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

bent in easing her weight into the recliner. When she took the paper, it trembled.
    “We’ll figure this out,” Isa promised. “Even if I have to put her back on you right now in order to save her, I won’t let her die.”
    A tear spilled over, but Helen’s lips reappeared in a tremulous smile. She nodded.
    No pressure, Ice.
    She shut and locked the heavy metal door. She called golden energy. It concentrated at her core, a pillar of sage-and-pinyon-scented magic flowing through her, slower and colder than she’d become accustomed to while Murmur’s magic had augmented hers. They’d been stronger together. She was smaller now. Diminished. Was he?
    Sending energy through her right palm, she cast a circle within the room, walling maudlin conjecture off outside the circle. Save a life first. Miss her tattoo and count her deficiencies later.
    She lit candles and summoned power into the room. Magic shimmered up within her, tickling her palms. Sweet-smelling sunshine brushed her face. Isa shivered, missing the heat it used to carry with it.
    Kicking her rolling stool close to the recliner, she settled upon it and focused her gaze upon the graying mermaid.
    “My fingers on the paper,” Isa said, “while I investigate.”
    “Okay,” Helen breathed.
    Isa touched the page, channeled a tendril of magic through that contact, and nudged her awareness out of her body. She landed on her feet on the slippery, seaweed-encrusted rocks. A ghostly sea sighed against the stones of the mermaid’s island.
    As Isa knelt beside the limp mermaid, she detected no rise and fall of her ribs. The stones and the sea faded.
    With a gasp, Isa planted both palms on the mermaid’s shoulder and shoved energy into the tattoo, desperate to stabilize her. To keep her promise not to let her die.
    One more life she owed Murmur since she had to assume that it had been his power that had restored hers.
    Damn, she missed him.
    Yanking her attention back to the mermaid, Isa frowned. Something had gone seriously wrong with the stasis paper. She’d intended for it to sustain a Living Tattoo indefinitely. Not sentence the spirit enlivening the Ink to a slow decline and death. In a flash, she saw what must have happened.
    Live Ink fed on blood and magic. She’d thought she’d embedded enough of both in the stasis paper. Apparently, she’d been wrong.
    Power poured out of her into what felt like a cold, bottomless pit beneath her hands. Even though she didn’t need to breathe in this otherworld, her physical body reacted to her effort by spiking her respiration rate as if she were running a race.
    Trapped in the paper Isa had made, the mermaid had been starving to death.
    Isa’s heart knocked against her physical ribs. The tattoo of the whirlwind. Was she killing it with stasis paper, too?
    The mermaid groaned.
    Relief shot another surge of liquid gold up from the depths.
    Color rippled through the mermaid’s scales. Blue, green, silver. Her eyes opened. Her brow creased and her mouth worked.
    “Helen brought you to me,” Isa said. “You’re in trouble. We’ve got to get you back onto her.”
    Milky tears flooded the mermaid’s eyes but didn’t spill over.
    “The magic I’ve fed you should suffice long enough for me to do the job,” Isa said. “Can you hang on that long?”
    The mermaid needed life force combined with magic in order to survive. Putting her back on Helen would give her unlimited access to both. Though Isa had thought she’d designed the paper to do the same thing—to stand in for a host. Some critical part of the formula had to be wrong.
    The mermaid’s lips moved.
    “Don’t talk,” Isa urged. “Save your strength . . .”
    “Is she well?” the mermaid rasped in defiance of the command.
    A stab of loss went through Isa’s chest. In both worlds.
    Starving to death, the tattoo still cared more about her host’s well-being than her own. Why did the love the two of them shared wound Isa? She’d understood the pain