel,” Isa said. “I need to hunt down that dragon and find a way to contain it. If you have suggestions or if you hear anything . . .”
“I will contact you immediately,” he said, taking her hand. He lifted it to his lips in a gesture so old-fashioned she had to suppress a snort.
Isa didn’t like the anticipation that fluttered through her lower belly at the contact.
He released her and strode away without a backward glance.
Abruptly exhausted, she sank into her chair. She wrapped her arms around her ribs. It didn’t help. Nothing changed.
A man was still dead.
His tattoo had escaped her so-called containment studio.
Daniel still walked away.
The ache in her leg and in her head redoubled. “Got any whiskey for that coffee?”
“Not unless I raid the evidence room. You all right?” Steve asked.
Isa shot a look between the two of them. The detective and the AMBI agent. “You tell me.”
The agent planted her palms on Steve’s desk and leaned in. “Ms. Romanchzyk . . .” She stumbled over the name and paused.
“Romanchzyk,” Steve said, “rhymes with romantic.”
Isa rubbed her forehead.
“We keep an eye on Live Ink artists,” she said. “And it hasn’t escaped our notice that you seem to have contact with some interesting people. Gangs members. Criminals. Organized crime.”
“Precious few of the last,” Isa acknowledged, picking up her coffee and gulping a huge mouthful of the steaming liquid. After a close encounter with Daniel Alvarez, she needed the fortification. “Organized crime types don’t go to hacks for Live Ink. They can afford someone who knows what they’re doing. Ink rarely goes bad on those guys.”
“Not to mention the accountability of being the artist whose Live Ink tried to kill a mobster?” Steve interjected.
“Not to mention I serve the people who come through my door, no questions asked because I bind Live Ink,” Isa said. “That makes me neutral territory. Anyone who comes to see me while wearing Live Ink comes in knowing they’re losing control of what amounts to a loaded weapon.”
“I don’t question the service you provide, Ms. Romanchzyk,” Anne Macquarie said. “I question whether it puts you in contact with someone who might have paid you to delay saving a material witness in a federal organized crime case.”
Isa sat bolt upright and nearly spilled her coffee. “I didn’t know anything about your witness until he showed up bleeding in my studio. Hell, I was halfway across the room trying to get my gear when he died.”
“Why don’t we take care of your statement? We can address specific questions from there,” Steve said. He pulled out his chair, sat down, signed into his computer, and called up the forms. “Go ahead, Isa. Whenever you’re ready.”
She swallowed another swig of bitter coffee. The headache seemed to appreciate the influx of caffeine. She sketched the sequence of events.
Anne Macquarie stood behind Steve’s desk, frowning over Isa’s point-by-point recitation, until Isa crossed her arms and sat back in her chair.
“Do you know Nikolai Vladimirovich Vasilyev?” the agent demanded.
“The real estate guy who’s buying up vacant lots in Seattle?” Isa clarified, and then shrugged. “I know of him. From the news.”
“From the news,” Anne echoed.
Scowling, Isa waited for a follow-up question or accusation.
It didn’t come.
“If you’re suggesting that Mr. Solvang was turning against Vasilyev, I’ll ask if the whole Russian mob thing isn’t a little trite by now,” Isa said. She turned a frown on Steve. “Are we done here?
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