Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) by Marcella Burnard Read Free Book Online

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 . . .
    She hadn’t spilled anything.
    Self-preservation popped a weak, flickering shield into existence beneath the surface of her awareness. It shoved back the icy onslaught of loss that left her shuddering and weeping in both worlds.
    Isa gasped and opened her eyes on the ethereal plain.
    The hydra, wracked by ripples of color-negating binding ink, sank to what passed for ground in this incorporeal place. The tattoo wheezed and shrank to the size of a mammoth. It stretched three of its heads out in a beseeching gesture that froze Isa’s breath.
    It replayed what had happened, seeking to comprehend.
    Pure silver light had sliced the tattoo from its host.
    Horror jolted Isa.
Again?
That radiant silver power had belonged to Daniel’s tattoo, the malevolent angel who’d wanted unfettered access to Isa’s world so he could consume it.
    It couldn’t be true. That monster had fallen through the portal between the worlds. She’d slammed the door shut on him. He couldn’t still be in this world prying Live Ink from people. He couldn’t.
    But the hydra
had
come loose. It showed her the silver magic that had cut the