Inked Destiny

Eighteen

Sleepy Ruiz was too amped up to worry about being pulled over by the cops or getting caught cruising through territory that belonged to other gangs. Where the fuck was Lucky? He should have called by now, should have called a long time ago.

Something bad had gone down in that alley. Something real bad.

“We gonna keep cruising all night?” Puppy asked, passing a beer up to Drooler who was riding shotgun.

“Pull the phone out from under the seat,” Sleepy said.

Drooler did it, handing off Lucky’s cell.

“Tell me again,” Sleepy said.

“It’s like the tenth time already. The guy left his club with another dude and headed toward the parking garage. They were talking, totally into their conversation and not paying attention to what was going down around them, which was nothing, man. Nothing. I texted Lucky and split, like he told me to do. He should have let me take the guy. I could have done it no problem.”

Sleepy wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up. What mattered was Lucky. No way Lucky cut and ran. No way. This was nothing, an easy hit compared to taking someone out behind bars.

He stomped on the gas pedal, leaving rubber behind. This was personal now. He didn’t have the in with Jacko, not the same way Lucky did, but he wasn’t going to let this go, not without a direct order.

Scanning through Lucky’s phone numbers, he found Jacko’s and pulled over. He got out of the car, not wanting Puppy and Drooler to hear. A few steps away, he made the call.

Jacko gave his companion a thumbs-ups. He was the man here, getting things done.

“Yo, Lucky. Tell me something good, camarada.”

“It’s Sleepy.”

His high deserted him. “Where’s Lucky?”

“We don’t know. It was all set up. He was in place, only needed the Irish pendejo to walk past him. He was supposed to call for a pick-up. That was like hours ago.”

“The police involved?”

“No. We’ve been cruising. It’s like nothing went down.”

“He shows, he calls me.”

Jacko hung up. Lucky had vouched for Sleepy, but he didn’t know him well enough to trust him right away.

“Your camarada fail you?” Cyco asked.

“Cathal Dunne must have taken him out.”

“You sure he didn’t run?”

“Positive.”

Cyco leaned over, lifting the grenade launcher. “Say the word, I’ll do you a favor.”

Etaín woke, or would have said she did except for the lake in front of her and the thrum of magic against her senses, the beat of it pulsing through the soles of her feet. It took her a second to recognize the cadence, to compare it to the absence of sound that had been testament to a heart silenced.

Relief filled her. This was no post-death visitation. Though as the water rippled toward the center, green condensing and yielding to blue, solidifying in a precursor to the Dragon’s forming, she understood that if not a visitation, then this was a summoning, and she, the one summoned.

The beat against the bottom of her feet quickened. Involuntary reaction rather than panic or fear, there was no point in either. She’d be dead if the manifestation now rising from the lake wanted it so.

Sunlight caught on emerald green scales and turned droplets of water into glistening rainbows of color. It was hard not to be awed by the sight, harder still not to take a step backward as the Dragon approached.

In its presence, she couldn’t accept that this was an avatar. The Dragon’s laughter was a snorted puff through her mind. I exist as you do.

“Where am I?” Etaín asked, hoping to learn something though doubting she’d been summoned to satisfy her curiosity.

The beast cocked its head. The place of your birth.

“Figuratively speaking or literally?”

Clever changeling. Your mother found her way to my lake already heavy with child. She and I made a bargain, and on these shores you were born. In these waters you were bathed after taking your first breath, and for a time you both remained here.

“This is Elfhome?”

Fire came in answer, exhaled in a snort, though its flame parted when it reached her, making her aware of bare skin and her own nakedness. Fuck. Not that she was self-conscious about her body, but she’d prefer to choose who got to see it.

Another blast of flame reminded her that in this place—at least for now—her thoughts weren’t hidden from the being who’d summoned her.

She considered drawing the glyph of containment Eamon had taught her but discarded the idea.

The Dragon was real. This place was real.

Yesss.

Not Elfhome. But somehow connecting.

Yesss. See for yourself.

She turned to view the primordial forest behind her, heartbeat skittering as if in preprogrammed joy at its proximity.

It was a dark place, trees tall and wide, close-set like border sentinels. But enough light snaked through to hint at a trail. She understood instinctively it would lead to a fissure between realities, to a gate, like the one Eamon had spoken of during their lesson, only this would take her into the world his ancestors had been banished from.

A few steps and she could be on the trail. It would almost be like walking into the past, into shrouded memory.

Yesss. But to retrace your mother’s path is to travel to your death.

Etaín turned to face the Dragon, the magic pulsing against the soles of her feet becoming liquid fire. It surged upward to the vines inked in her arms, concentrated there in near agony before sliding to the bands at her wrists, the burn there seeming to waken the eyes on her palms, so she opened clenched fists to release hundreds of streaks of gold, as if Dragon fire had been converted to captured sunshine.

Choose one.

There was nothing to make one stand out from another so she chose the closest of those shooting upward from her left hand.

The others winked out like the golden highways had the night she’d piggybacked on a murderer’s reality. Only this time she knew immediately who wore her ink, her vision filling with the sight of DaWanda above her, generous breasts cupped by hands she recognized as Jamaal’s.

Shit! Etaín jerked away mentally, slamming the door on the scene, unwilling to invade a friend’s privacy.

Sometimes invasion is warranted. Sometimes it is necessary.

Her thought? Or the Dragon’s?

She couldn’t be sure and because of it, she felt a creeping uncertainty, a worry that maybe Eamon was right, and none of this was real.

A snort buffeted her with smoke and surrounded her in flame. Earth-bound Elf. What does he know of a seidic born in a realm forbidden to him because of his ancestors’ acts?

Heat and haze faded and her palms were alight again with rays of gold. Each representing a person? Or a tattoo?

I could teach you to use this. With it you could identify the killer you seek. Yesss?

The sibilant sound of it made her think of a serpent in a tree of knowledge, a metaphorical image for temptation, and she was tempted. But the remembered feel of coils around her neck, choking off choice, had her asking, “At what cost?”

Fire came on a controlled breath, the Dragon creating a sigil burning in the air between them, taking up the entirety of consciousness and continuing to flame against her eyelids even when she woke.

In her mind’s eye she saw where the sigil would interlock on the insides of her wrists with the tattoos there. Understood it was ink that couldn’t be applied by others, that would require Cathal or Eamon to stretch the skin while she used the hand tool on herself.

Slowly the immediacy of it faded. She tried to put off confronting what it meant by snuggling in a cocoon of masculine warmth, but couldn’t. Finally giving up to sit and reach across Cathal’s naked chest to snag the tablet and colored pencils on the night stand.

He sat as well, distracting her with thoughts of sex when the sheet fell away, enough moonlight remaining to reveal the erection against a taut stomach. A tug on the comforter by Eamon hid it from view, refocusing her on the tablet in hand as Cathal muttered, “Asshole.”

“That’s Lord Asshole to you,” Eamon said. The twitch of very kissable lips would have derailed her for a second time if not for the tension running through Cathal and his lack of response.

“How long have you been back?” she asked Eamon.

“Only a few hours.”

“Before I came up to bed, Liam told me you’d gone to investigate a disturbance in the wards around the city. Did you find anything?”

“Nothing definitive.”

Cathal turned the bedside lamp on, her uneasiness growing at the increased tension in him. She stopped herself from reaching out, from touching him, afraid, very, very afraid she wouldn’t be able to control her gift. That she’d rifle through his mind to find the answer to what was bothering him.

Something must have happened. Not here, unless she’d slept through it.

At the club seemed more likely. When he’d arrived home…

Delight shivered through her despite a sudden surge of insecurity. Maybe being totally immersed in his own world, in everything normal, had led to him having regrets about this, about them. It would explain the fierce lovemaking. The underlying violence and desperation.

She bit her lip, the small pain clearing her head. Later, when she and Cathal had a moment alone, she’d ask him what was going on, why the change from when the three of them were together in the hot tub.

Selecting an emerald-green pencil from the box, she drew the sigil without commenting on its origins. When it was done, Eamon leaned forward, his chest touched to her shoulder as he traced the intricate design with an elegant finger. “It represents servitude. You saw this on one of the humans who are part of our world?”

He meant the ones who’d been in her line at the shelter fund-raiser, the very same humans they’d fought about before she was taken by the Harlequin Rapist.

“I saw it in a dream.” Truth? Lie? What could she call it other than a dream? “How is it used?”

“At its core, it signifies an oath-bond. For you, most sigils are things to be applied in ink. That is what makes the seidic unique, and why Elves typically wear no tattoos. The seidic are rare and few have access to them when they exist at all. In this world, at the whim of the queen, the seidic are used to punish or reward.”

“But for some reason, you immediately thought I’d seen this sigil on a human. Why?”

“An aside first, Etaín. Because we don’t typically have access to the seidic, whose gifts include the ability to enhance magic or deny it, and even to gift it with the application of their ink, we compensate with magical focal points, things usually crafted for a single purpose. The earrings I wear are such items.”

Etaín touched a fingertip to the stud Eamon wore in his left ear, moved on to the ones above it, along the rim, smiling at the way his gaze heated as if remembering the feel of her tongue and lips on them. “You made them?”

“Not the base pieces of jewelry. Metal work and stone craft aren’t my gifts, but the specifications, yes. They’re bound personally to me and useless to anyone else. The majority of Elves who are able to claim and hold territory are spell-casters. It’s because of that ability, humans can be made part of our world, and their lives extended.”

“Hundreds of years added just by wearing a spelled piece of jewelry?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that. It requires a blood-oath given in a witnessed ceremony. It entails an acceptance of responsibility matched to a pledge of obedience.”

“Why servitude?” Cathal asked, a growl in his voice, and she didn’t blame him, not when the word obedience set her teeth on edge.

Eamon shrugged, a gesture almost guaranteed to end the peace if Cathal’s behavior hadn’t already announced a change to it. “Few humans are touched by magic.” Meaning, in essence, they’d never be considered equal.

Not a thought for relationship harmony. She glanced down at the pad in her lap, the emerald green a reminder of the Dragon. “What about between Elves, or between Elves and something not human? Would the sigil be used?”

“It could be.” His tone said it wouldn’t often be.

Her mother wore no jewelry, nor did she wear the mark in ink, but Etaín shivered, realizing she couldn’t be certain her mother didn’t bear the Dragon’s sigil of servitude. Like the emerald green she wore, until the ordeal of the Harlequin Rapist was behind her, she’d been blinded to the truth of the marks she’d put on Cathal.

She hadn’t seen truly until she stood in the shower with him, the rivulets of water streaming down his arms turning the design into a circle in her mind’s eye, so she recognized that her mother wore the same pattern around her wrists, hidden by the entwining of other sigils—and even then she hadn’t made the connection as she did now.

Her father was seidic. Her mother had the gift of sight, she was now positive of it.

Even in paradise there are politics, and some pairings are viewed as a threat by those in power. Your mother found her way to my lake already heavy with child. She and I made a bargain, and on these shores you were born.

“What has you frowning so fiercely,” Eamon asked.

“I was thinking about my mother and the sigil.”

“You believe she wears it?”

“I think it’s possible she might be bound to the Dragon.”

“For your mother’s sake, I hope you’re mistaken. It would mean the magic controls her rather than the other way around.”

“If the Dragon isn’t real,” Etaín said, though sitting in Cathal’s bed, surrounded by the everyday things of a normal world, the absolute certainty she’d felt faded as she thought about the emerald-green water rippling toward the center, like dissolved magic condensing and solidifying into an avatar that never completely emerged from the lake.

Given the stakes, she tried to tell Eamon in detail about the dream, but the tightening of her throat and freezing of her hand when she might have drawn what she couldn’t say, was warning enough, and struggle would only make her lack of control obvious.

She applied the magic lessons that had left her an exhausted lump on the couch. Imagined the sigil that would divert and channel magic away from her in a harmless loop, but freedom to speak was returned to her only when she changed the subject completely. “I need to go to Stylin’ Ink in the morning.”

“I’ll accompany you. Cathal?”

Was there command in Eamon’s voice? Cathal couldn’t be certain.

His gaze strayed to the clothing he’d been wearing, eyes lingering on the pocket where the dead gangbanger’s phone was. What the fuck should he do with it?

Taking it to the police was out, given the dead body and his failure to call them. Taking it to his father could lead to a blood bath, though he realized he’d have to visit his father too, because guilt would chew him up if Brianna was targeted for revenge and someone got to her.

Hand it off to Eamon? Like a good little obedient human would?

He suppressed a snarl. That left Sean, and a lot of dancing around the truth about where the phone came from and why it might be important.

“No. I’ve got some meetings I couldn’t reschedule. Afterward I’m going to meet up with Sean to see if he and Quinn have gotten anywhere on the drawings Derrick delivered.

“Heath, my fifth, will accompany you as bodyguard,” Eamon said, yanking the string of paranoia that existed in Cathal because of his father and uncle.

The suspicion in his gut burned hotter. Why now and not before? Because Eamon knew about the gangbanger? Because he knew Cage’s boat was moored near Sean’s?

The magic chose him. I accept the choice though I wouldn’t have made the same one. Eamon’s words, spoken to Etaín. Only now Cathal considered that with him out of the way, Eamon’s options expanded.

Regardless, she’d be safe with Eamon and the guards. Safer still away from him now that it seemed just as likely the drive-by in front of the shelter was meant to take him out, not Anton.

The wrap of Etaín’s arms and press of feminine curves allowed him to escape the darkness of his thoughts. What he needed was some breathing room and he’d have it in a few hours.

For now…

He captured her mouth, content to lose himself in her.