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

tattoo’s cords. Cast adrift, raging and afraid, it had fed the place its host had once filled with the blood and magic of innocent bystanders. Staring into one of the dimming yellow-green eyes, Isa shifted to set the fingers of one hand on one of its snouts.
    Her physical body, still pillowed on crumbled steel, registered the move with a flash of agonized protest. In the etheric, she channeled regret to the creature.
    It had been worse than a rabid dog.
    She couldn’t restore its host. The tattoo’s host had been its first victim. A picture of a giant man with silvering black hair and a round, weathered face with brown eyes that scrunched nearly closed when he smiled popped into her brain with such intensity that she flinched. She gasped in both worlds.
    The hydra keened, begging for its host, for the one person who could have restored the tattoo to wholeness.
    Sadness lodged a spiked lump in Isa’s throat. Her heart hurt. It had to be destroyed. She’d have to be the one to kill it. Why then, even though he was gone, did she hear Murmur’s voice accusing her of murder?
    Would he have had a different solution? A way to reverse the death toll? To render the creature innocent of the horror it had visited upon countless families?
    Isa choked on a sob and drew up power until the inside of her circle glowed so brightly it blinded her magic sight. Spending a little excess energy, she folded a sense of comfort she didn’t feel into the glow, hoping to soothe the hydra, if only a little.
    Before she killed the soul enlivening the Ink.
    Had it come into this world the way Murmur had? Willingly? Or had it been ripped from another life in another place in order to become a Live Tattoo in this one?
    “Blessed may you be,” she breathed to it. “Be now all that you’ve ever—” She couldn’t get the words out. Her throat closed.
    She couldn’t spare the hydra. Or herself. The only mercy she had to offer was a quick, clean death.
    Get on with it, Isa.
    The hydra’s mourning keen hiccoughed. Power ran in ripples and surges through the hydra, ebbing and flowing as the binding ink tangled in the matrix supporting the creature’s spirit.
    Isa eased compassion into the monster while she sucked power into her ethereal body. It gathered behind her ribs, building. Isa flashed her cold, winter sunshine power into a weapon. She drove it in a beam down her arm. Magic she’d stored in the binding ink when she’d brewed it rose in recognition from within the hydra’s body to meet the weapon she shoved down the hydra’s gullet.
    The creature shrieked.
    Isa drove the spear of energy deep into the hydra’s body. Living Tattoos didn’t have a physical heart, but they did have a metaphorical one. The artist who’d done the art, who’d originally brought the hydra into being, had anchored the tattoo with spells. Those spells hid deep within the matrix of Ink and magic that made up the hydra.
    Binding ink wound around the power branching out from the roots and trunk of those spells.
    Over the hydra’s pleading cries and thrashing magical assaults, she stabbed her weapon hard into the heart of the creature’s making. With a whispered apology, Isa blew the spear apart.
    The hydra died, blown out of existence by her hand. Its final pleading scream reverberated over and over inside the place where Murmur had once been. Her heart tripped and fell.
    Spell shrapnel, the hydra’s, her own, ripped her etheric skin.
    Cold tears wet her face. It took several seconds to summon the power to step sideways into the regular world.
    Several things hit the moment Isa fell back into her physical body. The sun had gone down. Icy rain spattered her face, washing away salt tears.
    Pain ravaged her.
    At some point in the proceedings, she’d opened her physical eyes. When they struggled into focus and she managed to lift her head, she saw the mangled, bloody mess of her left leg. She couldn’t hold her head up. Her head banged against the hood of the