Inked Destiny

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?” Etain 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.

Etain 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! Etain 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, Etain. 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