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

car.
    Shouts sounded nearby along with the racket of someone pounding on something. Steve. It had to be Steve trying to get to her. The persistent
thud, thud
felt as if whatever was being hit was attached to her. Isa’s skull rang with each impact.
    She whimpered.
    Her containment circle collapsed.
    The hammering in her skull stopped.
    Oh. Of course. Her circle. Part of her. The glimmer of golden magic sustaining her flickered and winked out.
    “Isa!” Steve’s voice, rough with fear, shouted.
    The cold, aching emptiness inside her psyche expanded, swallowing her. Isa sighed and closed sandpapery eyes.
    “Murmur. I need you.”

Chapter Four
    Hushed voices, muted beeping, and a too warm hand stroking her wrist reeled Isa up out of the writhing depths of nightmares she couldn’t quite remember. Even though she commanded her eyes open, something thick and cottony twined through her blood, holding her beneath the surface of consciousness.
    A dull throb penetrated her fuzzy awareness. Leg. Hers? Or someone else’s? Magic, the color of an oil sheen on a mud puddle, flashed like someone taking photos. It seemed to fire off in time with the pulse thrumming in her ears. As if only waiting for her to notice the beat of magic, heat mounted with each strobe until burning pain spread to sear her.
    She gasped.
    “Isa?”
    Steve’s voice.
    A cuff on her right arm pumped up. She tried to moisten parched lips with a tongue as dry as sand, and to marshal her thoughts into some semblance of order. Recognition hit. Hospital.
    A spike of hope lodged in her ability to breathe. She turned inward, wanting and needing her insides to be crowded by an angular, ill-fitting, malicious demon.
    Empty. The void didn’t even echo anymore. Of course he wasn’t there. That had been the last time she’d ended up in an emergency room. This was a different iteration.
    Hope collapsed. Her sigh sounded like a sob.
    “Easy, sweetheart,” Steve said.
    Grimacing, she forced her eyes open. She did not want anyone inside her sense of loss. Her friends had celebrated the day she’d survived Murmur ripping out her throat and leaving. Steve especially. He didn’t need to know she hadn’t survived it intact.
    The blood pressure cuff deflated.
    The tiny, dim room with pale yellow walls was barely big enough to contain her bed, much less Steve.
    “Hey,” he said. Stubble smudged his jaw. His eyes looked sunken. Shadowed. “Are you in pain, Ice?”
    The bitter, voiceless laugh Isa huffed out heightened the ache in her skin and muscles.
    It was his hand on her right wrist, stroking as if trying to soothe the both of them. He stopped and stepped away from the bed. “I need to let the nurses know you’re awake.”
    “No,” Isa croaked as he reached for the call button beside the closed and undoubtedly locked door.
    “They asked me to notify them, Isa,” he said. “They want to know you’re okay.”
    “Containment?” she asked.
    “Some of your injuries are magical. You’re throwing really uncomfortable sparks.”
    Harborview had built a containment unit, individual treatment rooms tucked into the basement, as close to bedrock as they could get. They’d embedded metal cages—sort of reverse Faraday cages designed to keep energy inside—into the stone and concrete. Each room had its own cage.
    The hospital had worked hard to disguise the metal skeleton enclosing the room, but the visible lack of unshielded electronics and the locked door gave it away.
    Someone knocked. The lock clicked and the door slid open enough for a man in blue scrubs to poke his head into the room.
    With the door open, Isa could hear an alarm beeping out in the hallway.
    The nurse glanced at the monitor above her head, then at her. “I’ve paged the doctor. He’ll be here shortly. Are you in pain? Can you rate it? Scale of 1 to 10.”
    “42?”
    He coughed as if covering a chuckle. “Life, the universe, and everything? Not what I wanted to hear.”
    “Me, either,” she